mylesk | The Anger-Forgetting Machine

"Meditate on this," I recited to myself. "Meditate on the idea that an emotion is a sensation with a story attached. If you wait for the sensation to pass before attaching a story to it, you can prevent its persistence."

This recitation came to mind as I walked south down the alleyway between 82nd and 83rd street, just north of the stadium. I had seen the sentiment earlier that morning in a meme or article, and though I cannot recall the proximate source, I have heard the idea expressed in a TED Talk by Lisa Feldman Barrett, from Buddhist monks, and perhaps from Stroke of Insight author Jill Bolte Taylor. It is the idea that feelings fade in as little as 90 seconds unless they are re-triggered by thought. And if we are not conscious of the way we re-trigger ourselves, we can sustain an emotional state for so long that it becomes our character.

Like a physics gedankenexperiment, I am imagining two cognitive systems at work in my brain: the thought narrative trigger system, and the emotional coping system. The first triggers the emotions that I feel, and the second manages the impacts of the emotions I create. Over the past seven years, I have integrated these two systems into myself so that they now operate invisibly. The emotion I trigger most over the past seven years is anger. The way I cope with anger is the sub-form of forgetting that is denial. My mind runs an anger-denial cognitive machine.

I need to re-create the joy-remembering machine.