More and Less Exciting Things

Universal patterns in language and behavior reveal that pairs of psychological opposites are structured such that one component is more arousing than the other.

What, was he sad, or merry?
Like to the time o’ the year between the extremes
Of hot and cold, he was nor sad nor merry.

— Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (2022)

Perceptual heat, fluidity, motion, speed, disorder, brightness, the so-called “warmer” colors red, orange and yellow, sound, loudness, high pitch, upwardness, outwardness, the left side, spikiness, length, large size, large numbers of things and novelty tend to be more exciting to animals than their opposites: coldness, solidness, stasis, slowness, order, darkness, the “cooler” colors purple, blue and green, silence, quietness, low pitch, downwardness, inwardness, the right side, roundness, small size, small numbers of things and familiarity.

These qualities, listed below, make up psychological dualities that we appear to distinguish, understand and appreciate by way of differences in how they influence the temperature of the brain, sometimes directly so in the case of heat and cold, otherwise indirectly by way of sensory signals and the level of neurological excitation they convey.

More exciting things (list 1): heat, fluidity, dynamism, speed, disorder, brightness, warm colors, sound, loudness, high pitch, upwardness, outwardness, the left side, length, spikiness, large size, multiplicity, novelty.

Less exciting things (list 2): coldness, solidness, stasis, slowness, order, darkness, cool colors, silence, quietness, low pitch, downwardness, inwardness, the right side, roundness, shortness, small size, small numbers, familiarity.

The qualities in list 1 and their conceptual relatives are used figuratively to describe higher states of arousal like anger, passion, happiness, humor, intoxication and insanity, and often to mean excitement itself, in addition to their literal meanings. They stand for impropriety, disobedience, disagreement, informality, generality, effortlessness (easiness), fantasy, uncertainty, dominance, danger, evil and lies, and they’re used euphemistically to counter the unexcitingness of death, loss and other unpleasant events, more so at least than the qualities in list 2 and their conceptual relatives, which tend to denote less excitement and lower arousal states like sadness, boredom, seriousness, sobriety and sanity. List 2 qualities describe rules, laws, difficulty (hardness), reality, certainty, knowledge, agreement, formality, specificity, submission, safety, goodness and the truth, and they counter the unpleasantness of overly exciting behavior and situations.

Thus, pairs of more recently derived conceptual opposites are organized in the mind according to the same system of differential excitement that animals have been using for millions of years to understand each other and their surroundings. Primitive perceptual opposites function something like an operating system of the mind, with higher level concepts relying on them to “make sense.”

List 1 and 2 qualities delineate extremely primitive sensory abilities, those we use to comprehend temperature, texture, motion, light, color, sound, shape and direction. They can be experienced by all animals with appropriate sensory systems. Mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, arthropods, mollusks and others, some of our most distant animal relatives, probably think of them as opposites just as we do. A connection between sensory system structure and preferences can explain why so many different species exhibit such similar aesthetic inclinations. Birds and humans, for instance, are both amused by song, dance, contrasting coloration and flowers.

There are, of course, more and less exciting things to be considered apart from those listed above. Some also represent primitive opposites (e.g., forward versus backward, front versus back, peripheral versus central, expansion versus contraction, freedom versus confinement), while others are more recently derived: evil versus good, soul versus body, win versus lose, irrational versus rational, id versus ego, free will versus determinism, fluid versus crystallized intelligence and so on.

Some concepts that have no apparent opposites can nevertheless be shown to fit into one or the other excitement category. Time, names, money, skin, math, thought and the mind are this way, for example, all of them falling on the less exciting side. Dreams and magic are examples on the more exciting side. Animals can be put into more and less exciting categories based on the degree to which they express list 1 and list 2 qualities: mobility, coloration patterns, the volume and pitch of vocalizations, the length and spikiness versus roundness of their bodies and so on. Sensory systems themselves are evidently differentiated by levels of excitement, with visual stimuli being more exciting than auditory and olfactory stimuli, although this doesn’t necessarily apply to certain species.

For almost every pair of opposites that we recognize universally, it’s easy to determine that one component is more exciting than the other. In fact, there seem to be many more psychological dualities to which this applies than there are exceptions, and the more universal and primitive the opposites are the more obvious it is that one is more exciting. The idea applies so widely that it’s reasonable to conclude differential excitement has something to do with the way sensory systems work, that it occurs inevitably and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between opposites without it.

One could imagine perceptual abilities having aesthetic side effects in the form of biases that persist despite being adaptively neutral, or even detrimental but negligibly so compared to the benefits of seeing, hearing, and knowing the difference between wet and dry, motion and stasis, night and day, sound and silence, long and round, up and down, out and in and so on.

Cultural phenomena, animals bodies and behaviors evolve and develop through aesthetic selection to express perceptual structures that juxtapose list 1 and list 2 qualities, as opposed to taking on forms that combine qualities within a particular list, and rather than having a random structure with respect to opposites. Aesthetic decisions in biology and culture select for mixtures of more and less exciting things, or for moderation with respect to the degree of arousal conveyed by shapes, coloration patterns, movements, sounds, sequences of concepts and other phenomena.