In the first part of this series on Affective Technology, I talked about Poems and Stories, using Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” as one example and a passage from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer as the other. Coleridge’s poem talks about an injured poet having to spend the afternoon alone while his friend’s take a walk through the countryside. Thought the process of actively imagining his friends enjoying themselves, the disconsolate poet pulls himself out of his funk to the point that he is able to bless them in their journey. The passage from Tom Sawyer mirrored something I did as a child when I was sent to my room as punishment for something I’d done wrong. I would imagine that my parents were lamenting my death and their imagined lamentations would enable me to feel better. The passage from Tom Sawyer was more or less like that, though a bit grander, as befits Tom’s sense of himself. Tom and his friends had run off to the river and the townspeople began searching the river for their drowned bodies. When he realized what was going on, Tom snuck into his Aunt Polly’s house at night and listened to the women commiserate over the deaths of their boys. It made him feel good. The point is a simple one: we use poems and stories to regulate our emotional life.
In the second article, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, I introduced the concept of state-dependent memory, which holds the our memories are chemically keyed to the neurochemicals active during the experiences themselves. Thus, I suggested, “if the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole?” Using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit,” as an example, I went on to argue that literature, and art more generally, provides a (neurochemically) neutral ground giving us access to a full range experience. And this allows us to construct a coherent sense of self.
What happens if, however, the process of constructing a self fails? Read more »