Arousal

From the book A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by the Nobel laureate Robert McLaughlin, I first heard about the phenomenon called "emergence".  I found a book by Steven Johnson on the subject and he started with certain insights about systems, say, of atoms.  One of the insights is referred to in shorthand as "More is different".  That odd statement merely means that having a great deal of something is qualitatively different sometimes from having some of it.  When you get enough quantity, you have a different basic quality.  Statisticians are familiar with the vastly different phenomena that can emerge from 1000 cases and from 1 billion cases.

There are all sorts of debates and details about whether something genuinely new really emerges or whether it is all really present from the start.  As you can imagine, if genuinely different phenomena or particles emerge, physicists would have difficulty with their project of finding the ultimate basic building blocks of matter. 

I am interested in the subject of human arousal.  I thought of the word "arousal" in connection with sex for a long time but I have read of other kinds of arousal.  Once, I read an article in Psychology Today that said something about the a character in the Song of Roland or the story of El Cid who courted a young beauty by first killing all her beloved doves.  There was some presumption that her state of emotional arousal (Grief? Anger?) would enhance his chance of being accepted by her.  Personally, I would not advise such a courting strategy.  I read that a single professional wrestler in a state of arousal kept many policemen at bay.  The idea of a berserker in Norse tales of battle was one of a warrior so aroused as to be nearly super-human.  These ideas relate to the concept of flow, especially in athletics, where a player gets into a state of dance-like, trance-like heavenly performance, the kind where she is said to be 'at one with the ball'.

Depending on the level of arousal, we may be almost different people from one time to another.