Consciousness is energy, its interface with nature is emotion, and like energy consciousness as emotion moves as a wave. These waves are physically embodied as emotional affects (butterflies in the stomach, chill up the spine, queasy feeling, wobbly in the knees, shortness of breath, sense of weightlessness, flow, resonance, etc., etc.); affects that evolved in […]

While I do not expect an interesting dialogue to emerge from this post/counter-post exchange with the Unknown Scientist, http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/5-tall-tales-from-1-small-mind/ I nevertheless welcome the opportunity to rub my theory up against the mainstream in order to render some important distinctions that can help bring the emotional dynamic into sharper relief and hopefully make the effort worthwhile […]

In order to understand why dogs do what they do I believe that one must first realize that a profound error is made by projecting human thoughts onto animal behavior. At some point it just clicks that transposing the human intellectual capability of comparing one point-of-view to another point-of-view, or one moment-in-time to another moment-in-time […]

Thanks to Russell for the following: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-herding-sheep-selfish.html Emotion is a calculus of motion, feelings are the capacity to apprehend the midpoint of a flow system. Calculating the motion of individual prey animals renders the center mass of the herd and/or defensive formation. The midpoint is place of maximum vulnerability, thus, the young are concentrated at […]

Why are there swings in playgrounds? Or in other words, what makes a good feeling feel good?

I’ve heard Jill Bolte Taylor, the author of “Stroke of Insight”, on radio interviews and she also has a lecture on TED.com. Recently my agent Farley Chase, who is reading the book, sent me the following passages and I’ve quoted his email below. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist suffers a stroke and recovers (and) because […]

ADAM asks: I’m still having trouble really feeling and understanding this line… “The dog perceives being looked at (or called) just as if it is being pushed, just as if its mother is knocking it over and rolling it around on the ground. It’s a force of acceleration, a degree of momentum that demands a […]

One of the reasons the energy argument I’m making on this website strikes some as stupendous is because unless one can articulate the distinction between emotion and instinct, and between a feeling and a thought, then one doesn’t know what emotion is or what a feeling is, which means the terms will be used loosely […]

I don’t dismiss behavioral science and I value its many astute observations and precise descriptions; however it is missing the fundamental element of behavior, to wit: the animal’s nature which is an evolved function of energy. So what is energy? Science understands energy as an “action potential,” as a differential in concentration of “charged” particles […]

BURL: OK, next, what is the difference between a feeling and an emotion?  I submit it is much akin to that between color and ‘particular colors.’  As I recently explained using a quote from LCK, a physical feeling has a datum (what it is) and a subjective form (HOW it is), and I stated that […]

Some of my definitions are scattered across this site and mostly in terms of why-dogs-do-what-they-do, but what follows is a more concise summary. ENERGY: An action potential, a differential of force between two poles. Energy in animals builds up by virtue of a bipolar, two-brain makeup each with its own divergent agenda just as if […]

I can say that the ability of a dog to feel an earthquake before it happens, often hours, is the same capacity of a dog to feel an impending epileptic seizure or diabetic attack in an owner, hours before it happens. Its sense of continuum is picked up through its balance circuitry and when there […]