Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  One method might have been to run the same experiment while her subjects masturbated. That way, their eyes would more surely seek out what carried an erotic jolt. But there was little chance that she could get this kind of study approved by the university’s review board and, even if she could, too high a chance that research with masturbating women would bring Meana the outraged scorn of Las Vegas’s conservative press—condemnation that could, in turn, endanger all of her explorations. Las Vegas was a paradoxical place, with nearly all its advertising based on titillation and with prostitutes waiting at licensed ranches down the highway and yet with a prudish strain in the atmosphere, a resistance to the animal impulses that made people flock to the city. This divided psyche seemed an extreme version of a split that ran throughout the country. It left the erotic as hard to study as it was omnipresent. This was partially why Chivers, who had earned her PhD and done the first of her plethysmographic experiments in the States, had returned home to Canada after graduate school to continue. During her years in the United States, her research had been the target of ridicule. The Washington Times had protested the American government dollars that helped to pay for her work. “Federally Funded Study Measures Porn Arousal,” the headline had read. A congressman had demanded an investigation. The outcry over her small project soon faded, but she worried about an acute American aversion to looking too closely, too carefully, at the sexual. Meana was going slowly with the review board. She was designing a study that would use eye-tracking and X-rated videos. The films would turn on her subjects more than the soft-porn photos could. In this more heightened state—a state less conducive to cognition and comparison—would the women’s eyes become less drawn to female body parts and more compelled by everything male? She didn’t think so. She expected that the pattern from her earlier experiment would hold, that when it came to bodies, the female figure would prove full of electricity. As she developed the new study and hoped for the review board’s approval, she didn’t yet know about Chivers’s research with the pictures of isolated genitals. Those results might have led her to wonder if, in her video experiment, women would seek—as well as female bodies—Deen-like erections, pure declarations of male desire. Meana’s ideas grew not only from her lab but also from her work as a clinician, some of it trying to help women besieged with dyspareunia, genital pain during intercourse. The condition is not, in itself, caused by an absence of lust, yet her patients reported less pain if their desire increased. So part of her challenge was how to enhance desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she said, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  But as far as Hanno Buddenbrook was concerned, even the great Heinrich, who beat everyone, could not make up his mind to lay hands on him for dandruff and cowardice, for vague fear of the softness of his hair, of the delicacy of his limbs, of his dull, shy and cold gaze... "I'm scared," said Hanno to Kai, stopping at one side wall of the yard, leaning against the wall and pulling his jacket tighter with a shivering yawn... "I'm terribly scared, Kai, it hurts all over me Body. Is Mr. Mantelsack the man to be so afraid of? Say it yourself! If only this disgusting Ovid hour were over! If I had my reprimand in the class register and stayed seated and everything was in order! I'm not afraid of it , I'm afraid of the scandal that entails..." Kai fell into thought. "This Roderich Usher is the most wonderful character ever invented!" he said quickly and abruptly. "I've just read the whole lesson... If I could ever write a story that good!" The thing was that Kai busied himself with writing. That was also what he meant this morning when he said he had better things to do than doing his homework, and Hanno must have understood him. From the love of storytelling he had shown as a young boy, attempts at writing had developed, and recently he had completed a poem, a fairy tale, a ruthlessly fantastic adventure in which everything glowed in a dark glow that lay beneath Metals and mysterious embers in the deepest and most sacred workshops on earth and at the same time in those of the human soul played, and in which the elemental forces of nature and the soul were mixed, turned, transformed and purified in a strange way - written in an inner, meaningful, a little exuberant and longing language of tender passion ... Hanno knew this story well and loved it very much; but he didn't feel like talking about Kai's work or Edgar Poe now. He yawned again and then sighed, all the while singing to himself a motif he had recently invented on the grand piano. This was his habit. He used to sigh often, breathing deeply in the urgent need to get his inadequately working heart into a somewhat more lively pace, and he had become accustomed to letting the exhalation happen after a musical theme, some piece of melody of his own or someone else's invention... "Look, here comes the good Lord!" said Kai. "He's strolling in his garden." "A nice garden," said Hanno and burst out laughing. He laughed nervously and couldn't stop, held his handkerchief to his mouth and looked over it at the one Kai had called "Dear God".

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He sat down next to Hanno Buddenbrook, smiled softly and a little slyly and bade the neighbor a good morning, accommodating the prevailing jargon which distorted the word into a bold and careless tone. Then, while everyone around him was chattering, getting ready, yawning and laughing, he began to work silently on the class register, manipulating the pen in an incomparably correct way with slender and straight fingers. After the lapse of two minutes footsteps were heard outside, the occupants of the front pews rose unhurriedly from their seats, and further back this and that followed their example, while others did not let themselves be disturbed in their occupations and hardly noticed that Mr Headteacher Ballerstedt came into the room, hung his hat on the door and went to the lectern. He was in his forties with a likeable embon point, with a large bald head, a reddish-yellow, short beard, a rosy complexion and a mixed expression of unction and comfortable sensuality about his moist lips. He picked up his notebook and leafed through it in silence; but as the quiet in the class left much to be desired, he raised his head, stretched out his arm on the desk, and, while his face slowly swelled so dark red that his beard appeared bright yellow, he flexed his weak and white fist several times, feebly up and down, his lips working convulsively and fruitlessly for half a minute, finally uttering nothing but a short, tight, and groaning "Well , swelled and was satisfied. This was Ballerstedt's way. He had once wanted to be a preacher, but his tendency to stutter and his penchant for worldly well-being made him prefer to turn to education. He was a bachelor, had some fortune, wore a small diamond on his finger and was fond of food and drink. He was the senior teacher who only socialized with his peers on official business, but otherwise mainly with the unmarried commercial life of the city, even with the officers of the garrison, ate twice a day in the first inn and was a member of the "club". If it met larger students anywhere in town at two or three o'clock in the morning, it would swell, never asked from him. The head teacher had gotten together with his uncle Christian too often in a purely human way for him to be happy to get into official conflicts with his nephew... "Well..." he said again, looking around the class, flexing his weakly clenched fist with the small diamond again, and glancing at his notebook. »Perleman. The overview." Somewhere in the class, Perlemann stood up. One hardly noticed that he was climbing up. It was one of the small, advanced ones.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  We are heartfelt friends and brothers in arms!” Kai was visibly relieved. "I'm in exactly the same position," he explained cheerfully. "I didn't work on Saturday because tomorrow was Sunday, and not on Sunday, out of respect... No, nonsense... mainly because I had something better to work on, of course," he said with sudden seriousness, his face flushing slightly flew over. "Yes, today can be fun, Hanno." "If I get another reprimand," said little Johann, "I'll stay where I am; and I'm sure I'll get that if he takes me on in Latin. It's the letter B's turn, Kai, there's no getting rid of it..." “Let's wait and see! Ha, Caesar is going out. Dangers in my back have always only threatened me; when they see Caesar's forehead...' But Kai didn't finish his declamation. He also felt very bad. He went to the lectern, sat on it, and began rocking in the armchair, scowling. Hanno Buddenbrook still let his forehead rest on his crossed arms. So they sat in silence for a while. Suddenly, somewhere in the distance, a dull humming sounded, which quickly became a roar and within half a minute it was threatening to roll over... "The people," Kai said bitterly. 'Lord, my God, how quickly they are finished! Less than ten minutes shortened the hour..." He descended from the lectern and went to the door to mingle with those who came. As for Hanno, he raised his head for just a moment, grimaced, and just sat there. It came, with slurping, pounding and a tangle of male voices, trebles and overturning alternating organs, flooded up the stairs, spilled over the corridor and also streamed into this room, which was suddenly filled with life, movement and noise. They came in, the young people, Hanno's and Kai's comrades, the junior high school students, about twenty-five in all, strolled to their places with their hands in their pockets or swinging their arms and opened their Bibles. There were pleasant and confiscated physiognomies, some that looked well and healthy and others that looked precarious, tall, strong rascals who soon wanted to be merchants or even go to sea and didn't care about anything anymore, and little ones above her old age advanced nerds, who excelled in subjects requiring memorization. But Adolf Todtenhaupt, the leader, knew everything; he had never owed an answer in his lifetime. This was partly because of his quiet, passionate industry, partly because the teachers were careful not to ask him anything he might not have known. It would have hurt and shamed her, it would have shaken her belief in human perfection to see Adolf Todtenhaupt fall silent... He had a strangely hunched skull, to which blond hair was glued smooth as a mirror, grey, black-rimmed eyes and long, brown ones Hands sticking out of the too-short sleeves of his neatly brushed jacket.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But I had made many firm friends among them and I hardly believed that I should be able to avert an open rupture. When they had assembled at about a hundred yards in front of our camp, Safeni and I walked up towards them and sat down midway. Some half-dozen of the Mowa people came near, and the shauri began.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Post-hypnotic, or deferred, suggestions are such as are given to the patients during trance, to take effect after waking. They succeed with a certain number of patients even when the execution is named for a remote period—months or even a year, in one case reported by M. Liégeois. In this way one can make the patient feel a pain, or be paralyzed, or be hungry or thirsty, or have an hallucination, positive or negative, or perform some fantastic action after emerging from his trance. The effect in question may be ordered to take place not immediately, but after an interval of time has elapsed, and the interval may be left to the subject to measure, or may be marked by a certain signal. The moment the signal occurs, or the time is run out, the subject, who until then seems in a perfectly normal waking condition, will experience the suggested effect. In many instances, whilst thus obedient to the suggestion, he seems to fall into the hypnotic condition again. This is proved by the fact that the moment the hallucination or suggested performance is over he forgets it, denies all knowledge of it, and so forth; and by the further fact that he is 'suggestable' during its performance, that is, will receive new hallucinations, etc., at command. A moment later and this suggestibility has disappeared. It cannot be said, how-ever, that relapse into the trance is an absolutely necessary condition for the post-hypnotic carrying out of commands, for the subject may be neither suggestible nor amnesic, and may struggle with all the strength of his will against the absurdity of this impulse which he feels rising in him, he knows not why. In these cases, as in most cases, he forgets the circumstance of the impulse having been suggested to him in a previous trance; regards it as arising within him-self; and often improvises, as he yields to it, some more or less plausible or ingenious motive by which to justify it to the lookers-on. He acts, in short, with his usual sense of personal spontaneity and freedom; and the disbelievers in the freedom of the will have naturally made much of these cases in their attempts to show it be an illusion.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Against this impulse we have the dread of the irrevocable, which often engenders a type of character incapable of prompt and vigorous resolve, except perhaps when surprised into sudden activity. These two opposing motives twine round whatever other motives may be present at the moment when decision is imminent, and tend to precipitate or retard it. The conflict of these motives so far as they alone affect the matter of decision is a conflict as to when it shall occur. One says 'now,' the other says 'not yet.' Another constant component of the web of motivation is the impulse to persist in a decision once made. There is no more remarkable difference in human character than that between resolute and irresolute natures. Neither the physiological nor the psychical grounds of this difference have yet been analyzed. Its symptom is that whereas in the irresolute all decisions are provisional and liable to be reversed, in the resolute they are settled once for all and not disturbed again. Now into every one's deliberations the representation of one alternative will often enter with such sudden force as to carry the imagination with itself exclusively, and to produce an apparently settled decision in its own favor. These premature and spurious decisions are of course known to everyone. They often seem ridiculous in the light of the considerations that succeed them. But it cannot be denied that in the resolute type of character the accident that one of them has once been made does afterwards enter as a motive additional to the more genuine reasons why it should not be revoked, or if provisionally revoked, why it should be made again. How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness, we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to 'change our mind.' FIVE TYPES OF DECISION.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The process of deliberation contains endless degrees of complication. At every moment of it our consciousness is of an extremely complex object, namely the existence of the whole set of motives and their conflict, as explained on p. 275 of Vol. I. Of this object, the totality of which is realized more or less dimly all the while, certain parts stand out more or less sharply at one moment in the foreground, and at another moment other parts, in consequence of the oscillations of our attention, and of the 'associative' flow of our ideas. But no matter how sharp the foreground-reasons may be, or how imminently close to bursting through the dam and carrying the motor consequences their own way, the background, however dimly felt, is always there; and its presence (so long as the indecision actually lasts) serves as an effective check upon the irrevocable discharge. The deliberation may last for weeks or months, occupying at intervals the mind. The motives which yesterday seemed full of urgency and blood and life to-day feel strangely weak and pale and dead. But as little to-day as to-morrow is the question finally resolved. Something tells us that all this is provisional; that the weakened reasons will wax strong again, and the stronger weaken; that equilibrium is unreached; that testing our reasons, not obeying them, is still the order of the day, and that we must wait awhile, patient or impatiently, until our mind is made up 'for good and all.' This inclining first to one then to another future, both of which we represent as possible, resembles the oscillations to and fro of a material body within the limits of its elasticity. There is inward strain, but no outward rapture. And this condition, plainly enough, is susceptible of indefinite continuance, as well in the physical mass as in the mind. If the elasticity give way, however, if the dam ever do break, and the currents burst the crust, vacillation is over and decision is irrevocably there. The decision may come in either of many modes. I will try briefly to sketch the most characteristic types of it, merely warning the reader that this is only an introspective account of symptoms and phenomena, and that all questions of causal agency, whether neural or spiritual, are relegated to a later page. The particular reasons for or against action are of course infinitely various in concrete cases. But certain motives are more or less constantly in play. One of these is impatience of the deliberative state; or to express it otherwise, proneness to act or to decide merely because action and decision are, as such, agreeable, and relieve the tension of doubt and hesitancy. Thus it comes that we will often take any course whatever which happens to be most vividly before our minds, at the moment when this impulse to decisive action becomes extreme.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In all this the determining condition of the unhesitating and resistless sequence of the act seems to be the absence of any conflicting notion in the mind. Either there is nothing else at all in the mind, or what is there does not conflict. The hypnotic subject realizes the former condition. Ask him what he is thinking about, and ten to one he will reply 'nothing.' The consequence is that he both believes everything he is told, and performs every act that is suggested. The suggestion may be a vocal command, or it may be the performance before him of the movement required. Hypnotic subjects in certain conditions repeat whatever they hear you say, and imitate whatever they see you do. Dr. Féré says that certain waking persons of neurotic type, if one repeatedly close and open one's hand before their eyes, soon begin to have corresponding feelings in their own fingers, and presently begin irresistibly to execute the movements which they see. Under these conditions of 'preparation' Dr. Féré found that his subjects could squeeze the hand-dynamometer much more strongly than when abruptly invited to do so. A few passive repetitions of a movement will enable many enfeebled patients to execute it actively with greater strength. These observations beautifully show how the mere quickening of kinæsthetic ideas is equivalent to a certain amount of tension towards discharge in the centres.[481] We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, "I must get up, this is ignominious," etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer"—an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Does it not seem as if the excitations of the bodily nerves met the ideas half way, in order to raise the latter to the height of emotions? [Note how justly this expresses our theory!] That they do so is proved by the cases in which particular nerves, when specially irritable, share in the emotion and determine its quality. When one is suffering from an open wound, any grievous or horrid spectacle will cause pain in the wound. In sufferers from heart-disease there is developed a psychic excitability, which is often incomprehensible to the patients themselves, but which comes from the heart's liability to palpitate. I said that the very quality of the emotion is determined by the organs disposed to participate in it. Just as surely as a dark foreboding, rightly grounded on inference from the constellations, will be accompanied by a feeling of oppression in the chest, so surely will a similar feeling of oppression, when due to disease of the thoracic organs, be accompanied by groundless forebodings. So small a thing as a bubble of air rising from the stomach through the œsophagus, and loitering on its way a few minutes and exerting pressure on the heart, is able during sleep to occasion a nightmare, and during waking to produce a vague anxiety. On the other hand, we see that joyous thoughts dilate our blood-vessels, and that a suitable quantity of wine, because it dilates the vessels, also disposes us to joyous thoughts. If both the jest and the wine work together, they supplement each other in producing the emotional effect, and our demands on the jest are the more modest in proportion as the wine takes upon itself a larger part of the task."[427] Second Objection. If our theory be true, a necessary corollary of it ought to be this: that any voluntary and cold-blooded arousal of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself. Now this (the objection says) is not found to be the case. An actor can perfectly simulate an emotion and yet be inwardly cold; and we can all pretend to cry and not feel grief; and feign laughter without being amused.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such curious analysis as this; but he can observe more tranquil states, and that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to be true of the less. Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one's bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named. Our concern here being with the general view rather than with the details, I will not linger to discuss these, but, assuming the point admitted that every change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Mr. X., a merchant, born in Vienna, highly educated, master of German, Spanish, French, Greek, and Latin. Up to the beginning of the malady which took him to Professor Charcot, he read Homer at sight. He could, starting from any verse out of the first book of the Iliad, repeat the following verses without hesitating, by heart. Virgil and Horace were familiar. He also knew enough of modern Greek for business purposes. Up to within a year (from the time Charcot saw him) he enjoyed an exceptional visual memory, He no sooner thought of persons or things, but features, forms, and colors arose with the same clearness, sharpness, and accuracy as if the objects stood before him. When he tried to recall a fact or a figure in his voluminous polyglot correspondence, the letters themselves appeared before him with their entire content, irregularities, erasures and all. At school he recited from a mentally seen page which be read off line by line and letter by letter. In making computations, he ran his mental eye down imaginary columns of figures, and performed in this way the most varied operations of arithmetic. He could never think of a passage in a play without the entire scene, stage, actors, and audience appearing to him. He had been a great traveller. Being a good draughtsman, he used to sketch views which pleased him; and his memory always brought back the entire landscape exactly. If lie thought of a conversation, a saying, an engagement, the place, the people, the entire scene rose before his mind. His auditory memory was always deficient, or at least secondary. He had no taste for music. A year and a half previous to examination, after business-anxieties, loss of sleep, appetite, etc., he noticed suddenly one day ail extraordinary change in himself. After complete confusion, there came a violent contrast between his old and his new state. Everything about him seemed so new and foreign that, at first he thought he must be going mad. He was nervous and irritable. Although he saw all things distinct, he had entirely lost his memory for forms and colors. On ascertaining this, he became reassured as to his sanity. He soon discovered that he could carry on his affairs by using his memory in an altogether new way. He can now describe clearly the difference between his two conditions.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Memory aims at filling the gap with an image which has at some particular time filled it before, reasoning with one which bears certain time-and space-relations to the images before and after"— or, to use perhaps clearer language, one which stands in determinate logical relations to those data round about the gap which filled our mind at the start. This feeling of the blank form of relationship before we get the material quality of the thing related will surprise no one who has read Chapter IX. From the guessing of newspaper enigmas to the plotting of the policy of an empire there is no other process than this. We trust to the laws of cerebral nature to present us spontaneously with the appropriate idea: "Our only command over it is by the effort we make to keep the painful unfilled gap in consciousness.[485] . . . Two circumstances are important to notice: the first is, that volition has no power of calling up images, but only of rejecting and selecting from those offered by spontaneous redintegration.[486] But the rapidity with which this selection is made, owing to the familiarity of the ways in which spontaneous redintegration runs, gives the process of reasoning the appearance of evoking images that are foreseen to be conformable to the purpose. There is no seeing them before they are offered; there is no summoning them before they are seen. The other circumstance is, that every kind of reasoning is nothing, in its simplest form, but attention."[487] It is foreign to our purpose here to enter into any detailed analysis of the different classes of mental pursuit. In a scientific research we get perhaps as rich an example as can be found. The inquirer starts with a fact of which he seeks the reason, or with an hypothesis of which he seeks the proof. In either case he keeps turning the matter incessantly in his mind until, by the arousal of associate upon associate, some habitual, some similar, one arises which he recognizes to suit his need. This, however, may take years. No rules can be given by which the investigator may proceed straight to his result; but both here and in the case of reminiscence the accumulation of helps in the way of associations may advance more rapidly by the use of certain routine methods. In striving to recall a thought, for example, we may of set purpose run through the successive classes of circumstances with which it may possibly have been connected, trusting that when the right member of the class has turned up it will help the thought's revival. Thus we may run through all the places in which we may have had it. We may run through the persons whom we remember to have conversed with, or we may call up successively all the books we have lately been reading. If we are trying to remember a person we may run through a list of streets or of professions.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  If we try to explain in terms of brain-action how a thought which only potentially exists can yet be effective, we seem driven to believe that the brain-tract thereof must actually be excited, but only in a minimal and sub-conscious way. Try for instance, to symbolize what goes on in a man who is racking his brains to remember a thought which occurred to him last week. The associates of the thought are there, many of them at least, but they refuse to awaken the thought itself. We cannot suppose that they do not irradiate at all into its brain-tract, because his mind quivers on the very edge of its recovery. Its actual rhythm sounds in his ears; the words seem on the imminent point of following, but fail. What it is that blocks the discharge and keeps the brain-excitement here from passing beyond the nascent into the vivid state cannot be guessed. But we see in the philosophy of desire and pleasure, that such nascent excitements, spontaneously tending to a crescendo, but inhibited or checked by other causes, may become potent mental stimuli and determinants of desire. All questioning, wonder, emotion of curiosity, must be referred to cerebral causes of some such form as this. The great difference between the effort to recall things forgotten and the search after the means to a given end, is that the latter have not, whilst the former have, already formed a part of our experience. If we first study the mode of recalling a thing forgotten , we can take up with better understanding the voluntary quest of the unknown. The forgotten thing is felt by us as a gap in the midst of certain other things. If it is a thought, we possess a dim idea of where we were and what we were about when it occurred to us. We recollect the general subject to which it relates. But all these details refuse to shoot together into a solid whole, for the lack of the vivid traits of this missing thought, the relation whereof to each detail forms now the main interest of the latter. We keep running over the details in our mind, dissatisfied, craving something more. From each detail there radiate lines of association forming so many tentative guesses. Many of these are immediately seen to be irrelevant, are therefore void of interest, and lapse immediately from consciousness. Others are associated with the other details present, and with the missing thought as well. When these surge up, we have a peculiar feeling that we are 'warm,' as the children say when they play hide and seek; and such associates as these we clutch at and keep before the attention. Thus we recollect successively that when we had the thought in question we were at the dinner-table; then that of our friend J.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In consequence of this, it often stops. So soon as this happens, I notice it, whereas I naturally fail to notice it when going. When this first began to happen, there was this modification: I suddenly felt an undefined uneasiness or sort of void, without being able to say what was the matter; and only after some consideration did I find the cause in the stopping of the clock.'" That the stopping of an unfelt stimulus may itself be felt is a well-known fact: the sleeper in church who wakes when the sermon ends; the miller who does the same when his wheel stands still, are stock examples. Now (since every impression falling on the nervous system must propagate itself somewhither), Müller suggests that impressions which come to us when the thought-centres are preoccupied with other matters may thereby be blocked or inhibited from invading these centres, and may then overflow into lower paths of discharge. And he farther suggests that if this process recur often enough, the side-track thus created will grow so permeable as to be used, no matter what may be going on in the centres above. In the acquired inattention mentioned, the constant stimulus always caused disturbance at first ; and consciousness of it was extruded successfully only when the brain was strongly excited about other things. Gradually the extrusion became easier, and at last automatic. The side-tracks which thus learn to draft off the stimulations that interfere with thought cannot be assigned with any precision. They probably terminate in organic processes, or insignificant muscular contractions which, when stopped by the cessation of their instigating cause, immediately give us the feeling that something is gone from our existence (as Müller says), or (as his friend puts it) the feeling of a void.[383] Müller's suggestion awakens another. It is a well-known fact that persons striving to keep their attention on a difficult subject will resort to movements of various unmeaning kinds, such as pacing the room, drumming with the fingers, playing with keys or watch-chain, scratching head, pulling mustache, vibrating foot, or what not, according to the individual. There is an anecdote of Sir W. Scott, when a boy, rising to the head of his class by cutting off from the jacket of the usual head-boy a button which the latter was in the habit of twirling in his fingers during the lesson. The button gone, its owner's power of reciting also departed.—Now much of this activity is unquestionably due to the overflow of emotional excitement during anxious and concentrated thought. It drains away nerve-currents which if pent up within the thought-centres would very likely make the confusion there worse confounded. But may it not also be a means of drafting off all the irrelevant sensations of the moment, and so keeping the attention more exclusively concentrated upon its inner task? Each individual usually has his own peculiar habitual movement of this sort.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  By using this kind of mental posture, we are better able to think and act in ways that are more “aware,” “nonjudgmental,” and “in the present,” and to achieve the beneficial effects of meditation on physical and mental well-being. 192 Buddhist teachings have long emphasized the importance of being less “self-involved.” When we are fearful and anxious, we are concerned about our self and its well-being. These are autonoetic thoughts about one’s health, family, friends, wealth, life, death, and so on. Our conscious self, according to Mark Epstein, who is a Buddhist psychoanalyst, will do almost anything to maintain the independence, power, control, or success that it has achieved, even if to do so other people, other cultures, or the world has to suffer. 193 A healthier approach, Epstein says, is to let go of the “absolute self” that we construct and recognize our broader role in life. Learning to meditate can be a challenging task, but it is obviously a skill that is within the capacity of our species. Individuals who are inherently relaxed and low in anxiety may have a particular penchant for preventing the outer world or inner worries from dominating their thoughts. Perhaps those who first discovered this practice and its benefits were naturally endowed with the propensity and learned to pass it on to others through training. Not everyone has the time and motivation to spend years attaining the highest levels of training possible. However, learning simple relaxation and breathing strategies that are a key part of mindfulness and meditation practice is not especially difficult or time consuming and likely can benefit most if not everyone who puts in a minimal amount of effort. THE ANXIETY OF EVERYDAY LIFE Autonoetic consciousness is our best friend and worst enemy. It enables us to write and revise our narrative, our self-story, as we live each moment of each day. It also enables us to fill in the blanks of our future self. The way we fill in those blanks is an important element in our overall outlook on life. Fearful, anxious people see troubles ahead and lead their lives dwelling on worst-case scenarios that often do not come to pass. They believe that worrying gave them the power to execute plans that prevented the bad things from happening in the past. But just as the brain can learn to be anxious, it can also learn to not be that way. Although some people are by their natures more anxious than others, ever-increasing anxiety doesn’t have to be their destiny. Change is difficult, and for a variety of reasons it’s more difficult for some people to change than others. But the brain is adaptable. It’s just a matter of being able to make those changes happen. That’s where the science of fear and anxiety can hopefully help. Although we’ve come a long way in this effort, we still have a ways to go.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Yet a number of studies have been conducted in people with various degrees of training in meditation, from skilled monks to novices. Brain areas of the CCNs involved in attention and working memory, including various areas of the frontal (lateral, medial, orbital, cingulate, insular) and parietal cortices, are often implicated. 188 In addition, the brain’s so-called “default network,” 189 which is engaged when the brain is doing nothing in particular (such as daydreaming), is sometimes also involved. A leading researcher in this area, Peter Malinowski, has developed a model of the brain and meditation in which five cognitive processes, each related to a different brain circuit, are involved: orienting, alerting, salience, executive, and default mode. 190 This seems to be a useful scheme to guide future research. Now for an exercise in pure speculation: Through controlled breathing, arousal systems are engaged in such a way as to enable sustained attention via working memory networks. Because the breathing process can be trained to the point that it becomes habitual and does not require executive control to be carried out, executive control can then be used solely for attentional control of the contents of working memory. Although we have discussed attention in the context of selecting what enters working memory, selection, by definition, also includes exclusion. Executive functions might therefore be capable of preventing information from entering working memory. Studies have indeed shown that people can be trained to ignore particular stimuli or memories. 191 By isolating working memory from external stimuli and memories about the self (episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness), a sustained focus on the free flow of unselected thought, supported by breathing-induced control of the arousal system, might be maintained. This would be a kind of pure state of “self-less” working memory ( Figure 11.8 ). Figure 11.8: Meditation and Working Memory. The hypothesis depicted here builds on the established role of working memory in cognition (monitoring, selecting, focusing, controlling). These processes determine what occupies working memory and constitutes the content of immediate conscious experience (images, thoughts, feelings) and drives one’s self-narrative. During meditation, working memory uses these same cognitive processes to prevent inputs from entering working memory, allowing the mind to be present in the moment and nonjudgmental, and free of an ongoing self-narrative. How might this scenario of self-less working memory help relieve fear and anxiety? Feelings of fear and anxiety, I’ve argued, are states of autonoetic consciousness, and are thus about the self. If indeed the neural circuits that provide working memory with the ingredients required to experience these feelings have effectively been controlled via meditation, this “self-less” mind cannot feel fear or worry in the sense of a personal experience. With extensive training, one might learn to call upon this self-less mind state when the possibility of threat or worry arises, and thus short-circuit the cognitive construction of feelings of fear or anxiety.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  182 Discussions of meditation often mention the removal of the “the self,” as exemplified in expressions such as “no mind” or “no self.” 183 But this does not mean a blank mind so much as a mind that is free from what Austin calls “thought pollution.” 184 When the “incessant chatter” drops out, what remains is “the present moment.” 185 Although Austin’s ideas are speculative, in recent years meditation has become the subject of a great deal of research that is grounded in basic principles of modern neuroscience and cognitive psychology. According to Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz, leaders in this field, meditation is a “family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory strategies for . . . the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance.” 186 One style of meditation called focused attention involves sustained concentration on some object or thought, whereas another, open monitoring, involves observing experiences moment to moment and nonreactively. Often both styles are used in an individual’s practice. It is significant that meditation training often starts with training in breathing. Control of breathing, as we have just seen, can have a palliative effect on anxiety, 187 which helps prepare the mind for the more intensive activity of trying to be “in the present.” In the book Zen Training, which I have mentioned previously, Katsuki Sekida points out that it is easy to concentrate while holding one’s breath, because tension in the respiratory muscles sustains attention. Although we can hold our breath for only a short time, by learning to breathe using the methods employed by Zen masters, Sekida explains, breathing can be controlled in successive repeated cycles that make sustained attention possible. This, he proposes, occurs by way of the influence of the act of breathing on the reticular formation (what we now call arousal systems). As noted in other chapters, by releasing neuromodulators, arousal systems regulate attention and vigilance functions controlled by cortical areas. Interestingly, controlled breathing also sends messages to arousal systems by way of the ascending vagus nerve, doubling up on the ability of breathing to affect arousal. In light of the fact that attention has appeared repeatedly in this discussion of meditation, it is interesting to consider findings from studies that have measured brain activity using fMRI while people meditate. This is challenging research to carry out, because being in an fMRI machine is about as far removed as possible from the kind of serene, quiet environment in which meditation is often practiced.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Breathing on autopilot is controlled by respiratory circuits in the medulla and pons of the hindbrain that connect to the muscles of the lungs. 176 Neurons in these are sensitive to CO 2 and acidity (see earlier discussion), and this plays a key role in their control over the contraction of the diaphragm muscles, which in turn control the amount of air we take in to balance CO 2 and oxygen in our body. In addition to this automatic breathing control, we also have voluntary control of air intake and how fast or slow we breathe. Singing involves voluntary breath control, as does playing a flute, saxophone, or harmonica. Conscious control of this process is achieved by interactions between the executive control functions of the neocortex and the neurons in the medulla–spinal cord that control breathing. 177 When someone is stressed, it is common to advise, “Just take a deep breath.” This folk wisdom has a grain of truth to it. During stress the sympathetic nervous system dominates, overshadowing the parasympathetic system. The result is fast heart rate, but low heart rate variability, and shallow breathing. 178 When one breathes in the slow, measured way that is commonly taught in meditation, yoga, and relaxation training, the vagus nerve, which controls the parasympathetic nervous system, becomes more active, and the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic system improves. As a result, heart rate variability increases, and the times when it is somewhat slower provide windows of opportunity exists for automatic processes to drive heart rate down and thus reduce elevated blood pressure and other sympathetic responses. 179 Because it is an easy and free way to have some power over anxiety, everyone should learn to do this. In fact, I believe that instruction in the use of controlled breathing should be a major part of early education, something that children can be trained to do to the point that it becomes a habit that is simply expressed when any sign of tension arises. This simple trick, if built into one’s life early, before major problems arise, could greatly reduce the adverse consequences of uncontrolled stress in childhood. 180 MAKING WORKING MEMORY “SELF-LESS” In the 1960s meditation was often thought of as a hippie fad, just another example of the fascination with all things Eastern and/or mystical. But eventually meditation became a mainstream phenomenon. Along with relaxation, reappraisal, exposure, and coping strategies, some cognitive therapists today use meditation, or what is called mindfulness, as part of the therapeutic program. In the cognitive therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy, 181 the patient is encouraged to be mindful (present in immediate experience) and to accept rather than react to, judge, and change thoughts and experiences. So what goes on in the brain in meditation? James Austin, author of Zen and the Brain, describes meditation as “a relaxed attentive state” that “helps . . . relieve us from self-inflicted trains of thought.”

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  172 In this article, I used the term “ proactive avoidance ” to describe behaviors and thoughts that directly engage with anxiety triggers in order to change, through learning, their impact and thereby help the organism exert control. (The term “ agency ,” as used in the therapeutic community, seems to have a similar meaning.) This kind of strategy combines self-exposure to anxiety-provoking situations with strategies for gaining control over the trigger cues. Michael Rogan, 173 a former researcher in my laboratory and currently a therapist who specializes in social anxiety, suggests that rather than forcing oneself to ride out anxiety at a party (flooding), it’s more effective to use anxiety control strategies, such as relaxation and active coping (e.g., trips to the bathroom or stepping out to make a call), that enable regrouping before reexposure. Exposure can therefore be achieved in a way that allows instrumental learning to be reinforced by the successful regulation of defensive responses ( Figure 11.7 ). This does not contradict my earlier warning about not attempting to accomplish too much at once, because the reduction of defense responses triggered by the threatening social stimulation is necessary to reinforce instrumental learning. This strategy, it should be noted, circumvents the question of whether the triggers have been learned or not (see above), because the goal is to reinforce active control behaviors that reduce the responses elicited by the cues, regardless of their origin. Figure 11.7: Active Coping. (BASED ON IDEAS DEVELOPED BY LEDOUX AND GORMAN [2001] AND LEDOUX [2013]. For the most part, animals have to learn avoidance behaviors via trial and error. We humans likewise learn through instrumental reinforcement processes (implicit learning), but we’re also able to use observation and instruction to explicitly learn to avoid. 174 Through these approaches, or by sheer imagination, we create avoidance concepts or schemas, and when in danger we draw upon these stored action plans. Then, when we encounter threats, they can trigger the avoidance schema and motivate performance of the response. Given the hypersensitivity of anxious people to threats, learned or schematized avoidance can be easily triggered and drive behavior in pathological ways, but proactive avoidance schemas can function as part of one’s repertoire of coping skills. Shifting the balance from pathological to adaptive (proactive) avoidance is the key, and though it’s not easy to accomplish, understanding the difference between the two is a valuable first step. BREATHING AWAY ANXIETY Your brain usually takes care of breathing for you, 175 so that you don’t normally have to think about it at all. For example, if you exert physical effort—say, while jogging—your respiratory rate speeds up to take in more air, allowing more oxygen to be extracted and brought into the bloodstream to help with the metabolic processes that generate energy by using oxygen to break down glucose.