The new work is also part of a field called grounded or embodied cognition. Basically, this ever-growing understanding of human mental function notes that all ideas and concepts—including hard-to-grasp ones like personality and trustworthiness—are ultimately anchored in concrete situations that happen to flesh-bound bodies. For example, our faces respond to disconcerting behavior (incest) in a similar way to disgusting ingestive behavior (crunching a cockroach). Moral from oral.
In the realm of relationships, this mingling of the less and more-concrete means that attachment experiences with specific others, their unconscious emotional tone, and the temperatures they actually feel activate and are stored in overlapping networks of brain areas. These are the so-called multimodal brain regions (a key one is called the insula) that blend different channels of sensory experience into a singular whole. In individual brains, then, the multichannel experience of being safe with another (initially, a mother) is forever fused with the experienced physical warmth that comes with being safe, fed and held. At the level of both brain and experience, this multi-sensory co-experiencing forms a wordless bedrock that implicitly grounds relational language, interpersonal evaluation, social cognition, and even imagined ingestion. “Warm” triggers “trust,” as well as the reverse.
From these insights, other questions abound. Regarding the biology of attachment and warmth, for example, one wonders whether certain molecules—the attachment hormone oxytocin, for example — bias cognition and behavior in a balmier direction. After all, given its vital role in birth, nursing, and early attachment bonds, oxytocin has a strong unconscious association with warm milk, a tendency to inspire trust and generosity, and the capacity to make more benign the valuation of others. Oxytocin even boosts a persons’ perception of the warmth of their own personality, and a ‘warm touch’ intervention in married couples enhances oxytocin levels. On the opposite hormonal pole, might testosterone—which decreases trust — also make things seem colder?
My late, beloved father—a psychologist — had a puckish propensity to char the toast that was a mandatory component of his hand-made hot breakfast ritual. Thanks to social neuroscience, I can now better appreciate (and perpetuate) the wisdom of this ritual linking hot food with heart-felt.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
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7 Comments
Add CommentIf heat = good & cold = bad, then why does being "cool" have positive connotations, while "hot-headed" & "hot under the collar" have negative ones?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis (linguistic) tendency may be directly related to the study of molecular physical activity. Any increase in emotional energy, regardless of it's essential quality may, for the sake of simplicity, be interpreted as sharing sensory imagery with that physical change in the behavior of atoms. As there are many kinds of warmth and cool, from microwave excitation to body heat, the correlation seems strictly quantitative. At the same time even that relationship seems to be subject to curve due to specific inconsistencies and exaggeration.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSynaesthesia also may be attributable to these relatively recent interpretations as qualities associated with the inherent energies of spectral radiation. Often times the mind makes associations that are not as precise as contextual physical reality must be in this area, due to the mutability of circumstance. This is only a small part of the weakness of language as a "stand alone" tool in the hopes of real communication. Quantitative relative scale, and imagery are both necessary accompaniments in sometimes the slightest communique.
What a 'hot-headed' article... am sure none of the researchers are 'hot' either! Such studies are not 'cool' at all...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is possible that this kind of linguistic test may have cultural biases. In the hot and humid South India, at least in the state of Tamil Nadu, a warm or hot welcome is undesirable as expressed in the Tamil language (தமிழ்). A cool or sweet or loud (குளிர்ந்த, இனிய, பலத்த) welcome is the most desirable. One gets a cool hug (குளிர்ந்த அரவணைப்பு). A host welcomes you with cool face (குளிர்ந்த முகம்). Warmth and heat in general associate with conflict and coolness indicates friendship and care. The idiomatic Tamil equivalents of "chilly reception and an icy stare" might be "hot reception (சூடான வரவேற்பு)and burning stare(சுட்டெரிக்கும் பார்வை)." I hope these studies are also conducted in a different culture to identify such cultural biases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is not rocket science folks. Examine your own physical reactions. Being aroused sexually increases the feeling of physical warmth. Thus, "hot"= "sexually stimulating". By the same token a temper tantrum increases the sensation of physical warmth. Therefore "hot under the collar"="furious".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe phrase "cool" developed historically as an African American idiom that reflected the perceived difference in temperament between blacks and whites; whites were stereotypically seen as less excitable and therefore "cool", as in "cool as a cat" (ie. not very excitable). This was seen by some as a desirable trait to emulate.
In physics the more active the atoms in a substance the hotter the substance. Atoms in boiling water are much more active than in ice. Therefore it is logical to equate increased activity with heat.
So cuddle up with your "significant" other on a cold night, enjoy the increased heat, and conserve energy at the same time. Just be cool about it.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Perhaps all this stems from our ancestors earning their living by running down big game on the hot African savanna, and thereby evolving physiological mechanisms to handle heat, while having next to nothing to handle cold.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe simple look at a infrared camera that's wavelenght's are just out of human range , yet vibration's felt over the surface of the skin 1mm - 10mm across will under quiet observation synchronize with the movement's of the more physically active people in the group , heat is one of the force's that the electromagnetic spectrum transfer's into sound movement , the three major sense's of feeling , hearing and vision through synesthic techniques are more than enough to have an awareness of heat at distance
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