Nature Of Reality

The new science of emotion and the old takeaway from it

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Two nights ago, I started read a new book, How Emotions Are Made. In the first chapter, the author writes:

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It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

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“Hello,” I said. “I never thought about it that way. This anxiety/depression distinction sounds valuable. Better note that down for the future. Maybe I can apply it in some sales copy.”

I got out my notebook and started to write this idea down. “Numerous experiments showed that…”

But something bothered me. It was that phrase, “first tug of doubt,” higher up in the passage. So I scanned on down the page in the book. And sure enough:

It turns out that in spite of strong belief and “numerous experiments,” this idea about the roots of anxiety and depression is not reproducible.

In fact, 8 subsequent studies designed to reproduce this well-trodden distinction all reproduced the opposite result.

In some people, a failure to live up to one’s own ideals produced neither depression nor anxiety. In others, it produced both depression and anxiety. Never just the one the theory predicted. Same with a failure to live up to standards set by others.

This isn’t just a one-time failure to reproduce a specific result. Rather, it seems to be a new understanding of what emotions are in general.

Apparently, there’s a new science of how emotions are made and what they really are.

It’s not five core emotions like you may have seen in that Inside Out Pixar cartoon. And it’s also not the fixed and familiar smiley/frowny/cry-ey emojis we all know and respond to.

Rather, emotions are something complex, unique, and unpredictable, at least in the way they manifest themselves in our behavior, faces, and bodies. It’s taken us 100+ years of scientific study of emotion to tease out this counterintuitive result.

Whatever. I’m getting too inside baseball. My takeaway for you today is simply this:

Nobody really wants to hear about the complexity, the uniqueness, the unpredictability. Even the scientists, except for a few bad apples.

Instead, we all want the immense, pretty much unfathomably complex nature of the universe reduced to a few rules of thumb, certainties, slogans. And whenever we come across a new one of those, we say,

“Hello. Never thought about it that way. Sounds valuable. Better note that down for the future. And maybe let’s see what else this guy is selling…”

That’s my free advice for you for today.

For more human psychology, gleaned from actual scientific experiments performed over millions of people, you might like my Copy Riddles course.

Copy Riddles shows you what appeals people respond to in in great detail. And more importantly, it trains you to apply this knowledge so you can make more sales. To find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Incurable bachelor discovers a reality-bending mistake in human computational neurology

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I read today about a bride-to-be in the UK who took an eerie “spirit photograph” of herself trying on a wedding gown.

The woman was standing with her back to the camera. Facing her were two mirrors, one in front of her, one to her side.

The spirit photo, as captured by an iPhone, showed the following:

The woman in reality (ie, not reflected by a mirror) stood with one arm hanging by her side and other across her chest.

But the mirror in front of her showed a slightly different figure. In that front mirror, both the woman’s arms were clasped together in front of her chest.

And the mirror to her side showed a still different figure. In this mirror, neither of the woman’s arms was across her chest. Instead, both arms were down by her sides.

It’s like three slightly different different versions of the woman were all there in one room, looking at each other.

Maybe the iPhone captured a living human being and two spirits, who somehow looked exactly like each other?

Maybe it was the woman’s great-grandmother in the front mirror, and that great-grandmother’s grandmother in the side mirror, all coming together to convene with the bride-to-be at this crucial moment in her life?

T​​hat would be a good spectacle and a demonstration of the occult.

But the trick behind this bizarre photo is more modern and more technical.

As you might know, your phone camera, particularly if you got yerself a fancy iPhone, is not simply capturing “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

Instead, your camera is actually doing quite a bit of processing, selecting, and splicing to produce a final photo that looks good, and that makes the most satisfying visual presentation to you as the viewer.

That’s what happened with the bride-to-be.

​​Her poor iPhone got tricked into thinking it was seeing three different persons in one frame.

So the phone stitched together three slightly different visual moments to represent each of those three persons in the final shot.

​​If these were three different people, this would probably be undetectable. But since these were mirrored versions of one person, the iPhone’s mistake was glaring and unsettling.

“Haha stupid iPhone,” you might say. Except the reason why I clicked to read this article in the first place was the intriguing headline:

“A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple’s computational photography”

This headline got my interest because I, an incurable bachelor, have learned, both by direct experience and by reading up on the matter, that what we see in our mind’s eye is not “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

The fact is, our brains work in a similar way to a modern iPhone camera.

Sure, the underlying “stuff” of our minds is different to what an iPhone is made of, as are the algorithms we use to create the final results.

But like an iPhone, our minds are also sampling from different points in the data stream… filling in the gaps… and stitching together and even inventing stuff to create a final, coherent result.

That final result is not 100% “true,” or even close to it. Instead, it’s what makes the most satisfying image, story, or interpretation to us as viewers.

You might find that hard to accept. I know I did when I first read about it.

But if you start paying attention, you can catch yourself in the act of conjuring up reality.

Anyways, if you want a storytelling tip for how to take mundane events and turn them into something more fun or interesting… then keep in mind the image of the bride-to-be in front of her imperfect doppelgangers across two mirrors.

​​Remember the three slightly different women in wedding gowns facing each other, remember the explanation for it, and then do something similar when you are writing your story.

In entirely related news:

I’ve decided once again offer my Influential Emails training. ​I only offered this once before, live, two years ago.

​​In this training, I shared several advanced email copywriting techniques I used then, and continue to use, to make my own emails stand out in people’s minds.

I’ve noticed that two years later, some of my long-time readers and customers still feed back ideas and names to me that I only shared during that training. That’s to say, maybe these folks really did find the training impactful, useful, and even insightful.

I’ll offer the recordings of this training next week, between Thursday December 6th and Sunday December 10th. But I will do something different than usual.

Rather than making this training available to everyone, I will only make it available to people who get on a waitlist first.

​​If you’re curious why, I’ll explain that in my email tomorrow.

​​Meanwhile, if you want to get on the waitlist, you’ll first have to get onto my email list. Click here to do so.