“People eat physics,” said Dr. Van Vliet. “You eat physical properties with a little bit of taste and aroma. And if the physics is not good, then you don’t eat it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/health/mary-roach-on-studying-food-and-how-humans-eat-it.html?ref=science&_r=0
Dogs, emotional beings, construct a view of reality and experience the world through their insides. Humans, intellectual beings, experience the world from our outsides. Let a dog out from a warm house on a bitter cold day, he doesn’t brace himself. The bitter cold cools his insides, he is refreshed as the sensations of cold reduces the feeling of friction that characterizes a dog’s impressions of the outside. Whereas the human pulls the collar up higher to insulate from the cold. We’re stepping out and into our intellectual version of reality, and the bone-numbing cold insults it. Tom Brown in the “Tracker” writes of learning the Indian ways through an exercise of walking naked through the forest on a sub zero night called “making the cold your brother.”
Dogs assay external objects in terms of how it feels, or projected to feel, when held within their jaws. This is the first act of emotional ingestion. Likewise, very young children, who are more emotional than intellectual, assay external objects in terms of how it would feel when held in their hands, the hand being in humans the emotional equivalent of the jaws. The child projects what something might feel like by imagining the feel of it in their hands, not visualizing in their mind, but by constructing a feeling of its reality by referencing their hands.
DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSE OF SELF:
“To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply. Without your giving it a conscious thought.”
“Teeth and jaws are impressive not for their strength but for their sensitivity, Dr. Van der Bilt has found. Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about 10 microns across.”
(NOTE: In other words, the organism’s recognition of its Self can be pinpointed down to the micron level. On this scale, quantum mechanics can come into play. The sense of smell is also predicated on a quantum scale, and note also that smell is the social sense. The projection of the Self (p-cog plus physical memory) onto an Object of Attraction/Resistance in order to break it down for assimilation, in other words to pin point the essence of the other being to a point within one’s body, concomitant physical memories of flow thus being released, is likewise modeled after such quantum events. We are witnessing on a gross physical scale, what’s happening on a quantum scale, if that is we were to edit out our human thoughts that are reflexively projected as well. No matter what behavior we may observe, the animal is feeling on the inside what its projected p-cog is doing on the outside. What transpires in the subsequent interaction can only be discussed accurately in terms of an energetic logic, rather than a human rational logic, such as submission, dominance, control over resources, territoriality, reproductive strategies, etc., etc.. This also speaks to the incredible limit to what we can expect to uncover from neurological research on emotion and the brain. Our diagnostic tools at the moment are like trying to understand what’s going on around the office water cooler from operating a satellite camera from 250 miles in space. We can see the pulses of traffic coming and going from offices, and can grasp that something important is going on around Times Square, but we’re making big logic leaps and untested assumptions by projecting a psychology onto the behavior of drivers on their way to work. Whereas an immediate-moment manner of analyzing behavior renders a much finer grain of resolution. It can speak definitively based on an energetic interpretation of behavior as to what constitutes an animal’s sense of self.)
A SENSE OF SELF IS PREDICATED ON OVERCOMING RESISTANCE
“Those who can chew want to chew. We especially enjoy crunch. A colleague of Dr. Van der Bilt, Ton van Vliet, has spent the past seven years figuring out just how crunch works.”
“Back at the Restaurant of the Future, he stops by to instruct me in the basics of crispy-crunchy. We begin with nature’s version, a fresh apple or carrot.”
“It’s all bubbles and beams,” he said, sketching networks of water-filled cells and cell walls on a sheet of my notepad paper. When you bite into an apple, the flesh deforms and at a certain moment the cell walls burst. And there is your crunch. (Ditto crispy snack foods, but there the bubbles are filled with air.)”
“As a piece of produce begins to decay, the cell walls break down and water leaks out. Now nothing bursts. Your fruit is no longer crisp. It is mealy or limp or mushy. The same thing happens with a snack food degraded by moisture: Cell walls dissolve, air leaks out. The staler the chip, the quieter.”
“For a food to make an audible noise when it breaks, there must be what’s called a brittle fracture: a sudden, high-speed crack. Dr. Van Vliet takes a puffed cassava chip from a bag and snaps it in two.”
“To get this noise, you need crack speeds of 300 meters per second,” he said. The speed of sound. The crunch of a chip is a tiny sonic boom inside your mouth.”
When an Object-of-Attraction can fit within the jaws (its shell of resistance can be crunched) and is then emotionally ingested, it’s internalized as an “Emotional Bolus” wherein it is digested during the process of elaboration as Self and Object-of-Attraction interact and assimilate with each other. The emotional bolus becomes attached to the physical center-of-gravity that was projected onto the form of the Object-of-Attraction, the physical memory of the resistance overcome in order to ingest the Object-of-Attraction. When the form moves, the animal feels as if their own physical center-of-gravity is moving as well. Also note that the adult wolf regurgitates to its young. The young are the physical embodiment of the Emotional Bolus. The adult connects with the young via the actual physical bolus it regurgitates. The physical is based on the emotional. Emotion is based on physics.
(On a training note, this returns us to the subject of bite inhibition. Ian Dunbar is wrong. Puppies have needle sharp teeth not so they will annoy adults and thus be taught bite inhibition, but to protect their jaws because of their immediate need to crunch anything they are attracted to. What they grab is going to crumble before it damages their soft growing tissues. Then later in life the stress that the adults impose on the young as they mature and are more able to intensely focus their energies, tunes the nervous system of the young so as to avoid dangerous objects of resistance and this is advantageous to life in the wild. In other words, it LIMITS their capacity to cooperate when the resistance is especially high, as when confronting a large dangerous prey animal that’s HEALTHY, i.e. sexually virile. They cannot maintain their group configuration under these circumstances. In contrast, everything an owner requires of their dog so that they can live in harmony in our domestic world of intense change, is to be able to COOPERATE when dealing with extreme and out of the ordinary circumstances, i.e. high resistance. The dog must be able to feel he can fit Object-of-Attraction/Resistance into his jaws and remain aligned and in sync with his owner so as to absorb this feeling of acceleration and integrate the object of resistance into the configuration. In other words, in order to remain calm and social.)
