The future-sense of fear and desire #

Sparking potentiality #

Fear and desire both engage the same synaptic pathways as imaged by an MRI. 

The are the source for some of our funkier decision making, and for some of the more

• **They are emotions. **They have a neurotransmitter underpinning that floods us with emotions and mechanical changes. Our hearts beat faster, our breath becomes more shallow. Our skin might flush, or pale, or sweat. 
• We know that fear is a big part of us. It’s there in our fight/flight response. It’s in our stories. We have an entire story genre predicated on sparking fear. 
• And we know that desire is a big part of us. Catholics remove the acceptance of desire from their clergy; Buddhism sees the ability to accept it without giving in to it as the single biggest step to achieving nirvana. Marketing tries to spark it in us every single day. 

The unspoken bit of fear and desire? Both are primarily instigated by imagined future states.

Think about the difference in reaction to a tiger seen safely on a screen, compared to if you saw it 20 feet away with nothing but air between you and it. On screen, you know it isn’t right there; to your immediate environment, it's no more real than a movie. Fear is not a debilitating part of it, because there is no immediate probability of teeth. A tiger 20 feet away…you might peel apart the different moments when you would amp up your fear another notch, or you might go straight to the thought of teeth in your flesh. 

And desire? Simplify it. Think of it not as being eaten, but eating. You see your favorite fruit, and your memory will pull up sensations of the smell of perfect ripeness, juice, and sweetness; it will remember the satiety and energy that came shortly thereafter. 

Fear and desire are our first whiffs of the future. Then, we aim to avoid or attain, in shorter or longer timescales as necessary for the fear/desire at hand.

We’ve complexified it far beyond eating, and being eaten.

I think, because it’s a future state and potentially something that won’t be reconciled in the next 10 seconds, fear and desire can form their own priority nodes in our processing chain. 

So if we desire to become a wealthy person, that priority node will continue pinging and lean decisions towards that attainment whenever we see a potential opportunity. It’s something that stays with us, based on an anticipated future state that translated into desire and then became a priority, set within a stream of other priorities. How that priority is managed becomes part of the processing chain.