1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 15/74)

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

• If emotions are dulled feelings then your mind is capable of taking feelings and making them into emotions, and vice versa. That means that a part of intelligence is your ability to control your own feelings and emotions and thoughts.

Emotions and feelings are broad thoughts

Any emotion or feeling can be broken down into the sensations and real events that caused it. And you can think about any of those things (with thoughts).

A thought is thinking about something in specific. You can have a thought about an entire paragraph, but it is going to be just a thought, it is going to be about one thing, and that one thing might be a summary of the paragraph - but it is still a thought. So what we think of as thought is really just a short period of thinking - one unit of thinking that lasts for a short period of time. An essay is composed of many thoughts, but just one thought would be “I went to the store”. [So you can think about the paragraph, that might also be a thought even though you might not be thinking in sentences. You could have just read the paragraph and be visualizing what happened in it, or thinking deeply about it without using words.]

Then again, “I went to the store, and Jason followed me” might be considered one thought as well. So how long exactly is a thought? If it is longer than “I went to the store, and Jason followed me” then it is probably going to be considered multiple thoughts. Thus humans use the word thought as just a short period of time in thinking. [A thought could also be a group of similar things that go together, or multiple things that are different, if either fits into the short period of time of thinking you could call both just one thought.]

Thoughts are in general talked about as being verbal, people rarely think of emotions and feelings as thoughts. But emotions and feelings are thoughts if you think about that emotion and feeling. The short period of time in which you think about the emotion or feeling is a thought. So thoughts can be about emotions and feelings. They are just harder to identify because they aren’t verbal. [The question is, when someone is thinking about a feeling or a thought, do they really know what they are doing? Do you know what the feeling is, what caused it, how strong it is, if there are other feelings involved? Feelings and emotions are obscure.]

The reason that verbal things are easier to identify is because they are distinct sounds (that we have definitions for). Distinct sounds, different sounds, are easy to separate. It is easy to identify one sound from another sound, and that is all words are, different sounds. So it could be that someone is talking and you don’t have any thoughts about them talking, or you are not thinking about them talking. In that case you just aren’t listening to them, or you are not paying attention to the sounds they are making. [If words are just sounds, then what are thoughts? You identify a thought by "feeling" the thought, so thoughts are really just feelings. They are going to be more specific than a feeling, however, since you probably are going to know what the thought is about.]