The thinking part of our minds has gotten plenty of respect and admiration. It is the backbone of investigation, whether scientific, medical, historical, legal or other. I am confident there are many ways to describing rational analysis but asking a series of intelligent questions is one way. We can start with who, what, where, when, why and how and then search among the answers or lack of them for places where additional questions seem called for. A pursuit of satisfying answers is much like a hunt without spears or horses. We feel ourselves flying along toward the truth, toward a solution. We can feel that we are on the trail and closing in.
Schools and classes like to act as though they are about skills and knowledge but all humans know they are subject to continuous streams of emotions, fleeting feelings that seem to arrive unbidden and often without warning or explanation. I like this speaker but I am put off by that one. My brain, my habits and my society, not to mention my history, quickly supply reasons and justification for those feelings, pro and con. Without that quick buttressing, I would develop a picture of myself as driven by whim. People don't mind a whimsical friend but not too much emotional display at once, please.
If we are in pursuit of the reason for the experiment not supporting a really good hypothesis, if we feel that we are on the right track, we can probably sense camaraderie, team espirit, and "the great big brotherhood of man". It can break the mood that emerges and unifies us if we call a timeout in our pursuit, our hunt, our game to draw attention to the feelings we are feeling. Feelings seem too flighty and unpredictable. We tend to feel our emotions more clearly and with less interference if we are guided by them but don't examine them. It is hard to feel patriotic and discuss the meaning of patriotism at the same time.
Older adults are often very skilled at pausing their emotions or putting them in the background. They can feel and know that they feel but still leave inner space for a change of feeling, for some emotions to exit and others to enter. There is a difference, of course, between feeling an emotion and expressing that feeling in a way that communicates to others what is being felt. Throw in the facts of different degrees of approval of certain emotions in myself or in those who matter to me, and you begin to get a picture of the complexity of our feeling world. You can see why we sometimes try to stick to less emotion-based communicating.
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