Effects of The Sublime On The Body and Mind
I have touched of the human response to the sublime and it's contrasting emotions. I now want to look at what happens in the brain or to the body, what are the physiological changes of signs?
The first link that came up when I looked for "physiological response to extreme emotions" on Google was this page by the NCBO (National Center for Biotechnology Information), see here.
It says that "the most obvious signs of emotional arousal involve changes in the activity of the visceral motor (autonomic) system". This increases heart rate, can cause blushing or turning red from cutaneus (relating to or affecting the skin- Collins Dictionary) blood flow, piloerection (errection of hair- The Free Dictionary), sweating, and gastrointestinal motility. "These responses are brought about by changes in activity in the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric components of the visceral motor system, which govern smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and glands throughout the body."
"Intense activity of the sympathetic division of the visceral motor system prepares the animal to fully utilize metabolic and other resources in challenging or threatening situations." Fight or flight. "Conversely, activity of the parasympathetic division (and the enteric division) promotes a building up of metabolic reserves. Cannon further suggested that the natural opposition of the expenditure and storage of resources is reflected in a parallel opposition of the emotions associated with these different physiological states. As Cannon pointed out, “The desire for food and drink, the relish of taking them, all the pleasures of the table are naught in the presence of anger or great anxiety.”"
"More recent studies have shown that the responses of the autonomic nervous system are actually quite specific, with different patterns of activation characterizing different situations and their associated emotional states. Indeed, emotion-specific expressions produced voluntarily can elicit distinct patterns of autonomic activity. For example, if subjects are given muscle-by-muscle instructions that result in facial expressions recognizable as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, or surprise without being told which emotion they are simulating, each pattern of facial muscle activity is accompanied by specific and reproducible differences in visceral motor activity (as measured by indices such as heart rate, skin conductance, and skin temperature). Moreover, autonomic responses are strongest when the facial expressions are judged to most closely resemble actual emotional expression and are often accompanied by the subjective experience of that emotion!"
I found the image bellow on Extreme Tech, see full article here.
These are "body maps" that show where we feel certain emotions. I suppose from this, with the sublime in mind, I could look more closely at fear and love or maybe happiness.
BRAIN ACTIVITY AND THE SUBLIME
I have found the ideal article on this subject. I didn't think there would be a study specifically aimed at the sublime but there is this study done with 21 healthy, right handed volunteers, male and female, have a look at the study for more detail, click here. In this study the sublime is measured against the pattern seen with the experience of beauty.
"The results revealed a distinctly different pattern of brain activity from that obtained with the experience of beauty, with none of the areas active with the latter experience also active during experience of the sublime. Sublime and beautiful experiences thus appear to engage separate and distinct brain systems."
Activation:
"A number of brain areas, cortical and subcortical, were found to have been parametrically active when sublime ratings were used as modulators (see Table 2 and Figure 2). The cortical areas were the inferior temporal cortex (encroaching upon fusiform gyrus and the lateral occipital complex (LOC), the posterior hippocampus, and the inferior/middle frontal gyri. The sub-cortical cortical areas were the basal ganglia (head of caudate and putamen). There was, in addition, prominent involvement of the cerebellum."
I haven't included Table 2 here as it isn't so relevant to me at this time but I sound Figure 2 interesting (more on deactivation bellow).
The first link that came up when I looked for "physiological response to extreme emotions" on Google was this page by the NCBO (National Center for Biotechnology Information), see here.
It says that "the most obvious signs of emotional arousal involve changes in the activity of the visceral motor (autonomic) system". This increases heart rate, can cause blushing or turning red from cutaneus (relating to or affecting the skin- Collins Dictionary) blood flow, piloerection (errection of hair- The Free Dictionary), sweating, and gastrointestinal motility. "These responses are brought about by changes in activity in the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric components of the visceral motor system, which govern smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and glands throughout the body."
"Intense activity of the sympathetic division of the visceral motor system prepares the animal to fully utilize metabolic and other resources in challenging or threatening situations." Fight or flight. "Conversely, activity of the parasympathetic division (and the enteric division) promotes a building up of metabolic reserves. Cannon further suggested that the natural opposition of the expenditure and storage of resources is reflected in a parallel opposition of the emotions associated with these different physiological states. As Cannon pointed out, “The desire for food and drink, the relish of taking them, all the pleasures of the table are naught in the presence of anger or great anxiety.”"
"More recent studies have shown that the responses of the autonomic nervous system are actually quite specific, with different patterns of activation characterizing different situations and their associated emotional states. Indeed, emotion-specific expressions produced voluntarily can elicit distinct patterns of autonomic activity. For example, if subjects are given muscle-by-muscle instructions that result in facial expressions recognizable as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, or surprise without being told which emotion they are simulating, each pattern of facial muscle activity is accompanied by specific and reproducible differences in visceral motor activity (as measured by indices such as heart rate, skin conductance, and skin temperature). Moreover, autonomic responses are strongest when the facial expressions are judged to most closely resemble actual emotional expression and are often accompanied by the subjective experience of that emotion!"
I found the image bellow on Extreme Tech, see full article here.
These are "body maps" that show where we feel certain emotions. I suppose from this, with the sublime in mind, I could look more closely at fear and love or maybe happiness.
BRAIN ACTIVITY AND THE SUBLIME
I have found the ideal article on this subject. I didn't think there would be a study specifically aimed at the sublime but there is this study done with 21 healthy, right handed volunteers, male and female, have a look at the study for more detail, click here. In this study the sublime is measured against the pattern seen with the experience of beauty.
"The results revealed a distinctly different pattern of brain activity from that obtained with the experience of beauty, with none of the areas active with the latter experience also active during experience of the sublime. Sublime and beautiful experiences thus appear to engage separate and distinct brain systems."
Activation:
"A number of brain areas, cortical and subcortical, were found to have been parametrically active when sublime ratings were used as modulators (see Table 2 and Figure 2). The cortical areas were the inferior temporal cortex (encroaching upon fusiform gyrus and the lateral occipital complex (LOC), the posterior hippocampus, and the inferior/middle frontal gyri. The sub-cortical cortical areas were the basal ganglia (head of caudate and putamen). There was, in addition, prominent involvement of the cerebellum."
I haven't included Table 2 here as it isn't so relevant to me at this time but I sound Figure 2 interesting (more on deactivation bellow).
Fig.2
"(A) Parametric activations with sublimity. Statistical parametric maps rendered onto canonical anatomical sections showing t-statistics. Random effects analysis with 21 participants. Display threshold at p < 0.001 (uncorrected). I/MFG, inferior/middle frontal gyrus (−39 35 10); pHipp, posterior hippocampus (−24 −31 1); Fusi/ITC, fusiform gyrus/inferior temporal cortex (48 −55 −8, −45 −58 −5); caudate (head) (9 23 16); cerebellum (9 −64 −44). (B) Sites deactivated during the experience of sublimity relative to baseline activity. Display threshold at p < 0.05 (corrected). Light blue indicates common deactivations for all contrasts, very sublime < baseline, mid sublime < baseline, and not sublime < baseline, and dark blue indicates sites deactivated uniquely during the presentation of the stimuli experienced as “very sublime.” aSTS, anterior superior temporal sulcus (54 −10 −8/−51 −16 −8); SFG, superior frontal gyrus (30 32 55); ACC/mPFC, anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex; (9 62 1); PCC, posterior cingulate cortex (0 −52 40); caudate (tail) (−18 −46 22)."
Deactivation:
"Next, we investigated which brain areas were deactivated relative to baseline, using the following contrasts: very sublime < baseline, mid sublime < baseline, and not sublime < baseline. The results, summarized in Table 2 and Figure 2, show that all contrasts give significant deactivations in a number of areas. These include the anterior part of cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex, anterior superior temporal sulcus, parts of the cerebellum, and the caudate (tail and body). The significant deactivations in posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus and superior frontal gyrus were only obtained with stimuli rated as very sublime.
Deactivations in the cerebellum could be dissociated from the activations in it (peak voxels for deactivation, −24 −82 −32/21 −76 −35; for activation, −30 −61 −47/27 −64 −44, Figure 3)."
Fig. 3
"Activations and deactivations in the cerebellum; yellow shows activations (−30 −61 −47/27 −64 −44) and green shows deactivations (−24 −82 −32/21 −76 −35), when an inclusive mask covering the whole cerebellum was applied."
They also wanted to find out the difference between the neural correlates of the beautiful and the sublime experience.
"We therefore compared the regions engaged during the experience of beauty in our previous study (Ishizu and Zeki, 2011) with the regions engaged in the present one, by superimposing the pattern obtained in the former study onto the one obtained in the latter (Figure 4). A glance at this figure shows the profound difference in neural activity that correlates with the two experiences. In particular, field A1 of mOFC, in which activity correlates parametrically with the declared experience of beauty derived from different sources (Ishizu and Zeki, 2011, 2013; Zeki et al., 2014, inter alia) was not active in the current study, while other regions, notably the head of the caudate, the putamen, and the posterior hippocampus, in which activity has been recorded as correlating with experiences of pleasure, hate, and memory, respectively, were also active with the experience of sublimity."
Fig. 4
"Taken together, these results indicate that aesthetic (beauty) experiences and experience of the sublime engage separate and distinct brain systems."
This study points out that the sublime brings together a range of varying emotions such as fear, terror, awe, etc. "This is compounded by another difficulty, namely that each of these words can, in addition, describe or convey a multitude of feelings. “Fear,” for example, is flexible enough to apply to a variety of emotions and yet imprecise in not specifying the more specific emotion. Fear on viewing a face and the more detached and cognitive fear experienced when viewing natural scenes of immensity differ significantly, yet the word itself subsumes them under the same term."
The article goes on to say, "our results did not show any activity in brain areas such as the amygdala and the insula, which have been associated with the experience of fear and threat (Mattavelli et al., 2013; Aube et al., 2014) (although the great majority addressing this question have concentrated on faces) or perceived pain (Cheon et al., 2013; Ellingsen et al., 2013; Favilla et al., 2014), which engages the anterior cingulate cortex, de-activated in our study. Hence the overall pattern of activation in this study is significantly different from the overall activity observed in studies dealing with pain, threat, or fear, each one of which qualifies—at least lexically—as constituting an element in the experience of the sublime. It is therefore perhaps futile to give too rigid an interpretation of the functions of regions that were activated and de-activated in our study in relation to past imaging study that have addressed the individual components (such as fear or surprise) which are subsumed under the term (and experience of) of sublime."
Head to the article (here) to find out more about the various areas that where activated and deactivated during the test.
Conclusion:
"We undertook this work to learn whether there is any difference in the neural mechanisms that correlate with two complex experiences that are nevertheless easily distinguishable at the extremes, even if what is beautiful can sometimes also be regarded as sublime and vice versa. We were surprised to find that the neural activity that correlates with experience of the beautiful is very different from that which correlates with experience of the sublime. None of the areas active in studies of visual beauty (Kawabata and Zeki, 2004; Vartanian and Goel, 2004, inter alia; reviewed in Ishizu and Zeki, 2011), and not even beauty derived from a highly cognitive source such as mathematics (Zeki et al., 2014) were active in this study, and vice versa.
Burke terminated his book which, among other works, inspired our experiments, thus: “on a review of all that has been said of the effects, as well as the causes of both; it will appear, that the sublime and beautiful are built on principles very different, and that their affections are as different: the great has terror as its basis… the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure” (Burke, 1757, 4: XXV). Our experiments, while leaving many details unsettled and many questions unanswered, nevertheless show that the profound distinction between the two experiences emphasized in the past is reflected neurobiologically in the engagement of radically different mechanisms during the two experiences."
This is the best article or piece of information I've found so far regarding this topic. I haven't managed to find any book but it anyone would like to contact me or leave a comment regarding this I would be most grateful.
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