In recent years, neuroscience has introduced a new way of thinking about our emotions. The scientists behind the latest brain-imaging studies say they can now pinpoint with precision where these feelings are located within our heads. In 2013, for instance, a team of psychologists
published a study in which they claimed that they had found neural correlates for nine very distinct human emotions: anger, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, lust, pride, sadness, and shame.
This is an intriguing trend for academics like Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. "It's this idea that what we mean by 'emotion' has evolved," Smith tells Science of Us. "It's now a physical thing — you can see a location of it in the brain." And yet, of course, that's not all an emotion is; calling the amygdala the "fear center" of the brain offers little help in understanding what it
means to be afraid.
It's exactly that — the subjective experience of emotions — that Smith explores in her charming new book,
The Book of Human Emotions. It's a roundup of 154 words from around the world
that you could call an exploration of "emotional granularity," as it provides language for some very specific emotions you likely never knew you had. "It's a long-held idea that if you put a name to a feeling, it can help that feeling become less overwhelming," she said. "All sorts of stuff that's swirling around and feeling painful can start to feel a bit more manageable," once you've pinned the feeling down and named it.
Comment: No, don't take that as an excuse to binge watch TV. Ignore the click bait in the first sentence and you'll see that smart people are more sedentary because they probably spend that time being mentally active. Or at least, that might just be the ideal. If thinking people actually do spend more time vegetating in front of the TV, then that's just a sign of how much our society wastes the potential of its brightest.