MrRING
Android Futureman
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2002
- Messages
- 6,053
In one sense, we know that human emotion is a real thing, in that humans experience some emotional states in their life - anger, love, jealousy, obsessions, etc. They haven't been traditionally quantifiable in terms of scientific experimentation, though there is some scientific exploration of emotional states that has begun to occur, as in this 2013 paper at Current Biology:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.056
The scientific study of emotion is still fraught with peril though, as this article in the Atlantic points out:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...-sciences-struggle-to-define-emotions/385711/
If we viewed experiencing the paranormal as being directly related to emotional states of mind - not to dismiss the experiences as overheated imagination, but to explore the possibilities of an emotional state being required to properly respond to whatever is happening be it in the mind only or from a paranormal origin - might this not be a new avenue of investigation that might render results worth talking about?
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.056
Traditionally, science is objective and thus separated from all our emotional responses to the world. But, as neurosciences can now describe physiological correlates of emotional states, researchers in other fields are beginning to view emotions as a biological reaction that they can use in many different areas, from medicine to conservation. Michael Gross reports.
The scientific study of emotion is still fraught with peril though, as this article in the Atlantic points out:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...-sciences-struggle-to-define-emotions/385711/
And so the six emotions used in Ekman’s studies came to be known as the “basic emotions” all humans recognize and experience. Some researchers now say there are fewer than six basic emotions, and some say there are more (Ekman himself has now scaled up to 21), but the idea remains the same: Emotions are biologically innate, universal to all humans, and displayed through facial expressions. Ekman, now a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, with his own company called The Paul Ekman Group, was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2009, thanks to this work.
But despite the theory’s prominence, there are scientists who disagree, and the debate over the nature of emotion has been reinvigorated in recent years. While it would be easy to paint the argument as two-sided—pro-universality versus anti-universality, or Ekman’s cronies versus his critics—I found that everyone I spoke to for this article thinks about emotion a little differently.
If we viewed experiencing the paranormal as being directly related to emotional states of mind - not to dismiss the experiences as overheated imagination, but to explore the possibilities of an emotional state being required to properly respond to whatever is happening be it in the mind only or from a paranormal origin - might this not be a new avenue of investigation that might render results worth talking about?