Emotions of Unknown Meaning

Source: public domain

Forgive me for this sappiness. I am a guy with sound judgement in control of my emotions, yet occasionally, my eyes come across a copy of The Blue Marble. Fifty years ago, almost to the day of this writing, for the first time in the entire history of our planet, millions of earthlings saw a photo of Earth taken by NASA astronauts 28,000 miles from home on their way to the moon. I was an excited young man, thoroughly engaged in following the Apollo 17 moon shot.

In that one iconic moment, when, for the first time, I saw the color photo of The Blue Marble as it appeared on television and in newspapers, I felt joy and pride in being human, unexplainable happiness. I had seen earlier photos of Earth taken from satellites and rockets but never one in sharp color taken from such an extraordinary distance. I did not experience what some people call a spine tingle, if there ever were such a thing. I know eyes do not twinkle, so why should spines tingle? But, not having gone out to space, I had experienced something that astronauts call an overview effect, an exhilarating moment of looking at Earth floating in all its colors and silence from outer space while feeling the meaning of being an earthling. It was a mind sensation like no other.

Every once in a while, we come across an experience that pumps adrenaline. But can we feel emotions in our bodies?

What causes those remarkable bodily sensations so many people talk about? My mind fills with awe and wonder, as it always does when I see something new. But tingling? I put that question to two astronauts who had spent many months on the International Space Station. Michael Lopez Alegria had three missions to the station, his last as the American commander. For him, looking at Earth was not quite a free-floating little blue ball but rather a colossal mass that brought thoughts of home. For Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut from the European Space Agency, the sensation was different. She saw Earth as a beautiful ball that almost could be reached for a touch. For her, the adrenaline was always pumping. So then, who am I but someone sensitively energized by a two-dimensional glossy picture.

Conscious emotional experiences of fear, anger, or pleasure can be physical. The mind-body connection is real, so when I am happy, I can feel a burst of smiling energy flowing through my body. The same goes for other emotions, such as sadness and anger. Emotions affect physiological conditions through somatosensory feedback, such as one's heartbeat, breathing, and temperature, all functions that are generally in tune with circadian rhythms. Adrenaline secretion prepares us for challenges and spurs us on for success. It can direct our behavior and focus our physiological states of being through conscious emotions. Recent experiments have mapped body sensations related to different emotions triggered by words, stories, and facial expressions. Those maps suggest a relationship between consciously felt emotions and emotion-triggered bodily changes, such as pressure, warmth, and even reflexive facial expressions.

Pleasure, of course, is a high-energy, positive emotion that can manifest itself as either excitement or contentment. The body can show either as a smile or any other facial expression or by heartbeat or temperature.

But body-mapping experiments rely on participant feelings; subjects were shown emotional words, stories, movies, and facial expressions and simultaneously asked to color body maps according to where in their bodies they felt increasing or decreasing emotional sensations. Statistical evidence showed that different emotions could be felt as separable body sensations. Subjects self-reported conscious emotional experiences as if they were body sensations that they could physically specify.

Could it be that the experimenters assumed that their patients do feel emotions in their bodies, in which case, the experiment revolves around leading questions? One has to ask: can emotions be pinpointed?

Am I one of those bizarre outliers who cannot pinpoint on his own body high-energy positive emotions? I feel pleasure just as well as I can feel contentedness, but not through a conscious altering of my body. On the one hand, it makes me blush when asked to indicate a physical response to my emotions. I cannot do so, other than to become aware of my own smile. On the other, I know of many unknown-to-science healing techniques—Reiki and other complementary and alternative medicine practices such as acupuncture—that supposedly connect emotions with parts of the body through energy fields directed by temperature changes.

Moods can swing with the biochemistry that comes and goes in feedback loops. But emotions can be felt by the body to give protection against environmental encounters, by regulating the cardiovascular, gland-secreting hormonal, muscular, and unconscious nervous systems.

The Blue Marble, though just a photograph, brings me back a half-century to the surprise of knowing that though there are trillions of planets just in our little Milky Way galaxy, this little planet we call Earth is the one that brings meaning to our existence. We feel as if we are, once again, at the center of the universe. That does not just tingle my spine; it raises my awareness of connections. That, as Archibald MacLeish put it in his famous poem, “is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”

When Earth shows its colors from afar, it triggers the highest of secretions for joy.