Emotional anatomy
We don't magically know the workings of our emotions anymore than we magically know anatomy because we live in our bodies
I got into anatomy1 because my own orthopedic problems made the question personal and gave me a (painful) window into the gross mechanics of my body. At the educated lay person level of knowledge, it strikes me that learning anatomy has given me fantastic resolution on my own interoceptive experiences. I’m able to pinpoint problems to at least the muscle group, and often to their source further up a muscle chain. Just now, I told my sister I had “QL pain” instead of “my back hurts”. Knowledge of anatomy allows me to seek specific remedies and communicate to professionals who can relieve my pain or teach me how to deal with the problem.
I like learning about emotions, too, but I’ve always been skeptical that people were really worse off with smaller emotional vocabularies. I’m pretty anti-Whorfian2 and I always thought of people’s personal emotional vocabularies as being like any language acquired from birth— complete, and able, in principle, to express any proposition. Of course you need to have a common language to precisely express complex emotions to someone else, but I didn’t think you needed that nuanced language to express them to yourself. Being able to access help from others is reason enough to learn the complex common language, but I still suspected the claims about aiding personal introspection were overblown. Could more detailed language mislead people, guiding them towards the new vocabulary and away from their own direct experiences, the way that hearing about tennis elbow can lead to patients reporting they have “tennis elbow” instead of what they actually know (“pain in my arm when I do this”)?
But as I learn more granular characterization of emotion (most recently I read Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, which maps out 80-something emotions and groups them by similarity), I do find that learning about emotions is more like learning anatomy than I had previously thought (the book could have been called Brown’s Anatomy!). I live in this body and animate it, but I don’t have magic knowledge of how it works. I need someone to tell me what’s inside. Once I know what’s inside, I can notice small details that were already in my experience and I can predict the cause of painful sensations. My direct experience in my body is richer due to learning anatomy and my interaction with my orthopedic issues is more skillful.
With emotion, somehow, I was more tempted to believe that we magically know everything about what we are experiencing, and that if you listen to other people’s opinions about it you’ll just be suckered into experiencing it their way. I thought this even though I believe intellectually that core emotions are innate and universal (if expressed differently by culture and individual) and even though I know firsthand that the workings of my own mind are often mysterious to me. Why wouldn’t emotion have anatomy? Of course it does. And why wouldn’t we need to collaborate to figure out the anatomy of emotion? If I can’t magically intuit that “my back hurts” = “quadratus lumborum in spasm”, why would I think I could intuit the finer details of “I’m angry” without relying on a larger corpus of human knowledge on emotions?
I think we’re still in a more primitive state of knowledge about emotional anatomy, and it’s probably much more plastic and unique to culture and individuals than physical anatomy, so we all get to be Leonardo da Vincis dissecting our own hearts. I also think that means you can’t trust “authorities” on emotion anywhere close to the way you can anatomy textbooks today. But I’m updating to think that having detailed, high quality models of emotions refines and improves your experience of emotions from the inside besides just increasing your fluency with others.
I love, love, love this free anatomy visualizer! The images just below are screenshots from it.
Put simply, this is the hypothesis that language limits or even controls our ability to think.