0.8 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts  (Page 76/89)

Some other examples of unconscious goals or intentions are seeking pleasure, trying to feel any single or set of emotions, trying to increase, decrease, or maintain any single or set of feelings, or trying to achieve some thought you had at some other point - such as a conscious goal of some sort of success in your life or something like that.

How the mind works, principles of emotion, and mental states

The mind works primarily through various emotional principles - for instance striving for pleasure is a natural emotional process that people have little control over, and this process is going to be influenced by stimuli and cognition. Striving for stimuli or pleasure is one of the more important principles of emotion since clearly emotion is going to fluctuate and be influenced by stimulation, which often (and hopefully) takes the emotional form of 'pleasure'.

What exactly is a principle of emotion then, or, if emotion is so important to a mental state, what is a normal mental state? What happens differently to someones mind when they are under stress then when they aren't? What is the difference between a mental state and a mood? If someone is happy - that is a mood, if someone's mind is more or less competent, conscious or capable of performing then that is more of a mental state. Meditation is like a mental state - in that state the mind is doing certain specific things (such as being calm in a way that is induced by certain thoughts or feelings). A mood, however, is just your general way of feeling (which you can feel for a long period of time and doesn't necessarily impact your performance). Someone can be in a mental state to do work, or be in one of the two most obvious mental states - conscious or not conscious.

My saying that doing work is a mental state is theoretical. It depends on how someone defines the term 'mental state'. There could be a endless number of mental states, or someone could define mental states to be states just related to doing work. Maybe for one job they have their own defined mental states where they need to be in a certain mental zone or whatever in order to perform a certain task.

It looks like this is much more complicated than it seems. If you think about it, there are going to be a lot of factors that influence someones mental state. There are ways of going into a meditative mental state, people can prepare their minds to go to work, to go to sleep, etc. Everyone knows they are in different states at different times, however it would be interesting to know what exactly is going on. For instance, in each of these states what is the person focused on, what are they capable of doing, how are they feeling, what are they thinking about (consciously and unconsciously), how conscious are they and what are they paying attention to.

Concentration and emotions are important factors in intelligence

People can concentrate in various ways, and one of these ways is imbedded in how a person’s brain functions (their emotions, feelings and thoughts all contribute to a certain “brain structure” which would enable some people to concentrate more than others). All things which are harder to do and require a higher intelligence really require more concentration. Concentration is best understood when it is compared to a person’s emotional mind; that is, emotion and concentration are contrary to each other because as emotional development and temporary emotion increase, concentration decreases. As adults age their emotional development grows and how emotional they are increases as they learn to separate out the things they enjoy from the things they don’t, (as this is a sign of good emotional development) but their intelligence decreases. This must mean that something (probably emotion and emotional development) replaces the decline in intelligence that occurs as adults age. Emotion replaces it because that is the natural thing to happen. As animals use less and less of their conscious mind, they become more and more unconscious. For an animal with as large a brain as a human’s being more emotional would mean that they could be very emotional. The larger brain size increases emotional capacity. Since brain size doesn’t decrease over age the emotional capacity becomes used more as intellect goes down. When people are less intelligent, they tend to be more emotional because they have a more direct connection (they don’t have to “go through” or “think through” their intellect) to their emotions.