passed, which is why the really important parts of your brain (e.g., the ones that control your breathing) are down at the bottom and the parts you could probably live without (e.g., the ones that control your temper) sit above them, like ice cream on a cone. As it turns out, running with great haste from rabid wolverines is much more important than knowing what they are. Indeed, actions such as running away are so vitally important to the survival of terrestrial mammals like the ones from whom we are descended that evolution took no chances and designed the brain to answer the ‘What should I do?’ question before the ‘What is it?’ question.1 Experiments have demonstrated that the moment we encounter an object, our brains instantly analyse just a few of its key features and then use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very simple decision: ‘Is this object an important thing to which I ought to respond right now?’2 Rabid wolverines, crying babies, hurled rocks, beckoning mates, cowering prey–these things count for a lot in the game of survival, which requires that we take immediate action when we happen upon them and do not dally to contemplate the finer points of their identities. As such, our brains are designed to decide first whether objects count and to decide later what those objects are. This means that when you turn your head to the left, there is a fraction of a second during which your brain does not know that it is seeing a wolverine but does know that it is seeing something scary.
But how can that be? How can we know something is scary if we don’t know what it is? To understand how this can happen, just consider how you would go about identifying a person who is walking toward you across a vast expanse of desert. The first thing to catch your eye would be a small flicker of motion on the horizon. As you stared, you would soon notice that the motion was that of an object moving toward you. As it came closer, you would see that the motion was biological, then you would see that the biological object was a biped, then a human, then a female, then a fat human female with dark hair and a Budweiser T-shirt, and then–hey, what’s Aunt Mabel doing in the Sahara? Your identification of Aunt Mabel would progress–that is, it would begin quite generally and become more specific over time, until finally it terminated in a family reunion. Similarly, the identification of a wolverine at your elbow progresses over time–albeit just a few milliseconds–and it too progresses from the general to the specific. Research demonstrates that there is enough information in the early, very general stages of this identification process to decide whether an object is scary, but not enough information to know what the object is. Once our brains decide that they are in the presence of a threat, they instruct our glands to produce hormones that create a state of heightened physiological arousal–blood pressure rises, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, muscles tense–which prepares us to spring into action. Before our brains have finished the full-scale analysis that will allow us to know that the object is a wolverine, they have already put our bodies into their ready-to-run-away modes–all pumped up and raring to go.
The fact that we can feel aroused without knowing exactly what it is that has aroused us has important implications for our ability to identify our own emotions.3 For example, researchers studied the reactions of some young men who were crossing a long, narrow suspension bridge constructed of wooden boards and wire cables that rocked and swayed 230 feet above the Capilano River in North Vancouver.4 A young woman approached each man and asked if he would mind completing a survey, and after he did so, the woman gave the man her telephone number and offered to explain her survey project in greater detail if he called. Now, here’s the catch: the woman approached some of these young men as they were crossing the bridge and others only after they had crossed it. As it turned out, the men who had met the woman as they were crossing the bridge were much more likely to call her in the coming days. Why? The men who met the woman in the middle of a shaky, swaying suspension bridge were experiencing intense physiological arousal, which they would normally have identified as fear. But because they were being interviewed by an attractive woman, they mistakenly identified their arousal as sexual attraction. Apparently, feelings that one interprets as fear in the presence of a sheer drop may be interpreted as lust in the presence of a sheer blouse–which is simply to say that people can be wrong about what they are feeling.5
Comfortably Numb
The novelist Graham Greene wrote: ‘Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love.’6 Indeed, research shows that physiological arousal can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and our interpretation of our arousal depends on what we believe caused it. It is possible to mistake fear for lust, apprehension for guilt,7 shame for anxiety.8 But just because we don’t always know what to call our emotional experience doesn’t mean that we don’t know what that experience is like, does it? Perhaps we can’t say its name and perhaps we don’t know what made it happen, but we always know what it feels like, right? Is it possible to believe we are feeling something when we are actually feeling nothing at all The philosopher Daniel Dennett put the question this way:
Suppose someone is given the post-hypnotic suggestion that upon awakening he will have a pain in his wrist. If the hypnosis works, is it a case of pain, hypnotically induced, or merely a case of a person who has been induced to believe he has a pain? If one answers that the hypnosis has induced real pain, suppose the post-hypnotic suggestion had been: ‘On awakening you will believe you have a pain in the wrist.’ If this suggestion works, is the circumstance just like the previous one? Isn’t believing you are in pain tantamount to being in pain?9
At first blush, the idea that we can mistakenly believe we are feeling pain seems preposterous, if only because the distinction between feeling pain and believing one is feeling pain looks so suspiciously like an artefact of language. But give this idea a second blush while considering the following scenario. You are sitting at a pavement café, sipping a tangy espresso and contentedly browsing the Sunday newspaper. People are strolling by and taking in the fine morning, and the amorous activities of a young couple at a nearby table attest to the eternal wonder of spring. The song of a thrush punctuates the yeasty scent of new croissants that wafts from the bakery. The article you are reading on campaign-finance reform is quite interesting and all is well–until suddenly you realize you are now reading the third paragraph, that somewhere in the middle of the first you started sniffing baked goods and listening to bird chirps, and that you now have absolutely no idea what the story you are reading is about. Did you actually read that second paragraph, or did you merely dream it? You take a quick look back and, sure enough, all the words are familiar. As you read them again you can even recall hearing them spoken a few moments ago by that narrator in your head who sounds astonishingly like you and whose voice was submerged for a paragraph or two beneath the sweet distractions of the season.
Two questions confront us. First, did you experience the paragraph the first time you read it? Second, if so, did you know you were experiencing it? The answers are yes and no, respectively. You experienced the paragraph and that’s why it was so familiar to you when you went back through it. Had there been an eye tracker at your table, it would have revealed that you did not stop reading at any point. In fact, you were smack-dab in the middle of reading’s smooth movements when suddenly you caught yourself…caught yourself…caught yourself what? Experiencing without being aware that you were experiencing–that’s what. Now, let me slow down for a moment and tread carefully around these words lest you start listening for the high-pitched tones of the indigo bunting. The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning ‘to try’, whereas the word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning ‘to see’. Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event. The two words can normally be substituted in ordinary conversation without much damage, but they are differently inflected.