0.8 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts  (Page 8/89)

They can all be moving at the same time as well, not only does one thought follow another; but it occurs instantaneously. If the thing the person said was something you didn’t know, it might make you feel stupid, thus the thought results in a feeling. But that feeling can be translated to a thought. So it isn’t the feeling, “I am stupid” it is the thought “I am stupid”. Feeling stupid might make you feel bad, but it isn’t just that you are feeling bad, you are also thinking over and over “I am stupid” unconsciously, and that is what is making you feel bad. Or you are paying attention to the fact that you are stupid. Thus thought, feeling, and emotion is just paying attention to different things in your head. Concrete things.

It is a little more complicated than that, however. It is going to be a mix of a lot of concrete thoughts interacting with each other, not just the thought “I am stupid” repeated over and over but maybe also a less intense idea of “well I know x and y that that person doesn’t, maybe this was just one event”. So anything that is said or done is possibly followed by a long series of unconscious thoughts and thought processes.

There were two examples of thoughts, one was with the frog and the danger of a threat, and the other was a questioning of ones intellect relative to someone else. The example with the frog was an example of a thought process that was simple, while the example with the person showed how some thought processes can be much more complicated than they appear.

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

• It is stated first that use of emotion and thought requires attention, and therefore they both cause feelings, and if they both cause feelings then they are going to be similar in nature. Your intellect (or ability to do things which are real) is going to generate feelings just like emotions do.
• Feelings can result in thoughts – this was shown with the frog example, the frog has the thought “jump” which comes from the feeling of a threat of danger, and the feeling of it’s understanding that it can jump. That shows how thoughts can be encouraged by feelings and mixed in with them.
• Thought is also powered by feeling in other ways, as when you are nervous that you didn’t understand something, your feelings then cause you to think nervous things like “do I know that too?, does he think I care that he knows that?” Those thoughts are a function of intelligence, because they are causing you to think about real things, which is what intelligence is.

An explanation for this chapter:

This chapter basically outlined that thoughts can cause feelings and real things to happen, and these three things (thought, action, and feeling) can occur in any order. Feelings can cause you to jump, or some other action, and so can thoughts. Thoughts can cause feelings which could cause you to do an action. This means that any feeling, a physical one, a certain emotion, anything, could result in any thought which could cause you to do anything. For frogs, this process seems simple, if it has feelings, they are easy to label such as fear of a person coming near them. For a human, these feelings might be much more complex, involving many more unconscious thoughts and worries or whatnot. A frog isn't going to be worried if its intelligence is insulted, or any number of other possible unconscious thoughts that a person might have. You could still say the frog has thoughts though, since it reaches the conclusion at some point to jump away, and it moves in very complicated patterns. Those patterns of movement for a frog, however, are easy to understand and the same pattern occurs each time you see the frog pretty much. Humans can adapt their behavior with thoughts and make their behavior and thinking much more complex.