"Words"

Brian Lynch

Most of us by now have done a “search” on the Internet. Did you know that if you enter any seven words of your creation you have almost no chance of finding the phrase you made? I for example just made up the phrase “The cat went to get the ball.” and I did not find it on the Internet. The same with “The dog went to get the ball.” Simple seven-word sentences but they are not on the Internet despite the fact there are now, I have heard, about one trillion pages on the World Wide Web. I suppose that is something like at least thirty trillion sentences and not one of them the same as mine.

I mention this not just to point out the amazing creativity of language but also to relate it to our emotional lives.

I have often mentioned that we start life off with nine hard-wired emotions. That is our nervous system has developed to permit us to “feel” through this system. These feelings are interest, joy, surprise, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, and shame. Once again, I believe these are “hard-wired” in the nervous system just as we have a special nervous system to make our muscles move and another one to feel pain and another to feel pleasure and many more systems.

Words and emotions: seven words in a sentence and eight emotions so approximately the same number of possible combinations and there are not trillions of people but only six billion of us right now on earth.

The point is with just eight emotions you have plenty to work with to come up with very different personalities. And with seven words you have plenty to continue adding to 30 trillion sentences.

I, from an early age, get angry when someone laughs at me. You laugh with them. Another person feels fear, disgust, and so on. Then each of these will in turn feel succeeding emotions; after anger, I will feel shame and you will feel more joy while my neighbor will feel fear and then anger and thus we will begin to know each other as Brian, John, Jill, and Jane.

Then each of us will have our characteristic activities or behavior that accompany how we feel. I might leave the room, you will dance, my neighbor complains. Through these behaviors, we will get feedback and this feedback will cause new feelings, a cascade of feelings. But it will always be feelings first and “doing” second. But I emphasize it is all based on just these eight feelings, mixing and matching them and we get six billion personalities.

NB In the theory I most use for these pieces, Affect Psychology, innate emotion that which we call “affect” is slightly more complicated than I present here starting with the addition of a feeling we have never articulated and that is “dissmell”. Please see: Dismell