“At the center of the being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.” – Lao Tzu
Cognitive and Computational Neurosience Professor Anil Seth related an experiment from about 50 years ago on a Ten Percent Happier podcast that caught my attention. In the study, participants, who were all male, had to either walk over a low, sturdy bridge or a high, rickety bridge over a raging torrent. On the other side of the bridge was a female researcher who asked them some questions and then gave them her phone number in case they had any follow-on questions. The outcome was that many more of the male participants who had walked over the rickety, precarious bridge phoned the researcher to ask for a date or talk to her after the fact.
Anil Seth summed it up as “The interpretation of this ethically very, very dubious experiment is that the creepy walk across the rickety bridge misinterpreted their physiological arousal caused by the scariness of the bridge as some kind of sexual chemistry with the female researcher.”
The point that Anil Seth was making is that our emotions, whether it is fear of a snake or chemistry with another person, often start in our body and then are interpreted by our brain instead of the other way around even though it appears that our brains are running the show. This matches the metaphor presented by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Happiness Hypothesis of the elephant and the rider. The rider is our conscious mind and the elephant is everything else – our sensations, subconscious motives, internal presuppositions. We think the rider is in charge but that’s only the case if the elephant agrees.
This reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a couple of friends about online dating. I tried online dating about 10 years ago after my divorce and before I decided to start a family on my own. I dutifully filled out the surveys that catalogued interests and personality preferences, wrote the essay and subsequently met a number of nice men. In fact, my friend Eric was someone who I met online and we became great friends after deciding that dating wasn’t right for us.
It seems to me that online dating asks us to essentially name what we want – and that we don’t know what we want. We can’t quantify the mystery or adrenaline or whatever else it is that causes us to feel attraction. Of course from there, a committed relationship is a decision as much or more than a feeling but for that initial emotion, it seems might come from the body as it did in the experiment that Anil Seth described.
Unfortunately, codes being what they are these days in Seattle, I can’t think of any rickety bridges either to cross or to stand on the other side of. 😊
What do you think of online dating? What about the idea that emotion starts in the body and is interpreted by the mind?
(featured photo was taken by me in Nepal on the trek to Everest base camp in 2001)
Surprised By Joy 