#578 Positive Feelings

Turns out you were right.
Or maybe your gut was.
Recently, when they asked a top government official why he thought terrorism was getting worse, he said it was his gut feeling.
Humorists had a field day, proposing a new terror alert system that, instead of the now too familiar red, yellow, and magenta, would include such designations as gassy, bloated and, possibly, bilious.
It is unfortunate that the terms for emotional certainty must always have something to do with internal organs and glands. Having a gut feeling and feeling something in your heart remove some of the matter of fact objectivity you expect from something arrived at by rational processes in the brain.
Somehow, certainty arrived at by lower organs and appendages never can match that whole snooty-tooty brain deal.
But hey. Emotions come from the brain too.
And in some instances they are actually faster. Faster because it’s important to your survival whether or not you recognize and react to danger. Knowing the difference between a giant spider and a wad of tape is important.
Even if you haven’t quite consciously decided which it is before you jump out of the way.
Garden hoses and garter snakes may be equally innocuous. But snake recognition bypasses rational processes and causes me to leap and a scream like a little girl because, you know, possible poisonous fangs and stuff.
And recently tests have proven that one of those things we call intuition is actually recognition. So high-speed it seems like Matrix-type slow-mo recognition.
For years, people have had “feelings” about other people that they couldn’t quite place. But they would react to those feelings anyhow—not trust someone or be overly cautious. It was chalked up to intuition.
But science has proven it’s ultra-rapid expression recognition. Largely unconscious mental machinery in action. Tests show brain areas involved in emotion will respond to angry faces that are briefly presented then rapidly masked, even when subjects are unaware of having seen the angry face.
That recognition causes a little squirt of your stress glands and an involuntary contraction of your digestive tract. Guess what? Your brain triggers a gut feeling.
So that guy you thought was a jerk? You were right.
America ya gotta love it