🍄 All The Feels

There’s neurochemistry behind curiosity and thrill, wonder is an embodied sense and molecules of emotion run our bodymind.

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“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.” —Susan Sontag [1933-2004], American writer, critic and public intellectual

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. The human mind and body, you couldn’t make it up. And no computer can surpass it (yet). We are still learning about the role that consciousness, emotions and senses play in running our human software and hardware. Science shows that we can no longer separate the mind and the body. The hormones that make us feel good aren’t just regulated by the brain but are part of a choreography between the brain, heart and skin. Hugging has built-in stress-buffering effects; awe can give us healing ‘chills’; we have a built-in reward system that feeds our curiosity (hello fellow ‘informavores’); and yes, we can feel wonder in our bodies. In the words of the neuroscientist António Damásio, “We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.”

Molecules of emotion

Emotions are biological, chemical, hormonal, behavioral, and energetic expressions of the state you are in. Leading research shows that these emotions are throughout your body and mind, driven by neuropeptides and the Vagus nerve superhighway of bilateral communication between the body and the mind—the mind-body or bodymind connection—which regulations our emotions and the effects of stress which can lead to dis-ease and disease.

A significant contributor to the emergence of Mind-Body Medicine, the late neuroscientist and pharmacologist Candace Pert, who penned Molecules of Emotion [1999], had a pivotal role in the discovery of opiate receptors—molecules that unlock cells in the brain so that morphine and other opiates, including the body's natural opiate, endorphins, can enter. After years of studying the form and function of neuropeptides (tiny bits of protein that consist of strings of amino acids), Pert concluded that they are responsible for our emotions—not only the familiar feelings of anger, fear, sadness, joy, contentment, and courage, but also spiritual inspiration, awe, bliss, and other states of consciousness that scientists have never physiologically explained. This concept nullifies the prevailing idea that the mind has power over the body. “Instead, emotions are the nexus between mind and matter, going back and forth between the two and influencing both," Pert told ALICE in 2002. “If we accept the idea that peptides and other informational substances are the biochemicals of emotion, their distribution throughout the body's nerves has all kinds of significance. I like to speculate that the mind is the flow of information as it moves among the cells, organs, and systems of the body. The mind, as we experience it, is immaterial, yet it has a physical substate that is both the body and the brain.”

I feel therefore I am

Recognition that brain and body are dynamically coupled has enriched scientific understanding of mental health conditions and how biological signals interact centrally to influence how we think and feel, a process known as ‘interoception’—a vital component of self-consciousness—or what we like to call 'the sense of self.' Interoception is the ability to be aware of internal sensations such as heart rate, respiration, hunger, fullness, temperature, and pain, as well as emotion sensations. Interoceptive signals are processed unconsciously, but they occasionally enter our conscious awareness. These signals can subtly affect how we perceive the outside world and influence decision making and if they become out of sync, could affect our mental health.

“Interoception may be a missing variable in psychiatric treatment, which may be important in certain groups of patients who have extreme bodily experiences,” says Camilla Nord, principle investigator at the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, adding that profound physical changes are common in patients with anxiety and depression. Studies suggest that interoception-based treatments using mindful self-regulation could help decrease emotional reactivity.

Altered states of mind-body

Meditation and other mindfulness practices can induce altered states of consciousness (ASCs) that can lead to physical sensations and cognitive experiences. In an online questionnaire study conducted by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 45% of respondents reported experiencing a non-pharmacologically induced ASC during a mindfulness practice.

The ASCs reported by participants encompassed a wide range of experiences, including derealization (a sense of detachment from one's environment), unitive experiences (a feeling of unity or "oneness"), vivid perceptions, changes in perceived size, bodily heat or electricity, out-of-body experiences, and ecstatic thrills.

All the thrills

Thrill feels so good, but what exactly is it? The rush starts in the amygdala, a playground of neurons in the brain most closely associated with fear, emotions, and motivation. In a thrill-seeking situation—which almost always poses some kind of risk—the amygdala registers that risk then releases a dose of dopamine, adrenaline, endorphins, and other chemicals in order to protect the body against it. How much of each is released depends on the perceived level of risk. At its peak, every bodily function, chemical brain reaction, and sensory input is hyper-focused on the experience.

Every person’s brain assesses unknown situations differently. “Those with thinner sections of gray matter, for example, tend to perceive less of a threat and therefore seek greater thrills,” reports The Atlantic. No matter what type of thrill a person is seeking, the reaction triggers an increase in testosterone. “Vision narrows. Adrenaline shoots into the body, which increases heart rate. With the heart beating faster, we get more oxygen. The body redirects oxygen to the brain as fast as it can. The feeling often lasts less than 60 seconds, and the immediate aftermath is another flood of mood-boosting chemicals. This is what leads thrill-seekers to chase the process again and again.” Some thrill-seekers describe the feeling as being in the flow state— an energized focus on the joy of the moment.

Experiencing thrill can boost wellness. There are, in fact, tremendous advantages for those who covet thrills. Such people can often feel a sense of calm (like when skydiving) and are likely to feel relaxed in other high-pressure situations. ‎

One of the common themes researchers found with high sensation seekers is that the daily activities they engage in provide a sense of awe, that goosebump-laden feeling that we all know. According to researchers at UC Berkeley, awe is pretty good for your body, and this may be one of the reasons some of us go out of our way to seek it. In one study of saliva samples they analyzed for interleukin-6 (IL-6), a molecule known to promote inflammation throughout the body. Inflammation is tied to poor health, and low IL-6 might signal good health. Happy emotions were linked to lower IL-6 levels, but the strongest correlation was with a surprising emotion: awe. The more frequently someone reported having felt awestruck, the lower the IL-6.

Anticipation is makin’ me…

Sometimes the anticipation before a thrilling experience can be just as intense. And often its triggered by a sense of fear—that gut-reaching unknown that can lead to anticipation of what’s to come, whether you like it or not. Like watching a death-defying roller coaster as you wait in que. Or staring at a chocolate covered cricket before you dare to indulge. Researchers say that fear and excitement share a very thin line, often blurring together in intense situations. While fear is typically associated with negative emotions and discomfort, it can also be seen as a reflection of the body's response to adrenaline and heightened awareness. We can get ‘thrill chills’: Heart rate and blood pressure increase, veins in our skin constrict to send more blood to major muscle groups (responsible for the "chill" sometimes associated with fear—less blood in the skin to keep it warm) and muscles tense up, energized by adrenaline and glucose (responsible for goose bumps—when tiny muscles attached to each hair on surface of skin tense up, the hairs are forced upright, pulling skin with them).

The pleasure chill:

“When you say, ‘My heart is heavy with sadness,’ your heart is literally loaded with fat chemicals. When you say, ‘I’m bursting with joy,’ your skin is loaded with endorphins, interleukins and interferons, which are powerful immunobody regulators and anticancer drugs. To feel elated is generally attributed to the release of endorphins. When endorphins are released there is a temperature change, and people often feel cold or chilly. 

You've got negative hedonic aspects and positive ones and the temperature ones are the ones that give rise to pleasure. And there’s a lot of stuff that I put together in papers, mostly from Arctic research, and which essentially related pain, temperature, pleasure, and all of the endorphins systems. If you record from the brain or stimulate the parts of the brain that give rise to endorphins, people very often also feel cold. They feel comfortable but chilly. So there's a lot of connection there.” —Karl Pribram (1919-2015), Cognitive Neuroscientist, ALICE 2001 interview

The heart knows

The emerging field of neurocardiology studies the close interaction between the heart and the brain—in fact, the heart was reclassified in the mid-eighties to be part of the endocrine or hormonal system. We now know the heart secretes a pretty wide range of hormones, including oxytocin, the love or bonding hormone. And the heart secretes as much oxytocin as the brain.

Smile when your heart is breaking

Research from the University of South Australia confirms that a simple smile can trick your mind into happiness, due to how you move your facial muscles. When participants forced a smile, it stimulated the amygdala—the emotional brain center, which then released neurotransmitters to encourage an emotionally positive state.

“When your muscles say you’re happy, you’re more likely to see the world around you in a positive way,” says the chief investigator, Dr. Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos. He concludes that if the brain can be tricked into perceiving stimuli as happy, this mechanism could be used to boost mental health conditions such as reducing anxiety or depression.

The skin sense

There are receptors all over the body for oxytocin—the skin being the largest one. Our skin has its own hormonal system that releases oxytocin as well—and this is heightened by skin-to-skin contact. Oxytocin is also released through skin contact during orgasm, massage, touch, stroking and acupuncture. Oxytocin has also been found to have antidepressant qualities—and is the intricate link in the Brain-Skin axis where researchers are proving the connection of psychological stress to inflammation and skin aging (among other diseases). Even peripheral nerves can impact skin health through secreted factors like neuropeptides.

Keep in touch

Ever accidentally brush someone’s arm and rather liked it? Studies show that there’s a special pathway in our nervous system that’s particularly sensitive to forms of “social touch” such as hugging, kissing, a pat on the back and even just a brief stroke. This is because our skin contains a special type of touch receptor that responds to pleasant touch, at a medium velocity. These “C-tactile afferents” (also called CT fibers) project to a part of the brain called the insular cortex, which is involved in processing information about emotions and interpersonal experiences. Researchers hypothesize that the social touch pathway conveys important information to the brain that helps facilitate bonding.

Turns out, we have cells in the amygdala that respond to touch. In 2019, University of Arizona Health Sciences researcher Katalin Gothard, MD, PhD, discovered cells in the amygdala that not just responded to sights and sounds, but also touch—something that had never before been shown.

Friends with benefits

Hugging has hidden perks too. Psychologists at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany found that a 20-second embrace of a romantic partner prior to a stressful situation reduces the release of the stress hormone cortisol in women. In a clinical trial involving 76 people, the same effect was not seen in men or in women who did not hug their partner. Their study suggested that the sex difference could be related to varying levels of oxytocin released by men and women following an embrace. Previous research demonstrates that oxytocin levels in the human body increase after social touch, and therefore hypothesized to drive the decreased cortisol secretion.

The informavores

Studies show that information stimulates our brains the same way food and sex do. “Humans are deeply curious beings,” Harvard neuroscientists Vivian Hemmelder and Tommy Blanchard wrote for Footnote. “Our lives, economy, and society are shaped so strongly by a drive to obtain information that we are sometimes called informavores: creatures that search for and digest information, just like carnivores hunt and eat meat.”

Curiouser and curiouser

Hemmelder and Blanchard propose the possibility that evolutionary pressures have made information intrinsically rewarding. Neuroscientists Ethan Bromberg-Martin from Washington University School of Medicine and the University of Tokyo’s Okihide Hikosaka have shown that the brain is chemically wired to be rewarded with dopamine for learning information about the future. They conducted a study suggesting that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information. However, the researchers claim that many questions still remain about humanity's innate curiosity. For example, why are some types of information more interesting to us than others, and why are different people interested in such different things?

The wonder of it all

“Wonder might be humanity’s most important emotion,” writes Jesse Prinz, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, in Aeon. Neuroscientists today consider wonder as at the origin of reality-based consciousness, thus of learning. Educational experts consider wonder the center of all motivation and action in the child.

Often synonymous with awe, wonder is universally defined as a feeling of surprise and admiration that you have when you see or experience something beautiful, unusual, or unexpected. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith wrote that wonder arises ‘when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance’. Smith felt that wonder was a quality of experience that associated with bodily feelings — ‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’.

“These bodily symptoms point to three dimensions that might in fact be essential components of wonder,” writes Prinz. The dimensions he describes all relate back to a feeling. “The first is sensory: wondrous things engage our senses — we stare and widen our eyes. The second is cognitive: such things are perplexing because we cannot rely on past experience to comprehend them. This leads to a suspension of breath, akin to the freezing response that kicks in when we are startled: we gasp and say ‘Wow!’ Finally, wonder has a dimension that can be described as spiritual: we look upwards in veneration; hence Smith’s invocation of the swelling heart.”

We can experience the sensory, cognitive and spiritual benefits of wonder through art and aesthetic experiences. In their New York Times bestselling book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross take us on a journey of neuroaesthetics proving how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts—and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities.

What else we are wandering…

😆 Laugh more …
It’s just what the doctor ordered. Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. While six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day, adults laugh 15 to 100 times a day. “We all know something profound happens when we laugh,” the late neuroscientist and pharmacologist Candace Pert told ALICE. “And I am sure that 200 different neuropeptides get released and kind of move around. But it’s not that the laughter causes the release, or the release causes the laughter, there is this moment of something, and then the chemicals follow. I think that really is true. And that’s a new paradigm thinking.”

🧠 We can feel emotions throughout our body.
Researchers have found that the most common emotions trigger strong bodily sensations, and the bodily maps of these sensations were cross-cultural. Most basic emotions were associated with sensations of elevated activity in the upper chest area, likely corresponding to changes in breathing and heart rate. Happiness was associated with enhanced sensations all over the body. View the Bodily Maps of Emotions here.

🧠 Pre-cognitive emotion
The amygdala can trigger emotions before the brain can. And cells in the amygdala can respond to touch. The amygdala triggers what Dr. Joseph LeDoux calls ''pre-cognitive emotion,'' feelings independent of thought. The amygdala is the region of the brain primarily associated with emotional processes. Similar to the hippocampus, the amygdala is a paired structure, with one located in each hemisphere of the brain. The amygdala is part of the limbic system, a neural network that mediates many aspects of emotion and memory. Dr. LeDoux  discovered nerve pathways that lead directly from the thalamus to the amygdala, in addition to those going through the cortex—meaning that the amygdala can also receive direct inputs from the senses before they are fully registered by the rest of the brain; the emotion occurs before the thought.

…And the Duchess said to Alice, “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

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