A few days ago I had this question popping up in my head: is it possible that awareness of external situations (i.e. stimuli) happens faster than of internal ones?
A bit of context, without details, because I don't want to make this too personal. I often struggle to react with anger as a healthy means to establish boundaries. I am not talking about rage. Rather, I am talking about a healthy amount of anger that should keep something or somebody, that is pushing too much, out of the boundaries that I need to establish for my well-being: this is my choice and a basic need. The reason I am giving myself for not being able to do so is that my awareness of another person's fear or sadness comes before the awareness I have of my feelings. As naive as this might sound, this mechanism makes my empathy kick in before I realize that I don't have to necessarily let everything affect me. In hindsight, I think not allowing everything to touch us deeply can be healthy. In such situations, however, I often find myself apologizing for having opened up instead of simply saying - internal dialog here - "No, I'm not taking this".
Another way to describe this could be the following. Often, I struggle to perceive my own emotions in response to something. Again, differently, the awareness of my own emotions comes in a second moment, compared to that of someone else's emotions. Is it possible, therefore, that there is some sort of "information" that travels faster than communication? I am not thinking here about verbal and non-verbal communication, that's easy. Any kind of message our brain processes still comes from sensory information. Even traditional non-verbal communication (for example body posture or facial expressions) is being processed by our eyes. A little digression: I never thought of it this way, but during face-to-face communication, since light travels faster than sound, there is a, very small, delay between the information our eyes and our ears have to process.
I don't know how to frame this - well, this is a sentence I have used already a couple of times in other posts. I guess what I am wondering is something in the direction of: is it possible that when two human beings interact and are deeply connected they can exchange some sort of information without using any conventional form of communication? Even assuming no processing of sensory information is possible? Has anyone ever talked about "emotional waves"?
The above sounds a lot like sci-fi but I find it interesting nonetheless to explore it. While I was researching a bit on the topic I found the following article from the Queen Mary University of London that seems like a fun experiment: "Scientists propose new way to detect emotions using wireless signals".
Edit. Coming back to this post after some time, I read again the question:
Is it possible that awareness of external situations (i.e. stimuli) happens faster than for internal ones?
and more thoughts hit me. If awareness is to some extent driven by perception (i.e. sensory information) I cannot help but notice that external situations trigger, ideally, all our senses, whereas internal situations leave, at least, visual cues out. Also, on the question:
Is it possible, therefore, that there is some sort of "information" that travels faster than communication?
Quantum mechanics makes, to some extent, a case for information traveling faster than light when particles are entangled. The following article could be interesting: "The Relationship Between Quantum Mechanics and Human Consciousness". In this context, however, it seems relevant to keep in mind the No-Communication Theorem.
Picture created by the author using GenAI