I’ve realized that different sensory pathways have different emotional defaults. To explain what I mean imagine a piece of bad news, imagine hearing it read to you by a computer voice and now imagine reading it yourself as an email or letter.

Your emotional reaction you would assume would be based on the event not the delivery, but the remarkable thing about the brain is it doesn’t work that way.

I have a phobia so to speak of phones, specifically making and receiving calls. This does not apply to text or the Internet obviously. And I don’t mind talking to people, I actually kind of like strangers under certain conditions. For example I enjoyed the christmas time subway in new york, but I don’t like crowds at walmart.

Anyway, I’ve realized that audio data gets its emotional value magnified, while text gets its emotional value gutted. I can read about or see horror, but if I hear it I feel it.

Take for example being broken on the wheel, one of the most horrific methods of killing a person ever known. I hate it, but it doesn’t “get” to me. I’ve read accounts and seen drawings, but still, no real emotional impact.

But when I watched the video of the trucker being beheaded with a steak knife, I wish I could un-see that, not because of what I was seeing but because of what I was hearing.

I think people would be better off if they could realize the fact that different paths in the brain have different emotional value by default. It would tell them a lot about themselves emotional states and the world.