activity in the areas associated with vision.12 So if we flash a light on a particular spot on the wall and ask the blindsighted person if she saw the light we just flashed, she tells us, ‘No, of course not. As you might infer from the presence of the guide dog, I’m blind.’ But if we ask her to make a guess about where the light might have appeared -just take a stab at it, say anything, point randomly if you like–she ‘guesses’ correctly far more often than we would expect by chance. She is seeing, if by seeing we mean experiencing the light and acquiring knowledge about its location, but she is blind, if by blind we mean that she is not aware of having seen. Her eyes are projecting the movie of reality on the little theatre screen in her head, but the audience is in the lobby getting popcorn.
This dissociation between awareness and experience can cause the same sort of spookiness with regard to our emotions. Some people seem to be keenly aware of their moods and feelings, and may even have a novelist’s gift for describing their every shade and flavour. Others of us come equipped with a somewhat more basic emotional vocabulary that, much to the chagrin of our romantic partners, consists primarily of good, not so good and I already told you. If our expressive deficit is so profound and protracted that it even occurs outside of football season, we may be diagnosed with alexithymia, which literally means ‘absence of words to describe emotional states’. When alexithymics are asked what they are feeling, they usually say, ‘Nothing’, and when they are asked how they are feeling, they usually say, ‘I don’t know.’ Alas, theirs is not a malady that can be cured by a pocket thesaurus or a short course in word power, because alexithymics do not lack the traditional affective lexicon so much as they lack introspective awareness of their emotional states. They seem to have feelings, they just don’t seem to know about them. For instance, when researchers show volunteers emotionally evocative pictures of amputations and car wrecks, the physiological responses of alexithymics are indistinguishable from those of normal people. But when they are asked to make verbal ratings of the unpleasantness of those pictures, alexithymics are decidedly less capable than normal people of distinguishing them from pictures of rainbows and puppies.13 Some evidence suggests that alexithymia is caused by a dysfunction of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a part of the brain known to mediate our awareness of many things, including our inner states.14 Just as the decoupling of awareness and visual experience can give rise to blindsight, so the decoupling of awareness and emotional experience can give rise to what we might call numbfeel. Apparently, it is possible–at least for some of the people some of the time–to be happy, sad, bored or curious and not know it.
Warm the Happyometer
Once upon a time there was a bearded God who made a small, flat earth, and pasted it in the very middle of the sky so that human beings would be at the centre of everything. Then physics came along and complicated the picture with big bangs, quarks, branes and superstrings, and the payoff for all that critical analysis is that now, several hundred years later, most people have no idea where they are. Psychology has also created problems where once there were none by exposing the flaws in our intuitive understandings of ourselves. Maybe the universe has several small dimensions tucked inside the large ones, maybe time will eventually stand still or flow backward, and maybe people like us were never meant to fathom a bit of it. But one thing we can always count on is our own experience. The philosopher and mathematician René Descartes concluded that our experience is the only
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