I've Got a Feeling

I’ve got a feeling
A feeling deep inside
Oh yeah

-some dude

Perception and cognition seem like really different things. You see, hear, or smell something that catches your attention—you perceive what’s out there in the world, then bring that raw data into your mind.

In essence, perception is something that your body does and then brings to your mind, whereas cognition, by contrast, seems to take place completely internally, and doesn’t involve perception in any way.

In fact, this line is a lot more blurry than you might imagine, and this blurriness mirrors another pair of human tools for navigating the world’s complexities. This other dynamic duo is the pair of thinking and feeling, two mental processes that sometimes seem like polar opposites.

Whenever you make a decision to have another cup of coffee this morning, there’s quite a lot going on under the surface. Maybe you caught a whiff of some freshly brewing coffee (perception), and that triggered you to begin feeling a certain way. One of those feelings could be excitement and anticipation for another delicious flavor experience, inciting you to fill your cup now instead of later.

Your body brings information to your mind through the form of perception (that odor), but also by way of hormones traveling around through your body that make you feel a certain way about something happening in your world. This emotion often works faster than the more conscious, plotting thoughts you have whenever you’re deciding on logistics.

In the same way that we are wired to recognize numbers of things smaller than four without wasting time counting them, we have these little warning signs and guideposts that are helping us navigate our very complex day. A neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio coined the term somatic markers to describe these things, and the name (and concept) have stuck in psychology.

These are, essentially, feelings. They’re like micro-emotions that nudge your overall decision-making process one way or the other, like tiny ants crawling onto a perfectly balanced domino that might or might not fall. Tiny ants are constantly crawling on the other side of that domino, trying to make it fall the other way, so there is always a struggle going on—we just don’t always notice it.

Think about a conversation where you need to decide something more consequential than imbibing more caffeine. It’s not like emotions don’t enter into things, and only your thinking/cognitive mind participates in the discussion. In fact, you can feel what your feelings are doing in that moment by paying attention to how your body feels.

Are your palms sweaty? Is your heart beating faster?

Is the pit of your stomach feeling like there are butterflies having a field day? I’ve heard this feeling described as knots in your stomach, a heavy feeling, or even a feeling of emptiness in your gut. Whatever it is, it’s hard to pin down, precisely, and it’s not just here to make us feel bad.

Before we have time to bring a coldly logical, rational view to bear on whatever it is we’re trying to think about, we’ve already thought about things, in a manner of speaking. That’s because thinking doesn’t just take place in your brain.

Instead, chemicals splash around in there and go to war over how you’re going to feel about something on a molecular level. It is this decisive battle that often determines what we think about something.

The line between what we experience and what we think may not be as clear as we think it is, and the line between thinking and feeling might be even more blurry.