Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Dylan Evans

Author:Dylan Evans
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

13. Humans have known about the emotional effects of smell for thousands of years. This Egyptian carving showing the priestess Ihat sniffing a lotus flower dates from around 2400 BC.

Just as our evolved visual preferences are the raw material for visual art, so our evolved tactile preferences are the raw material for massage. Massage is an old technology, like art and music. It was practised by the ancient Egyptians, and Hippocrates recommended doctors to ‘be experienced in many things but assuredly in rubbing’. Today, orthodox medicine is beginning to rediscover the therapeutic value of massage, while it has been one of the central aspects of many alternative therapies for decades.

The gustatory technology of mood is, of course, cooking. By processing natural foods in a variety of ways, and combining them according to well-tested recipes, cooking does for natural flavours what painting does for natural colours and music for natural sounds. It cranks them up into a super-stimulus, tickling our taste buds more seductively than nature ever did. If strawberries taste good because they are sweet, cooks can make ultra-sugary things like strawberry ice cream that taste twice as good. Here, natural selection takes her revenge on us for daring to take the short cut to happiness instead of following the winding paths she set up for us to follow. Having given us a cheap and simple mechanism for finding glucose – a sweet tooth – she left us open to the dangers of wanting more than is good for us. In the stone age, that did not matter, since sugar came only in a rather diluted form called fruit. Today, however, where sugar comes in concentrated lumps called sweets, our intense desire for it can pose a serious problem for health. Obesity is now reaching epidemic levels in many affluent countries, and this is due largely to the dangerous combination of evolved desires for large amounts of sugar and fat, and the novel technology that is cooking.

Gustatory technologies of mood aim to induce good moods by stimulating our taste buds or by producing other chemical effects further downstream in the digestive process. Chocolate is quite an effective mood booster, as indeed are most foods and drinks that contain sugar. However, research has shown that, while most people feel more positive and energetic immediately after eating a chocolate bar, this effect soon wanes, and an hour afterwards they tend to feel even worse than they did before eating the chocolate in the first place. Tea and coffee have similar effects, with a short-term boost in mood being followed by a medium-term decrease. Most drugs have the same effect. In fact, the distinction between foodstuffs and drugs is a rather arbitrary one, and even today there is still no scientific basis for distinguishing drugs from the various other kinds of substance we consume. We tend to call something a drug if we consume it primarily for its psychotropic effects rather than for its nutritional or gustatory ones, but most kinds of food and drink have some effect on your state of mind.

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