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This week’s discussion sparks new ideas for me about mood, emotions and feelings. Each of these generalized control mechanisms have a substantial input on my behavior and can operate on micro or macro scales. In my own personal life I go back and forth about whether my emotions are wholly in my control or something which my body subjects me to and really doesn’t involve any personal input. Of course, as with many things in the body there is a middle ground or gray area. In each of these generalized control mechanisms the I-function does and doesn’t participate. Does the degree of participation depend on the kind of activity or person? I think these generalized control mechanisms have huge implications toward examining human action, an example of this would be in looking at crimes (as we discussed briefly in class). I especially think the act of creativity in all of this is also very interesting.

I believed that mood and emotions had a lot to do with the chemicals in your brain. It seems to be a common practice these days for doctors to assess the levels of specific chemicals in your brain and then make a conclusion about your mood state or the emotions that you are capable of feeling. This process has always sat a bit uncomfortably for me. Granted, I don’t experience depression, but even within Diabetes I know that certain chemicals (specifically the presence of ketones) can affect my mood and emotions. But still, there is something more. Mood as a generalized control mechanism means that we have coordinated nervous system activity. But in what way and what does that really mean? Does the coordination for ‘being angry’ look different from the coordination for ‘being happy’? And furthermore, we recognized in class that it isn’t just about coordinated nervous system activity, there is a fundamental feature of a degree of autonomy.

Autonomy: what does this word even mean any more in the context of what we have learned over the last semester about the nervous system? How can we maintain autonomy when we can’t even recognize if there is an “us” distinct from our nervous system? Sometimes with mood and emotions there is I-function input and sometimes there isn’t. When there isn’t I-function input you don’t recognize that you are having an experience since your experiences don’t manifest themselves under conscious control. How can we really maintain this ‘autonomy’ when most of our behavioral mechanisms and responses are byproducts of nervous system action and dialogue? I believe that we can bring these generalized control mechanisms out of their current state of lack I-function input by incorporating creativity. When you are creative, you are channeling your mood and emotions into a physical media, whether it is painting or music you are bringing seemingly “uncontrollable” nervous system activity and doing something with it. I think this is why art therapy can be so beneficial to so many people: it allows them to channel their emotions and bring them into their conscious activity so they feel as though they have some semblance of control about what is affecting their behavior and interaction with the external world.

These generalized control mechanisms have a large impact also on how we view people’s behavior. We briefly discussed the idea of intoxication as an example for showing that the conscious activity and unconscious responses are in a constant dialogue with one another. Drunkenness is supposed to act as an example for us about how personality is not exclusive to the I-function, but is in part associated with it. I think this is a fine example, except it calls to question many of the other activities we participate in on a daily basis: exercise (releasing endorphins), sleeping (I know we discussed this in the context of dreams and sleep states), eating and many other activities that may warp our personality within our context. I wonder if there is some sort of “core” of ourselves which is relatively unchanging in the I-function and then the details about how it manifests itself is filled in by the context of our environment. As with most weeks, more questions…