When the unconscious mind gets excited it’s not very good at knowing quite what it’s excited about. It picks up on something that sets it off (and it gets jittery about all sorts of funny things) and sends out a feeling. One of the world’s leading experts on emotions (the neurology professor Antonio Damasio – rather than someone who reads a lot of agony columns) describes consciousness as the “feeling of knowing” something. He’s quite sure from his work studying images of brains in action, and patients who have lost various important areas of brain function, that this feeling occurs quite clearly after the other feelings have had their go. Lots of other psychologists agree with him too. So ‘excitement’ gets registered by one sense and the rest of the mind tries to work out what might be causing this potentially important sensation. We’re being prepared so that we can pursue […]

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