My thermometer tells me I don’t have a fever, at least in the traditional sense. I do, however have that feverish sort of hallucinatory wooz going on. The body is an amazing and finely tuned machine, and when things go off-balance, that mind-body connection makes itself felt in the fine details. Ever wonder why it is so hard to think when you are sick? Surely the body should be able to handle its immune system cleanup jobs just fine without dragging the software down along with it, right? No, sadly, the software is really firmware, wetware, biochemical messiness of the highest order.
It may be that the vast majority of what we experience as emotion is the processing that occurs on the borders where mind meets body. The physical state of the body reacts to and with the brain activity that we experience as “feelings”, and this low-level interaction with our body has only very recently (in evolutionary terms) acquired the intellectual overlay that allows us to analyze what we are feeling. Before that, emotions served their purpose tying our senses, our homeostasis and our motivation centers all together into one coherent survival-motivated animal.
Much as we might not like to admit it, they still do that. Say what you like about therapy, discipline, controlling our emotions and so on, this system still runs the show behind the scenes. You don’t think your heartrate up, nor plan your sexual reactions, nor control the millions of other little motivations and physiological preparations that lead you through your day and keep your body in a state of readiness best suited to its environment. We like to think we are in control, but quite a bit of the grunt work takes place on the lower levels. Being sick and feeling the physiology drag your mood, mental acuity, and will to live down with it is a fine reminder of that fact.
Ok, so I am fudging the line a little between what we think of as emotion, instinct, reflex, the autonomic nervous system - but the point is, its our hindbrain that takes care of all the details, not the forebrain. What we feel, in other words, not what we think. This is an important thing to note. After all, God is in the details.
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