My understanding is that the mind body connection is accepted. Ie, if you have a chronic physical ailment it will affect your mental state.

What is more exciting for me is Daniel Kahneman explanation for why smart people do dumb things. He brings a more nuanced explanation than fear or flight. Essentially he argues our mind usually operates in autopilot System I thinking which is full of mental shortcuts and biases. Often people get trapped in a doom loop because they are so exhausted they cannot activate System II which will alter biases and behaviors. In other words, when people are chronically stressed and exhausted they keep doing the same thing and complain they are not getting better results.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d953fegpMFE&si=d1LN17swtSO6WNtK

> how systems from the endocrine system to the gut microbiome interact with the central nervous system and brain to generate and modify emotions

Our digestive system has a significant neural system of its own called the ‘enteric nervous system’ and given the (perhaps sensationalist) nickname ‘the second brain.’ There’s also the ‘intrinsic cardiac nervous system’ interfacing with our heart. There have been a lot of interesting results showing neuronal reactions to external stimuli. I don’t want to overstate things, as is so often the case with laypeople in the face of scientific mystery, but, at the very least, the brain isn’t entirely isolated when it comes to cognition.

I remember reading in a psychology manual years ago about an experiment where they gave people a drug which would induce a physical feeling, and verified how this "made" those people feel the corresponding emotion.

Personally I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a complex feedback loop at work, where both bodily sensations which come from outside of the central nervous system and mechanisms internal to the latter would give raise to emotions.

What negative responses do you expect? Don't feel like there are a lot of HN dualists out there.

Is this not just an obvious scientific fact on the verge common sense? Why would anyone (who's not a religious nut or something) not think exactly that?

Which to me make emotions an immune response.

What you're talking about is completely orthogonal to the article, and the reality at play here:

1. Some emotional issues have physical manifestations (i.e. anxiety symptoms). But some physical manifestation have no root in mental behaviour (i.e. cancer).

2. Like we often see in software engineering, if you turn a metric into a target, it stops being useful. GPs have a KPI tracking the number of people they see in a given timeframe, thus are more likely to dismiss psychological thing because they're not easily visible and need a long time to pin down. One of the reason of the global mental health crisis, and why staff cuts make this even worse.

It is not a school of thought. It's a dysfunctional medical system. The sad reality is that medical doctors, that includes GPs and most psychiatrists, are inadequate to dealing with psychological issues that cannot be easily fixed, masked or numbed with a pill. Even a quack might be more helpful, at least they'll try to keep you around as long as possible instead of dismissing you with a script and a leaflet on meditation.

A lot of Varela's ideas are considered in Spatial Computing VR/AR/MR also even refered to by some as Embodied Computing. XR works by expanding perception expectations (in the Lisa Feldmen Barrett sense) using an animated freedom to produce new experience but similar enough to be understood. The reasearch connecting visual processing in the hippocampus to emotional memory formation (visual thinking) is quite strong. XR and new interface formats are forcing us to look closer and explore the relationship between cognitive states and our understanding of embodiment/environment which certainly exists.

I call it "Soviet Yellow" whenever I see it, its a very common colour for buildings in Europe, and it is indeed rage-inducing. I feel that its a frequency of colour which produces a dissonance with ones own internal colour, which is more blue/white or blue/orange. This yellow feels very sickening whenever I encounter it.

Why are smileys and related emoji always bright yellow?

The thought you had is affecting your meta thought about being affected by a negative thought, my friend.

All your body does is process information that passes through the brain and nervous system. Thoughts are just as primary as the senses that reflect something in the outside world. And your negative realisation was interpreted by the rest of your system as an archetypal 'bad situation out of your control'. That's being trapped, which is a very old situation for an animal to be in. Trapped animals look for a way out and if nothing yields they become inactive.

I've found reminding myself of the above helps me take whatever limited control I can of the threat (i.e. writing down and visualising what I'm going to do when I can solve it) and also taking some control of other parts of my life. You can trick your body by sending it soothing signals which are an antidote to the /type/ of situation you are in (if not necessarily actually solve it).

Observing anger can be similarly humbling.

You can get ahead of the rush of cortisol enough to watch it happening and remain lucid / disconnected from it, but that's not enough (at least in my experience so far) to avoid the unpleasant physical sensation.

I think you're idea is backwards. You'd have to have a person born without that body part at all.

A person that could see then went blind can experience the idea of redness. A person born blind cannot.

Trauma can be lifelong if it isn’t worked through, but some trauma can be worked through (and hallucinogens are showing promise of working through trauma quicker than medication&talk therapy alone). I think the actual emotional trauma response however is individually maybe 10-15 mins long at maximum, but feeling the emotion often causes you to think other triggering thoughts or behave in a manner exacerbating the trigger, thus making an individual 10-15 minute thing take hours to sort itself out.

Yes, you can.

If the theory is well-formulated, rests on vetted facts, and you understand the context sufficiently, you can say: "This is a good theory." If it's not well-formulated or does not rest vetted facts, and your understanding is sufficent, you can say: "Bad theory."

There's an entire world of variation between those 2 extremes, but there's no reason implicitly why you can't understand a theory just by reading about it.

and why not? Both are neural nets. Carbon versus Silicon.

It's just scale at this point. At this point, maybe human neurons and connections are more complex than what can be done in a machine, but not for long.

Humans only think they are special, that a machine can't feel.

But that is only our subjective experience of ourselves, which itself is also just interpretation. It seems like everyone is in agreement that our perception of the outer world is fallible. But so is our perception of our internal processes. Our inner thoughts are just as opaque to us as the outer world.

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." Schopenhauer.

It's been a while since I read it, but one of the central ideas is that we construct instances of emotions based on sensory data (from the internal systems that detect and predict our energy needs) in a similar way to how we construct instances of concepts from other sensory modes, e.g. seeing a particular cluster of visual features and concluding "that's a bee". When we feel anger, that's our brain's best guess as to the appropriate interpretation of a bunch of internal measurements -- raised blood pressure, high arousal, etc -- based on context. The same internal state in a different context could be interpreted as a different emotion, so there is no consistent or unique biological fingerprint behind a given emotion.

It's counter-intuitive, but it fits better with what we know about how the nervous system works than the commonly accepted fingerprint idea.

Emotions are the brain's attempt at constructing the concepts that best explain and account for our body's energy budget.

Novelty most likely.

the likeness of color Harmony with that of music is no surprise. Music harmony has been known since Plato. Goethe called upon platonic ideas when he wrote about color harmony.

I am not a color scientist, I do work in VFX though. Pixels and their generally-vector-valued contents are what we've mostly delivered to our clients for many years.

I'm not code-shy, but I haven't worked on our color pipeline very deeply myself - I did definitely get the impression from those around-me that did, that some of the hoop-jumping we've had to do to deliver the expected result color-wise have been quite complex indeed (especially if you rewind 10-15 years!)

For example our desire to do-color-well more easily led our sister-company 'Rising Sun Research' to develop a sophisticated color-management, calibration and viewing-environment software product called: 'CineSpace'! (which was ultimately acquired by Cine-Tal and is now owned by THX.)

I guess the above is all to try to help illustrate that color (and its representation/manipulation as values on a computer) can be a very complicated topic indeed!

I do think though, that making-things-look-good might not be something that color theory is really going to help directly with?! Of course, knowing your tools better is always a good thing! With greater capabilities can come increased flexibility and perhaps speed/efficiency advancements too. Definitely worth exploring if it piques your interest!

Not particularly good links I apologize! But hopefully somewhat-of-a-springboard for investigation?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model

If you're going to delve in, you might like to look up some of the following topics too:

"Linear-to-Light Color" (this is probably the most important one for VFX/CG in my opinion, it affects everything from CG rendering/lighting to comp or even mip-map generation.. warping, image resizing (anything that 'filters' values), the list goes on! It's very important (and helpful!) to use values that are linear-to-real-world-light-intensities in cases where it is called-for!)

"Display Gamma" (This should explain why colors on most computers are all stored pre-raised to a particular power!)

"HSV/HSL Color Spaces" (transformation of color between spaces, sometimes the operation you want to do is trivial in another space and if you have good to/from transforms you can use, that can unlock some really powerful things!)

"High Dynamic Range Color" (This seems obvious in a way, but how bright is looking-at-the-actual-Sun compared to a full-white image (or an image of the sun) on a computer screen?!.. Using a less-limited-range (ie float values instead of integers, simplifying somewhat) to represent color is hugely important in some cases. It's mostly an issue on the very-bright-side but is also sometimes important on the dark-side too.)

Maybe for fun could you look into 'Spectral' color models?.. I find the idea fascinating but have not played with it much yet myself.

None of that is gonna help heaps with the creative side much though I wouldn't think.. but hopefully interesting if you're into this kinda stuff!

What books I would recommend would depend upon what application you would put them to. User Danwills mentions color spaces, which are the means by which colour is expressed and also the means by which color is 'transcribed' from one device to another. For this I would highly recommend Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, 2003. A great read.

It sounds as if you have an interest in the aesthetic application of colour. The standard tomes are Itten's The Art of Colour and Goethe's Colour Theory. In my opinion, both of them are semi-incoherent messes that have done more harm than good to painters. Bruce McEvoy's website 'Handprint' evidences a man who knows more about colour that Itten ever did. https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html Its good to see that he is finally getting round to writing a book.

The way I teach color application to my students is broadly as follows.

Firstly, the 'thinking' color space for an artist (digital or traditional) should be Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL). Using these values the colors of an aesthetic image can be 'conceptually disassembled'. To demonstrate this, I ask my students to describe the colors they are each wearing in terms of pairwise comparisons of HSL (e.g. 'A' is the same saturation as 'B' but of a different hue and slightly lighter).

For lightness, the simple rule of thumb is to ensure that the tones are approximately separate into three bands: light, middle dark (LMD). To this one might add black and white as the top and tail. Of courses, there is not an absolute rule, and without even blinking I could show you painters who have successfully employed only two-tone bands. Novices tend to overload the lower end of the tonal range. To demonstrate tone organization, I draw a posterise curve on Photoshop's Curves. It is important to know that the M of LMD is not absolute (with M as 50% with 0 as black), but instead tends to lay around 40%. It can also be observed that most paintings extend from black to white. However, again without even trying I could name a dozen exceptions (for example, check out the low tonal range of some of Gwen John's painting).

Saturation is the intensity half of the chromatic component of colour. In common with lightness, it exists as a 'ramp' value bound by a min and max. For this reason, it can mostly be treated in much the same way as lightness. For most of art history, the saturation map of a painting followed its lightness map. It was the development of the chemical and dying industry in France that introduced artists to a wider range of intense pigments. The saturation map of Gericault's Still Life with Lobsters is remarkably different to its lightness map. If you don't have access of MATLAB or Nuke or suchlike, you can make a saturation map in Photoshop using the Selective Colour adjustment. Just cycle through the colours in the drop-down menu and set the black value of each one to -100%. For the white, neutral and black, set the black value to +100%. Seeing the saturation of a painting expressed in this way is something that the impressionists would have murdered for.

Hue is the difficult beast in the HSL triumvirate. To get a grip on it you have to side-step into the RYB colour space. It is in the RYB colour wheel that the hues are arranged in their perceptually antagonistic pairings: red/green, yellow/purple, blue/orange. These pairings have been know for 100s of years, even before Newton's colour wheel was a thing. It is uniquely difficult to get a handle on hue... it defies easy conceptualisation. There is also a huge amount of bullshit in the wild on the subject of hue. Check out adobe's colour wheel: color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel See all that stuff about triadic complementary etc? Most of it is mostly hot air. How do I know? I have personally reviewed the hue histogram of hundreds of paintings. From this I can say that the organisational strategies that artists employ are, at best, approximate. Certainly, they are not as clear as the art books tell us. However, the following is generally true... painters avoid: hues that span no more than one half of the RYB hue wheel, hue that are evenly distributed on two halves of the RYB hue wheel, hue that occupies 360 degrees of the RYB hue wheel.

The final key wisdom that I expect of my students is to understand contrast as a structural phenomenon. This can be understood as manifesting in two (main) ways. The first is ratio contrast, which is simply the contrast between two values. In painting, these values are usually averages. Separately considered can be the contrast between neighbouring regions and those which are not. The former are perceptually prime and can overwhelm our ability to perceive those regions which are distant to each other. The second contrast is global contrast. An image which extends from black to white has higher global contrast that one which extends from dark grey to light grey. These two ways of understanding colour contrast can be extended in many dimentions. For example, the way that they manifest between (ratio) and within (global) the depth planes of a landscape.

As for what constitutes effective colour contrast: one observation holds true of all painters, writers, filmmakers etc.: that their task is to exaggerate life. This they do in two dimensions: exaggeration of difference and exaggeration of similarity (though Ruskin expressed this as a difference between affinity and contrast).