Emotional granularity and conceptual confusion

 A footnote or two on Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, and I’ll move on.

Professor Barrett explains “emotional granularity,” a term used by psychologists, with an analogy. An artist or designer, looking at something blue, might speak of azure, cobalt and ultramarine. She says her husband would call all those colors “blue.” (I’m further down on the spectrum. I’m the husband who, instructed to put on a blue tie, has to ask whether the tie he has in hand is the blue or the gray one.)

The ability to handle concepts of emotion — such as “anger” and “fear” — varies.

Psychologists speak of a science of alexithymia. The Greek roots suggest a lack of words for emotion. It’s considered a “subclinical construct,” a trait that is measurable but not in itself a disorder. Ten percent of the population might have this trait.

Some people, including me, have problems distinguishing colors. I’ve no doubt that some people have problems distinguishing emotions.

But it seems to me that countless people, including experts, also have problems with the concepts.

Through most of the history of Western thought, we’ve largely followed Plato in thinking that there must be some essential, definitive quality for any concept. When Wittgenstein examined the notion, he found no essences. He found family resemblances among members of a category, rather than a single essence. (If you are skeptical, try to find the essential feature in the concept of “game.” Does it account for football, polo, poker, solitaire, chess, Monopoly?)

I’d say that the concept of “emotion” is at least as slippery. I think the variation in experiences we lump together under “anger” is enough to confuse anyone. Don’t get me started on “grief.”

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Theory of constructed emotion

 Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University, contends that the model of the brain as a stimulus-response machine is a myth. Instead, she thinks of the brain as a predictions market, making guesses about everything the body senses.

If you’re walking in the woods and hear rustling in the leaves and don’t know what’s making the noise, your brain supplies possibilities. Is that a rattlesnake? Your brain is giving odds.

The brain self-corrects. If the feared rattler turns out to be a chipmunk, your brain will give you different odds next time.

Barrett says the brain is predicting, rather than reacting, because life comes at us too quickly to make calculations. Something as simple as a game of catch requires predictions. It takes too long to see a ball coming and calculate where it’s going to be when it arrives in front of you. Your brain predicts where the ball will be so you can get the glove up in time. When you’re a kid just learning to play, there are more misses than catches. Gradually, the predictions get better.

The predictions have physical consequences. Before you’re aware of the rattlesnake, your brain has prompted the release of chemicals to give you an extra burst of energy to escape.

Barrett says each of these countless predictions is accompanied by some feeling — fear in the case of a rattlesnake, relief in the case of a chipmunk. From such feelings we build emotions.

I’m still reading, still thinking about this account, which Barrett calls the constructed theory of emotion. But Professor Barrett is a serious thinker. If you are interested in how minds work, you’d probably be interested in her work.

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Enlightenment in a stand of alders

 This is a mystery to me: I can walk past something a million times without noticing it. Then, when I am looking for something else, I see it, as if for the first time.

We were out looking at the autumn leaves. The only reds in the canopy were the native sourwoods, Oxydendrum arboreum. While looking, I noticed some odd colors in a stand of alders in the wetlands along Stephenson Creek.

I’m not good with colors and couldn’t tell if I was seeing dark purple or black. I had to stop to look closely.

What I was seeing was leaf spot disease, typically caused by fungi. I’ve seen countless cases of it. My grandfather used to spray his fruit trees, and I’ve seen many blighted trees of many species in the forest.

I knew that alders, Alnus serrulate, grow in thickets and prefer wet soil. I knew, generally, that many fungi like wet environments.

What I hadn’t known was that fungi in genus Septoria could spread through a stand of alders like flu through a human population. I hadn’t known that the disease could spread so widely that it could be mistaken by an admittedly half-awake observer for a change of the seasons.

A book for young thinkers

 Leo Tolstoy thought his Calendar of Wisdom was his most important book.

The Calendar seems to me the kind of book that belongs in the hands of young students. Tolstoy collected sayings from many traditions. As he thought about them, he wrote about 800 notes of his own. He arranged all these notes by date.

One of the items for Oct. 23 is from Marcus Aurelius:

 

The purpose of your life is not to do as the majority does, but to live according to the inner law which you understand in yourself. Do not act against your conscience or against truth. Live like this, and you will fulfill the task of your life.

 

You’ll like some items more than others. But I would put the book in the hands of young readers as an example of the kind of thing they could do for themselves. I’d encourage young folks to collect specimens of the world’s wisdom that appeal to them and see if they can improve on the collection.

Tolstoy’s Calendar was popular in Russia until the Soviet Revolution. The autocrats banned it.

Some libraries in public schools in Texas have copies, a fact that has been discovered by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He’s devised ways to punish public schools that keep library books that he and his party don’t like.

Like the Soviets, Patrick and his party have a long list of books they want to purge. Like the Soviets’ list, Patrick’s includes Tolstoy’s Calendar.

• Sources and notes: Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, translated by Peter Kekirin; New York: Scribner, 1997.

Alejandro Serrano, “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick proposes penalties for schools that keep ‘vulgar’ books on library shelves”; The Texas Tribune, Aug. 19, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/19/texas-dan-patrick-obscene-books-school-libraries-penalties/

For an earlier note, see “Tolstoy’s ‘Calendar,’” June 7, 2926. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/06/tolstoys-calendar.html

A short fiction, with emotion

 A drill instructor was dressing down recruits in bootcamp. He woke the barracks up at 2 a.m. screaming. He stepped in front of each sleep-stunned teenager, nose to nose, and screamed.

Recruit A didn’t flinch. Before signing up, he’d taken a course in philosophy. As the drill instructor screamed, the recruit told himself he ought not to worry about the opinions of others.

Recruit B didn’t flinch either. He was a backwoods fellow whose family didn’t count an argument a feud until it had gone on for four generations. He quietly endured the berating but promised himself that if he were ever in the field with the drill instructor, he’d drop a grenade in his tent.

Recruit C swore at the drill instructor. This was exactly the type of undisciplined behavior that the drill instructor and the military were trying to ferret out. The recruit was assigned to Punishment Platoon.

Recruit D burst into tears. This, too, was one of those undisciplined behaviors that the military wanted to root out.

In my day, the military was not much interested in recruits, but it was interested in how individuals managed anger and fear.

What kind of grades would you give these recruits? All were subjected to the same stimuli. But what would you say of the responses?

I’d say two got angry — but in different ways. One lost his temper and got into a dustup. The other, in a cold fury, planned revenge. Of the others, one was afraid, perhaps, and one didn’t feel much at all, if the inquiry is limited to anger and fear.

This is my problem with talk of emotions. Each of the recruits in this story had some kind of feeling that was distinct from the others. But since we are social creatures and communicate with language, we must fit these feelings into categories.

I’m not sure it’s helpful to say that the fellow who lost his temper and the fellow who thought of murder were both “angry.” One was cool, and the other was ready to fight. Their vital signs were different. Would you expect to find neural activity in the same parts of their brains for such dissimilar thought processes, just because we use the word “anger” in both cases?

One of the basic errors in logic is called a categorical error. It seems to me that we’re prone to making such mistakes when we talk of emotions.

A catastrophe of everyday life

 A sweetgum fell across the fence in the woodlot — the one section, near the ravine, that’s made of hog wire. The falling tree would have taken the fence to the ground, but the trunk got stuck in the fork of a living tree, which a fence builder had used as a fencepost.

The crown of a sweetgum makes a remarkable mess. The limbs shatter easily.

But I’ve been filling the ravine with brush. For those seeking to restore eroded land, a fallen sweetgum is a gift.

I put on coveralls, laced up my boots, got an insulated bottle of coffee and spent the morning with a chainsaw. In addition to the erosion control, I have firewood.

A good friend said this catastrophe of everyday life invigorated me, and I suppose it did. I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Before I was old enough to understand the idea of a generational divide, I was raised among men divided by generation. My grandfathers worked with horses, mules and tractors, but mainly with their hands. Their sons went to school and learned to work with their heads.

It was presented to me just like that: head or hands. But I never got the either-or.

A 90-minute read

 One more thing about Theodore Zeldin’s little book Conversations that I admire: its form. I wish I could interest other writers in it.

The book is about a topic I’m interested in, and it’s brief — about 15,000 words.

I can tell you how long it took me to read it: 90 minutes. I’m pretty sure of that because that’s how long it took Zeldin to read it aloud on the radio.

Zeldin’s book is six chapters long. Each was a 15-minute talk on the BBC.

Readers typically cover 150 to 160 words a minute.

Ballpark: 2,500 words per talk or chapter, 15,000 for all six.

In print, the book has about 250 words per page, meaning each chapter runs about 10 pages — about 60 pages of text. The book has 36 pages of pictures by the author, each of which is tied to a question about conversations. Throw in the list of questions and the usual introductory material, and you have a book of 103 pages.

I have some books of more than 500 pages on my shelves and wouldn’t part with them. But I wish writers and readers would come to an agreement that 60 pages of text is a good length for an introduction to a topic.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.