Body Budget and Concepts

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

Lisa Feldman Barret, author of How Emotions are Made states, “Our body budget is our body/mind/brain capacity to cope.  Building a healthy body budget includes common sense practices such as eating well, maintaining a healthy weight and fitness level and taking time for relaxation.  She suggests helpful activities such as massage, yoga, reading or time spent in nature.  Time spent outside of our ruminations and thoughts helps us maintain a healthy body budget.  Meditation can be very helpful as a chance to experience and observe emotion, accept without judgment, and release.  Reading can be a mental vacation transporting us to other times and places.  A powerful body budget booster is gratitude.  Gratitude is known to increase levels of happiness and well-being.  Additionally, Barret points to positive social interactions and freely giving to others all as body budget enhancers.”

When we manufacture, create or develop a concept we are processing input from our sense systems, that input is compresses into efficient, multi-sensory summaries. Humans create or construct those instances through a process called, prediction. The summaries are unpacked into detailed predictions of the reality of our world and are checked against the actual sense at each stage. 

Our brains are actually actively constructing our experiences to be held in stasis by the state of our world and our bodies. Every thought, memory, emotion, or perception that we construct in life includes something about the state of our bodies. We all have what is called, “an interoceptive system” that regulates our body budget. Every prediction we make, every categorization our brains complete, is in relation to our body functions and effects, i.e., the activity of our lungs, breathing, heart as to beats, etc., our metabolisms as to the chemical actions and reactions, the immune system functions, and all the other systems that contribute to our body budget. 

The function of our brain is to achieve predictions and concepts that are precise enough to lead to efficiency; the biological payoff that leads toward survival. Preciseness leads to efficiency so effort in training and practice toward specificity and details when processed end up with efficient, proficient and stable concepts. 

Our experiences, our past creates knowledge that is wired into the brain connections that creates simulations of predictions of future experiences, such as imagination. Our instances of concepts, as an entire brain state, is an anticipation, guess, about how we may, should or will act in the present moment, present situation and against a particular person or process. This comes to define our sensations in that moment, the internal/external sensory signals the brain processed in that moment. 

We make in every moment predictions simultaneously, in a flood of probabilities, never focusing on a single appropriate/success oriented instance. When an instance is suitable and appropriate for a given moment in the current environment tend to rise to the top and survive to shape our perceptions and actions. 

In this phenomena called “making meaning” from the world and our bodies by way of concepts, in every waking moment, our brain will process our past experiences, organized into concepts, with a goal of guiding our actions while giving our sensations meaning. This speaks to the body-mind connections that also are connected to other folks body-mind connection calling it, “social reality.” 

About the concept of categorization, this is known also as, “experience, perception, conceptualization, pattern completion, perceptual inference, memory, simulation, attention, morality, and mental inference.”

Concept: We predict and categorize; we regulate body budgets; we wrap regulation in purely mental concepts; we construct the moment; we share mental concepts with other humans; we teach them to our offspring and we make a new reality of a kind and live by and in that reality every day, hour and moment completely unaware of the process. 

Consider this, “evolution provides the mind with an ability to create another kind of real, one completely dependent on our observations. Changes in air pressure are processed by the brain and provide us sounds. Wavelengths of light are processed by the brain and provide us with colors. It is our brains construction process, to construct a type of real and reality that allows the evolutionary process of our species. 

Albert Einstein wrote/said, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.” Those sounds the brain constructs, the colors the brain constructs, all of them need a “perceiver” to allow our brains to construct sounds, color and so on.

Our movement of muscles and the skeletal system, our bodily changes function as instances of emotion only when we categorize them that way, thereby providing them new functions that are our experiences and perceptions. Emotional conepts have social reality and it seems that our emotions are everything and it doesn’t come down to control or removal but rather a system that creates a level of maturity, understanding and concepts of such a nature that we manufacture an emotional intelligence and maturity that builds social skills to handle emotions well. 

The author above writes, “Human civilization is literally build with social reality. Most things in our lives are socially constructed: our jobs, our home address, our government and laws, and our social status. Wars are waged and neighbor slaughters neighbor, all for the sake of social reality.” 

Concepts, if you make something up, label it with a name or symbol, etc., and whalla…you have crated a concept. If you provide that concept to others and they agree and accept that concept, you have created something real. This is how we create, through categorization. We take things the exist and impose new functions/definitions on them that take the thing beyond their original properties; we convey that to others thus wiring their brains and we have a social world that is the essence and core of social reality. 

All concepts make meaning. Suppose you are breathing heavily, sweating profusely and your heart is beating rapidly. Are you excited about something; are you fearful of something; are you physically exhausted? Concepts therefor prescribe actions: If you are breathing heavily, sweating profusely and your heart is beating rapidly, what should you do? 

Concepts regulate your body budget. Depending on how you categorize, “breathing heavily, sweating profusely and your heart is beating rapidly.” The categorization affects the body, body budget, differently. 

Categorization provides meaning and and explains why we act the way we do. Concepts are tools that allow us to regulate other folks budgets, not just our own. 

AND about our emotions:

“Emotions are not simply reactions to things that happen to us, but emotions are constructed by how we make sense of our sensations, and by how we make predictions based on our past experiences and understandings.  Essentially, we are the architects of our emotions and have the capacity to master our emotions or “construct” our lives differently.”

Ms. Barret also speaks to our concepts, she states in her book,  “In every waking moment, our brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide our actions and give our sensations meaning.” 

Excerpts from Ms. Barret’s online presence:

“Instances of emotion are constructed throughout the entire brain by multiple brain networks in collaboration. Ingredients going into this construction include interoception, concepts, and social reality. Interoceptive predictions provide information about the state of the body and ultimately produce basic, affective feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, and calmness. Concepts are embodied knowledge (from your culture), including emotion concepts. Social reality provides the collective agreement and language that make the perception of emotion possible among people who share a culture.”

“Interoception is contemporarily defined as the sense of the internal state of the body.[1] It encompasses the brain’s process of integrating signals relayed from the body into specific subregions—like the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex—allowing for a nuanced representation of the physiological state of the body.[2][3] This is important for maintaining homeostatic conditions[4] in the body and, potentially, aiding in self-awareness.”

“Interoceptive signals arise from many different physiological systems of the body. The most commonly studied system is cardiovascular interoception which is typically measured by directing attention towards the sensation of the heartbeat during various tasks.[10][11][12] Other physiological systems integral to interoceptive processing include the respiratory system, gastrointestinal and genitourinary systems, nociceptive system, thermoregulatory system, endocrine and immune systems. Soft cutaneous touch is another sensory signal often included within the interoceptive processing system.”

“Social reality is distinct from biological reality or individual cognitive reality, representing as it does a phenomenological level created through social interaction and thereby transcending individual motives and actions.[citation needed] The product of human dialogue, social reality may be considered as consisting of the accepted social tenets of a community, involving thereby relatively stable laws and social representations.”

What all this brings about is a better understanding of how our bodies, minds and emotions effect how we live and how we create our realities and also how all of this enlightens us to how, why and what our training and practice deals with as to body, mind, and spirit/emotion. 

Bibliography (Click the link)