Clearly because depression is associated with creativity and has much more
primitive but probably more powerful functions, like making you want to stay
inside and conserve energy because its snowing like hell outside and maybe
it will stay that for several months. Or you have the flu so a primary
immune cytokine, il1, is slowing down glutamate activity in your hippocampus
and upregulating prostaglandin to raise body temperature while also
initiating cascade to make you more senstive to pain (hence aches with flu,
good idea, make you stay still) while TNFa, another primary immune cytokine,
is upregulating GSR7 or something so making you even more tired and
miserable it's called resting sometimes people get depressed because they
just don't rest enough.
I'm only guessing here okay, but you shouldn't be too surprised that
emotions are not well understood. Jeez, they can't even come up with
mutually agreeable categories/definitions of the same.
Optimists are often happier and are also more inclined to make stupidly
arrogant errors of judgement (think of Bay of Pigs). You are assuming that
there is only one preferred cognitive style for all occasions and that's
dangerous. Some of my best ideas come up while driving to work, the last
thing I want to do is make some presumptuous judgement about how I should
think; something I only do when desperate. It seems to me that at present at
least my level of knowledge is far too spurious for me to entertain the
pretension that I have obtained the depth of understanding that will make
the human condition as clear as the mountain lake.
Look harder, there just might be good reasons for feeling bad. Why is
feeling good always good? Go tell that to the psychopath. Just because you
feel good doesn't mean you are. Give me a break. Guilt: powerful and
necessary stuff. The antinomians (circa AD300?)were just plain crazy.
If you want a good critic go find some sad looking dude, chances are better
... .
"The only true realists are the mildly depressed, the rest of us tend to
overvalue ourselves."
Robert Ornstein, somewhere ...
Happiness is the circle of emotion,
(Donovan, old song)
John H.
ashwin kelkar <ashwin_k18 at my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8883cn$sr6$1 at nnrp1.deja.com...
> what is so good about feeling bad ??
> emotions are hard wired into our brains whay are bad emotions selected
> for ? feeling bad about anything may not increase anyone's chances of
> survival so why did emotions like hurt, sadness, etc. evolove as all of
> these are relative terms why consider them in cognition at all. so why
> select them ? if all they do is make the conscious mind unhappy. i
> believe that all thoughts originate either consciously or sub-
> consciouly to make the conscious mind happy so why did bad emotions get
> selected for ?
>>> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/> Before you buy.