As certain laws become clear I keep my eyes open for scientific evidence to attach to such principles. I know it has to be there because I’m convinced that emotion is energy and its principles of movement are the basis on which physiological systems and organs evolved. I’m confident in this conviction because this is the most conservative interpretation of evolution, the formed arising from the unformed, matter from energy. This means that various aspects of the emotional dynamic are mirrored by specific organs, systems and physiological adaptations because as hard as it is for our linear intellects to apprehend, the latter are based on the former.

Unfortunately I’m not able to mine the research directly because I would have to understand its technicalities and in all its intricacies in order to pull out what I’m looking for. Rather I have to wait until a scientific journalist, or a scientist trying to reach the public brings out some finding or paradox from which I can glean its network implications. Often what I’m looking for comes out in a throwaway line of no seeming consequence. For example, in his book “Balance” Scott McCredie observes that camel jockeys and elephant drivers, no matter how experienced, often experience motion sickness whereas equestrians no matter how novice, never do. It was mentioned as an interesting but inconsequential factoid whereas it hit me like a ton of bricks because I realized that the horse shifts its emotional center-of-gravity to include the rider, unlike any other animal, and therefore even the rank amateur on their first ride at a dude ranch is no more likely to experience motion sickness than were they walking on foot. And this explains the incredible connection between man and horse, the only animal other than the dog of which we can say is “all heart.” The horse can feel in its heart the rider-plus-its-self and then move accordingly, two beings composing one emotional body via a common wave function.

Finding just such a scientific correlate may have happened yesterday when reading the comment sections on the NPR story concerning the dog experiment I wrote about. While we should for now remain skeptical about the source until the information is fully verified, the author Margaret Hyde seems knowledgeable and credible and so I feel comfortable quoting her remarks below. I hope this exchange can prove an opportunity to vet the remarks.
It appears to be a very promising confirmation of the model of how emotion becomes unresolved due to resistance and then this physical memory is projected onto complex objects of attraction, i.e. other social beings, by way of piggybacking on primal and seemingly unrelated systems.

It’s been my experience that the most vital clues are most often seen as meaningless (junk DNA) or as accidents. For example, mainstream biologists interpret the fact that since the organs of sexuality also double as organs of elimination this is evidence of unintelligent design, nature as a haphazard random cobbling together of parts, rather than as perfect telescoping of network functions from primal systems. (See the article http://naturaldogtraining.com/blog/why-do-dogs-investigate-the-eliminations-of-other-dogs/ )

In her passage, I’ve added emphasis to what I find especially compelling.

Margaret Hyde: “Just for your information about how this part works. At 3 years of age, the frontal lobes complete the formation of the pathways that go from the frontal lobe to cells deep in the anterior medulla’s reticular formation that are responsible for informing the temporal lobe that there are changes in the baby’s external universe (these cells are mentioned below). The anterior medulla houses clumps and scattered cells all over it (reticular formation, cranial nerve nuclei, metabolic, satiety, and emotion centers). THESE STRUCTURES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR RELATING OUR EMOTIONS TO OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH FAMILY AND OTHER PEOPLE AND PLACES FROM THE PAST AND TO THE FUNCTION OF MUSCLES, BONES, LIGAMENTS AND TENDONS. (Why are emotions linked to the latter? An embryological accident-the mesoderm giving rise to the latter lies directly over the part of the nervous system that will develop the anterior medulla and thus is segmentally allied with it at the start). The anterior medulla also houses the pons which executes commands and sorts incoming sensory information from all over the body. Critical to the functioning of the anterior medulla is our external and internal universe–a map of what we see, hear, smell of the world around us.”

In other words, physical and psychological systems are predicated on emotional systems. What’s happening within the body and brain is a direct extension of what’s happening in the invisible emotional mind because the emotional mind requisitions these systems by virtue of how they are composed so as to interrelate in a network coherent manner.

The body’s means of registering resistance to physical movement is directly linked to family and social relationships (and I can think of no greater source of resistance to emotional movement than a family member). This linkage is no accident. When the infant experiences physical resistance to movement toward an object of attraction, she experiences stress; and this is stored in the body/mind as emotional battery, the core repository or densest layer being what I call the emotional center-of-gravity, and this core composes the animal mind’s sense of its “self.” This is that aspect of consciousness displaced by eye-contact and deflected onto where another persons’ focus is directed.

This e-cog is then projected onto complex objects of attraction that offer resistance to emotional expression in order to divine and break down the energetic signature of that complex being. This then allows her to become the equal/opposite in order to fit (two beings aligning around a common emotional c-o-g) with this complex object of attraction, and this subsequent mutual interlocking then allows the group they thus form to overcome greater challenges by virtue of being able to work together (i.e. create an overarching feeling or bond, a.k.a., a wave) that can entangle others and other objects into its function.

Two beings so aligned comprise one emotional body and the emotional body works according to the same principles as the physical body. The emotional body has a backbone (axis of connection between A and B), a center-of-gravity common to A and B, and a brain (the heart as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that serves as a synchronizing meter between A and B). And just as every physical expression of a body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the body’s physical center-of-gravity, likewise, every physical expression of the emotional body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the emotional center-of-gravity. The physical body generates rhythms over distance; the emotional body generates rhythms over time. In some behaviors the symmetry can take days, months or even years to manifest.

Unfortunately we miss this symmetry because to our intellectual eye we think we are seeing two separate entities of intelligence endowed with two separate brains as sources of their separate and distinct intelligences. We then read thoughts into their behavior because we’re so impressed with their capacity to synchronize over time. Whereas I’m arguing that the physical body with two poles at either end (Big-Brain/little-brain) composes the animal mind as a collective intelligence rather than just the Big-Brain in the head.

Emotional resistance is processed the same way that physical resistance is processed. But of course we should say physical resistance is processed the same way emotional resistance is processed.

Just as the Brain can’t feel a thing, Heart can’t move a muscle because it doesn’t exist within any one being. It takes two to make one Heart. (No animal is an island) Heart must evolve into existence in real time; it cannot be genetically encoded because genes are too static and also because the function of genes is to receive information that Heart generates and then reliably transcribe this, genes don’t create information.

In this interplay within the body/mind, Heart cannot communicate with the Big-Brain directly; it must go through the little-brain in the gut. This implements the principle of emotional conductivity. Hence we have “gut feelings” as precursors to integration. So I call the Big-Brain in the head the executor of action, I term the little-brain-in-the-gut the social brain, and Heart is the network brain. At the moment the Big-Brain gets all the credit and seemingly is the source of all the information but I believe a proper reading of animal behavior will ultimately prove that this is as sensible as saying that what comes out of a radio, or what is on a computer’s screen logged onto the internet, was generated by the radio or by the computer’s CPU. I’m proposing that we likewise turn our attention to the invisible waves that animate and inform such complex electro/magnetic devices. I’m proposing that animals are picking up a signal that they collectively generate.

Related posts:

1. Physical Center of Gravity
2. Definitions
3. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other

The main thing to realize is that the real action isn’t in the head. The Big-Brain is fundamentally but one terminal in the body/mind as an emotional battery. There is something going on to be sure up there, but the main function of neurological activity in the Big-Brain is to put the individual into conflict. Conflict makes energy and the intensity of the energy accesses physical memory. A state of conflict accesses physical memory.

When a squirrel-chasing dog sees a squirrel, the first thing that happens is that it will perceive being knocked off balance, just as if its physical center-of-gravity has been suddenly displaced, just as if something has literally pushed it off center. This response was established via Pavlovian conditioning during its infant imprinting phase. As an infant pup every time its mother or litter mates moved it was knocked off balance and therefore for the rest of its life any change in its perceptual field equals a state of imbalance because it triggers this physical memory of change. The degree of displacement equals the force of attraction. The intensity of this force activates a specific layer of physical memory. A loss of equilibrium is energizing because it provokes neurological activity as neurons fire off, just like a battery being ionized by an electrical input of a charger.

So the dog is emotionally “charged” by this sudden ionizing event upon the sight of a squirrel and typically, because the mandate of balance is engaged but the little-brain-in-the-gut doesn’t yet have anything tangible to digest, Squirrel Dog’s body tenses up like a rope twisted tight.

If we could ask Squirrel Dog where exactly its sense of consciousness is centered in its body/mind, where is the absolute center of its “self,” Squirrel Dog would point to its head, as this is the epicenter of the intense pressure of energy, the physical memory of having fallen face forward because it was knocked over by something moving fast, or it was moving too fast and tumbled before it had mastered locomotion. The point in the dog’s body it references as the center of its consciousness is the basis of its mind and will determine the nature of its perception and range of likely responses. This center point determines the nature of the physical memory to be summoned up into awareness, and then what menu (electric=balance, magnetic=hunger, or electromagnetic=heart as wave) will be activated in order to deal with this memory. If we had to reduce what’s going on in Squirrel Dogs’ mind to a human concept in order to articulate what is going on inside its head at this point, Squirrel Dog would say “I am squirrel” because as far as it can know all of its attention is fixated on a squirrel and so this is the entire scope of its consciousness in this moment. A dog has no concept of its “self” relative to other points of view. It’s view of its “self” depends on what it wants and how it feels.

It is possible that a dog might reference its little-brain hunger circuitry as its center point and in this case it could be said to be “ionized” to the negative polarity (preyful) and in this mode it has energy to absorb. It will then perceive the situation as if what is going on inside its body is pulling an object of attraction toward it, even if the dog is actually moving toward something standing still. This is a virtual state of magnetism. But in the hypothetical example above with the typical squirrel-chasing-dog it is referencing its Big-Brain balance circuitry and so it is ionizing toward the positive (predator) polarity and has energy to give. It will thus perceive as if it is pushing energy out and this pushing impulse will be the basis of whatever it learns next. The balance circuitry is the electrical menu.

Sometimes in the beginning of a squirrel-chasing dog’s career, we notice its hackles raise and it might growl and then bark at the sight of a squirrel. This is a bio-mechanical response to relieve this electrical-like tension referenced above, a pushing out of energy, especially if it is unable for some reason to pursue the squirrel as when held back on lead or when afraid of first squirrel it ever saw. It is not trying to communicate to the squirrel; rather it is off/loading energy so as to restore its body to a sense of stability. In this sense it is in fact communicating energy and this can be adaptive because barking and getting excited tends to make prey run and then the dog can flip polarity to the hunger circuitry.

But for Squirrel Dog working from the balance circuitry, it is therefore pushing energy out by pushing itself away from the spot that is so destabilizing and running to squirrel as ground, terra firma. In contrast, notice how a cat stalks its prey. It is referencing its little-brain and going-by-pull. It is feeling that its focus on the prey from its little-brain hunger circuitry is pulling the mouse toward it, in other words it has imported the essence of the mouse into its hunger circuitry and is beginning to feel what the mouse is feeling and self-regulating because it is magnetized to the prey. It stalks very quietly and then waits until the mouse quite literally walks into its waiting jaws. However, when the gap between them closes to its critical distance, this feeling will collapse given that the prey is so near (and much bigger) and the only mechanism it has that can handle such energy is the striking instinct. This is also why when we excite our kitties too much, they are prone to claw, clench and bite us, but before doing so usually run away to push off from that spot. Since dogs have a much higher emotional capacity than cats, it is possible for them to flip polarities from positive to negative, even when near the prey and this capacity would be necessary to allow the feeling to elaborate into higher expressions, such as herding the prey rather than killing it, or listening to the owner rather than chasing the squirrel. Flipping polarities causes the dog to reference its heart. (We can also see that wolves in the hunt would differentiate along the hunger/balance ratio and so each would respond to large prey differently and in a coordinated, complementary way, some would be pushing, some would be pulling.)

The typical squirrel-chasing dog straining at the lead upon seeing a squirrel is completely in its head and is electric. Its emotional capacity is overwhelmed because it cannot reference its body and so it will respond to form of squirrel via instincts and habits. It cannot take input from its handler precisely because it is referencing its inner-ear balance circuitry and trying to push energy out. No matter what the handler does to the dog, even if the handler’s corrections make the dog submit, or if a food reward distracts the dog from the squirrel (which isn’t likely), if the handler doesn’t constitute the full “ground” for this energy, the need to get to the squirrel for grounding is merely being reinforced. The dog is going by the form of the squirrel and is unable to discern the subtle energetic essences of the squirrel let alone that this person shouting and jerking is its beloved human. Because the Big Brain is running the show, the dog isn’t feeling. The brain can’t feel a thing which is why gray matter can be operated on directly without anesthesia. Furthermore, the only thing tangible the little-brain is getting to digest is the tactile input from being jerked around, straining into the lead and digging into the ground, and so the dog learns that this is what hunting a squirrel feels like.

The interplay between intensity of the Big-Brain and the capacity of the little-brain to ground this intensity reveals an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic by which all interactions with the environment proceed, and thereby render the dog’s mind as a function of energy. Animals have a bipolar constitution because of a two brain makeup so as to implement the principle of emotional conductivity so that all learning factors out a networked-intelligence. The following is the logic loop that drives the network: The greater the degree of displacement: the stronger the force of attraction. The stronger the force of attraction: the greater the fear of falling. The greater the fear of falling: the stronger the urge for grounding. The greater the resistance to grounding: the stronger the Drive to make contact. The more resistance to the Drive to make contact, the more sexual/sensual energy is engendered by physical memory. The more sexual energy: the easier to flip polarity in order to connect with object of resistance.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Reality in Natural Dog Training
2. Why do dogs chase their tails?
3. Why does a dog yawn?