Emotional Bypass and Alba Emoting

Recently, on our drive back from a road trip we came across an interesting talk show on NPR. It was called Radiolab, and they were talking about cities. Curious enough I went to their website and explored more topics by these refreshing scientific minds. A topic that was quite enticing was that of ‘emotional bypass’. Think of it this way. Before you feel pain or pleasure, the particular signals from one of your sensory perceptives (skin, nose, ears , eyes or mouth) are sent to brain, subsequently the signals are processed by brain and then brain reacts in the way it was trained to. In case of getting hurt, your skin bears the burnt or injury the brain receives the signals and sends the pain signals to skin. Have you ever wondered what if you trained you mind to ignore the injury, or further more give a heads up saying that I will be injured in next few moments. Apparently, this age old technique has a scientific name i.e. emotional bypass. It’s like we are diving forward for a catch, we take the catch and momentarily ignore the pain. This is because you already were prepared for such a pain. One more interesting example I learned was the effect of bullet to a civilian versus army soldiers. Apparently civilians express more panic symptoms and desire that they receive maximum dosage of pain killers, when civilians are involved in gun fire accidents. On the other hand, soldiers do not require that extra doses of morphine to recover. One possible reason was the preparedness of soldiers for a bullet wound that civilian.

In the same chain of thought, my friend Pilar has introduced me to the concept of ‘alba emoting’. It is relatively new field developed and pioneered by Dr. Bloch. In this technique an artist performs a certain breathing technique to bring out a certain emotion. Typically, actors have to go through a range of emotions within a very short time, which is many folds faster than a typical life speed. Alba emoting is a technique educated artists to combine breathing techniques and various emotions. From my own experience of running, I can realize when I can step up or need to slow down. Typically, when you have long steady breathe you are in cruise mode and I can notch it a little. On the contrary, when I have short and shallow breath it’s my signal to slow down. If you stop and think about it, we use variations of ‘alba emoting’ all the time. Think of a crucial match or point where you have to express emotional and intellectual stability. Emotionally, short breathes are a sign of anxiety and long breathes are sign of assuredness. So we take deeper breathes to calm us down.

In either cases, be it emotional bypass or alba emoting, you are empowered with ability to control your physical and emotional behavior. Coming from Hindu culture, I have always been informed that mind is an amazing thing. Though I believed it, I never understood the true nature of that information. However, with a little more reasoning and logic it does seem possible that we can do it. I remember my yoga teacher telling me to try to see deep within yourself, so deep that you can follow the blood through your arteries and veins; so deep that you can slowly unwind and rewind every muscle of your body. I truly didn’t understand it then, but now I know that there is a possibility that it actually CAN be done. Assuming that we are byproduct of our thought process and that we can control our thoughts, feels like science has come full circle - from exploring and mastering our surrounding back to understanding ourselves (at least in my case).

In summary, I see a chance to actually combine these two techniques. In life we are unhappy coz of some unforeseen calamities and mostly lethargic behavior (Well in biblical terms there are seven sins that make us fall in that path of unhappiness). So we can use emotional bypass technique by forewarning ourselves about few of the troubles that we can anticipate in near future. If and when these troubles occur, we can encounter them with minimal emotional damage. However, it is not possible to know all the calamities that can befall on us. When the unforeseen trouble strikes us, we can observe it through our breathing pattern. But since we know our feelings better, we can actually control the way we react to the unknown troubles, just the way we do to the known ones. It is easier said done, but once we know there is a route, as HUMANS we can EXPLORE IT.