For the Love of a Dog Read Online Free PDF Page B

(your heart starts pounding when you see your dog running toward the road), visible changes in expression (you freeze in place, your pupils dilate, your eyes widen), conscious thoughts (“Oh no! There’s a car coming!”), and feelings (your conscious experience of fear and panic). Thus, every emotion includes (1) changes in the body; (2) changes in expression; and (3) the feelings and thoughts that go along with them.
    What we’re not sure about is what comes first. Are you conscious of fear because your heart is racing and your eyes widen, or does your heart pound after your mind tells you your dog may be killed by a car? It seems reasonable to most of us that our bodies must be reacting to our thoughts—we see a car bearing down on our dog, we know enough about physics to know this is not a fair fight, so our bodies react with the feeling of fear. But research has shown that much of what we experience actually flows in the other direction. Often, it’s the changes in your body that create the thoughts in your mind.
    We’ve long known that you can stimulate different areas of the brain with a mild electrical current to evoke feelings of fear, sadness, or amusement. What’s most remarkable about those cases is that the research subject, wide awake and in no pain, always comes up with an intellectual explanation for his or her feelings
after
the emotion iselicited. In my favorite case, a woman reliably burst into peals of laughter every time one area of her brain was stimulated. When the attending neurologists asked her what was so funny, she said: “You guys are just so funny…standing around!” Apparently needing to explain her amusement, her brain turned a circle of serious researchers into a knee-slapping vaudeville act.
    You can even create emotions by moving parts of your body into different positions. You’ve no doubt read about experiments in which people were asked to raise or lower the corners of their mouths, and later asked how they were feeling. Just as our moms told us to put a smile on our face to cheer up, the people whose mouths moved into a smile felt better, while the frowners felt worse than when they came in. You can try it right now: hold a pencil in your back teeth for a few seconds and notice how you feel (besides silly). Most people report a mild boost in mood, because your mouth has to move as if it was smiling to hold the pencil. Now take the pencil out, drop your shoulders, droop your head, and slump down as if the air had come out of you. Feeling chipper? Probably not.
    There’s a long list of surprising ways you can influence your emotions by changing what you’re doing with your body. One researcher noted that people in love tend to gaze into each other’s eyes for prolonged periods of time. Wondering whether the process could work in reverse, she asked strangers to do the same for two minutes. After that amount of mutually agreed-upon eye contact, the people in the study reported feelings of attachment and attraction to the other person. (Of course, this long period of eye contact was by mutual consent, and had nothing to do with a stranger walking up unannounced and staring straight into your eyes. That would probably elicit the opposite of attraction. If the stranger was a dog, it might even get you bitten, so please don’t go experimenting with a nonconsenting partner of any species.)
    You never know where and when these postural changes might affect your mood. The famous jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald reported that one year she had become so tired she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. She went to several doctors until finally one asked her what she did during the day. As she thought through her day, she realized she was singing her hit song “I’m So Tired” over and over again, changing her posture each time to match the emotion she was expressing. Thedoctor prescribed eliminating the song from her repertoire, and Ella recovered in days.
    As we all know now, our