But How Do You Really Feel?

A verbal tour-de-feeling from brisket to Buddhism.

How Can Words Describe?

Beyond the DSM-5

Our stories are often defined by our emotional experience of life. It seems, however, language limits the way we express emotion. If you are a native English speaker, for example, you may say you're feeling blue, to connote a persistent sadness. But how is that distinct from being "down" or "depressed"? 

Much of what we can understand about other people's emotional states is in the ear, eye and even tongue of the beholder. 

-->How to put that into words?

Yiddish, the language of my grandparents, is a particularly “feeling” language. The language was spoken in the home by Jews of Western Europe. Ladino, the dialect for Sephardic Jews, scattered throughout the Mediterranean after expulsion from Spain due to the Inquisition, is an admix of Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish and other languages. 

The Yiddish tongue evolved to include an amalgam of Hebrew, Aramaic, German, Polish and a bissel of the Romance languages as the ancient Hebrews, who were destined to roam the Diaspora from the time of the Babylonian exile until the mid-20^th century, acquired the words and accompanying gestures to express a rich range of human emotions—from long-suffering to ecstatic. 

Take verklempt, made famous in a Saturday Night Live skit, “Coffee Talk,” with Mike Myers and Co. A word meaning “Overcome with emotion!” even sounds dramatic. Or hear somebody kvetch, complaining as if they’re trekking over mountains in pinchy high heels.

For a broader, yet more nuanced appreciation of how other languages have grown up around feelings, the infographic above shows the rich variations of emotional experiencing evidenced in a host of other languages. Each could contribute to the ways we understand ourselves--and each other.

What is missing in translation is how much expressions of emotion demonstrate the national/linguistic character of the peoples who speak any given language. And how much the rest of us are missing out on by not being able to express our feelings with precision.

Beyond generic constellations — 

-->sadness, love, joy—that evoke emotion in a general way, language can plunge knife-like into a specific area of the heart with pinpoint precision. Why do these expressions arise in some cultures and not others?

Why would a Japanese mother, for example, use language that expresses the emotion between "bittersweet", "painful" and "wistful"? Were there generations of Japanese women whose cherished children broke their hearts? Do not mothers in all cultures feel such maternal heartsickness at times?

On the other end of the emotional color wheel, a key aspect of cheerfulness in Danish is hygee, a feeling of comfort and coziness; enjoying food and drink with friends and family. Are Americans too busy to distinguish general good cheer from the joys of intimacy? Or is that experience of too much closeness a thing of the rosy past, when (according to my nonagenarian mother) families would hang out nightly on the front porch sipping lemonade and greeting neighbors strolling down the street? Does such general bonhomie then contribute to a trust that makes people comfortable leaving the front door unlocked?

Umami and Gedempt by Any Other Name Would Taste as Yummy

Is it any wonder that, in almost every language there are expressions for food that hit the taste buds with a burst of emotion?

Sweet, sour, salty, bitter – the words that describe the combination of tastes the celebrated French chef Escoffier discovered plying his culinary trade that go beyond any of those individual sensations on the tongue to make something greater in the sum than in their parts: umami. So it goes with gedempt, a Yiddish word for something “slow-stewed and falling apart”, like a brisket so tender and tasty the meat peels away from the fork. Is it any wonder that Escoffier’s 19^th century “invention” of veal stock was the basis for a recipe known to every Yiddishe mamma from the Pale to the Bronx?

And is it any mystery that words like sweet, sour, salty and bitter – flavorings and tastes that materialize merely in the mind of the taster – also are used to describe our emotions? And that, when it comes to describing utter deliciousness, words alone are a weak substitute for the experience of tasting?

Leashing Emotion to Unleash Expression

The stories we tell others, in any language, may seem pale in the face of intense emotions where words do not even suffice to express. In large part, our ability to express how we feel depends on empathy — the ability of another to feel and relate to what I feel. In the emotional retelling of our stories – our joys, fears, shames, love – seems to come from a deep human impulse to share, and one that most connects to others whose recounting of similar, even universal stories may often reassure us that we are not alone, thus bring healing and health to our hearts, words alone cannot express.

Emotion is a whole body experience. Felt in the mind, body and heart, we are emotional beings. Between our feelings, our words, ourselves and others lies a universe.

Yet, if we speak out of anger, fear,  or even ecstasy, we are less apt to make ourselves understood. Psychologists and neuroscientists alike confirm that we are not in control of our rational minds. In the throes of intensity, it is difficult to have the presence of mind to understand ourselves, much less convey to others what is going on. 

Think first, talk later.

An Escoffier contemporary, the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, reveals the secret to connecting from heart to heart in The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Speak from the heart, as the saying goes, and your story, no matter the limits of language, will touch other hearts receptive to the feeling.

Your Brain on Art

Imagine riffing on a mini-keyboard while immobilized in a tube that’s taking pictures of your brain. That’s what jazz bassist Mike Pope and other musicians have been doing to participate in Johns Hopkins otolaryngologist Dr. Charles Limb’s novel experiment to capture the brain on jazz.


Call it intuition, creative instinct, or "getting into the zone", but science is finding that artists brains work differently when they are in the creative act, and that they may, in turn have a feel for how their art will resonate in people's brains.

Call it instinctive neuroscience creative people seem attuned from the outset to tap into a social reserve of emotion and universal understanding. With artists holding such a head start, where do neuroscientists find the neuroagency that can help advance understanding of where we find creativity in the brain and what purposes it serves?

That was one underlying question during a lively converation with jazz musicians Pat Metheny and Mike Pope and otolaryngologist Dr. Charles Limb participating in a unique conference on "Perceptual Neuroscience and Aesthetics” on October 20 in Baltimore. The conference, at the American Visual Arts Museum, was filled to capacity with more than 300 attendees curious to explore how – and why – we respond to art, music, dance and drama. And to learn a little more about the brains of those people driven to create.



Are our brains hard-wired for Beethoven? What about Dr. Dre? Do mirror neurons attune to faces, such as the larger-than-life canvases by painter William Stoehr, and what emotions does it evoke in people? Stoehr pays most attention to the eyes of his models - reproducing them to draw us closely into the mind of his portraits. He highlights these black and white images with a splash of red, a touch of yellow. And much of the rest of the painting is more suggestion than explicit representation. Yet, he notes, that people who see his work believe that the eye, the ear, the chin is complete. The viewer's eye fills in what it expects to see, even when there is merely hinted at, in fact.

The former National Geographic photographer is exploring this theme on Facebook

The science of creativity
Science, technology, engineering, math and medicine – form a core of what might be called “left-brained” occupations – society recognizes the value of these roles through investment in education and reward in the workplace. Those possessing these functions in high degree are highly valued members of society: finding root causes and statistical bases for societal problems, creating living and working environments, curing disease. All these advance evolution of our species: inventing new treatments, technological advances, shelter, safety, defense. In short, these capabilities are fundamental to human survival.

Ars Artis
Bach might not save a life. Picasso never built a house. Although Doris Lessing, in a prolific career that has continued her publishing well into her 90s, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, it is doubtful that her most notable works, including The Golden Notebook, ever cured a reader. Throughout the millennia, artists have been alternatively ostracized and embraced, reviled and worshiped. But always, they have been seen as “different”, or outside the norm.


To glean art's ancient roots,listen to the tone of a 9000-year old Chinese flute here: http://www.shakuhachi.com/Sound/K-9KYearOldFlute.mp3

Poets, musicians, artists and writers, on the other hand, serve no noticeable function in preserving the species. The results of creativity serve less as tools of physical survival, but more in evolving the social and emotional capacity of society.

Neuroscience advances have begun to demonstrate that areas of the prefrontal cortex linked with self-expression and inhibiting censoring brain functions are active in artists in the process of creation, showing much different brain activation during periods of intense creativity, like improvisation. Measuring perception in the brain – vision, hearing, processing information – ties the neural output of the creative process into the realms of scientific understanding.

Science can illuminate art through its own creative explorations of what makes us pursue and consume art – is art its own reward?

What’s going on here?
In addition to an unusually articulate complement of left-brain and right-brained speakers, the conference drew from a disparate group – scientists, teachers, artists, writers, architects and musicians, all of whom might speak distinct languages. The stovepipes in our culture keep artists in their studios and scientists in their labs, and rarely the twain shall meet. Yet with the vernacular of hearing and seeing - the universal languages gleaned through the arts and beginning to be understood by neuroscience, each group might draw understanding to enhance their own work.

Is there a way to keep the channels open and engaged? How can we sustain such cross-fertilization of ideas in a society structured to reward specialization? What does the artistically creative mind conceive of during the act of creation? How does science measure the output? How does the process - from idea to output – unfold? What role does intuition play? Knowledge? And what are those teachable insights – where we can infuse science with creativity and art with measurement? These are only a few of the questions that began to emerge in the conversations that ensued.

Perhaps the poets have intuited all along the metaphysical expression in their craft:

To see a world in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour. -William Blake