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What Our Tears Are Trying to Tell Us

Man welling up

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who never ate his bread with tears doesn’t know what life tastes like.
—after Goethe

In many cultures, especially for men, crying is considered to be undignified and infantile behaviour, except in certain specific circumstances such as mourning the loss of a relative. After childhood, men shed tears much less frequently than women. The reasons for this are partly biological, but mainly sociocultural.

‘Crying’, or ‘tearing up’, is not just one thing. There are in fact three types of tear, two of which are rather uninteresting: basal tears that lubricate and protect the eye, and reflex tears that flush out irritants such as smoke particles or onion vapours. The third type of tear is, of course, shed in response to emotion.

Crocodile Tears

Whereas many animals have basal and reflex tears, emotional tears appear to be uniquely human. Although other animals, of course, vocalise and express distress, there is no convincing evidence that they shed tears for emotional reasons. So, presumably, if women cry more often than men, it is because they are more human? Elephants and chimpanzees are sometimes said to ‘weep’, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated that these are indeed emotional tears. On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that crocodiles don’t sob. The expression ‘to shed crocodile tears’ has its roots in an ancient legend, according to which crocodiles pretend to weep to either lure or mourn their prey.

What I Remember from Med School

Reflex and emotional tears are produced by the lacrimal gland and drained through the nasolacrimal duct into the nose, which is why we also sniff when we cry. Any excess fluid spills out of the eyelid and trickles along the side of the nose or surface of the cheek, forming teardrops. Damage to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve desensitises the cornea, impairing the production of reflex tears. However, it is the parasympathetic division of the facial nerve that is responsible for making tears, and damage to the facial nerve, as in Bell’s palsy, can lead to a decrease in tear production.

Existential Tears

When we think of crying emotional tears, we think of sadness and grief. But we also shed emotional tears in response to a range of other, sometimes positive, emotions and feelings, including elation, laughter, love, frustration, pain, anger, and surprise. We may also cry in response to music, beauty, kindness, yearning, reunion, or anything that strikes us as poignant. What all these instances of crying have in common is not sadness, but significance.

Social Tears

Crying is not merely a private affair. Tears may serve a number of social functions. In particular, they may serve to convey our emotions while emphasising their depth and sincerity; draw attention, sympathy, and assistance at a time of danger, distress, or need; and serve as a signal of appeasement, dependency, or attachment. If someone cries in our presence, it is almost impossible not to be moved, even changed, by that. No surprise, then, that tears can also be used to manipulate and deceive. The younger you are, the better you know this.

Healthy Tears

In ancient and mediaeval times, physicians believed that crying purged excess humours from the body. This idea survives in the modern scientific notion that emotional tears serve to excrete stress-related substances such as ACTH. But the more important purgation is, of course, psychological.

Crying may help us to feel better, in particular, by enabling us to experience, express, and ‘process’ our emotions. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that tragedy, by arousing emotions such as pity and fear, brings about a catharsis—a purgation or purification—of such emotions. After crying, we may feel not better exactly, but differently: calmer, clearer, more reconciled to life, or simply more certain of who we are and where we stand.

Crying as a Way of Knowing

Emotional tears signal moments that are of existential importance in our lives. They tell us that something matters deeply. Sometimes we know what that something is—the death of a parent, the birth of a child—but at other times our tears seem to know before we do, and to arrive bearing a message.

Imagine that a relationship or friendship has broken down. Three months later, or even three years later, you sit down on a park bench and unexpectedly begin to cry. Those tears tell you something that you may not have known, something that you may have been guarding against: that you still miss the relationship, and that it mattered more than you realised. The tragedy is when the other person also has their park bench moment, but neither of you acts upon it.

Thirty years, gone like that.

We do not always cry because we know what matters to us. Sometimes we know what matters to us because we cry. In this sense, crying can be a way of knowing, revealing deeper truths that reason, thought, and language cannot reach. It sometimes happens that we cry without quite knowing why. When that happens, we should ask ourselves: What does this mean? What is the more refined part of me trying to tell me?

What brings us to tears changes as we change. A child might cry because they are underwhelmed by their Christmas presents. The sadness is real because, at that age, the presents really do matter. As we mature, the objects of our tears change along with our hierarchy of values. We cry less at the frustration of our immediate desires, and more at an unexpected kindness, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, an abstract value like dignity or freedom, or the human condition.

We cry for our ex not merely because we can’t have them, but because they can’t have us.

Because without us, how on earth will they cope?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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The Physiology, Psychology, and Philosophy of Wine Tasting

Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913). The mind at work.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

What happens when a novice and an expert taste wine? Is it simply a matter of the wine impressing itself onto their senses? Or does the expert enjoy a different wine?

To answer this question, we need to begin with the biology of taste.

The Physiology of Wine Tasting

Our sense of taste arises from specialised sensory cells in taste buds on the tongue, hard and soft palate, and pharynx. There are around five thousand taste buds in the mouth, each with fifty to one hundred of these sensory cells, or chemoreceptors. Together, these chemoreceptors enable us to distinguish five basic or fundamental tastes: alkaloids and other compounds as bitterness, sugars as sweetness, salts as saltiness, acids as sourness, and amino acids as umami or savouriness. Although some parts of the tongue are more sensitive to certain tastes than others, the ‘tongue map’ that divides the tongue into discrete tasting areas very much overstates the case.

Chemical sense of taste is supported by the physical and chemical sensation of the liquid in the mouth, or mouthfeel. The physical sense of touch, which is responsive to dissolved particles as small as three microns, transmits the texture and temperature of the wine through specialised mechanoreceptors and thermoreceptors. The prickle of dissolved carbon dioxide is conveyed by chemesthesis, the same sense or sensibility by which chemical irritants such as chilli or mustard register their fieriness—not through taste, but through provocation.

Sense of smell, or olfaction—which is even more important—is triggered by airborne chemicals acting on olfactory receptors on the tiny hair-like cilia of olfactory receptor neurons in the nasal epithelium. The axons of these olfactory receptor neurons form the olfactory nerve (cranial nerve I), which courses up through the sieve-like cribriform plate of the skull to synapse in the olfactory bulb of the brain. There are around four hundred types of olfactory receptor, which, through a form of combinatorial processing, are capable of discerning several thousand aromas. Sensitivity to aromas can differ significantly, both from one aroma to another and from one individual to the next, with some aromas detectable in concentrations one hundred million times smaller than others.

The olfactory apparatus can be stimulated orthonasally, through the nostrils, or retronasally, from within the mouth and pharynx. Much ‘tasting’ actually takes place retronasally, which is why a runny nose can leave our food and wine tasting of cardboard.

What we call ‘taste’ is therefore much more than taste: it is also touch, temperature, chemesthesis, and, above all, olfaction. But this still leaves out the most important organ of all: the brain.

The Psychology of Wine Tasting

The ‘flavour’ of a wine is an integrated interpretation by the brain of all the various sensory stimuli detailed above. Upon tasting the wine, the brain experiences a sensory overload, whence the difficulty in picking out individual aromas and flavours. To ease its task, it relies heavily on preconceptions (including injurious ones, i.e. prejudices), context, and memory to inform its interpretation of the sensory stimuli.

The effect of expectation is so strong that, if a white wine with an aroma of lemons and apples is dyed red with food colourings, most people will describe red berry aromas; and if an ordinary table wine is served in a bottle labelled ‘Grand Cru’, most people will praise it as ‘balanced’, ‘complex’, and such-like.

The olfactory bulb is closely connected to the limbic system, an area of the brain linked with emotions and memories. Smells and tastes can trigger strong emotions and vivid memories that bias our perception of the wine. Conversely, our emotional state affects our appreciation of sensory stimuli, which explains why wine tastes better in good company or why champagne has it easy.

Blind tasting can help us overcome all these biases, first, by removing a number of their sources, and, second, by inviting us to focus on the wine itself. Paradoxically, by depriving ourselves of cues—grape variety, region, vintage, price, reputation, memories associated with the wine—we become a lot more attentive to the information that remains.

The Philosophy of Wine Tasting

In engaging with a wine, blind tasters activate not only the limbic system, but also areas of the brain responsible for cognition, which is a conscious, higher-order function. This process can be assisted and developed by writing tasting notes that seek to accurately describe the sensations produced by the wine. Given the limitations of language in accurately describing our sensations, this, like writing poetry, is no mean feat.

Nonetheless, language is by far the best tool at our disposal for communicating our experiences to others and, indeed, to ourselves. The practice of consciously describing the sensations produced by wine trains the mind and, over time, makes it much easier to taste and think about taste. As Wittgenstein famously remarked, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’

But does the language of wine merely enable us to describe what we taste, or does it enable us to taste more in the first place? Learning to taste involves learning what to attend to, how to discriminate, how to compare, and how to remember. What was once an undifferentiated sensation gradually resolves into parts, patterns, and relationships. Language does not merely label the world: often it helps us to notice it.

Although some people do have a higher density of taste buds, this does not necessarily make them better wine tasters. To use a computing analogy, tasting is not so much a function of the hardware (the sensory apparatus) as it is of the software (the mind or brain). That’s why I often say we taste far more with our brains than with our mouth and nose. Regardless of the sensitivity of their tasting apparatus, untutored tasters struggle to ‘get their head round’ more complex wines, and, as a result, derive greater enjoyment from simpler wines.

Just as an untrained ear can struggle with complex music, an untutored palate can struggle with complex wine. To the beginner, it can seem as though the more experienced tasters are making it up. But with enough experience and training, almost anyone can turn into a wine expert.

Think again of Kandinsky’s Composition VII. To an untutored eye, it can seem like a bewildering profusion of colours and forms. With sustained attention, relationships, rhythms, tensions, and depths begin to emerge. The painting has not changed.

If a novice comes to dinner, open something you can both enjoy. But keep your best Burgundy for experienced tasters such as me.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting.

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A Psychiatrist’s Three-Step Test for Self-Deception

Woman looking into mirror.
Can you trust what you see?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Some time after the publication of Hide and Seek, I received a letter from a reader, asking:

Are common, ordinary things like seeing the bright side, a silver lining, or an opportunity in misfortune just feeble rationalisations to help us live in a comfortable illusion? Your example about ‘sweet lemons’, a rejected love interest explained away as a blessing in disguise doesn’t feel to me as an illusory or self-deceptive belief. If a cancer patient is glad that they can respect life more fully after getting sick, surely they’re not just dwelling in self-deception and rationalising away things, clinging to some mistaken belief.

Could you clear things up a little about the murky world of self-deception? It’s true that someone rejected for a job opening might say that they’re ‘keeping doors open’, that they got ‘life experience’ or that setbacks are a part of life, and this would allow them to feel better, but I’ve never considered this to be some sort of self-deception.

I replied: 

That’s a very good question. How do we know when we’re deceiving ourselves, rather than learning or growing from our experiences, or just making the best out of a bad situation? By its very nature, self-deception is hard to distinguish from the truth—whether our internal, emotional truth, or the external, objective truth.

That a belief comforts us does not make it false; that it pains us does not make it true. What matters is whether we arrived at the belief because it fits the facts, or because we need the facts to fit the belief.

To establish the direction of fit between your beliefs and the world, here are three tests you can apply.

1. Feel It

First, trust your intuition, and ask yourself: ‘What does it feel like to react in the way that I’m reacting?’ Does it feel calm, considered, and nuanced, or shallow and knee-jerk? Am I taking the welfare of others into consideration, or is it just all about me? Am I satisfied with, even proud of, my self-conquering effort, or am I left feeling small, anxious, and a little ashamed?

2. Test It

Try to falsify the belief—that is, to prove yourself wrong. Self-deception doesn’t ‘add up’ in the grand scheme and can often be brought down by even superficial questioning. As with a jigsaw, try to look at the bigger picture of your life and see how the belief or reaction might fit in. Did you react from a position of strength or vulnerability? What would the person you most respect think? What would Socrates think? Ask others for their opinion. If they challenge or disagree with you, does that make you feel angry, upset, or defensive? The nature of your reaction and its congruity can speak volumes about the character of your motives.

3. Project It

Finally, project the belief into the future and consider where it is likely to lead. Truth is constructive and adaptive, whereas lies are destructive or self-defeating. So how useful is the thought or reaction going to be for you? Are you just covering up an irrational fear to get by, or creating a solid foundation for the future? Are you empowering yourself to fulfil your highest potential, or depriving yourself of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the line?

Is the cycle simply going to repeat itself, or will the truth, at last, make you free?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Scapegoating

The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854).
The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The ego defence of displacement plays an important part in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, frustration, envy, guilt, shame, and insecurity are displaced or redirected onto another, often more vulnerable, person or group.

The scapegoats—often outsiders, immigrants, minorities, ‘deviants’, or other vulnerable groups—are then persecuted, enabling the scapegoaters to discharge and distract from their uncomfortable feelings, which are replaced or overtaken by a crude but consoling sense of affirmation and self-righteous indignation. The creation of a villain necessarily implies that of a hero, even if both are purely fictional.

Sometimes it is the villain, or villains, who are in need of an even greater villain. Especially in a time of crisis, unscrupulous leaders and politicians can cynically exploit the ancient and deep-rooted impulse to scapegoat to deflect and distract from their own inadequacies and evade, or seek to evade, their burden of blame and responsibility.

The Ideal Scapegoat

An ideal scapegoat, whether a person or group, is sufficiently different to be blamed, sufficiently conspicuous to be noticed, and sufficiently vulnerable to be attacked.

A historical example of a scapegoat is Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI of France, whom the people called l’Autre-chienne—a pun playing on Autrichienne [Austrian woman] and autre chienne [other bitch]—and accused of being profligate and promiscuous. When the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette arrived in France to marry the then heir to the throne, the country had already been near-bankrupted by the reckless spending of Louis XV, and the naïve foreign princess soon became the unwitting target of the people’s mounting ire.

A scapegoat, such as Marie Antoinette, need not be entirely innocent. Indeed, some impression of guilt may make for a better scapegoat, providing a hook on which to hang greater grievances.

A scapegoat is often a person or group, but can also be an object, animal, or spirit. In fact, even human scapegoats are no longer regarded as fully human but are to varying degrees dehumanised and objectified. Some, such as witches and midwives in mediaeval Europe, are quite literally demonised. The dehumanisation of the scapegoat—which might, in the process, be transformed into a sacred or ritual object—makes the scapegoating both more potent and more palatable, and can even lend it a sense of pre-ordained, cosmic inevitability.

The Madness of the Crowds

According to the philosopher René Girard (d. 2015), owing to our crooked nature, envy gradually builds up in a society until it reaches a tipping point, at which order and reason cede to mob rule, chaos, and violence. To quell this ‘madness of the crowds’ which poses an existential threat to the society, an exposed or vulnerable person or group is singled out as a sink for all the bad feeling, and the bad feeling bred from the bad feeling. The scapegoat does not merely absorb aggression, but unites the aggressors and reduces their diffuse problems to a single, visible face.

After the defeat of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens in 403 BCE, Socrates, with his close links to prominent oligarchs such as Critias, who had been the first and worst among the Thirty, no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation made against him, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for the sufferings of the tyranny. The trial and death of Socrates, as related in Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, still makes for compelling reading.

Once he is no more, a scapegoat may be totemised—and all the more so if he is also a martyr, that is, one who opposes or resists a belief or system of beliefs that is being imposed upon him. Today, Socrates is chiefly remembered by his death, with the Stoic Seneca going so far as to opine that ‘it was the hemlock that made Socrates great’ (cicuta magnum Socratem fecit). Socrates himself seems to have anticipated his totemisation, which is one reason he accepted the death sentence even though he could have avoided it, or later escaped. In Plato’s Apology, he seems almost to court death.

The Ultimate Scapegoat

The term ‘scapegoat’ is rooted in the Old Testament, more specifically, in Chapter 16 of the Book of Leviticus, according to which God instructed Moses and Aaron to sacrifice two goats every year. The first goat was to be sacrificed and its blood sprinkled upon the Ark of the Covenant. The High Priest was then to lay his hands upon the head of the second goat and confess the sins of the people. Unlike the first goat, this second goat was not to be killed but released into the wilderness together with its burden of sin, which is why it came to be known as a, or the, scapegoat.

The altar that stands in the sanctuary of every church is a symbolic remnant and reminder of this sacrificial practice, with the ultimate object of sacrifice being, of course, Jesus himself. Upon seeing Jesus for the first time, John the Baptist is said to have exclaimed, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ (John 1:29). In Christian iconography, Christ is often depicted as the victorious Lamb of God of the Book of Revelation, with one leg hooked around a banner with a red cross—whence the name of one of Oxford’s most famous public houses, the Lamb & Flag.

The sacrifice prescribed in the Book of Leviticus prefigures that of Jesus, who played the role of the first goat in his human crucifixion, and the role of the second goat, the scapegoat, in his divine resurrection.

Scapegoating is so ingrained in our nature that we scapegoated God himself.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology and Self-Deception and Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Pain Is a Feeling but not an Emotion. Love Can Be Both.

Woman looking at herself in a mirror

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In brief, an emotion is an enduring psychological state, while a feeling is a conscious experience. An emotion such as love can give rise to many different feelings, while some feelings, such as pain, are not emotions at all.

‘Emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are often confused and assimilated. Even when they are distinguished, psychologists disagree about what they are. This is more than a quarrel over words. Unless we get the distinction right, we cannot meaningfully discuss our emotional lives.

What Emotions and Feelings Are Not

Many people use ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ as if they were exact synonyms. But this obscures an important distinction between an emotion and the conscious experience, or ‘feeling’, of that emotion.

Some experts go almost to the opposite extreme, defining an emotion as an automatic bodily response and a feeling as the conscious experience or interpretation of that response. But this is to confuse an emotion with its physiological manifestations. A racing heart is no more an emotion than tears are grief. The same bodily changes can accompany very different emotions, or no emotion at all, as during exercise or illness. Conversely, it is not clear that every emotion need involve appreciable bodily changes.

Other experts distinguish emotions from feelings chiefly on the basis of consciousness, treating an emotion as unconscious and a feeling as its conscious counterpart. This is much closer to the mark, but still conflates an emotion with the experience of that emotion—and leaves unexplained the many feelings, such as hunger and pain, that are not emotions at all.

Much of the confusion arises because behind these two words lie not two concepts but four: emotional experiences, emotions or sentiments, traits, and feelings. If you’re a philosopher and didn’t want to get hung up on words, you could just call them A, B, C, and D.

The Example of Pride

If I say, ‘I am grateful’, I could mean one of three things: that I am currently feeling grateful for something; that I generally feel grateful for that thing; or that I am a grateful kind of person.

Similarly, if I say, ‘I am proud’, I could mean that I am currently feeling proud about something, that I generally feel proud about that thing, or that I am a proud kind of person. 

Let’s agree to call the first instance (currently feeling proud about something) an emotional experience, the second instance (generally feeling proud about that thing) an emotion or sentiment, and the third instance (being a proud kind of person), a trait.

It is common to confuse these three instances, especially the first and the second. But whereas an emotional experience is brief and episodic, an emotion—which may or may not result from accreted emotional experiences—can perdure for many years, and, in that time, predispose to a variety of emotional experiences, as well as thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions. For instance, love can give rise not only to amorous feelings, but also to joy, grief, rage, longing, and jealousy, among others.

That’s why we can tell someone that we love them even while we are furious with them. In fact, the fury, which is the emotional experience, may arise out of the love, which is the enduring emotion. Whereas if love existed solely when we were consciously feeling it, we would fall in and out of love many times a day.

So What Is the Difference Between a Feeling and an Emotion?

Now that we have our terminology in place, we are in a much better position to distinguish between an emotion and a feeling. 

An emotional experience, by virtue of being a conscious experience, is necessarily a feeling, as are physical sensations such as hunger, fullness, or pain.

Notice, however, that not all conscious experiences are also feelings, not, for example, believing or seeing—presumably because they lack a somatic, or bodily, dimension.

In contrast, an emotion, being in some sense latent, can only ever be felt, sensu stricto, through the emotional experiences to which it gives rise, even though it may also be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions.

Thus, every emotional experience is a feeling, but not every feeling is an emotional experience. Pain is a feeling but not an emotion. Love can be both: we can be feeling love in the moment as a conscious emotional experience, while more enduringly being ‘in love’.

This is also why a feeling cannot simply be an interpretation of bodily changes: we do not have to interpret pain for it to hurt.

Now Let’s Start Talking

Now that we are conceptually clear about emotions, emotional experiences, feelings, and traits, we can start talking about our emotional lives without contradicting ourselves at every turn.

For example, because emotions need not themselves be conscious, some emotions, such as hating one’s mother or coveting one’s same-sex friend, might only be recognised after several years in psychotherapy.

If an emotion remains unconscious, this is often by repression or some more elaborate form of self-deception which builds upon repression.

Self-deception can also take place at the level of an emotional experience, commonly by misrepresenting the type or intensity of the emotional experience or misattributing its object or cause. Thus, envy is often construed as indignation, and Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others) as sympathy. Fear of ghosts or ‘the dark’ is almost certainly fear of death, since people who have come to terms with death are hardly afraid of such things.

Thus, we can feel something without knowing quite what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, or even whom or what we are really feeling it about.

Emotions as Ways of Seeing

Beyond this, it could be argued that even the purest and most accurate of emotions is inherently self-deceptive in so far as it lends weight in our experience to one thing, or some things, over others, thereby clouding our perspective and the ‘bigger picture’. In that much, emotions are not objective or neutral perceptions, but subjective ‘ways of seeing’ that reflect our particular, contingent needs and preoccupations.

The lover notices what every other overlooks; the coward sees danger where another finds opportunity. To understand our emotions—and the relations between A, B, C, and D—is not merely to understand how we feel, but how we see the world—and ourselves in it.

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