Why do sensations such as heartbreak/sadness/anxiety feel like physical pain?
In: Biology
We’ve got this whole complex psyche thing going on that emerges from this organ that’s evolved from jellyfish to lizard to primate, with all the responses it’s needed along the way.
At this point we’ve got this high level functioning consciousness with fine tuned analytic capacity. Feelings are communications from deeper in our psyche, ways of assessing information and communicating it to early rudimentary executive functioning in a way that generates a response (as pain or other sensations in our body.)
Our consciousness can only attend to so much information, this focus possible because much uncertainty is already attended to, responsibilities shared rather than surviving as the single organism of our early evolutionary history. But we still have these early capacities in varying degrees to assess broad amounts of information in much more chaotic environments. The results of this information processing arises as feelings.
A lot, perhaps most, of emotional and behavioural dysfunction exists as a result of higher level capacities being overwhelmed, leaving more fundamental responses to take over. Which were effective a few million or billion years ago, but not so much now.
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