Surprise

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 On Beauty (2005)

  ‘No, Mom, no . . .’ said Jerome uncertainly. ‘It’s just there’s something stuck here . . . it’s fine . . . we can just . . .’ Jerome brought the painting upright and rested it against his mother. He pulled again at a piece of white notecard tucked into the frame. ‘Jerome! What are you doing? Stop doing that!’ ‘I just want to see what . . .’ ‘Don’t tear it,’ yelled Kiki, unable to see what was going on. ‘Are you tearing it? Leave it!’ ‘Oh, my God . . .’ whispered Jerome, forgetting his own blaspheming rule. ‘Mom? Oh, my God! ’ ‘What are you doing? Jerome! Why are you tearing it more? ’ ‘Mom! Oh, shit, Mom! Your name’s written here!’ ‘ What? ’ ‘Oh, man, this is too fucking weird . . .’ ‘Jerome! What are you doing ?’ ‘Mom . . . look.’ Jerome pulled the note free. ‘Here, it says To Kiki – please enjoy this painting. It needs to be loved by someone like you. Your friend, Carlene .’  on beauty and being wrong ‘ What? ’ ‘I’m reading it! It’s right here! And then, under that, There is such a shelter in each other . This is too weird!’ Kiki lost her legs, and it was only Levi’s intervention, hands at her waist, which prevented both Kiki and painting from hitting the floor. Ten minutes earlier, Zora and Howard had arrived back home together. After driving around Wellington for most of the afternoon, thinking things over, Zora had spotted Howard walking back from the Greenman. She gave him a lift. He was in chipper spirits after a good afternoon’s work on his lecture and spoke so much and so continually that he didn’t notice that his daughter was not responding. Only when they came through the front door did it dawn on Howard that a cold front was coming off Zora in his direction. They walked silently into the kitchen, where Zora threw the car keys on to the table with such vigour that they slid the length of it and fell off the other side. ‘Sounds like Levi’s in trouble,’ said Howard cheerfully, nodding towards the sound of shouting coming from the basement. ‘He had it coming. I can’t say I’m surprised. There’re sandwiches developing into life forms in that room.’ ‘Ha,’ said Zora. ‘And ha.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Just admiring your ironic gift for comedy, Daddy.’ Sighing, Howard sat down in the rocking chair. ‘Zoor – have I pissed you off ? Look, if it was that last grade, let’s discuss it. I think it was fair, darling, that’s why I gave it. The essay was just badly structured. Ideas-wise it was fine, but – there was a lack of . . . concentration, somehow.’ ‘It’s true,’ said Zora. ‘My mind’s been elsewhere. I’m real focused now, though.’ ‘Good!’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Because it seemed to confirm the judgment of those nervous American publishers, the Girodias imprimatur became one more obstacle for Lolita to overcome, though the problem of its alleged pornography indeed seems remote today, and was definitively settled in France not long after its publication. I was Nabokov’s student at Cornell in 1953–1954, at a time when most undergraduates did not know he was a writer. Drafted into the army a year later, I was sent overseas to France. On my first pass to Paris I naturally went browsing in a Left Bank bookstore. An array of Olympia Press books, daringly displayed above the counter, seemed most inviting—and there, between copies of Until She Screams and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, I found Lolita. Although I thought I knew all of Nabokov’s works in English (and had searched through out-of-print stores to buy each of them), this title was new to me; and its context and format were more than surprising, even if in those innocent pre-Grove Press days the semi-literate wags on fraternity row had dubbed Nabokov’s Literature 311–312 lecture course “Dirty Lit” because of such readings as Ulysses and Madame Bovary (the keenest campus wits invariably dropped the B when mentioning the latter). I brought Lolita back to my base, which was situated out in the woods. Passes were hard to get and new Olympia titles were always in demand in the barracks. The appearance of a new girl in town thus caused a minor clamor. “Hey, lemme read your dirty book, man!” insisted “Stockade Clyde” Carr, who had justly earned his sobriquet, and to whose request I acceded at once. “Read it aloud, Stockade,” someone called, and skipping the Foreword, Stockade Clyde began to make his remedial way through the opening paragraph. “ ‘Lo … lita, light … of my life, fire of my … loins. My sin, my soul … Lo-lee-ta: The … tip of the … tongue … taking … a trip …’—Damn!” yelled Stockade, throwing the book against the wall. “It’s God-damn Litachure!!” Thus the Instant Pornography Test, known in psychological-testing circles as the “IPT.” Although infallible, it has never to my knowledge been used in any court case.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  To the right of this scene was his son, presently pressed up against a wall by Michael Kipps. Of other matters, Howard had time to note someone who must be Mrs Kipps with her right hand raised in the direction of Jerome, and someone beside her with their face in their hands and only their intricately plaited scalp on view. Then the tableau came to life. ‘Michael,’ Mrs Kipps was saying firmly. She pronounced the name so that it rhymed with ‘Y-Cal’, a brand of sugar substitute that Howard used in his coffee. ‘Let Jerome go, please – the engagement is already off. No need for this.’ Howard noticed the surprise on his own son’s face as Mrs Kipps said the word ‘engagement’. Jerome tried to stretch his head away from Michael’s body to catch the eye of the silent, curled-up figure at the table, but this figure did not move. ‘Engagement! Since when was there an engagement!’ Michael yelled and drew back his fist, but Howard was already there and surprised himself by instinctively reaching out to grab the boy’s  On Beauty wrist. Mrs Kipps was trying to stand but seemed to be having difficulty, and, when she called her son’s name again, Howard was thankful to feel all the will in Michael’s arm dissolve. Jerome, shaking, stepped aside. ‘Anyone could see it happening,’ said Mrs Kipps quietly. ‘But it’s over now. All done.’ Michael looked confused for a minute, and then a second thought seemed to come to him and he started to rattle the handle of the French doors. ‘Dad!’ he shouted, but the doors wouldn’t give. Howard stepped forward to help him with the top lock. Michael violently shrugged him off, spotted the fastened lock at last and released it. The French doors flew open. Michael stepped out into the garden, still calling for his father, as the wind chased the curtains up and down. Howard could make out a long stretch of grass and somewhere at the end of it the orange glow of a small bonfire. Beyond that, the ivy-covered base of a monumental tree, the invisible top of which belonged to the night. ‘Hello, Dr Belsey,’ said Mrs Kipps now, as if all of this were a perfectly normal preamble to a nice social call. She took her napkin off her knees and stood up. ‘We’ve not met, have we?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  More time to tune in to other important stuff. He’s just a little busy right now. Believe me,’ she said, with more conviction, ‘he’ll be a real addition to Wellington. We need more people like him.’ Jerome hummed in an ambivalent way. Zora rounded on him. ‘You know, there’s other ways to have a successful college career than the route you went down. Traditional qualifications are not everything. Just because – ’ Jerome mimed zipping up his lip and throwing away the key. ‘I’m a hundred and ten per cent behind you, Zoor, as ever,’ he said, smiling. ‘More wine?’ It was the kind of party where every hour two people leave and thirty people arrive. The Besley siblings found and lost each other several times that night, and lost new people they found. You’d turn to eat from a bowl of peanuts and not see the person you’d been talking to again until you met them forty minutes later in the line for the toilets. Around ten, Zora found herself on the balcony smoking a joint in an absurdly cool circle consisting of Jamie Anderson, Veronica, Christian and three grads she didn’t know. In normal circumstances she would have been ecstatic at this, but, even as Jamie Anderson was taking her theory about women’s punctuation seriously, Zora’s busy brain was otherwise occupied, wondering where Carl was, if he’d already left, and whether he’d liked her dress. Out of nerves she kept drinking, filling her cup from an abandoned bottle of white wine by her feet. Just after eleven, Jerome stepped out on to the balcony, interrupt-ing the impromptu lecture that Anderson was giving and plonked himself upon his sister’s lap. He was badly drunk. ‘Sorry!’ he said, touching Anderson’s knees. ‘Carry on, sorry – don’t mind me. Zoor, guess what I saw? I should say who .’ Anderson, piqued, moved away and took his acolytes with him. Zora bumped Jerome off her lap, stood up and leaned against the balcony, looking out on to the quiet, leafy street. ‘ Great – and how are we going to get home? I’m way over the limit. There’s no taxis. You’re meant to be the designated driver. Jesus, Jerome!’  On Beauty ‘Blasphemer,’ said Jerome, not entirely unserious. ‘Look, I’ll start treating you like a Christian when you start acting like one. You know you can’t handle more than a glass of wine.’ ‘But so,’ whispered Jerome and put his arm around his sister, ‘I come with news. My darling heart ex-whatever is in the coat room getting it on with your rapper friend.’ ‘What?’ Zora shook his arm off. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Miss Kipps. Vee. And the rapper. That’s what I love about Wellington – everybody knows everybody .’ He sighed. ‘Oh, well.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Stop doing that!’ ‘I just want to see what . . .’ ‘Don’t tear it,’ yelled Kiki, unable to see what was going on. ‘Are you tearing it? Leave it!’ ‘Oh, my God . . .’ whispered Jerome, forgetting his own blaspheming rule. ‘Mom? Oh, my God! ’ ‘What are you doing? Jerome! Why are you tearing it more? ’ ‘Mom! Oh, shit, Mom! Your name’s written here!’ ‘ What? ’ ‘Oh, man, this is too fucking weird . . .’ ‘Jerome! What are you doing ?’ ‘Mom . . . look.’ Jerome pulled the note free. ‘Here, it says To Kiki – please enjoy this painting. It needs to be loved by someone like you. Your friend, Carlene .’  on beauty and being wrong ‘ What? ’ ‘I’m reading it! It’s right here! And then, under that, There is such a shelter in each other . This is too weird!’ Kiki lost her legs, and it was only Levi’s intervention, hands at her waist, which prevented both Kiki and painting from hitting the floor. Ten minutes earlier, Zora and Howard had arrived back home together. After driving around Wellington for most of the afternoon, thinking things over, Zora had spotted Howard walking back from the Greenman. She gave him a lift. He was in chipper spirits after a good afternoon’s work on his lecture and spoke so much and so continually that he didn’t notice that his daughter was not responding. Only when they came through the front door did it dawn on Howard that a cold front was coming off Zora in his direction. They walked silently into the kitchen, where Zora threw the car keys on to the table with such vigour that they slid the length of it and fell off the other side. ‘Sounds like Levi’s in trouble,’ said Howard cheerfully, nodding towards the sound of shouting coming from the basement. ‘He had it coming. I can’t say I’m surprised. There’re sandwiches developing into life forms in that room.’ ‘Ha,’ said Zora. ‘And ha.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Just admiring your ironic gift for comedy, Daddy.’ Sighing, Howard sat down in the rocking chair. ‘Zoor – have I pissed you off ? Look, if it was that last grade, let’s discuss it. I think it was fair, darling, that’s why I gave it. The essay was just badly structured. Ideas-wise it was fine, but – there was a lack of . . . concentration, somehow.’ ‘It’s true,’ said Zora. ‘My mind’s been elsewhere.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  These rules can be specific to a culture, stipulating when it’s acceptable to construct a given emotion in a given situation. In the United States, it’s appropriate to feel fear when you’re on a rollercoaster, or about to hear the results of a cancer screening, or if someone points a gun at you. In the United States, it’s not appropriate to feel fear each time you walk out of your house in a safe neighborhood: that feeling would be considered pathological, an anxiety disorder called agoraphobia. My friend Carmen, who was born in Bolivia, was surprised when I told her that emotion concepts vary widely from culture to culture. “I thought everybody in the world has the same emotions,” she explained to me in Spanish. “Well, Bolivians do have stronger emotions than Americans. Más fuerte.” Most people have lived with one set of emotion concepts their whole lives, so like Carmen, they find this cultural relativity surprising. Yet, scientists have documented numerous emotion concepts around the world that don’t exist in English. Norwegians have a concept for an intense joy of falling in love, calling it “Forelsket.” The Danes have the concept “Hygge” for a certain feeling of close friendship. The Russian “Tocka” is a spiritual anguish, and the Portuguese “Saudade” is a strong, spiritual longing. After a little research, I located a Spanish emotion concept that has no direct equivalent in English, called “Pena Ajena.” Carmen described it to me as “sadness over another person’s loss,” but I’ve also seen it characterized as discomfort or embarrassment on someone else’s behalf. Here are a few more I find compelling: 25 Gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable. 26 Voorpret (Dutch): Pleasure felt about an event before the event takes place. 27 Age-otori (Japanese): The feeling of looking worse after a haircut. 28 Some emotion concepts from other cultures are incredibly complicated, perhaps impossible to translate into English, yet natives experience them as a matter of course. The concept of “Fago” in Ifaluk (Micronesian) culture can mean love, empathy, pity, sadness, or compassion, depending on context. In Czech culture, the concept of “Litost” is said to be untranslatable but roughly “torment over one’s own misery combined with the desire for revenge.” The Japanese emotion concept “Arigata-meiwaku” is felt when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you, but you’re required to be grateful anyway. 29 When I speak to audiences in the United States about emotion concepts as variable and culture-specific, and then suggest that our own English-language concepts are similarly local to our culture, some people are very surprised, as my friend Carmen was. “But happiness and sadness are real emotions,” they insist, as if the emotions of other cultures are not as real as our own.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I usually get the train!’ ‘Man, that’s freaky. That’s just not right,’ said Levi, whose mind naturally lent itself to conspiratorial and mystical phenomena. They shook their heads and laughed, and to relieve the sense of freakiness recounted their journeys to each other, taking care to assert common-sense arguments like ‘Well, we’re often in Boston towards the end of the week’ and ‘This is nearest to the T-stop we usually use’, but nobody was especially convinced by this and the wonder continued. The urge to tell someone became acute. Jerome called Kiki on his cell. She was sitting in her cubicle (decorated with photographs of these three children), typing doctor’s notes into the Beecham Urology Ward’s patient records. ‘Jay? But when d’you get back, baby? You didn’t say anything.’ ‘Just now – but isn’t that amazing?’ Kiki stopped typing and concentrated properly on what she was being told. It was so blustery outside. The window by her cubicle was lashed every few minutes by slick leaves plastering themselves across the glass. Every word of Jerome’s came to her like a cry from a ship in a storm. ‘You bumped into Zoor?’ ‘ And Levi. We’re all standing here – right now – we’re freaking out!’ In the background Kiki could hear both Zora and Levi asking for the phone. ‘Well, I can’t believe that – that’s crazy. I guess there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio – right?’ This was Kiki’s sole literary quotation, and she used it for all uncanny incidents and also those that were, in truth, only slightly uncanny. ‘It’s like what they say about twins. Vibrations. You must feel each other’s presence somehow.’ ‘But isn’t that insane ?’ Kiki grinned into the mouthpiece, but real enthusiasm failed her. There was a residual melancholy connected to the thought of these  the anatomy lesson three newly coined adults walking freely about the world without her assistance, open to its magic and beauty, available for unusual experiences and not, explicitly not, typing doctor’s notes into the Beecham Urology Ward’s patient records. ‘Isn’t Levi meant to be in school? It’s two thirty.’ Jerome relayed this query to Levi and offered him the cellphone but now Levi stepped back from it as if it were primed to explode. Placing his legs wide apart and trying to keep his balance in a fierce crosswind, he began energetically mouthing two silent words. ‘ What? ’ said Jerome. ‘Levi,’ repeated Kiki, ‘School. Why isn’t he in school?’ ‘Free period,’ said Jerome, correctly translating Levi’s mime. ‘He’s got a free period.’ ‘Is that so.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  31 Perhaps the most surprising thing about Albertani’s case is that the expert witnesses and the judge thought that the brain was an “extenuating explanation” for Albertani’s murderous behavior. All behavior stems from the brain. No human actions, thoughts, or feelings exist apart from firing neurons. The wrong way to use neuroscience in court is to argue that a biological explanation automatically releases someone from responsibility. You are your brain. 32 The law often looks for simple, single causes, so it’s tempting to blame a brain aberration for criminal behavior. But behavior in real life is anything but simple. It’s a culmination of multiple factors, including predictions from your brain, prediction error from your five senses plus interoceptive sensation, and a complex cascade involving billions of prediction loops. And that’s just the story inside a single person. Your brain is also surrounded by other brains in other bodies. Whenever you speak or act, you influence the predictions of others around you, who in turn influence your predictions right back. A whole culture collectively plays a role in the concepts you build and the predictions you make, and therefore in your behavior. People can argue over how large a role culture plays, but the fact of its role is not debatable. Bottom line: Sometimes a biological problem can interfere with your brain’s ability to choose your actions with intent. Maybe you grow a brain tumor, or some neurons begin to die in just the wrong places. But mere variability in the brain—in its structure, function, chemistry, or genetics—is not an extenuating circumstance for a crime. Variation is the norm. ... Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to death. Tsarnaev received a trial by jury, a right guaranteed to all Americans by the U.S. Constitution. According to the BBC, who reported on the sentencing, “Only two of the jurors believed Tsarnaev has felt remorse. The other 10, like many in Massachusetts, think he has no regrets.” Jurors formed these opinions of Tsarnaev’s remorse by observing him closely during the trial, where he reportedly sat “stone-faced” throughout most of the proceedings. Slate.com noted that Tsarnaev’s defense attorney “did not—or could not—present evidence [that] Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has felt any of the remorse that the prosecution says he is devoid of.” 33 Trial by jury is considered the gold standard for fairness in a criminal case. Jurors are instructed to make decisions based only on the evidence presented. In a predicting brain, however, this is an impossible task. The jurors perceive every defendant, plaintiff, witness, judge, attorney, courtroom, and iota of evidence through the lens of their own conceptual system, which makes the idea of the impartial juror an implausible fiction.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Oh, no, before then. Before any of you were born.’ ‘Some kind of romantic holiday,’ said Jerome. He tightened his tense grasp on the edge of the door. ‘The most romantic.’ Kiki smiled and shook her head free of some secret thought. She put the porcelain mask carefully to one side. Jerome took a step into the storeroom. ‘Mom . . .’ Kiki smiled again, her face upturned to listen to her son. Jerome looked away. ‘You . . . you need some help, Mom?’ Kiki kissed him gratefully. ‘ Thanks , honey. That’d be so great. Come and help me move some stuff out of Levi’s. It’s a nightmare in there. I can’t face it alone.’ Jerome put his hands out for Kiki and lifted her up. Together they crossed the hall and pushed Levi’s door open, working against the piles of clothes on its other side. Inside Levi’s room the smell of boy, of socks and sperm, was strong. ‘Nice wallpaper,’ said Jerome. The room was newly plastered with posters of black girls, mostly big black girls, mostly big black girls’ butts. Interspersed with these here and there were a few  On Beauty vainglorious portraits of rappers, mostly dead, and a massive photograph of Pacino in Scarface . But big black girls in bikinis was the central decorating scheme. ‘At least they’re not starving half to death,’ said Kiki, getting down on her knees to look under the bed. ‘At least they’ve got some flesh on their bones. OK – there’s all kinds of crap under here. You take that end and lift.’ Jerome hiked up his end of the bed. ‘Higher,’ requested Kiki and Jerome obliged. Suddenly Kiki’s right knee slipped and her hand went to the floor. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered. ‘What?’ ‘Oh, my God .’ ‘ What? Is it porn? My arm’s getting tired.’ Jerome lowered the bed a little. ‘DON’T MOVE!’ screamed Kiki. Jerome, terrified, lifted the bed high. His mother was gasping, like she was having some kind of a fit. ‘Mom – what? You’re scaring me, man. What is it?’ ‘I don’t understand this. I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS.’ ‘Mom, I can’t hold this any longer.’ ‘HOLD IT.’ Jerome saw his mother get a grip on the sides of something. She slowly began to pull out whatever it was from under the bed. ‘What the . . . ?’ said Jerome. Kiki dragged the painting into the middle of the floor and sat next to it, hyperventilating. Jerome came up behind her and tried to touch her to calm her, but she slapped his hand away. ‘Mom, I don’t understand what’s going on. What is that?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  How was Italy? Where’s – ’ Kiki spotted the subject of her question, Claire Malcolm, turning away from a stall selling massage oils. Claire looked confused for a moment, panicked almost, but then raised a hand, smiling. In response Kiki gave Claire the long-distance look of surprise and swept her hand up and down to signify the change in Claire, a little green sundress instead of her winter staples of black leather jacket, black polo neck and black jeans. Thinking about it, she hadn’t seen Claire Malcolm since the winter. Now she was speckled a toasty Mediterranean brown, the pale blue of her eyes intensified by the contrast. Kiki signalled to her to come over. The Haitian man, having fastened Kiki’s anklet, dropped his hands and looked anxiously at her. ‘Warren, just wait one minute – let me just do this – how much again?’ ‘Fifteen. For this fifteen.’ ‘I thought you said ten for a bracelet – Warren, sorry about this, just one minute – didn’t you say ten?’  kipps and belsey ‘This one fifteen, please, fifteen.’ Kiki hunted in her purse for her wallet. Warren Crane stood beside her, with his hefty head, too large for that neatly muscular blue-collar New Jersey body, his beefy sailor arms crossed and a whimsical look on his face, like that of an audience member waiting for the comedian to get on stage. When you are no longer in the sexual universe – when you are supposedly too old, or too big, or simply no longer thought of in that way – apparently a whole new range of male reactions to you come into play. One of them is humour. They find you funny. But then, thought Kiki, they were brought up that way, these white American boys: I’m the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around. Of course they find me funny. And yet I could cross the river to Boston and barely be left alone for five minutes at a time. Only last week a young brother half her age had trailed Kiki up and down Newbury for an hour and would not relent until she said he could take her out some time; she gave him a fake number. ‘You need a loan, Keeks?’ asked Warren. ‘Sister, I could spare you a dime.’ Kiki laughed. She found her wallet at last. Money dealt with, she said goodbye to the trader. ‘That’s pretty,’ said Warren, looking down her and then up her again. ‘As if you needed to get any prettier.’ And this is another thing they do. They flirt with you violently because there is no possibility of it being taken seriously. ‘What did she get – something lovely? Oh, that is lovely,’ said Claire as she approached, peering down at Kiki’s ankle.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  On the other hand, if you constructed some other instance of “Fear,” such as the exuberant fear of riding a rollercoaster, you might have trouble understanding why your friend was so upset by the flight. Successful communication requires that you and your friend are using synchronized concepts. Think back to Darwin’s ideas about the importance of variation within a species (chapter 1). Each animal species is a population of unique individuals who vary from one another. No feature or set of features is necessary, sufficient, or even frequent or typical of every individual in the population. Any summary of the population is a statistical fiction that applies to no individual. And most importantly, variation within a species is meaningfully related to the environment in which individuals live. Some individuals are more fit than others to pass their genetic material to the next generation. In a similar manner, some instances of concepts are more effective in a particular context to achieve a particular goal. Their competition in your brain is like Darwin’s theory of natural selection but carried out in milliseconds; the most suitable instances outlive all rivals to fit your goal in the moment. That is categorization. 18 ... Where do emotion concepts come from? How can a concept like “Awe” have such diversity: awe of the vastness of the universe; awe of Erik Weihenmayer, who scaled Mount Everest while blind; and awe that a tiny worker ant can carry five thousand times its body weight? The classical view proposes that you are born with these concepts, or that your brain finds emotion fingerprints in people’s expressions and internalizes them as concepts. But we know that scientists haven’t found such fingerprints, and infants show no evidence of being born knowing “Awe.” The human brain, it turns out, bootstraps a conceptual system into its wiring within the first year of life. This system is responsible for the wealth of emotion concepts that you now employ to experience and perceive emotions. The newborn brain has the ability to learn patterns, a process called statistical learning. The moment that you burst into this strange new world as a baby, you were bombarded with noisy, ambiguous signals from the world and from your body. This barrage of sensory input was not random: it had some structure. Regularities. Your little brain began computing probabilities of which sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, and interoceptive sensations go together and which don’t. “Those edges form a boundary. Those two blobs are part of a bigger blob. That brief silence was a separator.” Little by little, but with surprising speed, your brain learned to resolve this ocean of vague sensation into patterns: sights and sounds, smells and tastes, touches and interoceptive sensations, and combinations thereof. 19 Scientists have debated for hundreds of years over what you’re born with versus what you learn, and I won’t enter that debate. Let’s just say that one thing you’re born with is a fundamental ability to learn from regularities and probabilities around you.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘This is insane . I don’t even ever come this way. I usually get the train!’ ‘Man, that’s freaky. That’s just not right,’ said Levi, whose mind naturally lent itself to conspiratorial and mystical phenomena. They shook their heads and laughed, and to relieve the sense of freakiness recounted their journeys to each other, taking care to assert common-sense arguments like ‘Well, we’re often in Boston towards the end of the week’ and ‘This is nearest to the T-stop we usually use’, but nobody was especially convinced by this and the wonder continued. The urge to tell someone became acute. Jerome called Kiki on his cell. She was sitting in her cubicle (decorated with photographs of these three children), typing doctor’s notes into the Beecham Urology Ward’s patient records. ‘Jay? But when d’you get back, baby? You didn’t say anything.’ ‘Just now – but isn’t that amazing?’ Kiki stopped typing and concentrated properly on what she was being told. It was so blustery outside. The window by her cubicle was lashed every few minutes by slick leaves plastering themselves across the glass. Every word of Jerome’s came to her like a cry from a ship in a storm. ‘You bumped into Zoor?’ ‘ And Levi. We’re all standing here – right now – we’re freaking out!’ In the background Kiki could hear both Zora and Levi asking for the phone. ‘Well, I can’t believe that – that’s crazy. I guess there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio – right?’ This was Kiki’s sole literary quotation, and she used it for all uncanny incidents and also those that were, in truth, only slightly uncanny. ‘It’s like what they say about twins. Vibrations. You must feel each other’s presence somehow.’ ‘But isn’t that insane ?’ Kiki grinned into the mouthpiece, but real enthusiasm failed her. There was a residual melancholy connected to the thought of these  the anatomy lesson three newly coined adults walking freely about the world without her assistance, open to its magic and beauty, available for unusual experiences and not, explicitly not, typing doctor’s notes into the Beecham Urology Ward’s patient records. ‘Isn’t Levi meant to be in school? It’s two thirty.’ Jerome relayed this query to Levi and offered him the cellphone but now Levi stepped back from it as if it were primed to explode. Placing his legs wide apart and trying to keep his balance in a fierce crosswind, he began energetically mouthing two silent words. ‘ What? ’ said Jerome. ‘Levi,’ repeated Kiki, ‘School. Why isn’t he in school?’ ‘Free period,’ said Jerome, correctly translating Levi’s mime. ‘He’s got a free period.’ ‘Is that so. Jerome, can I talk to your brother, please?’

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  The basic emotion method, you may recall, was designed to study “emotion recognition.” On each trial of an experiment, a test subject views the photograph of a face, carefully posed by a trained actor, to represent the so-called expressions of certain emotions: smiling for happiness, scowling for anger, pouting for sadness, and so on. Accompanying the photo is a small set of English emotion words, depicted in figure 3-2, and the subject chooses the word that best matches the face. The same words appear trial after trial. In another version of the basic emotion method, a test subject selects the best of two or three photos to match a brief story or descriptive phrase, such as “Her mother died, and she feels very sad.” [image file=image_rsrc7AJ.jpg] Figure 3-2: Basic emotion method: picking a word to match the face Test subjects from all around the world (Germany, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, Greece, Estonia, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) choose the expected word or face about 85 percent of the time on average. In cultures that are less like the United States, such as Japan, Malaysia, Ethiopia, China, Sumatra, and Turkey, subjects match faces and words slightly less well, responding as expected about 72 percent of the time. Hundreds of scientific studies have used these findings to conclude that facial expressions are universally recognized and therefore universally produced, even by people in faraway cultures that had little contact with Western civilization. Ultimately, these emotion “recognition” findings have been so well replicated over the last several decades that universal emotions seem to qualify as one of those rare bulletproof scientific facts, like the law of gravity.5 The thing is, universal laws have this annoying habit of losing their universality. Newton’s law of universal gravitation was only universal until the theory of relativity showed that it wasn’t. Watch what happens when we change the basic emotion method very slightly. Simply remove the list of emotion words. Test subjects must now freely label the same posed photographs from the dozens (or even hundreds) of emotion words that they know, as depicted in figure 3-3, instead of choosing a response from a short list of possibilities, as depicted in figure 3-2. When we do this, the subjects’ success rate plummets. In one of the first free labeling studies ever conducted, subjects named the faces with the expected emotion words (or synonyms) only 58 percent of the time, and in subsequent studies the results were even lower. In fact, if you ask a more neutral question without referring to emotion at all—“What word best describes what’s going on inside this person?”—the performance is even worse.6 [image file=image_rsrc7AK.jpg] Figure 3-3: Basic emotion method with the emotion words removed

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The notes you found were fragments of a novel. Your name and hers were put in by mere chance. Just because they came handy. Think it over. I shall bring you a drink.” She neither answered nor turned, but went on writing in a scorching scrawl whatever she was writing. A third letter, presumably (two in stamped envelopes were already laid out on the desk). I went back to the kitchen. I set out two glasses (to St. Algebra? to Lo?) and opened the refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I removed the ice from its heart. Rewrite. Let her read it again. She will not recall details. Change, forge. Write a fragment and show it to her or leave it lying around. Why do faucets sometimes whine so horribly? A horrible situation, really. The little pillow-shaped blocks of ice—pillows for polar teddy bear, Lo—emitted rasping, crackling, tortured sounds as the warm water loosened them in their cells. I bumped down the glasses side by side. I poured in the whiskey and a dram of soda. She had tabooed my pin. Bark and bang went the icebox. Carrying the glasses, I walked through the dining room and spoke through the parlor door which was a fraction ajar, not quite space enough for my elbow. “I have made you a drink,” I said. She did not answer, the mad bitch, and I placed the glasses on the sideboard near the telephone, which had started to ring. “Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson,” said Leslie Tomson who favored a dip at dawn. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you’d better come quick.” I answered, perhaps a bit testily, that my wife was safe and sound, and still holding the receiver, I pushed open the door and said: “There’s this man saying you’ve been killed, Charlotte.” But there was no Charlotte in the living room. 23 I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a peculiar sight. A big black glossy Packard had climbed Miss Opposite’s sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap), and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I know about Kippses? I don’t know nothing about no Kippses.’ ‘Jerome – go to school.’ ‘Now I’m Jerome too?’ ‘Levi – go to school .’ ‘Man, why you gotta be all . . . I just ahks a question, that’s all, and you gotta be all . . .’ Here Levi provided an inconclusive mime that gave no idea of the missing word. ‘Monty Kipps. The man your brother’s been working for in England,’ conceded Kiki wearily. It was interesting to Howard to see how Levi had won this concession, by meeting Kiki’s corrosive irony with its opposite. ‘See?’ said Levi, as if it was only by his efforts that decency and sense could be arrived at. ‘Was that hard?’ ‘So is that a letter from Kipps?’ asked Zora, coming back down the stairs and up behind her mother’s shoulder. In this pose, the daughter bent over the mother, they reminded Howard of two of Picasso’s chubby water-carriers. ‘Dad, please , I’ve got to help with the reply this time – we’re going to destroy him. Who’s it for? The Republic ?’ ‘No. No, it’s nothing to do with that – it’s from Jerome, actually. Getting married,’ said Howard, letting his robe fall open, turning away. He wandered over to the glass doors that looked out on to their garden. ‘To Kipps’s daughter. Apparently it’s funny. Your mother thinks it’s hilarious.’  kipps and belsey ‘No, honey,’ said Kiki. ‘I think we just established that I don’t think it’s hilarious – I don’t think we know what’s happening – this is a seven-line e-mail. We don’t know what that even means , and I’m not gonna get all hepped up about – ’ ‘Is this serious ?’ interrupted Zora. She yanked the paper from her mother’s hands, bringing it very close to her myopic eyes. ‘This is a fucking joke, right?’ Howard rested his forehead on the thick glass pane and felt the condensation soak his eyebrows. Outside, the democratic East Coast snow was still falling, making the garden chairs the same as the garden tables and plants and mail-boxes and fence-posts. He breathed a mushroom cloud and then wiped it off with his sleeve. ‘Zora, you need to get to class, OK? And you really need to not use that language in my house – Hup! Hap! Nap! No! ’ said Kiki, each time masking a word Zora was attempting to begin. ‘OK? Take Levi to the cab rank.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  People raised in Russia are simply taught that light and dark blue are distinct colors with different names. These color concepts become wired into their brains, and so they perceive seven stripes. 2 4 Words represent concepts, and concepts are tools of culture. We pass them down from parent to child, from one generation to the next, just like your great-great-grandmother’s candlesticks from the Old Country. “Rainbows have six stripes.” “Money is traded for goods.” “Cupcakes are a dessert and muffins are a breakfast food.” Emotion concepts are also cultural tools. They come with a rich set of rules, all in the service of regulating your body budget or influencing someone else’s. These rules can be specific to a culture, stipulating when it’s acceptable to construct a given emotion in a given situation. In the United States, it’s appropriate to feel fear when you’re on a rollercoaster, or about to hear the results of a cancer screening, or if someone points a gun at you. In the United States, it’s not appropriate to feel fear each time you walk out of your house in a safe neighborhood: that feeling would be considered pathological, an anxiety disorder called agoraphobia. My friend Carmen, who was born in Bolivia, was surprised when I told her that emotion concepts vary widely from culture to culture. “I thought everybody in the world has the same emotions,” she explained to me in Spanish. “Well, Bolivians do have stronger emotions than Americans. Más fuerte. ” Most people have lived with one set of emotion concepts their whole lives, so like Carmen, they find this cultural relativity surprising. Yet, scientists have documented numerous emotion concepts around the world that don’t exist in English. Norwegians have a concept for an intense joy of falling in love, calling it “ Forelsket. ” The Danes have the concept “ Hygge ” for a certain feeling of close friendship. The Russian “ Tocka ” is a spiritual anguish, and the Portuguese “ Saudade ” is a strong, spiritual longing. After a little research, I located a Spanish emotion concept that has no direct equivalent in English, called “ Pena Ajena. ” Carmen described it to me as “sadness over another person’s loss,” but I’ve also seen it characterized as discomfort or embarrassment on someone else’s behalf. Here are a few more I find compelling: 2 5 Gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable. 2 6 Voorpret (Dutch): Pleasure felt about an event before the event takes place. 2 7 Age-otori (Japanese): The feeling of looking worse after a haircut. 2 8 Some emotion concepts from other cultures are incredibly complicated, perhaps impossible to translate into English, yet natives experience them as a matter of course. The concept of “ Fago ” in Ifaluk (Micronesian) culture can mean love, empathy, pity, sadness, or compassion, depending on context.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  LUCIUS APULEIUS : igitur inefficaci celeritate fatigatus commodum ves- 6 pera oriente ad balneas processeram; ecce Socraten contubernalem | meum conspicio. Humi_ sedebat scissili palliastro semiamictus, paene alius lurore, ad miseram maciem deformatus, qualia solent for- tunae detrimina! stipes in triviis erogare. Hune talem, quamquam necessarium et summe cognitum, tamen dubia mente propius accessi. * Hem’ inquam * Mi Socrates, quid istud? Quae facies? Quod flagi- tium? At vero domi tuae iam defletus ei conclamatus es; liberis tuis tutores iuridici provincialis decreto dati ; uxor persolutis inferialibus? officiis, luctu et mae- rore diuturno deformata, diffletis paene ad extremam captivitatem oculis suis, domus infortunium novarum nuptiarum gaudiis a suis sibi parentibus hilarare compellitur. At tu hic larvale simulacrum. cum summo dedecore nostro viseris, ^ Aristomene,’ inquit *Ne tu fortunarum lubricas ambages et in- stabiles incursiones et reciprocas vicissitudines ignoras!' Et cum dicto sutili centunculo faciem suam iamdudum punicantem prae pudore obtexit, ita ut ab umbilico pube tenus cetera corporis renu- daret. Nec denique perpessus ego tam miserum aerumnae spectaculum, iniecta manu ut assurgat ! Oudendorp's emendation for the impossible deterrima of the MSS. 2 Helm's emendation for the MSS’ ferialibus. Or the Feralibus of the older editions would suffice, 10 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK I

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  In Czech culture, the concept of “ Litost ” is said to be untranslatable but roughly “torment over one’s own misery combined with the desire for revenge.” The Japanese emotion concept “ Arigata-meiwaku ” is felt when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you, but you’re required to be grateful anyway. 2 9 When I speak to audiences in the United States about emotion concepts as variable and culture-specific, and then suggest that our own English-language concepts are similarly local to our culture, some people are very surprised, as my friend Carmen was. “But happiness and sadness are real emotions,” they insist, as if the emotions of other cultures are not as real as our own. To this I usually say: you are exactly right. Fago , litost, and the rest are not emotions . . . to you. That’s because you don’t know these emotion concepts; the associated situations and goals are not important in middle-class American culture. Your brain cannot issue predictions based on “ Fago, ” so the concept doesn’t feel automatic the way that happiness and sadness do to you. To understand fago, you have to combine other concepts that you do know, performing conceptual combination and expending mental effort. But the Ifaluk do have this emotion concept. Their brains automatically predict with it. When they experience fago, it feels just as automatic and real as happiness or sadness does to you, as if fago just happens to them. Yes, fago , litost, and the rest are just words made up by people, but so are “happy,” “sad,” “fearful,” “angry,” “disgusted,” and “surprised.” Invented words are the very definition of social reality. Would you say that your local currency is real money and the currencies of other cultures are just made up? To someone who has never traveled, it might seem that way, lacking the concept for another currency. But experienced travelers have the concept “Currency from Another Culture.” I’m asking you to learn the concept of “Emotion from Another Culture,” so you understand that its instances are just as real to others as your own emotions are to you. If you’ve found these ideas challenging, try this one: some cherished Western emotion concepts are completely absent in other cultures. Utka Eskimos have no concept of “Anger.” The Tahitians have no concept of “Sadness.” This last item is very difficult for Westerners to accept . . . life without sadness? Really? When Tahitians are in a situation that a Westerner would describe as sad, they feel ill, troubled, fatigued, or unenthusiastic, all of which are covered by their broader term pe’ape’a. Someone who believes in the classical view of emotion would explain away this variability, saying that a frowning Tahitian really is in a biological state of sadness, whether he knows it or not.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “I see you are not too favorably impressed,” said the lady letting her hand rest for a moment upon my sleeve: she combined a cool forwardness—the overflow of what I think is called “poise”—with a shyness and sadness that caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the intonation of a professor of “speech.” “This is not a neat household, I confess,” the doomed dear continued, “but I assure you [she looked at my lips], you will be very comfortable, very comfortable, indeed. Let me show you the garden” (the last more brightly, with a kind of winsome toss of the voice). Reluctantly I followed her downstairs again; then through the kitchen at the end of the hall, on the right side of the house—the side where also the dining room and the parlor were (under “my” room, on the left, there was nothing but a garage). In the kitchen, the Negro maid, a plump youngish woman, said, as she took her large glossy black purse from the knob of the door leading to the back porch: “I’ll go now, Mrs. Haze.” “Yes, Louise,” answered Mrs. Haze with a sigh. “I’ll settle with you Friday.” We passed on to a small pantry and entered the dining room, parallel to the parlor we had already admired. I noticed a white sock on the floor. With a deprecatory grunt, Mrs. Haze stooped without stopping and threw it into a closet next to the pantry. We cursorily inspected a mahogany table with a fruit vase in the middle, containing nothing but the still glistening stone of one plum. I groped for the timetable I had in my pocket and surreptitiously fished it out to look as soon as possible for a train. I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery—“the piazza,” sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Brain regions like the amygdala are routinely important to emotion, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion. 35 This is one of the most surprising things I learned as I began to study neuroscience: a mental event, such as fear, is not created by only one set of neurons. Instead, combinations of different neurons can create instances of fear. Neuroscientists call this principle degeneracy. Degeneracy means “many to one”: many combinations of neurons can produce the same outcome. In the quest to map emotion fingerprints in the brain, degeneracy is a humbling reality check. 36 My lab has observed degeneracy while performing brain scans on volunteers. We showed them evocative photos, with subject matter like skydiving and bloody corpses, and asked them how much bodily arousal they felt. Men and women reported equivalent feelings of arousal, and both had increased activity in two brain areas, the anterior insula and early visual cortex. However, women’s feelings of arousal were more strongly linked to the anterior insula, while men’s were more strongly linked to visual cortex. This is evidence that the same experience—feelings of arousal—was associated with different patterns of neural activity, an example of degeneracy. 37 Another surprising thing I learned while training to be a neuroscientist, along with degeneracy, is that many parts of the brain serve more than one purpose. The brain contains core systems that participate in creating a wide variety of mental states. A single core system can play a role in thinking, remembering, decision-making, seeing, hearing, and experiencing and perceiving diverse emotions. A core system is “one to many”: a single brain area or network contributes to many different mental states. The classical view of emotion, in contrast, considers particular brain areas to have dedicated psychological functions, that is, they are “one to one.” Core systems are therefore the antithesis of neural fingerprints. 38 To be clear, I’m not saying that every neuron in the brain does exactly the same thing, nor that every neuron can stand in for every other. (That view is called equipotentiality, and it’s been long disproved.) I am saying that most neurons are multipurpose, playing more than one part, much as flour and eggs in your kitchen can participate in many recipes. The reality of core systems has been established through virtually every experimental method in neuroscience, but it’s most easily seen with brain- imaging techniques that observe the brain in action. The most common method is called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can peer harmlessly into the heads of living people who are experiencing emotion or perceiving emotion in others, recording the changes in magnetic signals related to firing neurons. 39 Even so, scientists employ fMRI to search for emotion fingerprints throughout the brain. If a particular blob of brain circuitry shows increased activation during a particular emotion, researchers reason, that would be evidence that the blob computes the emotion. Scientists initially focused their scanners on the amygdala and whether it contains the neural fingerprint for fear.