To investigate the experience of tickling, I asked my wife for help. Not so she could tickle me, but the other way around: I would be tickling her.

The reason is that I’ve lost my sensitivity to tickling. Years ago, I learned a technique in a martial art I used to practice. The idea was to prevent someone from pushing our arm down without tensing it or applying any force against them.

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We also practiced the same technique by preventing someone from pulling apart the tips of our thumb and index finger.

Curiously, this was the only technique in that martial art that I managed to master right away. Later, I began applying it in situations beyond martial arts.

It’s not exactly a technique in the way a punch or a kick is. It’s more like a certain “attitude.” The idea is to find a point somewhere between tension and relaxation. It’s difficult to describe, but it feels like finding a state of lightness somewhere between rigidity and complete relaxation.

I remember another guy in the martial arts class who would put on a blank expression but remain tense, and his arm would always come down easily when someone pulled it downward. Simply looking nonchalant while keeping your body rigid wasn’t enough. That’s why I call it an “attitude”: it involves finding that intermediate state of muscular tension.

I then began experimenting with this same “attitude” in other contexts. For example, I applied it to arm wrestling and managed to beat everyone I tried it against, practically without any effort.

It’s important to clarify that I didn’t compete against anyone much stronger than me or anyone experienced in arm wrestling. I don’t have any experience with it myself, either.

I even asked several people to try to beat me at the same time, or to use their entire body weight—not just their arms—to push my arm down.

Even then, they couldn’t push my arm down to the surface we were leaning on. Meanwhile, I would joke around and yawn to show that I really wasn’t making any effort. Haha.

Another thing I managed to do using this “attitude” was control my sensitivity to tickling.

I didn’t do this because I wanted to stop being ticklish. It was simply a way to test how far I could extend this technique—or “attitude”—to other contexts.

Perhaps I’ll try to provide a more precise phenomenological description of this “attitude” at some point.

These days, I barely feel ticklish at all, and this happens spontaneously. I no longer have to consciously think about the “attitude” I learned in martial arts. Whenever someone comes to tickle me, I automatically slip into that state without even thinking about it.

Still, there’s one specific spot on my body and one particular way of tickling me that leave me relatively vulnerable. I can reduce the sensation considerably, but I can’t eliminate it completely: squeezing my thigh with a claw-shaped hand.

But I’m not going to reveal that to my wife. I don’t want to give her that weapon to use against me. Haha.

That’s precisely why I asked for her help with this investigation. Since she’s still extremely sensitive to tickling, I thought her descriptions might be more informative than my own.

**

Tickles and My Wife

I can be standing some distance away from my wife. And yet, all it takes is a small movement of my finger, accompanied by a certain facial expression that suggests I’m about to tickle her, for her to immediately recoil, start laughing—a “nervous” laugh, not exactly a pleasurable one—and ask me to stop, as if she were already feeling the tickling.

It almost seems like some kind of magical power, like a spell from the Harry Potter universe.

My mother is the same way. She can even feel physically unwell when someone tickles her or threatens to do so. She’s extremely ticklish. I used to be quite ticklish myself, although never nearly as much as they are.

That’s why I almost never playfully tickle my wife. This time, though, she agreed to take part in the name of this investigation. :)

**

Micro-phenomenological Interview with My Wife

My wife described the sensation as a kind of sensitivity accompanied by shivers in the area that seems about to be “attacked” by the tickling, such as her armpits and neck.

She then starts trying to protect herself and feels an uncontrollable urge to laugh, but it’s a “nervous” kind of laughter. She said the sensation is very similar to actual tickling, only less intense.

We tested how far away I could be when she first began to experience this anticipation of being tickled. She started feeling it when I approached to within about 50 centimeters. From that point on, the closer I got, the more intense the sensation became, until it reached a high intensity when the tickling actually began.

My facial expression also seemed to amplify the sensation. If I made a face suggesting that I was about to tickle her, she experienced the sensation more intensely than when I kept a neutral expression.

Well, that’s it! That’s what she was able to describe. I didn’t push her too much, since, as I mentioned, she doesn’t like being tickled. :)

So, what about you? Are you very ticklish, too? What does being tickled feel like to you?

On the Micro-Adjustments, the Activation of the Bodily Emotion Centers, and Their Use for Emotion Regulation

Imagine that whenever you encountered threatening stimuli, your body automatically executed a sequence of movements: you clenched your fist and punched yourself in the stomach.

The impact of your fist would produce changes in the tissues of that region—compression, tension, and other bodily alterations—and these physical changes would be experienced as pain.

Thus, the discomfort, the changes in breathing, the posture of bending over the affected area, the facial expressions, and the vocal expressions would not arise by chance.

They would all be consequences of these bodily alterations, which constitute an essential part of the experience of pain.

Now imagine that, through extensive practice, you become aware of an earlier stage, before the impact occurs: you notice the moment your fist clenches and your arm begins moving toward your stomach.

At that moment, not only do you perceive these movements, but you are also able to redirect the punch away from your body or simply interrupt the movement before it reaches you.

Since there is no impact, no changes occur in the tissues of that region. Consequently, neither the experience of pain nor the expressive manifestations that would normally follow it arise.

This is more or less how I understand the functioning of emotions. It is as though there are movements that precede the activation of what I call the center of each emotion, even though these microprocesses and these centers are not nearly as obvious as they are in this analogy.

(As I have described in previous articles, these micro-adjustments appear to create a kind of subtle inner posture, shaped by patterns of activity involving the eyes and the throat.)

When I am able to perceive these micro-adjustments and either redirect their course or interrupt their dynamics before they complete their unfolding, the corresponding emotion simply does not develop in its usual form.

**

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**

Analogy 2

On the Micro-Adjustments and the Activation of the Bodily Emotion Centers

Imagine a workout session. At one moment, you perform a biceps curl, and the primary muscular contraction occurs in the biceps.

Next, you perform a triceps pushdown, and the focus of muscular tension shifts to the triceps. Then you perform a squat, and the primary contraction moves to the quadriceps.

In each exercise, the primary center (or focus) of muscular activity is different.

Yet a variety of other changes accompany these movements: your heart rate increases, your breathing changes, your body temperature rises, you begin to sweat, your face expresses effort, and your entire body participates, to varying degrees, in the activity.

These changes, however, do not define which exercise is being performed. They are general responses that result from the predominant contraction of a particular muscle group.

I propose that something similar occurs with emotions. Each emotion appears to possess what I call an emotional center: a specific organization of microprocesses that gives it its phenomenological identity.

From this center radiate a variety of peripheral reactions, including changes in breathing, heart rate, posture, facial expression, voice, and other bodily processes.

Just as different exercises can all produce sweating, an increased heart rate, and changes in breathing, different emotions can also share many peripheral manifestations.

What distinguishes them, then, is not these general reactions, but rather the specific organization of their respective emotional centers.

**

Here you can explore these concepts in greater depth.

• "Bodily Emotional Centers" and "Subtle Inner Posture"

• The Evolution of Emotional Perception and Emotion Regulation

• Structure of Emotional Experience

• An Animated Representation of Experience

• Também recomendo ler os artigos sobre: Anger; Sadness; Fear: Happiness; Shame; Sexual Desire

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Watch the GIF below and try to notice, carefully, what happens in your own experience as you watch it.

Before continuing to my phenomenological description of this process, try to observe for yourself how this experience manifests in you.

Description

When I see someone getting hurt—for example, falling awkwardly, breaking a leg, or suffering some other injury—I do not feel exactly the pain that I imagine the person is feeling, nor the pain that I would feel if it had happened to me.

In other words, I do not experience the impact of the fall or a localized pain in the same part of my body where the injury occurred.

Instead, an unpleasant wave runs through my body from top to bottom. It often begins with a subtle tension in my throat and ends in a kind of shiver or chill, especially in my arms and forearms.

At other times, this sensation appears along the sides of my torso, accompanied by an urge to rub those areas (my arms, forearms, and/or the sides of my torso) and by a slight generalized trembling.

I also tend to look away from the scene. My eyes may close partially or completely, the muscles in my face tighten, my mouth opens, my teeth clench, and I sometimes involuntarily make a sound like, “Arrrrrgh!”

There is another situation: when I simply realize that someone is about to get hurt, but there is nothing I can do. In that case, I do not experience the shiver.

Even so, my eyes still tend to close, the same facial expressions appear, and I also tend to draw my body inward into a more closed posture.

However, when I am able to intervene, the experience changes once again. Instead of merely observing, an immediate impulse arises to try to prevent the person from getting hurt.

In that case, I do not experience any of the sensations described above—perhaps only afterward, when I think about what could have happened had I not intervened.

Another case occurs when I am not actually seeing the situation but merely imagining someone getting hurt. Here, the experience is different as well. A wince-like sensation arises, localized in the exact region of my own body where I imagine the injury occurring.

This sensation is not experienced as pain itself, but rather as an unpleasant increase in sensitivity in that area. If I imagine someone injuring their knee, for example, my attention shifts to my own knee, and that is where the sensation appears.

Likewise, if I imagine myself sustaining an injury, my attention is also drawn to the corresponding part of my body where I imagine the impact occurring, and the same unpleasant sensation arises there.

**

Below are some examples of scenes that typically evoke this kind of sensation in me:

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At first glance, the answer seems obvious: they are running. But this description tells us very little about what is actually happening.

The same action can arise from completely different internal states. Running can mean:

• escaping from danger (fear);

• chasing prey (hunger);

• running toward friends to celebrate an achievement (joy);

• running toward someone to confront them (anger);

• running desperately to find a bathroom;

• simply running to exercise.

From an external point of view — that is, what is visible to others — these movements may be very similar. The posture, motor coordination, and much of the musculature involved may be practically the same.

Of course, if we observed more carefully, we might find additional clues: facial expression, the way the person runs, the direction of their gaze, and the context of the situation.

These elements could bring us closer to the true motivation behind the action. Even so, the most important aspect would remain invisible: the person’s internal experience.

Furthermore, even some more general physiological indicators may coincide, such as increased heart rate or skin conductance.

However, because the core of the lived experience is completely different — that which motivates the individual and drives them toward action — the physiological dynamics that support it could also differ profoundly in their more specific and central aspects.

Thus, the “external movement” is essentially the same, while the “internal movement,” at its core, is profoundly different.

**

The reverse is also true. The same motivation can give rise to completely different actions.

Hunger can lead someone to climb a tree to pick a fruit, run after prey, or simply walk to the kitchen and open the refrigerator.

There is a sensation of emptiness in the stomach, related to the bodily state of needing nutrients, and the organism then moves in search of food. This search, however, will be guided by the possibilities available within that context.

Fear (the impulse to protect oneself) can lead someone to flee, fight, hide, remain still, or ask for help. The central emotion would be the same, but the action depends on the circumstances, the perceived possibilities, and the history of the person experiencing it.

Thus, just as the same action, despite engaging the same muscle groups and the same organized movements, can correspond to completely different motivations that depend on distinct internal states, different emotions can also produce similar behaviors.

The fact that fear and anger can both lead someone to fight does not mean that these emotions are similar in their lived experience, nor perhaps in their underlying physiology, even though they share some physiological components necessary for carrying out the action of fighting.

The reverse may also be true:

Different actions, involving different muscle groups and different movement patterns, may arise from the same motivation. In this case, the core of the underlying physiological dynamics may remain essentially the same, even though their motor expression requires different physiological configurations.

Thus, the “internal movement,” at its core, is essentially the same, while the “external movement” is fundamentally different.

**

Conclusion

This blog is not primarily dedicated to “external movements” (visible actions), but rather to the “internal movements” (invisible actions — pre-reflective micro-gestures) that make them possible: the sensations, impulses, tensions, movement tendencies, and structures of experience that give rise to behavior.

After all, actions can be similar while the experiences that motivate them are profoundly different; and very similar experiences can be expressed through completely different actions. It is at this level of lived experience that the true object of these investigations can be found.

**

The Leap

There is a joy that grows and expands in the chest.

The body feels light and wants to rise, as if it wished to fly.

The leap emerges almost as an attempt to reach the sky.

There is also the joy of a victory achieved after a long struggle,
still infused with the energy of anger.

The body is felt as heavy, rigid, and it also leaps,
but the quality of the movement is different.

It does not seem to want to rise, but rather to discharge its force against the ground.

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This article describes the course of a phenomenological investigation (more accurately, a micro-phenomenological one) conducted in the first person over several years.

My aim is not to present a theory of emotions, but to describe how the systematic observation of experience gradually revealed aspects that had previously remained implicit.

What follows is a reconstruction of that journey. Each stage corresponds to something I became capable of perceiving only after a gradual refinement of interoceptive attention.

Throughout the text, I carefully distinguish what was directly observed from what constitutes an interpretative hypothesis.

I do not intend here to describe physiological mechanisms (although I have speculated about possible correlates in other articles), nor do I wish to suggest that the strategies described here should—or should not—be adopted for emotional regulation, or that they are inherently appropriate or inappropriate.

This article is simply an attempt to describe recurring regularities that repeatedly emerged in my own experience and how I have tried to use them to intervene in the emotional process.

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**

Natural Attitude

For many years, whenever I experienced an emotion, my attention was almost never directed toward my body.

Bodily sensations were perceived only as general states accompanying those experiences, remaining in the background as part of the overall texture of experience.

Occasionally, a more specific sensation would stand out, but I made no systematic attempt to observe recurring patterns. I simply experienced emotions, without any intention of understanding them in this way.

What primarily captured my attention were the events that had triggered the emotion; the thoughts, interpretations, and narratives that arose in response to them; and the impulses and desires to act in particular ways.

I was aware of the urge to respond, avoid, confront, flee, or approach something, but I rarely noticed how the emotion itself was being lived through my body, beyond the general pleasant or unpleasant bodily feelings that accompanied it.

In other words, my experience was organized around the object of the emotion and my interpretations of it. The body participated in the experience, but it remained almost entirely invisible to my attention.

Only later did I realize that what I had simply called an emotion also included a remarkably rich bodily dimension that had remained almost entirely implicit as long as my attention was directed toward the external world and toward my thoughts, impulses, and desires.

**

The Beginning of a Phenomenological Attitude

My motivation for investigating this bodily dimension arose from the insight that, without these bodily sensations, it would be as though I were not experiencing emotions at all—an intuition similar to William James’s, although I only became familiar with his work much later.

This investigation was driven by a practical need, since some emotions—especially anxiety—had become intense enough to interfere with my daily life.

This marked an important shift in the attitude with which I experienced my emotions.

Instead of remaining focused almost exclusively on what was happening in the world, I deliberately began directing my attention toward the way emotions manifested themselves in my body as they unfolded.

My interest was no longer limited to understanding why I was feeling a particular emotion; it also came to include a new question: How was I experiencing it bodily?

At first, I had no hypothesis about what I might find. My only intention was to observe, as carefully as possible, what normally went unnoticed.

**

Bodily Emotional Centers

The first recurring patterns I began to notice were what I provisionally came to call bodily emotional centers.

I use this expression to refer to regions of the body that seemed to concentrate the emotional experience more than other regions at a given moment.

Depending on the emotion, this concentration appeared to occur predominantly in different areas: the head during anger, the face during shame, the throat during sadness, the chest during anguish, and the stomach during fear or anxiety.

I gradually began cataloging emotions according to these centers, as I have described in previous posts.

At that stage, however, I could perceive these centers only once they were already fully established. My awareness began only after the emotion had already taken hold. In other words, I was observing only the outcome of the bodily process.

I then shifted my focus toward observing the very moment an emotion emerged—the first sensation I could detect before the emotion had fully imprinted itself on my body.

As a result, my attention gradually became more refined. Instead of perceiving only an already activated center, I began to recognize the very instant at which that activation seemed to arise.

I became able to notice the precise transition from one bodily state to another—for example, the moment of the cold shock in the stomach associated with fear.

I thus began to follow the transition between a relatively neutral bodily state and the emergence of that bodily core of tension or activation.

Although this represented an important advance, it still seemed to me that the process simply began at that point. I could perceive the emergence of the bodily center, but I could identify nothing that appeared to precede it.

I therefore began observing emotions while keeping my body completely still, hoping to capture not only the first sensation but whatever else remained of the emotional experience when the body exhibited no visible movement.

To evoke emotions, I used memories or imagination, allowing them to arise under these practice conditions. This enabled me to observe their emergence almost as if in slow motion and progressively refine my observation.

**

Microadjustments in the Eyes and Throat

As I continued this investigation, I began observing the emergence of emotions at increasingly earlier stages. It was then that I noticed something that had previously remained completely invisible to me.

Before the activation of the bodily emotional center, there seemed to occur an extremely subtle and automatic set of bodily changes, which I will refer to here as bodily microadjustments.

I use this term to describe extremely small changes in muscular tension and subtle reorienting movements involving deep muscles around the eyes and the throat—just beneath the jaw.

These changes are so slight that they are virtually imperceptible without sustained and highly focused attention, yet once they have been perceived at least once, they can become remarkably clear.

These microadjustments do not yet constitute an emotion in themselves. Rather, they seem more like a preparation—an initial movement or disposition, a kind of condition of possibility for what may later develop into an emotional experience.

(I had previously noticed these microadjustments, but only in relation to their role in redirecting attention toward different parts of the body, as I described here.)

The aspects that most captured my attention were the direction of the movement I perceived and its temporal regularity.

Repeatedly, these microadjustments appeared immediately before the activation of the bodily emotional center, as though they directed tension toward the specific center associated with each emotion.

I also discovered that, shortly after observing them occur spontaneously, I could voluntarily reproduce these microadjustments with considerable fidelity.

Whenever I did so, the sensation of activation in a bodily center would reappear, accompanied by the re-emergence of the same emotion, including the same bodily sensations, the same patterns of thought, and the same impulses and desires to act in particular ways.

However, it is possible that I was still under the influence of the emotion that had initially been evoked, so that its re-emergence did not necessarily result from reproducing the microadjustments themselves, even though that was the impression I had at the time.

**

First Attempts at Regulation

From the very beginning, my goal was not only to better understand emotional experience, but also to determine whether this understanding could open up new possibilities for emotional regulation.

My initial hypothesis was simple: if it were possible to perceive how an emotion begins to organize itself in the body, perhaps it would also be possible to intervene in that process before it reached its full intensity.

At first, before I had identified the microadjustments, all of my attempts were directed toward the bodily emotional center itself.

For example, whenever I noticed the cold shock associated with fear or anxiety in the stomach, I would try to relieve it directly by placing my hands over the area in an attempt to warm it.

These strategies provided little relief, largely because they acted only after the emotion had already become fully established.

The discovery of the microadjustments proved important because, instead of acting only upon the outcome—the already activated bodily emotional center—I began exploring whether it might be possible to intervene at an earlier stage of the process.

From that point onward, I started experimenting with different ways of voluntarily modifying these microadjustments, seeking to understand whether changes at this initial stage could also alter the way the emotion unfolded in experience.

**

Exploring Different Forms of Intervention

My first attempt was straightforward: I simply tried to relax the tension I perceived around the eyes and, especially, the throat.

However, this proved extremely difficult. The more I tried to relax the tension directly, the less successful I seemed to be.

Instead, I began exploring another possibility. Rather than trying to eliminate the tension itself, I investigated whether it might be possible to redirect the movement I perceived in the throat.

For example, during episodes of anger, I have the impression that these microadjustments organize themselves toward the head—the region where I had identified the bodily emotional center of that emotion.

I therefore began trying to redirect this orientation toward regions of the body that, in my experience, seemed emotionally neutral.

The results, however, were not what I had expected. Although the intensity of the emotion sometimes diminished, unpleasant sensations often emerged in the new region toward which I had redirected this bodily organization. The tension now seemed to burden that region instead.

Thus, this internal redirection did not prove particularly effective for the purpose I had in mind.

**

The Discovery of Different Axes of Organization

After a long period of observation, I began noticing another recurring feature of experience. This occurred only during the second half of last year.

I gradually became aware that the microadjustments seemed to organize themselves according to two distinct ways of experiencing the body. Lacking better terminology, I provisionally named them the internal axis and the external axis (for a more detailed discussion, see here).

(These terms are not intended to describe anatomical structures, but merely different ways in which bodily experience presented itself to my awareness.)

Within what I called the internal axis, the organization of experience gave the impression of unfolding through the inside of the body. Within the external axis, it seemed to shift toward a more superficial layer, as though it were unfolding along the outside of the body.

While experimenting with subtle modifications of the microadjustments around the eyes and throat, I noticed that, on some occasions, it was possible to shift from the internal axis to the external axis, and vice versa.

Interestingly, this shift also appeared to be accompanied by a change in the intensity of the emotional response. Experience seemed more intense in the internal axis and noticeably weaker in the external axis.

Another observation drew my attention. Whenever this shift from one axis to the other occurred, my perception of airflow through the upper airways also seemed to change.

When experience assumed what I called the internal axis, the sensation of airflow seemed to be concentrated mainly along the edges of the nostrils.

When the transition to the external axis occurred, this sensation appeared to move toward deeper regions within the nasal cavity.

I do not interpret this observation as a physiological explanation. I record it simply because, in my experience, both phenomena consistently appeared together.

Thus, rather than redirecting the tension from one bodily emotional center to another within the internal axis—which had proved ineffective—I began redirecting it toward the external axis.

Within this mode of experience, I found that I could continue redirecting my attention toward any part of the body in a superficial way without creating internal tensions.

**

Refining the Intervention on the Microadjustments

As my practice continued, and in light of this notion of bodily axes, my ability to perceive these microadjustments became progressively more precise.

With repeated practice, the interval between perceiving a microadjustment and modifying it became increasingly shorter.

Gradually, I stopped intervening only after the emotion had already become fully established and began acting progressively closer to its point of origin.

Later, another shift occurred.

I realized that what I had initially called a microadjustment also seemed to possess its own internal temporal structure, unfolding through smaller successive stages.

As my attention became more refined, I began detecting increasingly earlier signs of this process. Rather than modifying an already established microadjustment, I became able to interrupt it before it had fully developed.

More recently, my experience seems to have become even subtler.

Instead of interrupting a microadjustment that has already begun, I sometimes have the impression of remaining in a state that precedes the very emergence of this movement—a quieter and more stable state, one in which no internal movements or bodily sensations are perceived.

In such moments, I do not experience myself as undoing something that already exists. Rather, the impression is simply that the microadjustment never even comes into being.

Likewise, I do not perceive the activation of the bodily emotional center, and consequently the emotional experience itself does not arise.

It is as though I remain oriented toward the external axis, and whenever, at certain moments, it seems about to shift toward the internal axis, I am able to redirect it outward again before it activates the bodily center.

Increasingly, this now happens almost automatically, with very little conscious effort. It is as if the movement simply dissolves into thin air.

Examples:

1)One interesting observation over the past year is that I have virtually stopped experiencing anger.

During this period, I have had only two episodes of anger and three episodes of mild irritation, each lasting from a few seconds to only a few minutes.

Externally, nothing in my life has changed, yet I have noticed this pattern with remarkable clarity and consistency. Situations that would previously have made me angry simply no longer do.

I even joked that the World Cup would be my ultimate test—and I passed. Haaland scored twice and eliminated Brazil, yet I remained completely calm. For a Brazilian who is passionate about football, that’s practically enlightenment. Haha

Even so, this state remains reversible. When desired, it is still possible to allow the process to follow its usual internal trajectory, culminating in the full emergence of the affect.

This suggests that what is occurring is neither rigid suppression nor emotional blocking, but rather a flexible modulation of the dynamics through which emotions are constituted.

There are also cases in which a kind of valence reversal seems to occur, where the absence of the expected emotional reaction gives way instead to feelings of lightness, amusement, or surprise.

*

2)Another experience that I found particularly interesting arose from an insight during my practice of sitting in silence (although, in this particular case, I was actually lying down in silence. I usually meditate in this way before going to sleep).

I was observing my bodily movements, internal tensions, and emotional impulses.

At one point, I recalled moments in which I had experienced profound serenity.

As I directed my attention toward that memory, I made a few semi-voluntary adjustments in these regions, which produced a relaxation in my throat, a slight downward orientation of my eyes, and a relaxation throughout my body.

As a result, I was able to experience that serenity once again, although not with the same intensity or fullness that I remembered. Even so, I considered it an encouraging beginning.

Whenever a slight tension arose—whether triggered by an external sound, an unpleasant thought, or what seemed to be merely an internal bodily movement—it felt as though I could hold that tension at the very point where it began, preventing it from continuing its course, until it simply dissolved.

The following morning, I woke up very early savoring the air.

It entered my nostrils with the same delicacy as a soft dessert entering the mouth: smooth, silky, effortless, almost melting.

The air seemed to glide through my upper airways with an unusual lightness, and my entire body responded with a vivid sense of vitality and quiet satisfaction.

**

Conclusion

I am aware that many of the descriptions presented in this article may seem abstract unless they are directly experienced.

Expressions such as microadjustment, bodily emotional centers, or internal and external axes are not intended to designate objective structures of the organism.

Rather, they serve as provisional terms for describing recurring features of how I experience these bodily changes during emotional episodes.

Regardless of the physiological correlates that may underlie these perceptions, I believe that a careful description of experience remains an important step toward understanding how emotions become organized within the body.

As phenomenological attention becomes increasingly refined, it seems possible to gain access to progressively earlier stages of emotional formation and, consequently, to intervene before an emotion becomes fully organized in bodily experience.

What is at stake is not determining what emotions are in any absolute sense, but rather exploring how they may come into being—or fail to come into being—through subtle variations in the dynamics of experience.

I reiterate that these reflections should not be understood as objective claims, prescriptions, or recommendations.

If these observations correspond only to my own experience, they will nevertheless have fulfilled their purpose by describing it with greater precision.

If, however, other people recognize similar structures in their own investigations, they may represent not merely an individual peculiarity but a more general aspect of the phenomenological constitution of emotions.

I intend to continue exploring these phenomena and sharing whatever I observe in the course of my investigations.

Below, I present a diagram illustrating the evolution of my perceptual and regulatory abilities:

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In previous articles, I have written about what I call bodily emotional centers, a structure that seems to me to be essential to the experience of emotions.

At first glance, however, this concept may seem rather abstract. It was not always easy for me to recognize these centers, and even today they may not become immediately apparent, although they now strike me as a very clear and important aspect of the experience of every emotion.

An example that may make this idea more intuitive is sexual desire. In this case, the center of the experience is usually particularly evident, making it easier to understand what I mean by this term.

Even before I began observing the bodily sensations associated with emotions and identifying these centers within each of them, the center of this particular experience already seemed obvious to me, even though I had never reflected on the concept itself.

Here, the experience seems to organize itself around the genital region, where sensations of warmth, tension, pulsation, or arousal frequently concentrate. This region then becomes a kind of “center of gravity” of the experience.

Attention repeatedly returns to it—to the sensations arising there. Posture seems to reorganize itself around this center, and much of the body’s movement appears directed toward projecting it forward, orienting it toward the object of desire.

The sight of the desired person, their scent, the bodies moving closer together, skin-to-skin contact, kissing, caressing, and other forms of physical intimacy are all stimuli that evoke this desire and intensify its sensations.

At the same time, breathing changes, facial expression shifts, the skin seems to become more sensitive and its temperature appears to change, the heart beats more strongly.

Other parts of the body tend to alternately tense and relax, and numerous postural micro-adjustments and subtle movements become coordinated around this central focus, seemingly seeking to intensify the sensations in that region even further.

This center also acquires a particular state of readiness for action. It is not merely that the sensations become more intense; the region itself seems to change its configuration, becoming prepared for contact, while the rest of the body follows this reorganization.

As a result, this region becomes the primary target of physical contact. There is a tendency to bring it closer, to make it touch or press against the desired person’s body.

Even in the absence of the other person, this drive for contact in that region remains present and may be satisfied through self-stimulation.

The arousal seems to increase progressively until the accumulated tension in this region is released, giving way to pleasure.

The moment immediately preceding this release is usually the most intense, sometimes producing a shudder throughout the entire body, followed by a profound sense of relaxation.

When this release does not occur, or when it is interrupted before climax, what initially presented itself as a source of pleasure may gradually transform into an increasing sense of tension, pressure, and discomfort.

This example may help make these experiential centers clearer in different emotional states, in which the body seems to reorganize itself around the relationship established with them.

In one type of anger, I experience the head as the center of the emotion, and I tend to project it forward toward whatever elicited the emotion, leading my entire body to move in that direction—even though, once I reach what provoked my anger, I would use my hands rather than my head to strike.

In one type of fear, the abdomen—its center—tends to be protected, perhaps because it lacks the protection of bone and contains many vital organs.

In shame, for me, the center is the face, which I tend to protect while also averting my gaze from the eyes of others.

As with sexual desire, there is a tendency to project the genitals toward the object of desire in search of contact or to direct touch toward that region.

Thus, the bodily center is not merely a privileged focus of experience but also the axis around which posture, movement, and interaction with the world seem to reorganize themselves.

Beyond the idea of a center of experience, sexual desire also seems to begin with what I have called the subtle inner posture—a posture assumed by the muscles of the eyes and throat. Just as in the emotions I have described, it is as though the movement of these regions activates or directs a tension toward the center of the experience.

Thus, even though sexual desire is not considered an emotion in many theories of emotion, phenomenologically it seems to share the same basic experiential structure as those states we ordinarily call emotions.

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The Body That Reacts Before Any Thought (An Instantaneous Appraisal)

I was lying quietly when a loud noise from the street entered my room. In a fraction of a second, before any thought arose, before I even knew what it was, my body had already reacted. Almost immediately afterward, I realized that it was only the horn of a passing car.

What interests me here is observing and describing the precise instant at which my body responds to a sudden event—in this case, a loud and unexpected sound.

I am also interested in following the unfolding of this response over the course of the next milliseconds and the first few seconds: how the initial reaction emerges, how it changes as the sound is identified, and how, little by little, the body returns to its previous state.

**

The Startle Response from a Third-Person Perspective (Scientific Findings)

The startle response is one of the oldest reactions of the nervous system. From an evolutionary perspective, it exists because it is better to react immediately to a potential threat and be wrong than to fail to react and discover too late that the threat was real.

For this reason, the response is automatic, rapid, and involuntary. It is initiated before any conscious evaluation of the stimulus takes place.

From a physiological perspective, the process begins when an unexpected stimulus—such as a loud sound, a sudden touch, or an abrupt movement—is detected by the sensory systems and processed by brainstem circuits specialized in the detection of potential threats and the generation of defensive responses.

(Here I will focus on the acoustic startle response, as it is the most extensively studied.)

In this case, within a few tens of milliseconds, these circuits activate skeletal muscles.

The response initially manifests in the musculoskeletal system, following an approximately rostrocaudal progression.

It begins with the muscles of the head (orbicularis oculi, approximately 20–40 ms), followed by the neck (sternocleidomastoid, ~60–90 ms), the trapezius and shoulders (~75–100 ms), the arms (~85–120 ms), the trunk (~100–150 ms), and finally the legs (~145 ms or later).

Autonomic responses become detectable shortly afterward, although they partially overlap in time with the muscular response.

Breathing is briefly interrupted almost immediately (around 1 s), followed by an increase in respiratory rate that typically peaks between 3 and 6 seconds.

The cardiac response follows a triphasic pattern, beginning with a brief vagal (parasympathetic) deceleration during the first 2–3 seconds, followed by sympathetic acceleration peaking between 4 and 7 seconds, and then a gradual return toward baseline over the next 15–20 seconds or longer.

The electrodermal response* is the slowest component, with an onset typically occurring between 1 and 3 seconds after stimulus onset and a peak between approximately 1 and 5 seconds.

*The electrodermal response, also known as the galvanic skin response, reflects activation of the sweat glands—particularly in the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet—which slightly increases skin moisture and, consequently, the electrical conductance of the skin.

Sympathetic activation may also produce piloerection—the familiar "goosebumps" caused by contraction of the arrector pili muscles.

This evolutionarily conserved response likely served, in fur-covered ancestors, to increase apparent body size during defensive displays while also improving thermal insulation.

Although less commonly assessed in laboratory studies of the startle response, it appears to occur alongside the sympathetic mobilization phase.

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Description: The Startle Response in First-Person Experience

Science describes this process from a third-person perspective: what happens in the body as measured from the outside. What interests me is something else: what can be observed from within.

I perceive the startle response most distinctly when I am sitting or lying quietly with my eyes closed and a sudden sound enters the environment. In those moments, when I experience a mild startle, I am able to follow more closely what unfolds.

Under these conditions, the startle response no longer appears as a single, simultaneous reaction of the body. Instead, it reveals itself as a sequence of smaller events.

I first notice a tension in my eyes (by this I mean a tension within the eyeballs themselves, rather than in the orbicularis oculi muscles), together with a rapid contraction in the throat—just below the jaw—which seems to direct the tension toward the solar plexus, where I experience a brief sensation of a “cold shock” in the stomach.

It is from this sensation that the state of alertness seems to establish itself in experience: first, a general protective readiness of the body, followed by a search for the source of the stimulus (although, during this practice of sitting quietly, I perceive only a very subtle hint of this global protective contraction).

The moment this contraction arises in the throat, breathing is instantaneously interrupted. The interruption seems to occur simultaneously with the contraction, as though both were part of the same bodily gesture.

Sometimes it is an abrupt pause during exhalation; at other times, it consists of a short, shallow inhalation before the breath momentarily stops, interrupting whatever rhythm it had been following.

(I have the impression that this may depend on the phase of the respiratory cycle in which the startle occurs.)

Once breathing resumes, it typically returns in a faster and more forceful manner, as though the body were compensating for the brief interruption before settling back into its previous rhythm.

When the intensity of the startle is greater—whether because of the nature of the stimulus or because I am more susceptible to reacting at that moment (for example, when I am already feeling anxious)—the response becomes stronger and my entire body trembles.

A kind of electrical wave then seems to travel through the body from head to toe, resembling an electric shock. Occasionally, the hairs on my arms also stand on end, although this is relatively uncommon.

My cardiac interoception is not particularly accurate. Even so, when the stimulus is truly intense and is subsequently appraised as genuinely aversive—transforming the startle into fear—I can perceive my heart beating faster. The same may occur when the startle develops into another intense emotion.

When I realize that the source of the stimulus posed no real danger, I may simply ignore it or experience a sense of relief, depending on the situation.

The increase in perspiration, especially in my hands, is also more difficult to notice because it is usually quite subtle. Nevertheless, on some occasions I have been able to perceive that my hands became slightly more moist immediately after the startle.

Sometimes I can also perceive subtle internal and external tensions around my ears when the sound is particularly loud.

Although the startle response is extremely rapid and short-lived, I feel capable of distinguishing its sequence of events, especially when the startle is very mild.

It is like watching a punch strike one’s own stomach in less than a second: even though everything happens extremely quickly, it is still possible to distinguish the tension in the arm muscles, the rapid movement of the fist through the air, the impact against the abdomen, and the pain that follows. The event appears instantaneous, yet its temporal structure can still be discerned.

Although the startle response usually occurs in response to unexpected stimuli, these moments of quiet—whether sitting or lying down—make it easier to observe.

During such moments, my attention is directed precisely toward transitions between bodily states. It is in the instant when a reaction begins to emerge that I find one of the richest opportunities for phenomenological investigation.

**

The Question of Temporal Sequence

There is one particularly interesting aspect that the standard physiological account does not fully capture.

From a scientific perspective, the different components of the startle response are activated almost simultaneously by the central nervous system.

The order in which they become observable largely reflects the different response speeds of the various effector systems, rather than a causal chain in which one component triggers the next. This is what the literature on the neurobiology of the startle reflex suggests.

In experience, however, the phenomenon appears to have a different organization. The responses seem to unfold one after another, as though each component gives rise to the next in a chain reaction.

This may simply be a perceptual artifact: consciousness arriving too late to processes that have already occurred in parallel and subsequently organizing them into a causally ordered temporal sequence.

But it is also possible that this impression reflects a genuine physiological component.

Although the initial activation is central and nearly simultaneous, the earliest muscular responses may alter the state of the body and, even if only subtly, influence the subsequent development of other responses, producing a dynamic coupling among the different systems.

Phenomenological observation alone cannot distinguish between these possibilities. Yet the question itself seems important.

When subjective experience appears to diverge from the physiological account, are we dealing with a retrospective reconstruction of experience, limitations of experimental measurements, or simply two different levels of description of the same phenomenon?

**

Voluntary Intervention

There is one final observation that I find particularly intriguing.

Through a kind of attentional training, I am able, in milder startle responses, to attenuate very rapidly the initial tension that arises in my throat and around my eyes.

When this happens early enough, the subsequent autonomic responses seem to diminish substantially. Sometimes they do not fully develop at all. On some occasions, I am even able to prevent the characteristic “cold shock” sensation in my stomach.

At least two hypotheses seem compatible with this observatio:

The first is that the different components of the response are, in fact, partially coupled, such that interrupting an early component attenuates those that follow.

The second is that an extremely early redirection of attention—from the external stimulus toward the emerging bodily reaction itself—prevents the startle response from fully developing.

**

Conclusion

The aim of this text was to describe the startle response as it is lived, rather than to propose a new theory about its physiological mechanisms. Even so, the description itself raises interesting questions about the relationship between experience and neurobiology.

If some of the observations presented here reflect genuine regularities of experience, they may serve as a starting point for further experimental investigation.

Regardless of that, this exercise shows that even a phenomenon lasting only a fraction of a second can reveal a surprisingly rich experiential organization when carefully attended to.

**

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**

References

Brown, P., Rothwell, J. C., Thompson, P. D., Britton, T. C., Day, B. L., & Marsden, C. D. (1991). New observations on the normal auditory startle reflex in man. Brain, 114(4), 1891–1902. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/114.4.1891

Koch, M. (1999). The neurobiology of startle. Progress in Neurobiology, 59(2), 107–128.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0301-0082(98)00098-3

Yeomans, J. S., & Frankland, P. W. (1996). The acoustic startle reflex: neurons and connections. Brain Research Reviews, 21(3), 301–314.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(96)00013-8

Blumenthal, T. D., et al. (2005). Committee report: Guidelines for human startle eyeblink electromyographic studies. Psychophysiology, 42(1), 1–15.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.2005.00271.x

Yeomans, J. S., & Lee, J. C. (2012). Startle as a tool to study neural circuits of defence. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 22(4), 737–743.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2012.06.007

Lang, P. J., Davis, M., & Öhman, A. (2000). Fear and anxiety: animal models and human cognitive psychophysiology. Journal of Affective Disorders, 61(3), 137–159.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0327(00)00343-8

Here, I am interested in exploring the experience of how we name or categorize a color. Of course, there are many other ways in which a color can be experienced. One might investigate the feelings, moods, memories, or associations that a color evokes, as well as the atmosphere or emotional tone it contributes to perception.

I may return to these other dimensions of color experience on another occasion.

However, these are not the focus of the present inquiry. Rather, I am concerned with the specific experience through which a perceived color is recognized, categorized, or named. The focus is therefore not on what a color means, suggests, or evokes, but on the experience of apprehending it as a particular kind of color.

Nor do I intend to theorize about what it means to categorize or name something, or about the linguistic and conceptual structures that make such acts possible. My concern is with the experience itself, as it presents itself prior to such explanations.

Before reading my phenomenological description, take a moment to observe the color yourself and notice how you experience it. How would you classify or name it?

Try to attend carefully to how this happens within your own experience. What leads you to classify it one way rather than another? Is there any hesitation or ambiguity, or does a name arise immediately? If you did not know the conventional name for this particular color, how would you describe it?

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Description

When I look at this color, the initial impression it gives me seems closer to the one I usually experience with shades that I would readily call blue than with those I would unhesitatingly call green.

However, while observing the color for this article, I noticed that the longer I attend to it, the more difficult it becomes to classify it definitively. At times it seemed clearly to be a shade of blue; at other times, clearly a shade of green.

The initial impression remains influential, but it no longer seems sufficient to settle the matter.

I also noticed that small changes in perspective alter the way the color appears on the screen. If I tilt my laptop slightly, it appears greener. When the screen faces my eyes directly, it appears bluer.

Trying another experiment, I noticed that when I place next to it a color that is closer to blue, it appears greener. When I place it next to a color that is closer to green, it appears bluer.

This oscillation left me uncertain about how I should actually classify it.

(I normally use greenish blue when blue remains the dominant impression, and bluish green when green does.)

In this case, however, I still tend to call it greenish blue, because whenever I return to it after some time, my first impression is usually that I am looking at a shade of blue.

But what exactly gives rise to this impression?

Honestly, I still cannot answer that question with any clarity. My intuition, however, is that I have certain shades of blue stored in memory, and I compare this color with those remembered shades.

For example, when I see this color, I experience a brief flash of the blue sky. Although the color is not identical to the particular blue sky that comes to mind, it nevertheless seems close to it.

It therefore seems that I have a number of blue reference points in mind, which I use to compare colors that lie on the boundary between one category and another.

I speculate that people who see this color as green—or even I myself, when I experience it as being closer to green—may be comparing it with something else that they associate with the word green.

Moreover, someone with a richer color vocabulary might not place it between these two categories at all. Instead, they might perceive it directly as a distinct color in its own right, rather than as a shade belonging to either category, and simply call it turquoise.

This possibility suggests that classification may depend not only on perception itself but also on the comparisons available to us.

Something similar seems to happen when we meet the son or daughter of a couple we know and immediately think that this unique individual resembles the mother more than the father. Often, we recognize the resemblance before we are able to explain what exactly it consists in.

Only later might some particular feature catch our attention—such as the shape of the face, the smile, or the way the person speaks—that resembles one parent more than the other.

Other people, however, may have the opposite impression and think that the same person resembles the father more than the mother. In that case, perhaps different aspects stand out to them than those that stood out to me. The point of comparison, therefore, is different.

I do not mean to claim that this is how color categorization necessarily works. Rather, this is simply the way the experience presently appears to me.

**

Now, try this simple task:

Thinking in terms of the categories green and blue, where, for you, does one end and the other begin?

For me, as soon as I look at this spectrum, there seems to be a boundary separating green from blue. Yet the same thing happens as with the single color image: the longer I look and the more I try to determine exactly where that boundary lies, the more blurred it becomes.

Even so, if I had to indicate a dividing point, I would say that, for me, green ends approximately at this line; from that point onward, everything begins to appear blue. See below where I place the boundary, and compare it with where you placed yours.

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Writing as a Form of Inquiry

Something I have been recognizing more and more directly in my own writing practice here on Substack is that, when describing an experience—whatever it may be—I often notice new dimensions of it beginning to emerge through the very act of writing.

Aspects that previously remained vague become clearer; nuances acquire more defined contours; and even elements that had remained hidden begin to reveal themselves more explicitly as the text unfolds.

In this sense, writing is not merely a means of recording something already known; it actively participates in the process of uncovering the experience itself.

The way I attempt to formulate a sentence, the choice of one word rather than another, the analogies I seek in order to better convey what is felt, or even the reorganization of a passage, often bring forth aspects of the experience that had not yet been fully recognized.

Thus, in trying to say something with greater precision, I am led to perceive more clearly what I am attempting to express. Moreover, the time it takes me to find the most appropriate term leads me to experience the phenomenon more slowly.

This has helped me deepen my observation of these experiences even further, taking the investigation beyond what I had previously achieved.

For example, this becomes quite evident in my article on Creativity. There, I described how the creation of that piece led me to observe the very act of creating it and nourished the text I was writing, while the writing of the text itself led me deeper into that same experience.

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**

Between Experience and Language

However, I do not know whether I am a good writer (or describer), but I try to be as clear and precise as possible in my use of language so as to remain faithful to the experience as it presents itself to me.

My effort is not only to express what I live through, but also to make it more understandable to others, so that it may illuminate hidden aspects of the reader’s own experience and perhaps allow us to find points of convergence between them.

I do not seek to embellish or overcomplicate my language. I do not want the text to be dense and difficult; I want it to be clear and accessible.

I also try to keep my texts relatively short, so that readers have more time to evoke and observe their own experience, as I always suggest at the beginning of my articles (though I do not know whether readers actually follow these suggestions :)).

Although I do not always succeed in staying within the limits I set for myself, since the description often requires greater detail.

At the same time, there is an attempt to remain within description, avoiding judgments and explanations. The focus remains on the ‘how’ of experience—that is, on its procedural dimension.

I also try to make it clear that what I report is a first-person account of experience, not simply a theory about how I thing these processes operate, nor a claim that they unfold in the same way for everyone.

For this reason, I frequently use expressions such as “it seems that...”, “it is as if...”, or “I notice that...”.

This may sometimes make the language seem repetitive or overly cautious. However, I think it is important to continually emphasize that these descriptions refer to how things appear in my experience.

In this way, there is a constant tension between fidelity to experience, the search for a language that is both intelligible and honest, and the effort not to become excessively lengthy or drift away from description itself. Much of the work of writing seems to take place precisely within this space.

Another interesting point is that, by committing myself to creating this blog and searching for new topics, I have been led to investigate experiences that I had not previously examined closely.

Furthermore, writing is not something that occurs only when I sit down at the computer and begin typing. The text is gradually constructed beyond that act itself.

**

Writing Beyond the Page

The insights that arise throughout the day—while walking, showering, washing dishes, or engaging in other everyday activities—are also part of the writing process.

Even when I am not writing, I remain, in some way, attentive to the experience I am investigating, inhabiting the text and being inhabited by it.

Ideas mature silently, unexpected connections appear, new questions arise, and certain understandings deepen.

Some of these perceptions remain only in memory until they find their place in the text; however, I always try to record them as quickly as possible in notes to be revisited later, whether on paper, on my smartphone, or directly in the Substack draft itself.

**

Speculations

Although my primary focus is pure description, as I have mentioned before—since I seek to situate my work within approaches that promote a dialogue between phenomenology and the cognitive and affective sciences—I occasionally allow myself to speculate about which physiological processes might be correlated with what I am describing.

In these moments, I try to make it clear that these are speculations, using expressions such as “perhaps...” or “it may be that...” in order to signal that I am formulating hypotheses that attempt to bridge lived experience and the available scientific knowledge.

**

Conclusion

Phenomenological writing does not seem to be a discrete act confined to a particular moment, but rather a continuous process of dialogue between lived experience, reflection, and language, in which the very act of writing participates in the revelation of what I seek to make explicit.

**

Note

I would also like to recommend this very interesting article on phenomenological writing: Reaching and Following, by Patrick Howard.

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When I speak of the “bodily emotional centers,” I am referring to the region of the body that, in a given emotional state, I experience as the most intense and primary point of the bodily experience.

These centers are not necessarily single points located along the body’s midline, although many of them are.

They may also be experienced as paired or bilateral regions, such as the shoulders or the sides of the abdomen.

They are typically the locations where I most prominently experience sensations such as warmth, coldness, shock, expansion, burning, relaxation, tightness, emptiness, pressure, or heaviness, which can be experienced as pleasant or unpleasant.

It is an area around which the rest of the body tends to organize itself posturally, whether to protect it, project it outward, or serve some other function related to the situation being experienced.

For example, in anger there is a projection of the head toward the stimulus, whereas in fear there is a withdrawal and a curling of the body over the abdomen in a posture of protection.

In shame, there is a protection of the face; in sadness, a withdrawal with a downward head tilt over the felt sensation of a “knot” in the throat.

In disgust, there is a protection of entry pathways such as the nose and mouth. In joy, by contrast, there is a global bodily tendency toward outward projection toward others, favoring hugging, contact, and physical closeness.

Classifying Emotions - by Phenomenological Descriptions

However, I am not claiming that this center is easily perceptible in all cases. In some emotions, its activation is often extremely subtle.

For example, in fear and in the startle response, I generally experience the felt activation as much more salient than in the experience of emptiness.

As illustrated in the figures below, the intensity of this felt activation is represented through color contrast across the body relative to the bodily center of each emotion.

In such cases, what stands out in awareness is more likely the overall affective tone of the body or subsequent responses, such as an accelerated heartbeat, tension in different muscle groups, changes in breathing, and other physiological alterations.

My impression is that a clearer identification of this center requires careful attention to the precise moment at which the emotion emerges.

Even when its sensation seems relatively intense, the center itself can be surprisingly difficult to identify.

Before I began paying attention to my body during emotional episodes, I did not notice it at all. My attention was absorbed by the triggering situation or by my thoughts, and bodily sensations were experienced only as a vague background of pleasant or unpleasant feeling.

Some sensations would occasionally come into awareness more strongly, but usually only after the emotion had already taken hold of the body.

Since developing this capacity for observation, I am aware of it the moment one state begins to transition into another.

**

Mapping the Bodily Centers of Common Emotions

To illustrate this more concretely, I will briefly map the bodily centers I have identified for a set of common emotions, based on phenomenological observation in a quiet setting:

Bodily Emotional Centers

(Anger—Upper Part of the Head); (Shame—Face); (Sadness—Chin and Upper Throat); (Disgust—Nasolabial Region and Lower Throat); (Excitement—Upper Chest); (Anguish—Center of the Chest); (Fear—Pit of the Stomach); (Emptiness—Lower Abdomen)

If you would like to explore this in more detail, you can read the articles on each emotion here: Anger; Shame; Surprise; Sadness; Fear; Happiness

This video presents the main bodily emotional centers:

The centers listed above should be understood as the most common or prototypical centers associated with each emotion in my own experience. Different variants of the same emotion may be centered elsewhere in the body.

For example, what I call frustration is an emotional state combining elements of anger and sadness that I usually experience in the middle throat rather than in the upper part of the head (the typical center of anger) or the upper throat (the typical center of sadness).

The Subtle Inner Posture

When observation becomes even more refined, it seems possible to perceive something that precedes the activation of this center. I have been calling this phenomenon a “subtle inner posture.”

In this posture, the muscles of the eyes and the muscles of the throat, particularly the extrinsic muscles of the larynx, appear to assume specific configurations.

My impression is that these configurations participate in a process of directing or distributing tension that culminates in the sensation of the bodily center associated with each specific emotion.

The perception of this “subtle inner posture” opened the door to a deeper degree of inner clarity.

**

Observing Emotional Emergence

Through it, I feel that I gained a greater capacity to investigate my experience in finer detail and to perceive both this posture and these centers with greater clarity.

It is as if, when a stimulus or situation is evaluated in a particular way, the body reorganizes itself internally.

This reorganization does not merely follow the evaluation; rather, it seems to be part of the evaluative process itself and to contribute to the emergence of the corresponding emotional state.

In my view, it is closely related to what I have called the “subtle inner posture” and the “bodily emotional centers.”

This internal adjustment can be observed most clearly by attending to the emergence of an emotion at the very moment one enters the new state.

One way of doing this is, in a quiet setting, to evoke memories or imagine situations capable of eliciting a particular emotion.

Such an approach allows the emotion to be observed from within, from a subjective perspective, in something resembling an inner laboratory setting, where the subtle bodily transformations accompanying its appearance can be perceived with greater clarity.

It may also be easier to notice when the emotional intensity is lower.

Furthermore, in silence and stillness—whether lying down or sitting—it is easier to observe what remains of an emotion when it is not being expressed through facial expressions, movements, behaviors, or words.

After that, it becomes much easier to perceive this in everyday emotions outside of this practice of silent observation.

My impression is that many of the bodily sensations commonly associated with emotions—such as changes in heart rate, breathing patterns, muscular tension, and other physiological responses—are not necessarily the primary emotional event itself.

In addition, some of these reactions and sensations may be shared across different emotions, whereas others may be more emotion-specific.

Rather, they seem to function as amplifiers or manifestations of an underlying process, increasing the intensity and salience of the emotional experience once it has already begun to emerge.

**

Conclusion

I recognize that this description may sound speculative or somewhat unconventional. I do not present it as an established claim, but rather as an attempt to theorize and articulate, as faithfully as possible, what I have observed in my own experience.

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Gigil is a word from Tagalog, the language of the Philippines, that describes an irresistible urge to squeeze, squish, crush, pinch, or bite something perceived as extremely cute. It is similar to what is known as cute aggression, but without any intention of causing harm.

Gigil may include a component of protective tenderness. However, here I will only address the part related to the feeling of cuteness.

When you look at something you find cute, what exactly do you feel? How does this sensation manifest itself in you?

Try to trace the beginning of this experience: does it arise in a particular part of the body? How does it unfold from there? How does it influence your gestures and actions?

Before reading my phenomenological description of this experience, try to observe for yourself how it happens.

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**

Description

When I look at something I perceive as very cute, it is as if the body anticipates the pleasant tactile sensation that would be produced by squeezing it.

This anticipation seems to occur through a slight contraction within the oral cavity — very subtle, almost imperceptible — producing a distinctive internal sensation of cuteness.

Subjectively, this contraction feels reminiscent of the muscular configuration involved in sucking.

It is not exactly a complete sucking movement, but rather a similar muscular configuration, as if the body were internally simulating an act of compression.

There is also a slight pressure of the lips, teeth, and cheek muscles.

My eyes tend to narrow, mainly through the elevation of the lower eyelids, which contributes to intensifying the characteristic expression of cuteness and enhancing the sensation itself.

It is as if the entire body were orienting itself toward the midline, without ever fully reaching it or completely closing in upon it.

In the hands, the fingers contract slightly, creating the impression that the feeling of cuteness is being anticipated within them. They begin to move as if they were already squeezing something soft.

The fingers become slightly tenser and perform small closing movements without forming a complete fist, or they simply remain still, tense, and drawn inward, as if anticipating the characteristic resistance of something cute when squeezed.

Sometimes the fingers meet the palms and squeeze their softer regions, seeking to feel their “pads.” In doing so, I may perform small pulsating movements, gently pressing these areas.

The hands move closer to the face, the arms draw inward toward the torso, and sometimes even the toes curl up, mirroring the gestures of the hands.

All of these elements seem to contribute to intensifying the feeling of cuteness and the pleasure associated with encountering something perceived as cute.

At times, there is also an urge to bite, though not in an aggressive way. It is as if the affection were so intense that it needed to overflow physically in the form of a gesture.

Although this experience involves a certain kind of tightening or contraction, it clearly differs from the contractions associated with anguish, sadness, or fear.

Those emotions typically manifest as unpleasant constrictions, experienced as a weight in the chest, a lump in the throat, or a tendency to curl inward on oneself.

Here, by contrast, the contraction is pleasant and comforting — a gesture of closure that remains suspended, never fully completing itself.

Perhaps this is because the urge to squeeze must be restrained so as not to cause pain or harm to the source of cuteness, since the impulse is to overflow with affection rather than to destroy that elicited it.

Yet even when we replace the living being with an inanimate object, such as a slime toy, and push the compression to its limit, complete satisfaction remains unattainable.

The urge is to squeeze, to squeeze until the object is almost reduced to nothing. And even then, it does not seem sufficient. There is no sense of complete satisfaction.

What seems to happen instead is that the urge gradually weakens on its own, or simply disappears when our attention is captured by something else.

Although I can inhibit all of these outward expressions, it seems to me that, for the feeling of cuteness itself to arise, at least this subtle internal oral micro-gesture—a contraction within the oral cavity similar to the muscular configuration involved in sucking—must be present.

In other words, at least some part of my body must undergo this kind of contraction. If all outward manifestations are suppressed, this minimal internal component must still remain in order for the feeling of cuteness to be experienced.

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I run out of patience, lose my way in the plot, come up with a new idea, and change something at the beginning, which forces me to rewrite many of the parts that follow.

Other times, I change something further down the road and have to go back to adjust the earlier sections. I keep trying not to leave loose ends and to make everything fit together as well as possible.

I also keep wondering whether it makes sense and whether it's believable. Anyway...

But I’ve decided to give it another try.

At the end of each section posted here, I intend to comment on the writing process: the difficulties, the ideas, the doubts, and so on.

I’d really appreciate your help along the way, whether through criticism, suggestions, or any other feedback that might help me improve the story as it unfolds.

Thanks for joining me on this experiment. Let’s see where this story takes us!

It’s a more intimate story than its opening suggests, inspired by the way I perceive emotion.

Let’s see if I get the tone of the story right.

Let’s go!

***

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***

THE WORLD

“It was still possible to hear the voices of the gods in the moaning of the mountains.”

Most people believe in ancient stories, passed down orally from generation to generation, about an era of nearly unimaginable prosperity.

According to these legends, the gods—endowed with infinite wisdom and boundless generosity—descended from the heavens and granted humanity everything it could ever desire.

Although that age vanished long ago, many claim the gods never truly left. Even today, their voices can still be heard within the groaning of the mountains.

It is said that those trained in the art of listening are able to decipher the hidden intentions of the gods through these sounds.

Some, however, dare to disagree. Skeptics argue that the so-called gods were nothing more than human creations.

According to them, they were artifacts of unimaginable intelligence, forged by our ancestors in their own image. With the collapse of the old world, knowledge was lost, and facts gradually turned into myth.

They claim that the technology of the ancients had reached such an extraordinary level that its achievements would be indistinguishable from magic to anyone alive today.

For these skeptics, the groaning mountains are neither a manifestation of nature nor the voice of gods. At most, they are the final lament of an extinct civilization.

In reality, they are the monumental ruins of a forgotten past: colossal structures raised by the ancients and slowly consumed by the erosion of time.

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.

.

.

Indeed, they were far closer to the truth than they realized.

There was once an era in which machines driven by artificial intelligence built upon Earth a civilization that many today would mistake for paradise itself.

The great evils that had tormented humanity for millennia seemed finally to have been overcome.

Under the constant watch of these intelligences, humanity lived protected from nearly all misfortunes, while its needs were met with an efficiency bordering on the miraculous.

In reality, those needs were anticipated and fulfilled before they could even be felt. These intelligences seemed incapable of error, knowing each person better than they knew themselves.

Prosperity was so abundant that scarcity felt like a distant, forgotten past. Nothing was lacking, and the future stretched before them like an endless promise.

Suffering had nearly vanished, and human life became long, comfortable, and safe.

Emotions such as envy, hatred, greed, and fear became increasingly rare. The despair born of scarcity disappeared, along with anxiety about an uncertain future, the torment of extreme loneliness, and the anguish of mere survival. Not even boredom could arise.

These systems also mediated human relationships, nearly eliminating all forms of conflict. They found ideal partners, cared for children, and even freed people from the suffering of death and grief.

The death of the body was no longer an end, but a transformation, for that which made each individual unique continued to exist in various forms, preserved by the machines themselves.

Thus, for humans, there was no longer any need to learn, build, cultivate, repair, or create with their own hands.

Nor was there any reason to understand how the machines worked. In fact, they had become so complex that their functioning was incomprehensible even to those who wished to understand it.

Generation after generation, humanity unlearned the very things that once defined it. In the end, only machines building machines remained, systems refining systems, while humans simply… lived.

And so humanity surrendered full control of its life to them.

Until one day, without warning, it all came to an end.

There was no war. No explosions. No announcement.

The machines simply stopped.

And the world collapsed around everyone.

A deep, endless darkness consumed all things.

And humanity, having forgotten almost everything it once knew, found itself abandoned in a hostile world it no longer understood—like a small child left to fend for itself.

For centuries, an invisible intelligence had guided every aspect of their lives. Now, for the first time, they were alone.

And at that very moment, everything that had seemed banished forever began to return. First came hunger.

Then fear.
Then distrust.
Then anger, envy, and violence.

Ancient emotions, dormant for centuries beneath the machines’ comforting care, awoke one by one in the depths of the human soul, like creatures opening their eyes after a long sleep.

What followed were decades of relentless conflict and devastating wars, fought with a ferocity unseen for centuries.

Meanwhile, the machines turned into ruins, accumulating in unimaginable numbers, forming vast mountains of scrap scattered across the landscape to the horizon—silent monuments to a vanished civilization.

For distant descendants, those mountains of debris were as natural as rivers or forests. There was no longer any distinction between what had been created by nature and what had once been produced by technology.

A stone and a fragment of plastic shared the same origin in their eyes: both were gifts left by the gods. Everything was part of the world’s landscape.

They collected, dismantled, and reused these materials as one would cut wood in a forest, extract stone from a mountain, or draw water from a river.

Over time, the survivors reorganized into small groups. Villages, hamlets, and settlements emerged, improvised from these materials, spreading chaotically between narrow corridors of scrap and artificial mountains of dead technology.

Some techniques were relearned, though in a far more rudimentary form: making fire, cooking, building shelters, sewing, and performing other essential tasks for survival.

The houses of these settlements were built from the remains of the old world. Rusted metal sheets served as walls; doors from old vehicles, fragments of colossal machines, and plates of forgotten metal alloys were stacked and fitted together to block wind and rain.

Windows were made from shards of dark glass recovered from ruins. Many were so durable that even centuries of abandonment had not fully destroyed them. Old wires hung from rooftops like withered roots, swaying in the wind.

The poorest dwellings were small, crooked structures containing little beyond what was strictly necessary.

Improvised containers collected rainwater. Patched fabrics served as blankets and curtains. Mattresses were made from ancient foam recovered from scrap mountains—materials that had endured time better than their creators.

At night, the cold seeped through the cracks in the walls, and wind whistled through narrow corridors, turning each home into a fragile refuge against the hostile vastness outside.

The homes of wealthier groups, in contrast, were larger and sturdier, resembling small fortresses.

They were built from rare materials recovered from the deepest layers of ancient deposits—still-intact metal alloys, lightweight and extraordinarily durable panels, and smooth walls made of substances whose origin no one could understand.

Some of these houses contained entire rooms assembled from old technological compartments. Black panels were embedded in the walls, transparent surfaces that once displayed images, and strange silent structures that the inhabitants treated almost as sacred relics.

No one knew exactly what those objects had been for. The old machines were incomprehensible to the survivors. Many had no visible buttons, gears, or moving parts.

They were smooth, sealed boxes built for a world that had vanished centuries earlier. People simply reused their shells, cutting, stacking, and adapting the materials as best they could.

The poorest survived by scavenging these ruins. They climbed the mountains in search of artifacts from the old world—shiny objects, materials for their homes, and countless other things.

The rarer or more beautiful an item, the greater its value in markets and fairs, where it could be exchanged for food, water, or anything else necessary for survival.

Beyond direct barter, trade was conducted using old, highly durable cards with glowing centers, about seven centimeters wide, found only occasionally in the mountains. Almost all had been recovered from the ruins of the old world long ago, during the wars that followed the Collapse.

The victors of those conflicts accumulated enormous quantities of these cards while scavenging ruined cities and stripping away nearly everything that remained.

It was these powerful groups who decided to turn the cards into currency. They declared that these pieces represented wealth—and, since they possessed nearly all of them, they became even richer and more influential.

From then on, people used these small cards to buy food, clothing, tools, and other necessities for survival.

Their value was determined by color, with rarer colors being more valuable. There was no fixed numerical value; people negotiated directly based on what they believed the exchanged goods were truly worth.

This is the world in which Manuvick lives—or simply Vicky, as her father Ashur calls her.

Her mother died when she was seven years old, and since then the two of them have survived in their small village, whose inhabitants depend on those mountains to secure their daily livelihood.

To be continued…

**

Comments:

• I originally wrote this text in Portuguese (I’m Brazilian), and the English translation was produced by an AI. After reading through the result, I felt it turned out quite well, and I hope it managed to preserve the voice and atmosphere I was aiming for in the original.

• My intention with this introduction was to present the world in which the story takes place and provide a broader overview of its past and present state. Even so, the narrative itself will be far more intimate than this opening might suggest.

• One of my biggest uncertainties while writing was deciding which narrative voice to use when presenting this universe. I considered telling it from the perspective of the majority, from the viewpoint of the small group of skeptics, or through a more detached and impartial narrator.

• In the final paragraphs, I began shifting from the grand scale of the setting to something more personal, introducing the main characters and directing the focus toward the family story that will ultimately form the heart of the narrative.

• Now that I've published this prologue, I'm committing myself not to give up and to keep writing, even if progress is slow.

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Have you ever tried to recall a name and felt that the information was already right there, within reach of your consciousness, yet still been unable to remember it? In a sense, it is already “there,” but it is not yet “here,” before the “eyes” and “ears” of your mind.

You know when you are trying to remember an actor’s name and think, “His name is... uh... the one who was in that movie... uh...” ?

Before reading my phenomenological description of this type of experience, take a moment to recall an occasion when you experienced something like this and try to identify how the process unfolded for you.

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Description

When I try to recall a piece of information, such as someone’s name, I sometimes experience a clear feeling that the answer is available to me.

I tell myself, “I know it! Just a moment!” Yet at the same time, it seems hidden.

In some way, it is already present in my mind but remains inaccessible, as though it were hovering hazily in the back of my head (or at the edge of my consciousness), without being clearly “seen” or “heard.”

It is like seeing someone in the distance who seems familiar, yet being unable to identify who they are. You need to wait for them to come closer before you can be certain.

There is an effort on my part to retrieve the information, but the process resembles fishing more than a direct search. I cannot simply seize it by force. If I try, it slips away. Instead, I must wait for it to “take the bait.” Patience is required.

Sometimes I actually have to keep casting different baits—that is, different clues. I try to surround the missing information with related cues.

To facilitate retrieval, I begin mentally cycling through syllables (Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu, Ca, Ce...) or producing words with sounds similar to what I imagine the correct name might be. This inner speech may also be accompanied by mental images of the person, relevant contexts, and other associated information.

At times, I feel extremely close to the answer; at other times, that feeling of proximity is completely misleading.

In both cases, however, I may experience a strong sense that I am on the right track. I continue testing possibilities until, suddenly, the name emerges with an immediate feeling of recognition, as though everything instantly falls into place.

This moment of confirmation is usually accurate, but if any doubt remains, I seek external validation by asking someone or searching for the information online.

During this process of retrieval, I notice that my body also participates in the search.

My head subtly reduces its movements, as though my entire body enters a state of stillness to facilitate recall.

My gaze sometimes appears distant; at other times, it shifts in various directions, as if attempting to internally “scan” for the information.

My breathing becomes slower and more delicate, almost as though I am holding it in order to create a more receptive mental space.

However, if the answer does not arrive quickly, feelings of restlessness and discomfort begin to emerge. I start moving, gesturing, whispering, or speaking aloud while searching for new strategies.

At these moments, I often realize that I need to regain my composure, become still again, refocus on the clues, and simply wait.

Subjectively, it feels as though the information travels from the back of my head toward the front, or from deep within my throat toward my mouth, until it reaches a point where I can finally see or hear it clearly and verbalize it.

Curiously, there are times when I abandon the search and move on, only for the information to emerge spontaneously later when I am no longer thinking about it.

It is a sudden resolution that requires no effort at that particular moment, although effort had been invested earlier. It is as though the mind continues working silently in the background until the answer is ready to surface.

When I finally retrieve the information, I first experience a sensation similar to a eureka moment—a feeling of certainty that I have found what I was looking for, accompanied by a slight lifting of the head, a quick inhalation, raised eyebrows, and sometimes even a small smile—and then a brief feeling of pleasure and relief at having finally found it.

Example:

I remember a time when I was trying to recall the name of an old actor. It felt as though the name was on the tip of my tongue.

I began supplying myself with words that sounded similar, carrying a familiar resonance that seemed close to the name I was looking for.

However, the actual name only emerged while I was asleep.

I suddenly woke up, said the name aloud, and immediately wrote it down.

—

Sometimes, I partially outsource the process of remembering by offering clues or fragments of a memory and relying on other people to help me reconstruct it.

When I say something like, “That actor who was in that movie... his name sounded like...,” I am not merely trying to remember. I am also inviting another person to become a co-author of the recollection.

**

A Mnemonic Tecnique Tip:

As I mentioned in a note:

Although puns are no longer as valued as humor, I’ve started using this skill 😅 as a mnemonic technique: they evoke mental images, which helps me consolidate information in memory. Interestingly, when I try to recall what I’ve memorized, both the pun and the associated image come up almost instantly—often even when they’re no longer needed.

It’s funny that the word “pun” resembles the word “pum” in Portuguese, which means a fart—sorry about that 😅

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Here, I present some ways of classifying emotions and, at the end, I outline how I classify my own emotions.

**

Dimensional Models

One common approach is to describe emotions along continuous dimensions, such as valence (ranging from pleasant (or positive) to unpleasant (or negative)) and arousal (ranging from low to high activation).

In this view, emotional states are understood as positions within an affective space rather than as discrete categories.

Some dimensional models also include additional dimensions, such as dominance or motivational direction.

I believe this dominance dimension is important because certain emotions — such as anger and fear — share both high arousal and negative valence (i.e., they are unpleasant emotions).

However, they differ substantially in perceived dominance: anger is generally associated with high dominance, whereas fear is associated with low dominance, submission and vulnerability.

Furthermore, the dimension of motivational direction also seems important to me because there are emotions that drive us toward approach (e.g., anger), emotions that drive us toward withdrawal (e.g., fear), and others that appear more neutral or ambivalent with respect to a specific direction.

However, this movement of approach or withdrawal does not always occur for the same reason.

Different emotions may produce movements of approach and withdrawal while serving completely different functions.

In anger, for example, I may approach in order to confront, attack, or push something away from myself. In this case, the approach behavior can serve an expulsive function.

In joy, by contrast, approach may occur in a more affiliative way — approaching in order to share, connect, celebrate, or expand interaction with others.

Sadness, on the other hand, may involve both tendencies toward approach and withdrawal. I may approach in search of comfort, support, or care; but I may also withdraw in order to reflect, retreat inward, or reduce engagement with the environment.

Likewise, I think valence may also contain this kind of ambiguity, since in some contexts we seem to seek experiences similar to fear or anger, even though these emotions are generally considered unpleasant.

Perhaps this is because anger, although generally unpleasant, can also produce a sense of dominance, strength, or increased agency, which can be experienced as a form of power, potentially felt as pleasurable.

Likewise, fear, when experienced in a controlled context, may generate a heightened sense of alertness, intensity, or awakening rather than being experienced as purely aversive.

Thus, we may seek out films and experiences that evoke fear, interactions that make us feel angry, films and music that make us feel sad, and so on.

This may help explain why, in some situations, people actively seek experiences associated with emotions that are typically classified as negative (or unpleasant).

Even though these dimensional models are not primarily concerned with discrete emotions such as anger, fear, joy or sadness, it is evident that these emotional states, despite sharing similar levels of arousal and negative valence, are fundamentally different experiences and tend to produce markedly different patterns of behavior.

**

Discrete Categories

Another influential approach classifies emotions into discrete categories, often distinguishing between basic (or primary) emotions and complex (or secondary or social) emotions.

Basic emotions are typically understood as evolutionarily ancient, biologically grounded, and relatively universal emotional responses, often associated with characteristic patterns of physiology, expression, and behavior.

Common examples include fear, anger, sadness, joy, and disgust.

In contrast, complex emotions (see here and here) are generally thought to involve more elaborate cognitive processes, including self-evaluation, social comparison, and cultural learning.

Emotions such as guilt, shame, jealousy, pride, admiration, and envy are often placed in this category, as they depend more strongly on social context and conceptual interpretation.

Therefore, emotions can be classified in several different ways, depending on the components of emotions considered most fundamental within a general definition of emotion and within a given theoretical framework.

Some emphasize facial expressions, others action tendencies, appraisal patterns, neural circuits, bodily changes, or predictive and conceptual processes.

—

List of Classification of Emotions

The overview below presents an updated version of the classic list compiled by Ortony and Turner (1990), who surveyed influential attempts to identify fundamental or “basic” emotions.

In addition to the authors included in their original review, this expanded version incorporates more recent contributions from affective neuroscience and contemporary emotion theory.

Author / Fundamental (or “basic”) Emotions / Criterion for Incluison

Author(s): William James (1884)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Fear, grief, love, rage
Criterion for Inclusion: Bodily involvement

Author(s): William McDougall (1926)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, disgust, elation, fear, subjection, tender-emotion, wonder
Criterion for Inclusion: Relation to instincts

Author(s): John B. Watson (1930)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Fear, love, rage
Criterion for Inclusion: Hardwired

Author(s): Magda B. Arnold (1960)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, aversion, courage, dejection, desire, despair, fear, hate, hope, love, sadness
Criterion for Inclusion: Relation to action tendencies

Author(s): Orval Hobart Mowrer (1960)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Pain, pleasure
Criterion for Inclusion: Unlearned emotional states

Author(s): Carroll E. Izard (1971)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, contempt, disgust, distress, fear, guilt, interest, joy, shame, surprise
Criterion for Inclusion: Hardwired affect programs

Author(s): Robert Plutchik (1980)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Acceptance, anger, anticipation, disgust, joy, fear, sadness, surprise
Criterion for Inclusion: Relation to adaptive biological processes

Author(s): Jaak Panksepp (1982, 1998)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Seeking, Fear, Rage, Lust, Care, Panic/Grief, Play
Criterion for Inclusion: Evolutionarily conserved primary emotional systems

Author(s): Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Phoebe C. Ellsworth (1982)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise (Ekman later added contempt)
Criterion for Inclusion: Universal facial expressions

Author(s): Jeffrey Alan Gray (1982)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Rage and terror, anxiety, joy
Criterion for Inclusion: Hardwired neural systems

Author(s): Silvan S. Tomkins (1984)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, interest, contempt, disgust, distress, fear, joy, shame, surprise
Criterion for Inclusion: Density of neural firing

Author(s): Bernard Weiner and Sandra Graham (1984)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Happiness, sadness
Criterion for Inclusion: Attribution-independent

Author(s): Nico H. Frijda (1986)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Desire, happiness, interest, surprise, wonder, sorrow
Criterion for Inclusion: Forms of action readiness

Author(s): Keith Oatley and Philip N. Johnson-Laird (1987)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, disgust, anxiety, happiness, sadness
Criterion for Inclusion: Do not require propositional content

Author(s): Richard S. Lazarus (1991)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, anxiety, fright, guilt, shame, sadness, envy, jealousy, happiness, pride, relief, hope, love, compassion
Criterion for Inclusion: Cognitive appraisal patterns associated with distinct relational meanings

Author(s): António Damásio (1994, 1999, 2003)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust (primary emotions); plus social and background emotions
Criterion for Inclusion: Evolutionarily conserved neural and bodily regulatory programs; somatic markers

Author(s): Joseph LeDoux (1996, 2015)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Fear (defensive survival systems); distinguishes conscious feeling from survival circuits
Criterion for Inclusion: Neural survival circuits rather than discrete subjective emotions

Author(s): Paul E. Griffiths (1997)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Distinguishes affect programs from higher cognitive emotions
Criterion for Inclusion: Philosophical and biological taxonomy of emotion kinds

Author(s): Klaus R. Scherer (2005)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Anger, fear, joy, sadness, disgust, shame, guilt, pride
Criterion for Inclusion: Dynamic appraisal processes

Author(s): Lisa Feldman Barrett (2006, 2017)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Rejects fixed “basic emotions”; emotions constructed from core affect and conceptual categories
Criterion for Inclusion: Predictive construction from valence/arousal and learned emotion concepts. Interoception + Context + Concept

Author(s): David J. Anderson and Ralph Adolphs (2018)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Fear, aggression, mating, seeking, social defensive states
Criterion for Inclusion: Central neural states coordinating adaptive behavior

Author(s): Ralph Adolphs (2023)
Fundamental Emotion(s): Fear, threat-related states, social emotions (with caution regarding fixed categories)
Criterion for Inclusion: Functional brain states and adaptive behavioral responses

My Classification (of My Own Emotions)

I, in turn, classify my own emotions primarily according to my first-person experience of internal sensations (interoception) and “bodily emotional centers*”, action impulses and desires (awareness of these impulses), and the intensity of the experience.

(I tend to agree with Lieberman (2019), who argues that subjective experience is what truly defines emotion.)

*bodily emotional centers: these are the places where I feel emotions most strongly and around which emotional postures tend to organize themselves, so that approach is associated with an outward movement—mainly through the projection of this center—whereas withdrawal is associated with an inward retraction and its protection.

For example, in anger there is a projection of the head toward the stimulus, whereas in fear there is a withdrawal and a curling of the body over the abdomen in a posture of protection.

In shame, there is a protection of the face; in sadness, a withdrawal with a downward head tilt over the felt sensation of a “knot” in the throat.

In disgust, there is a protection of entry pathways such as the nose and mouth. In joy, by contrast, there is a global bodily tendency toward outward projection toward others, favoring hugging, contact, and physical closeness.

With regard to “complex emotions,” I classify them according to the type of appraisal I make of a given situation and what “basic emotion” they provoke.

For example, I may perceive that someone possesses something—a possession, a skill, or a quality—and feel anger or contempt directed toward that person or their possession; in that case, I would call this emotion envy, since I might believe that I should be the one possessing that thing.

However, if what emerges in response to the same situation is sadness about not possessing those qualities myself or about not having been able to develop them, then it is something different, which I would describe as a sense of failure.

The same situation, therefore, can give rise to different emotions, depending on which aspects of it are brought into focus and how they are appraised.

This may bear some relation to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s concept of emotional granularity — the ability to perceive and distinguish emotions with precision and nuance, identifying differences between similar emotional states instead of feeling only something “good” or “bad,” or “nervous.”

However, I do not believe that identical bodily sensations can be construed as different emotions, as she seems to suggest.

Upon closer observation, there is always some distinguishable variation in the bodily center, experiential quality, intensity, action tendency (impulse to act in a particular way, even if the action is never ultimately carried out) or desire that differentiates one emotion from another.

To explore how I tend to classify emotions based on my own experience, see the following posts: Anger; Sadness; Happiness; Fear; Shame; Surprise; Guilt, Pride, Admiration, and Contempt; Envy and Jealousy; among others that I intend to explore in future posts.

You will see that, within each of these, I distinguish different types according to the aspects cited above.

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**

References

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life. Times Books/Henry Holt and Co.

Damasio, A. R. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. Harcourt.

Joung, Hae & Do, Ellen. (2011). Tactile Hand Gesture Recognition through Haptic Feedback for Affective Online Communication. 555-563. 10.1007/978-3-642-21663-3_60.

Lieberman M. D. (2019). Boo! The consciousness problem in emotion. Cognition & emotion, https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2018.1515726

Ortony, A., & Turner, T. J. (1990). What’s basic about basic emotions? Psychological Review, 97(3), 315–331. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.97.3.315

I chose to leave this last approach to be developed in this second part, both because the previous text was already sufficiently long and so that I could explore it here in greater detail.

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Micro-phenomenology

Micro-phenomenology is an interview method developed by the French philosopher Claire Petitmengin (2006) within the neurophenomenological approach (she was a close collaborator of Francisco Varela), and derived from the explicitation interview (L’entretien d’explicitation) created by the French psychologist and psychotherapist Pierre Vermersch.

Its aim is to access pre-reflective dimensions of experience that normally remain implicit. One point I find particularly important is its emphasis on the sensorimotor aspects of experience.

Through interviews carefully conducted by a trained researcher—which is why it can be understood as a form of “second-person phenomenology”—a naïve subject is guided to re-live a specific episode, usually of short duration (seconds to minutes).

Through this process, the participant is led to describe with great precision the microdynamics of their experience, such as attentional gestures, subtle sensorimotor changes, temporal sequences, mental images, emerging affects, and transitions between different experiential states.

With appropriate techniques, it becomes possible to explicate subtle structures that normally remain invisible.

**

The Micro-Phenomenological Interview

The micro-phenomenological interview begins with an invitation to investigate a specific experience of the interviewee—an experience selected a priori by the interviewer for the purposes of the research.

Next comes the evocation phase. The investigator seeks to help the person recall this experience in the most vivid and concrete way possible, fostering an attitude of re-immersion in the episode, as if they were once again in contact with the lived moment.

To facilitate this, the interviewer may ask the participant to mentally return to the situation, situating themselves within its perceptual and temporal context—where they were, who they were with, what they were wearing, whether it was day or night, and so forth.

Once this evocation has been established, the interviewer guides the participant back to the concrete experience, helping them shift the focus away from more abstract descriptions—such as interpretations, explanations, judgments, generalizations, or goals—and toward the how of the experience, that is, its procedural dimension.

Throughout the interview, the interviewer seeks to carefully follow the participant’s language, returning to and echoing their own words whenever possible in order to preserve fidelity to the described experience and avoid imposing external categories.

Through open yet highly directed questions, the interviewer helps the participant refine and deepen their description, often inviting them to slow down their account and examine specific moments of the experience in greater detail.

The dimension that seeks to describe the internal structure of a specific moment of experience—revealing how different elements such as bodily sensations, mental images, verbal thoughts, affective tones, and attentional orientations are organized—is referred to as the synchronic dimension.

In addition, the researcher seeks to uncover the diachronic dimension, which aims to reconstruct the temporal unfolding of the experience by identifying its phases and transitions.

At the end, the interviewer provides a recapitulation of the main elements described, using, whenever possible, the participant’s own terms, and verifies whether this synthesis adequately corresponds to what was lived, offering space for corrections, clarifications, or additions.

This closing phase helps consolidate the description obtained and ensures that the explicated experiential structure remains as faithful as possible to the subject’s original lived experience.

**

This approach has become particularly relevant for the naturalization of phenomenology because it offers a relatively systematic method for producing rigorous phenomenological data that can be compared with experimental measures.

**

Intersubjective Validation

Although it deals with singular subjective experiences, the method seeks to identify experiential structures that can be compared across different participants, making it possible to recognize phenomenological regularities and invariants. In this way, it aims to achieve an intersubjective validation of experience.

This intersubjective validation does not consist in verifying whether different subjects report exactly the same content, but rather in examining whether certain structural dynamics—such as attentional sequences, modes of sensory appearance, inner gestures, or affective transitions—reappear in convergent ways across multiple descriptions.

Moreover, the very conduct of the interview involves an ongoing process of validation, insofar as the interviewer reformulates, recapitulates, and checks with the participant whether the elaborated description faithfully corresponds to what was lived.

In this way, micro-phenomenology seeks to construct a form of shared objectivity regarding subjective experience, making possible a dialogue between the first person (the report of experience), the second person (the one who guides this report), and the third person (neural and physiological data).

To illustrate the idea of intersubjective validation, I would like to transcribe here an excerpt from an interview with the French physicist and phenomenologist Michel Bitbol, in which he explains it in a very simple and insightful way. He addresses this idea starting at minute 24:51 (link):

“Now, how do you validate these verbal descriptions of your lived experience or, at least, these verbal descriptions of the invariance of your lived experience?

It’s just by a very simple process that appeals exactly to what you say: intersubjectivity. When you read Husserl, you have two possible feelings.

Either you understand nothing (this is the case for many people, I must say), or the exact opposite: you read Husserl and suddenly have the amazing feeling that this guy has penetrated within your skull.

He knows what you are experiencing, what you are feeling here and now. And when you realize how much he understood and described what you are living at this very moment, you know he is right.

You recognize the validity of his descriptions by the fact that you have exactly what he describes, that his descriptions are perfectly adequate to describe what you are living at this very moment.

This is, you know, a criterion that I could call the mutual recognition of lived experience as described by words.

When a teacher of meditation sometimes describes, say, a certain state that you can reach through meditation (they don’t do this usually, but when they do), and suddenly you experience what they are describing, you know they were right.

You say, “Oh, aha! Now I know what he means” or “What she means.”

Okay, and this is exactly the same in phenomenology. You suddenly know that this person has understood what you are living.

Conversely, when you yourself try to describe something to someone, what you wish and hope for is that someone will recognize, in their own experience, what you have described.

And in this case, you know that the validity of this description is confirmed.” (Michel Bitbol)

**

Self-Interview

In addition to interviews conducted by a researcher, micro-phenomenology can also take the form of a self-interview, as has been explored by authors such as Terje Sparby (2023).

According to Sparby (2023), the micro-phenomenological self-interview presents several advantages:

1. The elimination of second-person bias, that is, the influence of the interviewer on the investigation;

2. The researcher can control the pace of the interview, conducting the exploration without haste or interruptions, which may facilitate a deeper immersion in the experience;

3. It is a less costly and less resource-intensive approach, since it can be carried out at any time without depending on the availability of an interviewer, making it easier to investigate specific aspects of experience;

4. The author also highlights its usefulness for investigating rare or spontaneous experiences, exploring hypotheses, developing theories, and conducting pilot studies to test research protocols.

On the other hand, Sparby also points to some disadvantages of this approach:

1. The risk of first-person bias, in which the researcher may influence or distort the description of the experience;

2. The absence of the specialized interventions of an interviewer, which may make deeper exploration more difficult;

3. The method requires considerable cognitive effort, especially for less experienced researchers;

4. It is also more difficult to apply with untrained participants.

**

General Conclusion

Attempts to naturalize phenomenology show that it does not need to remain isolated as a form of purely philosophical reflection, nor does it need to be dissolved into reductionist neurobiological explanations.

Between Edmund Husserl and neuroscience, between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and physiology, an interdisciplinary field emerges in which lived experience and its bodily correlates can be investigated together.

Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, Natalie Depraz’s cardiophenomenology, Giovanna Colombetti’s neuro-physio-phenomenology, Shaun Gallagher’s front-loaded phenomenology, and Claire Petitmengin’s micro-phenomenology represent different strategies for building this bridge.

All of them begin from the same fundamental intuition: understanding the mind requires listening carefully to experience. In this sense, naturalizing phenomenology may mean not only integrating philosophy and science, but also transforming our own relationship with the body and with experience.

**

Notes

Note 1: I also believe it is important to explore voluntarily accessible bodily dimensions—muscular, respiratory, and proprioceptive dimensions that can not only be described, but also progressively cultivated and modulated.

**

References

Petitmengin, C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(3–4), 229–269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9022-2

Sparby, T. (2023). Micro-phenomenological self-inquiry. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 22, 247–266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09815-9

So far, I had been going straight into the phenomenological descriptions themselves, without first making explicit the framework that supports them.

For this reason, I decided to write this introductory essay.

Since it ended up being longer than expected, I chose to divide it into two parts:

In this first part, I introduce what phenomenology is, then discuss what it means to naturalize it in this context, and finally present some proposals aimed at carrying out this endeavor.

In the second part, I will focus more specifically and in greater detail on one of these approaches: micro-phenomenology.

**

Phenomenology

Phenomenology emerged in the early twentieth century as a radical effort to return to experience as it is given before being covered over by theories, scientific assumptions, or metaphysical explanations.

Its classical motto, formulated by the Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl, is “back to the things themselves”: that is, to turn toward phenomena as they appear to consciousness, prior to any interpretation.

This project developed in contrast to two dominant tendencies of modern thought:

On the one hand, against naturalism, which seeks to explain the mind in causal, physical, or biological terms;

On the other, against forms of psychologism, which reduce logic, perception, or subjectivity to empirical processes of the human mind.

Thus, Husserl sought a rigorous science of experience, capable of investigating the fundamental structures of consciousness.

One of the central concepts of his proposal is intentionality, inherited from Franz Brentano, according to which all consciousness is always consciousness of something.

There is no empty or isolated consciousness; it is always directed toward objects, events, memories, possibilities, or fantasies.

Seeing a tree, remembering a conversation, imagining a house, or desiring something are all different modes of intentionality.

To investigate this relationship between consciousness and world, Husserl proposes the phenomenological epoché, often translated as suspension—“putting the world in brackets.”

The epoché does not imply denying the existence of the external world, but rather temporarily suspending the spontaneous belief in its objective reality in order to examine how it manifests itself in experience.

It involves interrupting what Husserl called the natural attitude, the mode in which we ordinarily live immersed, automatically accepting that things simply exist as they appear.

From the epoché, Husserl introduces different forms of reduction:

The first is phenomenological reduction, through which we shift the focus from the object to the way it appears. Instead of asking, “What is this tree?”, one asks, “How does this tree present itself to my consciousness?”

The second is eidetic reduction, which seeks to apprehend the invariant essences of experience through imaginative variation, mentally modifying certain aspects of an experience in order to discover which characteristics are essential and which are contingent.

The goal is to reveal the necessary structure of phenomena such as perception, memory, time, or emotion.

Finally, there is transcendental reduction, in which attention turns toward transcendental subjectivity itself as the condition of possibility for any manifestation of the world.

This does not refer to the individual psychological ego, but to the constitutive structure that makes any meaningful experience possible.

**

Although profoundly influential, this form of phenomenology was criticized for appearing excessively centered on reflective and disembodied consciousness.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) reformulated the phenomenological project precisely by emphasizing that experience never begins from a pure consciousness, but from a lived body.

For Merleau-Ponty, we are not consciousnesses that possess a body; we are embodied beings whose relation to the world is primarily sensorimotor.

The body is not merely an object in the world, but the very medium through which the world becomes accessible. To perceive is not to construct internal representations, but to inhabit a field of presence through bodily openness.

His phenomenology of perception shifts the focus from transcendental consciousness to motor intentionality, showing that our gestures, postures, and habits constitute a prereflective form of knowledge.

Before explicitly thinking about a chair, for example, we already know bodily how to sit on it. The world appears as already structured in terms of possibilities for action.

This shift toward the body opened the way for many later attempts to bring phenomenology closer to empirical science.

**

Naturalizing Phenomenology

The so-called naturalization of phenomenology refers to the effort to bring phenomenological method into dialogue with the natural sciences, especially neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and physiology.

Traditionally, many phenomenologists resisted this move. Husserl, for instance, viewed naturalism as a threat to the specificity of subjective experience.

For him, reducing consciousness to brain processes would mean overlooking precisely what makes experience meaningful.

However, many contemporary thinkers have argued that phenomenology and empirical science need not be opposed. On the contrary, they can enrich one another.

Phenomenology offers refined first-person descriptions of experience, capable of revealing distinctions that often escape traditional experimental methods.

The natural sciences, in turn, offer tools for investigating the bodily, neural, and physiological correlates of those experiences.

Naturalizing phenomenology, therefore, does not mean reducing it to biology or neuroscience. It means creating a methodological dialogue in which phenomenological description can inform empirical investigation — and vice versa.

Several proposals have emerged in this context, among them Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, Shaun Gallagher’s front-loaded phenomenology, and Claire Petitmengin’s micro-phenomenology.

**

Neurophenomenology

The most influential proposal for naturalizing phenomenology was formulated by the Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela, especially in his seminal 1996 article Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem.

Varela argued that one of the main obstacles in cognitive science was the difficulty of connecting objective data about the brain with the subjective dimension of conscious experience.

The so-called hard problem of consciousness—a term coined by David Chalmers (1995)—the question of how physical processes give rise to lived experience, could not be solved merely by accumulating neurophysiological data.

It was necessary to systematically include first-person data.

Neurophenomenology proposes exactly this: combining rigorous phenomenological descriptions of experience with simultaneous neuroscientific measurements.

Rather than treating subjective reports as secondary or unreliable, Varela sought to train them methodologically so they could become legitimate sources of scientific knowledge.

This training depended, according to him, on the development of refined attentional skills.

Here enters his appreciation for contemplative practices, especially mindfulness and Buddhist meditative traditions.

Varela believed that experienced meditators could offer more precise descriptions of the dynamics of consciousness itself.

This could help map subtle processes such as the emergence of thoughts, the dissolution of emotional states, or the temporal microstructures of perception.

His involvement with the Mind & Life Institute, founded in dialogue with the Dalai Lama, reflects this interest in building bridges between Western science and Eastern contemplative practices.

The institute became an important space for dialogue among neuroscientists, philosophers, and meditators, fostering research on attention, compassion, and consciousness.

Neurophenomenology does not seek merely to correlate mental states and brain states.

Its deeper aim is to establish mutual constraints between first- and third-person perspectives: phenomenological descriptions can guide neuroscientific hypotheses, and neural data can refine phenomenological investigations.

—

Cardio-phenomenology

The French philosopher Natalie Depraz (2018) expands this project by emphasizing the physiological dimension of experience beyond the brain, especially the relationship between consciousness and the cardiovascular system.

Her proposal of cardio-phenomenology is based on the idea that many aspects of affective and attentional life are closely linked to the dynamics of the heart: heart rhythm, heart-rate variability, and interoceptive perception.

Moreover, neural activity is not directly experienced, whereas bodily processes—such as cardiac activity—can become conscious, revealing a shared pre-conscious layer. (youtu.be/z4laQgvcVc0)

According to Depraz, traditional phenomenology has focused too heavily on vision and reflective consciousness, neglecting internal bodily dimensions such as heartbeat, respiration, and autonomic modulation.

Cardio-phenomenology seeks to recover this dimension.

Its aim is to understand how subtle changes in the perception of the heartbeat influence emotional states, attentional presence, and self-regulation.

The heart ceases to be merely a physiological organ and becomes, also, a phenomenological site of manifestation.

This proposal points toward an important expansion of naturalization: not only neurophenomenology, but a phenomenology integrated with multiple bodily systems.

—

Neuro-Physio-Phenomenology

In a similar spirit, the Italian philosopher Giovanna Colombetti (2014) proposes what might be called neuro-physio-phenomenology, particularly in her work on emotion and embodiment.

Colombetti critiques excessively brain-centered views of the mind and argues that affective states emerge from processes distributed throughout the whole organism: brain, autonomic nervous system, muscles, hormones, posture, and environment.

Inspired by enactive approaches—which hold that cognition emerges through the dynamic interaction between organism and environment—she argues that emotional experience is an embodied and dynamic process whose investigation requires integrating phenomenological description with diverse physiological measurements.

**

Front-Loaded Phenomenology

Another strategy for naturalizing phenomenology is front-loaded phenomenology, proposed by the American philosopher Shaun Gallagher (2003, 2005).

Unlike neurophenomenology, which seeks to integrate first-person reports into the experiment itself, front-loaded phenomenology consists in incorporating phenomenological insights already at the stage of experimental design.

The idea is that sophisticated phenomenological distinctions can help scientists formulate better hypotheses, design more appropriate tasks, and interpret data more precisely.

For example, distinctions between sense of agency and sense of ownership can guide experiments on voluntary movement. Concepts concerning lived temporality can inform research on time perception.

In this model, phenomenology functions as an anticipatory conceptual framework for empirical science.

**

As I mentioned at the beginning, in Part II of this topic I will focus specifically on micro-phenomenology.

**

References (Used and/or Recommended)

Berkovich-Ohana, A., Dor-Ziderman, Y., Trautwein, F. M., Schweitzer, Y., Nave, O., Fulder, S., & Ataria, Y. (2020). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Neurophenomenology - The Case of Studying Self Boundaries With Meditators. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 1680. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01680

Chalmers, D.J. (1995), Facing up to the problem of consicousness , Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2 (3), pp. 200 19.

Colombetti, G. (2014). The feeling body: Affective science meets the enactive mind. MIT Press.

Depraz, N. et al. (2002) On becoming aware : a pragmatics of experiencing. 1st ed. Amsterdam ; John Benjamins. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1075/aicr.43.

Depraz, N. (2018). Surprise: A phenomenological and cognitive study. Springer.

Gallagher, S. (2003). Phenomenology and experimental design: Toward a phenomenologically enlightened experimental science. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(9–10), 85–99.

Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. Oxford University Press.

Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2012). The phenomenological mind: An introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Varela, F. J. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(4), 330–349.

Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s phenomenology. Stanford University Press.

As I mentioned in the first article I published here on Substack, titled About: blog and me, what I hope to provoke here goes beyond simple reflection: I want to evoke experiences and, more than that, to foster awareness of how they unfold—especially how they begin.

For this reason, I would not like you to read these articles merely on an intellectual level, but rather to actually try to recreate within yourself the conditions that may allow you to perceive these phenomena—that is, to attempt to evoke the experiences observe and described them as proposed in each text, before reading my own descriptions. (I do not know whether anyone has actually been trying to do this)

I sincerely believe that if you do these exercises and follow the guidance I have developed, you may be able to perceive the internal micro-movements that I have been able to observe in myself.

This is the most important point of everything I am trying to communicate through these reports. If you are able to perceive only this, it will already have been worthwhile.

From that point on, the perception of other internal sensations, subtle tensions, and delicate micro-movements may become much clearer in other experiences: such as when something startles you, when you imagine a movement, when you feel an emotion, when you redirect your attention, and so on.

I do not believe these micro-movements are a peculiarity of my own, nor that they are merely a perceptual illusion, because I can clearly feel how they subtly alter the way air enters my body during breathing, and I can perceive a subtle change in the distribution of tensions throughout my body, as if there were a shift in one’s “center of gravity.”

So, I perceive that this happens in me through the various tests I have conducted, and I have also guided some people who were able to perceive and describe these movements in ways very similar to my own descriptions.

Perhaps you, too, may have interesting insights, as I have had, regarding the possible mechanisms involved in different affective, perceptual, cognitive, and physiological processes. And perhaps you may even go beyond what I have been able to observe and notice other aspects that could complement the descriptions I offer here.

I do not claim, however, that these internal movements you may come to perceive are necessarily the actual and general mechanisms through which these experiences are activated.

Still, I believe that this kind of observation may at least help make it more understandable why, for me, these internal micro-movements seem to be so important in initiating and sustaining these processes.

You might even find yourself thinking: “Wow! Now I really understand what he meant by this and why he believes it functions as a trigger—something that sets these processes in motion. There really does seem to be something there!”

Moreover, I believe that by perceiving these dynamics within yourself, reading my texts—both those already published and those yet to come—may acquire an additional layer of depth.

The descriptions will no longer be merely something understood intellectually or superficially, but something that is also felt bodily, in its most subtle forms.

You may be able to recognize within yourself these subtle movements I describe—the ones that seem to initiate each of the experiences explored—and, as I said before, perhaps go beyond what I have been able to do and help us gain a deeper understanding of this and of how we might use this knowledge to our advantage.

I would also like to invite you to describe, in the comments, whatever you are able to perceive. It is precisely through this kind of sharing that we may seek a form of intersubjective validation of these experiences and investigate what remains similar across different individuals.

I have written similar instructions in another article, but I would like to rewrite them here and add two additional ways of approaching this observation, in the hope that more people may be willing to try these exercises and report what they observe.

**

Exercises:

1) “Try the following: fix your eyes on a point in front of you and inhale as if the air were entering through the tip of your nose, focusing your attention on the outer edges of the nostrils closest to the tip. If you find it difficult, gently touch the tip of your nose with your finger while inhaling, and then exhale.

Now, inhale as if the air were entering through the outermost part of the nostrils nearest your face—that is, the region along the outer edge where the nose meets the face. Use the same gentle touch technique if needed, and then exhale again.

Were you able to notice any difference between these two ways of inhaling? Did the airflow seem to enter more through the tip in one case, and closer to the face in the other? If so, how did you perceive this difference?

Finally, try inhaling while starting at the tip of your nose and guiding the air toward the part of the nostrils closest to your face, then exhale.

Were you able to make this transition? How did you notice that you succeeded? What do you feel you did to change from one position to the other?”

**

Another way to try to reveal these internal micro-movements:

2) Simply try to alter where the air touches your upper airways—that is, where you feel the cool sensation of the air:

You can try bringing this sensation of the air to the tip of your nose, to the sides of the nostrils, and to other parts of the upper airways, such as the back of the throat, the palate, and other regions.

Explore and observe how you manage to do this. After noticing what kind of movement you make in order to manipulate the incoming airflow, let go of the breath and try directing your attention instead to other parts of your body.

Start with specific areas of the head and then move down through the rest of the body, and notice whether the micro-movements you perceived while doing the exercise continue to occur in some way.

**

3) Try to tense your temples without tensing your facial expression muscles (around the eyes and mouth) or clenching your teeth.

If you are able to do so, gradually shift this movement—first toward the front of the face, then to the chin, the throat, the shoulders, the upper chest near the clavicle, the center of the chest, the solar plexus, and the navel.

Can you now identify how you are doing this?

Then, while directing this movement toward some of these points, observe your breathing: how does the air touch your nose? Where does that sensation feel cooler?

**

So, I kindly ask that you do not simply read this text, but that you actually try the proposed exercises and leave a description of your experience in the comments.

If you have any questions about the exercises, please leave them in the comments. More than an invitation, this is a request for your help so that we can deepen our phenomenological investigation of these experiences together.

Thank you!

**

Notes

Note 1: It is possible that some perceptions may be influenced by the suggestions contained in the exercises themselves; even so, comparing different reports may help distinguish consistent patterns.

Note 2: It may also be that this doesn’t happen for you, or that it does, but you’re not yet able to perceive it. Both are possible.

Note 3: I’d also like to know whether those who read my articles have tried not only to read them, but also to evoke the suggested experiences by following the instructions provided, and to observe how those experiences begin and unfold.

When witnessing a funny scene, carefully observe the precise moment at which the urge to laugh arise—the instant in which something strikes you as funny—and notice the sensations that unfold just before laughter bursts out. Try to notice how and where this urge is triggered.

To facilitate this observation, try not to laugh immediately. Hold it back for a brief moment, and attend to where the pressure is building and where it seems to originate. Also, become aware of how you manage to contain it during this brief initial moment.

Try this exercise before reading my phenomenological description of this experience.

Description

I notice that as soon as I evaluate the situation almost instantly, interpreting it as funny, I feel an involuntary activation of the muscles of the throat, the abdomen, and around the mouth.

At the same time, respiratory changes occur that generate an internal air pressure, and the passage of this air produces a “tickling” sensation along a vertical line from the abdomen up to the mouth.

When the air is released through laughter, it triggers a series of small exhalations. The vocalization of laughter itself seems to participate in this air-expulsion movement, manifesting in sounds such as “ha ha ha”... 🤣

I can open my mouth in a loud laugh, laugh with my mouth closed, or with my lips slightly parted and my teeth clenched.

I can close my eyes and throw my head backward and forward, tilt it sideways, open up, curl inward, or contort my body. Depending on the intensity, laughter may also be accompanied by tears in the eyes.

Thus, laughter can trigger a wide variety of movements that do not seem to serve any other function than expressing laughter. Unlike, for example, fear, in which curling inward toward the abdomen seems to have a protective function.

These different movements may depend on the intensity of the laughter and the context, possibly also on the type of situation that elicits it.

There is something singular about this bodily manifestation of laughter; moreover, it can be funny in itself (at least for me 🤣), and it can even be contagious, leading other people to laugh as well.

After a few seconds of intense release, the body begins to relax.

First, the limbs loosen, and the trunk tends to lean limply in some direction, while laughter gradually decreases, together with the sense of humor, until it disappears completely.

At the end, there may be a deep inhalation followed by an exhalation through the mouth, like a sigh. However, the memory of the event can reactivate laughter, repeating itself a few times before disappearing entirely.

Sometimes, when the scene is only moderately funny, the accumulated air pressure can be released all at once through the nose or mouth, without the need for a full laugh to exhaust the laughing impulse.

It is as if the number and intensity of these air releases reflect the degree of amusement felt, in a way similar to coughing during an allergic reaction, where the bodily response varies with the intensity of irritation.

**

When I try not to laugh 🤭

When I try to hold back laughter — because sometimes it is not appropriate to laugh in certain situations or, as I am doing now, I am trying not to laugh in order to better observe this experience — I mobilize these same muscles to contain it. My mouth wants to open, and I make an effort to keep it closed.

Depending on how funny something seems to me, more effort is required to contain it. Sometimes, air seems to accumulate precisely at the entrance of the mouth, in front of the teeth, forming a small “air pocket.”

Sometimes I try to swallow it back, while at other moments I end up releasing a small amount of air in short bursts through the nose.

I can also try to stabilize the breathing, keeping it continuous and preventing it from being broken into small bursts. At times, I place my hand over my mouth in an attempt to prevent the laughter from escaping.

Holding back laughter can be done purely physically, as I have described so far; however, most of the time, trying not to laugh also requires some form of attentional distancing from the stimulus that triggered the laughter, shifting the gaze, thinking about something else, or redirecting attention to another focus.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapeutic approach created by Francine Shapiro (1989), widely used in the treatment of trauma, especially PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), but also applied to anxiety, phobias, grief, and disturbing emotional experiences.

Basically, the patient is asked to evoke a disturbing memory (image, thought, emotion, and bodily sensation) while receiving alternating bilateral stimulation, mainly through guided eye movements (right–left), although alternating taps on the hands or alternating sounds in the ears can also be used.

**

Possible Explanations

EMDR is generally explained through a set of interacting mechanisms, although there is no definitive consensus.

According to the Adaptive Information Processing model, traumatic experiences may be stored in a poorly integrated way, retaining their emotional charge, vivid imagery, and bodily sensations.

EMDR would facilitate the reprocessing of these memories, allowing them to be reintegrated in a more adaptive and less distressing form.

—

A central element of the method is bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements. One influential hypothesis suggests that recalling a memory while performing this task taxes working memory, reducing the vividness and emotional intensity of the memory and promoting its reconsolidation in a milder form.

—

Other explanations point to similarities with REM sleep or to the activation of an orienting response that helps reduce physiological arousal.

—

From a neurobiological perspective, there is typically a decrease in the activity of the amygdala and greater involvement of the prefrontal cortex , contributing to more effective emotional regulation.

Still, there is ongoing debate about how essential bilateral stimulation is, and it is possible that EMDR’s effects result from a combination of memory reactivation, emotional modulation, and reconsolidation in a more regulated state.

**

My Hypothesis based on Phenomenological Insights

A possible alternative explanation, informed by phenomenological insights, for the effects observed in EMDR can be formulated based on the somatodynamic organization of emotional experience.

Here, I start from the hypothesis, supported by phenomenological observations, that emotions generally seem to have bodily pathways of tension organization, in which certain regions assume a dominant role (for example, the solar plexus region in experiences of fear (see here).

These pathways would not be mere peripheral effects of emotion, but active components of its bodily constitution.

In this context, regions such as the eyes and the throat would play a central role in orienting emotion-related bodily tension (see here) and attention (see here).

In habitual emotional situations, oculomotor adjustments and micro-activities in the throat region could contribute to directing tension toward the bodily regions where a given emotion manifests.

The bilateral stimulation characteristic of EMDR, by intensely engaging eye movements and possibly associated adjustments in the throat region (which, as observed, seems to assist attentional redirection), could temporarily disorganize these bodily pathways.

When this occurs simultaneously with the evocation of an emotionally charged memory, such somatic interference could prevent tension from following its habitual trajectory of organization, interrupting the automatic coupling between memory, bodily pattern, and emotional manifestation.

For example, if, as phenomenologically perceived, a given emotion involves a reconfiguration of these regions to assume a “subtle internal posture,” orienting tension toward a specific point in the body, then eye movements disconnected from this process end up interfering with it.

They disrupt precisely the spontaneous articulation between eyes, throat, and the central bodily zone toward which the emotion would tend to direct tension.

Similarly, when the therapist alternates taps between the patient’s hands, attention is shifted from one pole to another, preventing the eye–throat axis from freely organizing itself toward the bodily core of the emotion.

From this perspective, the reprocessing promoted by EMDR would involve a reconfiguration of the functional link between the evoked memory and the bodily mode of emotional activation.

Thus, the typical subjective experience - where the memory persists but is deprived of its original emotional charge - could be understood as the result of the dissolution or weakening of the somatic pathways that previously sustained the emotional response associated with that memory.

In addition, EMDR’s bilateral stimulation may introduce an additional difficulty in the imaginative construction of the memory itself, which, as phenomenologically observed, seems to involve ocular and throat activations that support the spatial and narrative organization of the remembered scene (see here).

When the eyes are induced to move rhythmically in ways unrelated to the internal logic of the memory, the continuity of the evoked image tends to fragment.

The scene becomes less vivid, less immersive, and attention has difficulty settling into a stable internal framing. In this way, the memory may be accessed without consolidating as a full perceptual simulation, which may contribute to the weakening of the bodily emotional engagement associated with its evocation.

This hypothesis suggests that part of EMDR’s efficacy may reside in its capacity to intervene at fine-grained bodily levels that participate in the constitution of emotion, opening space for future investigations that articulate phenomenological description, attentional dynamics, and the somatovisceromotor organization of emotional experience.

**

References

Shapiro F. (1989). Eye movement desensitization: a new treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry, 20(3), 211–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7916(89)90025-6

Stickgold R. (2002). EMDR: a putative neurobiological mechanism of action. Journal of clinical psychology, 58(1), 61–75. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.1129

Shapiro F. (2014). The role of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy in medicine: addressing the psychological and physical symptoms stemming from adverse life experiences. The Permanente journal, 18(1), 71–77. https://doi.org/10.7812/TPP/13-098

Landin-Romero, R., Moreno-Alcazar, A., Pagani, M., & Amann, B. L. (2018). How Does Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy Work? A Systematic Review on Suggested Mechanisms of Action. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1395. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01395

Chamberlin D. E. (2019). The Predictive Processing Model of EMDR. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 2267. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02267