The Human Range....

I've discovered that the human capacity of dealing with things is quite high (through self presevation methods) and the range is quite wide but that the feedback to the brain and heart can be a bit narrow, or lacking in resolution. This is to say that things in reality that can have HUGE effects on a person's life may only cause so much of an emotional ripple in the human consciousness. (The one exception is the flight or fight instinct.) Conversly things that may have no immediate effect on a person in practical terms can be equally as disturbing as the thing that is "a big deal". Funny how that works.

My hypothesis is that we only have a narrow range of raw emotional feedback. We don't have a scale with enough paritions to be able to properly place and rate the things that effect us. This is probably due to the limited capacity of handling things... a self preservation mechanism developed to perhaps prevent trauma and all the physical and mental effects that can carry with it. Essentially I think that given the effect little things can have on us, I think we'd go all go crazy or drive others crazy if we felt things in a proportional amount.

Realizing this, its very easy to see why we constantly hear people say or hear ourselves say...."Put it in persepctive". "Keep it together". This time its our rational conscious part that serves to preserve oneself. Without putting things in the correct perspective we may just go ahead and do things based on emotional intensity. An example of this is in the workplace - lets say when you see a person work not on the critical path items when behind, but respond to cutomers who yell the loudest or whatever they are most personally anxious or excited about. This person wouldn't last too long because the critical items would not get done.

So to recap, we have....an unconcious emotional feedback control system that scales to what our psychie can handle, and a rational portion of our brain that puts things in proper perspective so as to act in the appropriate manner. Together they form the range of things we can handle.

Why am I thinking all this? On a somewhat personal note, there have been a few things that have gotten to me recently. Some had probably litle impact on me but rattled me a bit, and some truely were big things that shook me too...but definitely not so much as one would think if one were to use the small impact event's reaction and scale that up linearly. I was wondering how such unlike events in magnitude could ellicit some similar levels of emotional feedback to my psychie.