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.

Linguistic Patterns

'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die- to sleep.
To sleep- perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

— Shakespeare, Hamlett (2022)

Linguistic patterns demonstrate differential excitement between list 1 and list 2 qualities. For example, we call undesirably ordinary or unexciting things “cold,” “icy” (cold/solid), “dry” (solid), “stale” (solid), “stiff” (solid), “tired” (stasis), “slow,” “lifeless” (static), “tame” (orderly), “square” (order), “flat” (order), “lackluster” (dark), “drab,” “ho-hum” (low pitch), “meh” (low pitch), “monotonous” (orderly sound), “underwhelming” (down), “boring” (inward), “dull” (not spiky/round), “small” and “ordinary” (order/familiar), despite the lack of a consistent, outwardly observable reason to do so, and as if they fail to satisfy a desire for some amount of heat, fluidity, dynamism, disorder, brightness, high pitch, variation, spikiness, large size and outwardness, which represent higher excitement in “things are heating up,” “a fever pitch” (heat), “on cloud nine” (fluid/multiple), “boiling over” (hot/fluid/up), “blood was boiling” (red/fluid/hot), “make a splash,” “get a rush” (speed), “earth shaking” (dynamic), “earth shattering” (disorder), “cracked up” (disorder/up), “all hell broke loose” (many/hot/disorder/free), “bright and breezy” (bright/fluid), “beaming” (light/happy), “tickled pink” (bright), “rosy” (red), “red hot” (bright/red), “buzzing” (high pitch), “alarmed” (loud/high pitch), “riled up,” “shook up” (dynamic/up), “sensory overload” (over/up), “freaking out,” “blown away” (away/outward), “on pins and needles” (spiky), “a big deal” (large size), “swell” (size increase) and “no small matter.”

Hundreds of examples of expressions like those above are listed in the following section: Differential Excitement in Language, along with those supporting the other suggested connections between primitive perceptual qualities and more derived concepts, which can be stated metaphorically, as in: anger and passion are hot, uncertainty and humor are fluid-like, insanity is outward and disorderly, certainty is solid and orderly, happiness is upward and bright, sadness is downward and dark, dominance is higher, submission is lower, difficulty is hard, lies are smoke and so on.

The given patterns evolve and persist in languages because their contents and meanings are psychologically congruent. Our interpretation of them is aligned with preexisting expectations. They have aesthetic value because they conform with categories that exist in the mind from birth, such as those defined by lists 1 and 2. Calling something in list 1 by the name of something else in the same list automatically makes sense and gives us a type of satisfaction, and the same goes for the qualities in list 2. “Boiling blood” makes sense because the qualities heat, disorder, redness and fluidity are all associated, congruently, in a mental category of higher excitement that also contains the idea of anger. “Take it with a grain of salt” makes sense because inwardness (taking), smallness, singularity and solidness are all congruently associated in a category with lack of excitement.

The pattern in which list 1 qualties denote higher excitement and list 2 qualties denote lower excitement is in contrast to incongruent expressions that juxtapose opposites, which have aesthetic value because they contradict expectations. These are part of a second, equally important linguistic pattern, which is addressed in the section Aesthetic Mixtures. They include expressions like “take it with a huge grain of salt,” which adds large size to the original, in contradiction to the concept that something as small as a salt grain is insignificant. The variation “take it with a bunch of grains of salt” adds multiplicity to make a mixture, although the phrase is still predominantly unexciting. It’s common for phrases to evolve this way, to include additional qualities from the opposite mental category, which compensate for the original, unmixed content. The attractiveness of contradiction is why we say things like “awfully good,” “old news,” “seriously funny,” “same difference,” “more is less” and “bittersweet.” In each saying one component is more exciting, respectively awfulness, newness, funniness, differentness, more and sweetness.

As an example of the distinction between a congruent and contradictory expression, “bored to death,” a literal, congruence-based metaphor, amuses us by reflecting the particularly universal idea that death is less exciting than life, while “thrilled to death,” an ironic, contradiction-based idiom, amuses us as well, in this case by the way it creates a contrast between differentially exciting things. The expression “dead asleep” is based on congruence because sleep, in terms of arousal, is closer to death than being awake. Shakespeare uses our collective understanding of this to be entertaining in the opening quote, while his suggestion that death is “Devoutly to be wish'd,” and brings unknown dreams, makes the lines overall a complicated mixture.

Aesthetic congruences and contradictions describe a significant portion of the structure of human language. Idioms can be sorted into one or the other type, and similar numbers seem to fall into each category, but the incidence of the contradictory type (mixtures) is higher in poetry, lyrics, the names of paintings, songs, fictional stories and other material specifically created to be aesthetically pleasing.

Because congruent expressions contain two or more references to phenomena in the same mental category, they can be thought of as combining qualities or concepts that reinforce each other, either on the more or less exciting side, while contradictory expressions can be thought of as mixtures, with the components counteracting each other to some extent and resulting in relative moderation with respect to arousal.

“Dead calm,” “dead silence” and “dead of night” are congruent idioms (combinations), based in part on unconscious associations between list 1 qualities and death. People are well aware that calmness, quiet and darkness are different from being dead. No one is actually mistaking one for the other, but they make more sense to us than mixtures of death like “dead restless,” “dead loud” and “dead of day.” The latter expressions, although they don’t exist, happen to be very close in their structure to some that do: “the quick and the dead,” “loud enough to wake the dead,” “die laughing,” and “Day of the Dead.”

Some idioms are made up primarily of references to things from the same excitement category, but they refer to something in the opposite category, making them contradictory overall despite the congruence of their content. “Ride off into the sunset” is exciting in its references to motion, outwardness and the sun, but it’s made less so by its meaning, to die. The contradiction between its content and meaning is at least part of the reason it’s popular. The phrase itself is actually a composition of dynamism (ride), outwardness (off), inwardness (into), heat (sun), brightness (sun) and downwardness (set), giving it a four to two balance of excitement before accounting for however unexciting it is due to meaning death. Death euphamisms are generally structured this way, using qualities from the more exciting side of primitive perceptual dimensions to make it sound a little more satisfying. Curiously, along with dynamism, outwardness is one of the most common qualities in list 2 that happens to be used this way. We speak of the deceased, which is Latin for “going away,” as if they’ve travelled outward, “departed,” “gone to the great beyond,” “passed away,” “crossed over,” or, in Shakespeare’s famous quote, “shuffled off.”

Thus, one can identify two major patterns in language that appear to originate through distinct mechanisms, although both of them are related to arousal. One is made up of combinations that amuse us because they vindicate universal associations. Another, evidently more amusing pattern, is made up of expressions that do just the opposite, violating the same associations. The former pattern is demonstrated in the following section, and the later in Monoaesthetic Mixtures.

Differential Excitement in Language

The following lists give examples of common expressions that connect list 1 and 2 qualities to more or less excitement, as proposed above, to higher and lower arousal emotions (e.g., anger, sexuality, happiness, intoxication, insanity, depression, sadness, boredom, sobriety and sanity), and to the concepts of truth, lies, fantasy, reality, humor, seriousness and so on.

Expressions that demonstrate mental categories are included. For example “lower your voice,” “quiet down,” “deep voice” and “keep it down” connect the list 2 qualities of quietness and low pitch to downwardness (quiet/low pitch=down). The lists are laid out so that qualities from list 1 alternate with their opposites from list 2. Some of the expressions are followed by descriptions of their meanings, in parentheses, especially if the meaning isn’t well known.

Heat and Coldness

Heat (39): a flame (romantic relationship), a hot date, a hotbed, a hotspot, a short fuse (excitable), a smoke show (sexuality), add fuel to the fire (more/fluid/hot), all fired up, ball of fire (energetic), barnburner (exciting), blow a fuse (anger), breathing fire (angry=fluid/hot), burning desire (heat=sexuality), burning with rage (heat=anger), fan the flames, fired up (excited), five-alarm fire, furious (heat=anger), he/she is hot (sexuality), heated argument, hothead (excitable), hot damn, hot diggity dog, hot-tempered (anger), in heat (sexuality), in hot water, in the hot seat, inflame the situation (excitement), inflammatory, playing with fire, spitting fire (angry=fluid/hot/out), temper tantrum, the heat of passion (sexuality), things are heating up, torrid romance, steam coming out of the ears (fluid/out~in), in the heat of the moment, emit smoke from seven orifices (fluid/many/out, Chinese idiom), heat wave (heat=fluidity), too hot to handle, sell like hotcakes (heat=fast).

Cold (23): a cool head (calmness), chill, chill out, chillin, cool calm and collected, cold comfort, cool as a cucumber (calmness), cool down (calmness), play it cool, cool your heels (slow down), cool your jets (calm down), lower the temperature (calm down), out cold (unconscious), cold shoulder (indifference), cold as ice (unemotional), cold fish (unemotional), in the cold light of day (reality), chillax (cold=calm).

Fluidity and Solidness

Fluidity (65): add fuel to the fire, all gas and gaiters (nonsense), bad blood (disagreement), before the wind (fast), blood was boiling (anger), blow air with the bellows (a Spanish idiom for sex), blow it out of the water, blow off steam, blow smoke (lie), blow the lid off, blow your top (anger), blown out of proportion, boil over (intense emotions), breeze away (speed), cause a stir (cause excitement), cooking with gas (speed), cream of the crop, don't make waves, drooling over, fan the flames, foaming at the mouth, full of piss and vinegar (energetic), fuming (angry), gaining steam (more/fluid), gaslighting (dishonesty), get a second wind (energy), gushing, have a gas, have a meltdown, have the wind up (be anxious), huffing and puffing (upset), in full flow (fast), juicy, lickety split (fast), mad as a wet hen (anger), make a splash (exciting), on cloud nine, open the floodgates, out for blood (anger), outpouring, pleased as punch, simmer down, sleazy (sexuality), slick as a whistle (high pitch), smoke-show (sexuality), souped-up, sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, spitting fire (very angry), spitting mad (very angry), steam your beam (very angry), steamy (sexuality), stewing (angry), stir things up a little, stir up trouble, take my breath away, take the wind out of your sails, the calm before the storm, trouble is brewing, turbulent times, waiting with bated breath, walking on air (ecstatic), weak sauce, where there's smoke there's fire, windmills in your head (crazy), winds of change (fluidity=novelty).

Solidness/Dryness (18): bone idle (stasis), carved in stone (certain), crystal clear (certain), feel it in my bones (certain), hard times (difficulty), hard-pressed (difficulty), home and dry (ending), like watching paint dry (boring), bored stiff, rock bottom, solid argument (reality), solid as a rock (stability), hard as nails (unsentimental), hard-nosed (realistic), the hard way (difficult), dry as dust (boring), es un peñazo: “it is a big rock” meaning boring in Spanish, 따분하다: “stale” meaning extremely boring in Korean.

Dynamism, Speed, Stasis and Slowness

Dynamism and speed (21): a fast temper (anger), a quick temper (anger), actions speak louder than words (dynamism=loudness), all shook up (many/dynamic/up), drive me crazy (dynamism/disorder), drive me wild (dynamism/disorder), emotional (motion), flip out (dynamic/out), get a rush (excited), get some action (sexuality), go crazy (dynamic/disorder), go for broke (dynamic/disorder), go hog wild (dynamic/disorder), go mad, go nuts, raring to go, life in the fast lane (exciting life), riding high, running amok, running roughshod, time flies when your having fun (fun=speed).

Stasis and slowness (10): bored to death (unexciting), dead on (correct), dead set (certain=stasis), no great shakes, slow (boring), slow your roll (calm down), slow on the uptake (unintelligent), a bit slow (unintelligent), unmoved (unexcited), snooze fest (boring).

Disorder and Order

Disorder (50): a firecracker, a crook (impropriety), a smash hit, banging, bend the truth (falsehood=disorder), daybreak (bright=disorder), break of day (bright=disorder), crack of dawn (bright=disorder), break into song (sound=disorder), break the rules (impropriety=disorder), bursting at the seams, bust a nut (sexuality), bust up, by cracky (surprise), crack a smile (happiness=disorder), crack the whip, crackhead (intoxication), crackpot (insanity), deranged (insanity), dirty language (impropriety=disorder) dirty rat (offensive), dirty trick (dishonesty), don’t twist my arm (annoyance), get all bent out of shape, get bent (offensive), get cracking (energy), get dirty (sexuality), get freaky (sexuality), get kinky (sexuality), get nasty (sexuality), having a blast, in your wildest dreams, just for a twist (novelty=disorder), let it rip (dynamism=disorder), like gangbusters (energetic), loose cannon, make a crack, nervous breakdown, not all it’s cracked up to be (not that exciting), on a tear (speed=disorder), play dirty (dishonesty), read the riot act, rough you up, shaken up, storming mad, twist the truth (lies), twisted, wisecrack, with a twist (novelty=disorder), wrongheaded (falsehood=disorder), you’re cracking me up (humor).

Order (11) a clear conscience (goodness), come clean (truth), conscience is clean (goodness), even-keeled, get square (fairness), level-headed (calm), on the level (honest), on the square (honest), shape up (goodness=order), straighten up, with clear eyes (reality).

Brightness, Darkness, Warm and Cool Colors

Brightness and warm colors (16): a heavy purse makes a light heart (lightness=happiness), all moonlight and roses (many/light/red=positive), all sweetness and light, bedazzled, bright and breezy, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (bright/spiky), dazzled, eyes light up, in its heyday, it dawned on me (bright=novel), light at the end of the tunnel (positive), light up the room, light-hearted, lighten the mood, like a red flag to a bull (anger), newsflash, tickled pink (excited), red hot (exciting), see through rose-tinted glasses (optimism).

Darkness and cool colors (6): baby blues, dark times, dark days, darken the mood (sad=dark), feel blue (blue=sad), have the blues (sad), dead of night (darkness=stasis), broyer du noir: “crush some dark” in French meaning to feel very depressed, verlo todo negro: “see everything dark” in Spanish meaning pessimistic and negative.

Sound, Loudness, High Pitch, Silence, Quietness and Low Pitch

Sound, loudness and high pitch (16): alarmed, alarming, all cry and no wool (many/loud/high-pitched), all horns and rattles (spiky/loud/high-pitched), barking mad (crazy), buzzing, mad as a hornet, no screaming hell (not exciting), on the fiddle (dishonest), rattled, uproar (up/loud=excitement), whistling Dixie (optimistic), whistling in the dark (optimistic), whistling past the graveyard (optimistic), ticked off, with bells on, no big whoop (not exciting=big/loud).

Silence, quietness and low pitch (6): ho-hum, nothing to shout about, peace and quiet (calm), lower your voice (quiet=downward), quiet down (quiet=downward), keep it down (quiet=downward), a deep voice (low pitch=downward/inward).

Up and Down

Up (50): a bang-up time (up/fun), a blowup (fluid/up/exciting), a toss up (uncertain), above and beyond, all riled up, all shook up (many/dynamic/up), all worked up, all wound up, amped-up, blow your top, crank it up (intensify), fed up, flight of fancy (unrealistic), floating on air (happy), fly off the handle, flying high, get off your high horse (superiority), get your hopes up, go through the roof, high alert, high spirits, high stakes (up/spiky), high strung, hopping mad, I’ve had it up to here, jumping for joy (happiness), on the upside, on top of the world, over done, over the moon (happy), over the top (up/up), overall (generality), overhyped, overwhelming, overzealous, raise the stakes, raising a ruckus, raising hell, raising red flags (up/bright/fluid), riding high, sensory overload (too exciting), super! (excited), suspense (up=uncertain), up in arms, up to no good, upheaval, uplifting (happy), upset (angry), exalted (superiority), escalate.

Down (34): a Debbie downer (sad), a downer (sad), below par, bring down a peg or two, calm down (down/less excitement), dampen down, dial it down (lower the intensity), diddly squat (down=none), down and out, down in the doldrums (sad), down in the dumps (sad), down in the mouth (sad), down on your luck, down trodden, down with (agreement), downplay, drop by (downward=entry), drop in (downward=entry), feeling down, feeling low, hit rock bottom (solid/down), let down (disappointment), low spirits (down~fluid), on the downside, settle down, simmer down, something got you down?, subdued, under the weather, understatement, underwhelming, deescalate, grave (down=death=serious), dead serious (death=serious), sinking feeling (sad=down).

Out and In

Out (13): a bad trip (intense), all shot to hell, away with the fairies (crazy), bliss out, blown away (overwhelmed), blown out of proportion (fluid/out/big), extrovert, far and away, flipping out (dynamic/out), freaking out, jump out of your skin, go all out (dynamic/many/out), out for blood (out/fluid/red=angry), out of it, rip off (disorder/out=dishonest).

In (18): it’s a pity (sad=down/in), bottom of the barrel (down/in=unexciting), come to grips (understand), down in a hole (down/in/in), heart in my boots, in a funk, in the doldrums, in a dark place, from the bottom of my heart (down/in=honest), introvert, keep it down (quiet), pull it back, pull it together, reel it in, shortcomings, stuck in a rut, take it easy (in=calm down), with a heavy heart.

Spikiness, Length and Roundness

Spikiness (11): a barb, a sharp tongue, bristle with rage (angry), my hair stood on end, on pins and needles (excited), prick (insult), prickly, razor sharp (witty), sharp (smart), sharp sound (spiky=high pitch), spike the pinch (spiky=drug use), cortisol spike (spiky=excitement).

Length (5): a long shot (unlikely=long/out), an arm and a leg (many=long), go to any length, go to great lengths, my patience is wearing thin (thin=angry), widespread (general), with a broad brush (general).

Roundness/Dullness (8): cold as balls (coldness=roundness), see eye to eye (agreement), in point of fact (round=real), on point (correct), dull (boring), dull as dishwater (boring), in point of fact (round=true).

Large and Small Size

Large size (11): a big deal (exciting), a whale of a time, a huge deal (exciting), at large (outward), big into, big on, big up, bold, larger than life (dynamism), no small matter (exciting), the big cheese (dominance).

Small size (10): don’t sweat the small stuff, feel small, lay low and sing small, small fry, small time, small talk, small wonder (unsuprising), small potatoes, take it with a grain of salt (in/single/small/solid), the worlds smallest violin.

Multiplicity

More (18): all the rage, at sixes and sevens (craziness), double or nothing, double trouble, double-tongued (deceitful), excessive, extraordinary, feel like a million bucks (happy), from zero to sixty, hit for six (upset), hope springs eternal, in full flow (fast), in full swing (fast), in seventh heaven (happy), like a dog with two tails (very excited), on the double (fast), two-faced (deceitful), utmost.

Less (10): a nothing burger, an empty shell, bar none (certain), emptiness, glass half empty, feel nothing inside, inner void, nothing special, nothing to write home about, too little too late.

Excitement

Using the term “excitement” to describe perceptual qualities has the advantage that it’s descriptive of stimuli and related levels of physical stimulation in the brain at the same time. A bright light, loud sound or rapidly moving object is an exciting stimulus that most likely activates relevant neurons and thereby excites matter in the brain more than darkness, silence, or the same object in a motionless state.

Finding something exciting isn’t the same as liking it, and less excitement, or calmness, is hardly unlikable. In the present context, no value difference is meant to be implied between higher and lower excitement levels. Both can be good or bad depending on the circumstances. In general, we don’t consistently prefer to be excited over being subdued, or vice versa, any more than we always like heat more than coldness or coldness more than heat.

Our feelings depend on whether we’re hot or cold to begin with, on the temperature of our surroundings. If it’s hot we like the idea of coldness and we like heat when it’s cold. This holds for other opposites as well. We’d rather live in a world made up of both red and blue things than one in which everything is either red or blue, or one with both sound and silence rather than only one or the other. The same goes for bright and dark, motion and stasis, high and low pitch, disorder and order, freedom and confinement and other primitive perceptual opposites.

Calling one mental category “hot” or “warmer” and the other “cold” or “cooler” is an alternative that avoids misconceptions having to do with the way we might think of more excitement as somehow better than less. Unfortunately, it also avoids the convenience of translation from stimulus to stimulation, and so does the term “arousal,” used in scientific literature, which otherwise has almost the same meaning as the term excitement the way it’s used here. In any case, for simplicity, hot and cold and other primitive perceptual qualities are sometimes used in this text as labels for the mental categories that contain them.

Gestures

Human gestures of high excitement are apparently more likely to include list 1 qualities, and the opposite is generally true for those of low excitement. The fact that the gestures listed below are structured like language in this respect makes sense if one assumes both types of communication evolved to exploit preexisting biases. They undermine the experiential thesis of conceptual metaphor, while supporting that of associations between the qualities in the lists.

Higher excitement gestures: spitting (fluid/out), faster movement, pacing, spinning, waving, yelling, screaming (loud/high pitch/disorder), crying, singing, clapping, jumping, arm raising, thumbs up, high-fives, upwardness and outwardness of the body and body parts (head, arms, fingers) such as smiling, keeping the chin up or standing ovations.

Lower excitement gestures: stillness, slower movement, silence, quietness, thumbs down, downwardness and inwardness of the body and body parts (limbs, head, fingers) such as nodding, frowning, bowing and prostration.

Relatively complex gestures that mix opposing qualities tend to capture our interest. This is probably epitomized by dance, but there are numerous less obvious examples such as intricate greetings (multistep handshakes) or shaking the head, which mixes up and down or left and right, as well as roundness and dynamism.

Given the primitive nature of the sensory systems underlying animal abilities to detect list 1 and list 2 qualities, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that animals of all kinds have evolved or learned to reference them in a similar, dualistic manner with respect to arousal.

Across taxa swinging limbs, jumping and bouncing, rapid upward tail movement, fast wing movements, expansion of the body, hair or feathers to increase spikiness and size, and loud, higher-pitched, rapid and random vocalizations are ways that animals relay higher excitement. Implicitly, the opposite actions are indicative of lower arousal. This outcome is improbable in the absence of a set of universal psychological traits in the receivers of these signals that the signals have evolved to exploit. For example, both birds and mammals automatically interpret dynamic, upward and outward behavior as indicators of excitement because these qualities have always produced more arousal in observers than their opposites, going back at least to the common ancestors of these groups.

It might seem obvious that sensory systems would work such that a quality like motion draws attention and puts us in an alerted state, so that we can be ready to react and protect ourselves. However, not every quality in list 1 is necessarily a natural sign of danger (redness, disorder, length), and arousing gestures are employed in a wide variety of contexts. They also occur frequently in courtship rituals, where they’re meant to amuse and attract members of the opposite sex, although in these cases they tend to be juxtaposed in intricate patterns with less exciting gestures and sounds.

Notes

Perplexity’s response to “Compare the features of high arousal gestures versus low arousal gestures.”

High arousal gestures are larger, faster, and more expansive, while low arousal gestures are smaller, slower, and more contained.

High arousal: Movements are large in amplitude, fast, and often jerky or high-velocity, with arms raised, extended, or repeatedly opening and closing. Low arousal: Movements are reduced in amplitude, slower, smoother, and may show general motor slowing or minimal gesturing.

Posture and spatial extension

High arousal: Postures are expanded and space-occupying, with the chest open, shoulders lifted, arms stretched out in front or to the sides, and an “open” stance. Low arousal: Postures are contracted or withdrawn, with slumped shoulders, inward rotation, head down, and a smaller overall body silhouette.

Action readiness and direction

High arousal: Gestures often exhibit clear action tendencies (e.g., punching, emphatic pointing, forceful illustrators) and may be directed outward into extrapersonal space, signaling readiness to act or engage. Low arousal: Gestures may be more self-focused (self-touch, self-adaptors) or show withdrawal, signaling reduced readiness to act and a tendency to conserve energy or disengage.

Rhythm, variability, and organization

High arousal: Gesture sequences are more frequent and dynamically varied, with rapid preparation–stroke–retraction cycles and higher overall movement activity. Low arousal: Gestures are infrequent, sometimes stereotyped, with longer pauses, less rhythmic variation, and extended rest phases.

Attention

List 1 qualities are used in human culture to get attention, as warnings for instance, and by other animals both as warnings to potential predators and as sexual signals that attract mates and indicate fertility, although sexually selected features are typically elaborate, incorporating list 2 qualities as well. Arousal is closely linked to attention, in that we tend to notice and focus on stimuli that excite us, “physically salient stimuli,” including bright, red, yellow, saturated, sharp, moving and rapidly growing objects, loud, high-pitched and irregular sounds, and novelty, as well as more specific phenomena like angry faces, blood, erotica, profanity and scenes or situations that violate our expectations.

For some salient stimuli it’s easy to think of how we would benefit from giving them extra attention. It seems like an obvious advantage to notice an angry face in a group of individuals who are otherwise content, because there’s a greater chance that person might do us harm. Likewise, a sharp object might be noticed at the expense of a round object because it’s more of a threat. From an evolutionary perspective, of course, this would require that our ancestors were killed by angry-looking individuals and sharp objects at a higher rate than they were killed by non-angry individuals and round objects, which sounds entirely likely, although it doesn’t necessarily address why a person would benefit from looking angry or why a particular facial configuration should come off as such to an observer.

It’s not so easy to imagine why red should be more salient than blue, high pitch more so than low pitch, irregularity more so than regularity, or the left side more so than the right. The lack of an obvious, immediate adaptive purpose for differential excitement in these and other perceptual dimensions supports the idea that arousal is essential to the process of distinguishing between opposites, and that it evolves to be part of sensory systems regardless of whether it plays a direct role in survival. There’s probably no significant survival advantage an individual would get from pseudoneglect, or attending to the left field of vision more readily than the right. This bias could simply be a side effect of the ability to tell the two sides apart.

Assuming the attention-grabbing tendency of red, orange and yellow is an inherent, unavoidable feature of color vision can explain the evolution of these colors as advertisements in flowers, fruits, sexual organs and courtship coloration patterns. This perspective is parsimonious because it avoids the need for countless independent explanations of a predilection for these colors in pollinators, frugivores and mates.

A random mutation in a plant that causes bright and warmly-colored pigmentation in a fruit or flower would automatically result in that individual and its offspring being noticed at the expense of other members of the plant population, giving the mutants a reproductive advantage. The same, simple process can potentially explain a number of cases throughout the animal world in which warm colors are used for attraction, particularly when they’re absent outside mating seasons.

Brighter and redder colors attracting more initial attention than their opposites due to the structure of the visual sensory system, rather than evolving to meet some specific ecological purpose, can also explain their prominence in aposematic signals in animals, and why humans more often use these colors when getting our attention is important for safety reasons, such as in road signs, caution signs, warning labels, warning lights and emergency vehicles. Similar arguments can be made for the evolution of high-pitched sounds as warnings and sexual signals, both in animals and human culture.

One could take an anecdotal situation in which special attention to high pitch would have protected our ancestors, claiming for instance that it protected them against hissing or rattling snakes. A snake, however, has no interest in attacking a much larger animal. Its goal is to avoid a confrontation, and higher, louder sounds have always served this purpose better than quiet, low sounds due to the structure of animal auditory sensory systems. We didn’t evolve to notice high-pitched, loud sounds more than their opposites to avoid snakes. Snakes evolved to express these qualities to avoid us and other animals that might pose a threat to them.

The universally arousing effect of loud, high-pitched sounds on sensory systems is evident in the repeated evolution and persistence of hissing, shrieking and screaming behaviors across diverse taxa, throughout insects, spiders, snakes, lizards, birds and numerous mammals such as cats, foxes, opossums, raccoons, weasels, otters, sea lions, camels, rodents, monkeys, apes and humans. Such sounds exploit perceptual sensitivities that transcend species-specific psychology.

Notes

Perplexity’s answer to “Do heat, fluidity, dynamism, speed, disorder, brightness, warm colors, sound, loudness, high pitch, upwardness, outwardness, the left side, length, spikiness, large size, multiplicity, novelty capture attention more than their opposites coldness, solidness, stasis, slowness, order, darkness, cool colors, silence, quietness, low pitch, downwardness, inwardness, the right side, shortness, roundness, small size, small numbers, familiarity?

Some of the “hot/active” poles on your list do reliably capture more attention (motion, novelty, luminance/contrast, numerosity, left side), but others show weaker or more context‑dependent effects, and many are better described as “high arousal” rather than intrinsically attention‑capturing.

Motion / dynamism / speed. Visual search and interface work converge that motion (including flicker and abrupt onset) is one of the strongest bottom‑up attractors; static items are less likely to capture attention under equal conditions.

Novelty / change. Oddball designs show that deviant auditory events (novel sounds among standards) trigger an orienting response and impair performance on an ongoing task, supporting robust involuntary capture by novelty.

Brightness and contrast. Saliency models and behavioral data indicate that higher luminance and stronger contrast have greater bottom‑up salience than dim, low‑contrast regions, other factors held constant.

Warm colors (vs. some cools). Longer wavelength colors like red, orange, and yellow often produce higher physiological arousal and attentional priority than many neutral or mid‑wavelength hues, though effects depend on task and context.

Multiplicity / numerosity. Numerosity behaves as a basic visual feature; sets of many items can be detected pre‑attentively and act as salient “texture,” distinguishing them from regions with fewer items.

Left side. In neurologically typical adults, pseudoneglect produces a small but reliable leftward bias: people bisect lines to the left of true center and tend to initiate visual search on the left, indicating an inherent attentional advantage for left field over right.

The Great Chain of Being

We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost (2020)

The Great Chain of Being, a popular concept throughout history going back at least to Ancient Greece, might be thought of as a vertical spectrum with phenomena representing qualities at the more exciting ends of primitive perceptual dimensions (list 1) at the top and those from the less exciting ends (list 2) at the bottom. This assumes fluid-like spirits excite us more than minerals, that animated beings like animals excite us more than inanimate objects, that brightness does so more than darkness, and that it’s more exciting to be eternal than lifeless, powerful than inconsequential, and located in the heavens than in the ground.

Gods and angels, the highest characters in the Chain, are said to be purely spirit, or nonmaterial, like a fluid. Minerals, at the bottom, are totally material and solid, while humans and organisms are in the middle, a soft mixture of these conditions, partly spirit and partly matter, or both fluid and solid at the same time, like a liquid crystal. Solids themselves are ordered according to brightness, with gold above silver and silver above lead. The very bottom of the Chain, below minerals, is absolute nothingness.

Dynamism is absent in the minerals at the bottom of the Chain, but present in plants, and increases from the “lower” to “higher” animals. Elevation increases as well, in that gods and angels are usually positioned spatially above humans and the earth, descending occasionally for reasons such as delivering a message directly to humanity, getting revenge or retrieving someone from hell. Vitality also increases with height, from the nonliving to the living to the immortal.

Not every pair of opposites in the Chain is arranged so that the more exciting quality describes higher components. Order, particularly its conceptual relatives perfection and lack of change, are understood to be greater in the gods than humans. Demons are below angels despite being evil and presumably disorderly by comparison, and the Bedlam beggar represents a lower, more chaotic stage of humanity adjacent to the beasts. Minerals are the least perfect objects, and nothingness is the least perfect nonexistent thing, although the word “perfection” in this context probably means something closer to fullness of existence than to our contemporary idea of order. Light and heat aren’t official participants in the hierarchy, but they’re more associated with the upper reaches, and multiplicity seems to fall off from the middle in both the upward and downward directions.

Within animals, those that are larger, more dynamic and have blood are above smaller, slower, “bloodless” types. Lions and elephants are the kings of beasts, and sessile animals, shellfish and invertebrates populate the lowest ranks. Among celestial bodies, the sun is above the moon, but below the “unmoved mover” and ultimately the Empyrean, or highest heaven, derived from Greek words meaning “in the fire,” “fiery” or “region of pure fire and light.”

Dominance is maximized by the gods at the top, who have power over angels, and both types of beings have more power than kings and royalty, who rule over common people, who themselves dominate animals, who dominate plants and minerals. This follows the universal human conviction that there’s a vertical difference between the superior (or dominant) and inferior (or submissive), which is also built into language and words, “super” in “superior” meaning “above, over, beyond” (up and out), and “sub” in “submission” meaning “under, below, beneath.”

Calling it a chain implies continuity, and various intermediate beings fill in the gaps between levels, such as demigods with less vitality than gods and more than mortals, demons with more power than people and less than angels, or plant-like animals with less of a soul than animal-like animals but more of a soul than a rock.

The upper section of the Chain is mythical, invented and adopted by humans, and this is important to consider because otherwise it would be a fairly accurate description of reality, and therefore less of an aesthetic phenomenon. The mythic section makes us inferior, when we could have placed ourselves at the top. Gods, angels and demons don’t need to be part of the Chain, and they don’t need to be made of pure spirit. No one noted their properties and placed them above us to represent observable reality. They were added and assigned a fluid-like form for our satisfaction, making the Chain as a whole of greater interest from a psychological point of view than it would be otherwise. Without gods it would only be a partial spectrum of differentially exciting opposites. Fluidity would top out about halfway to its full realization in spiritual beings. Mediocre humanity, with its limited control of the universe, would be the pinnacle of power, and immortality, or infinite animation, wouldn’t exist at all.

We’re amused when the Chain is disrupted by characters moving out of their proper positions. They might be promoted or demoted, travel from one link to another and come back, or split into two and go both up and down at the same time, as when a demon is thrown down to Earth, a god becomes mortal, a statue comes alive, a frog turns into a prince, a king becomes a beggar, a base metal is alchemized into gold, a hero goes to hell and back, a man dies and gets resurrected, angels descend and ascend a ladder between the divine and human realms, or a soul exits a body and floats away. To the extent that there’s a continuous excitement differential from one end of the Chain to the other, such disruptions are mixtures of more and less exciting things.

Humor

Shall I crack any of those old jokes, master, At which the audience never fail to laugh?

— Aristophanes, Frogs (Bartlett 2022)

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

— Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897)

Insults

We use references to primitive perceptual opposites to express our displeasure with each other, linguistically and in gestures, and dislike it when others use them against us. The examples listed below are in the same order as the qualities in lists 1 and 2, with each quality having various numbers of representatives. For instance, three insults (hot mess, flamer, a burnout) have heat as a conceptual relative, five have fluidity (airhead, windbag, lickspittle, milksop, piss ant, drip, mouth breather, blowhard), three have dynamism (jerk, creep, spaz) and so on. Some relate to more than one quality at once, such as “scum” and “sleaze,” which are both disorderly and fluid, or “tosser,” which is both dynamic and outward.

More exciting insults: a hot mess, hothead, flamer, burnout, airhead, windbag, lickspittle, milksop, piss ant, drip, mouth breather, blowhard, jerk (rapid movement), creep, spaz, junky, crook, weirdo, scum, sleaze, trash, trashy, white trash, crackhead, train wreck, slob, misfit, rotter, redneck (red), clown (bright), quack (high pitch), carnival barker (loud), uptight, tosser, tosspot, prick (spikiness).

Less exciting insults: cold, cold-blooded, bonehead, numbskull, hard ass, meathead, knucklehead, shit for brains, stiff, thick, dense, deadbeat, slow, blockhead (order), square, dimwit (darkness), lowlife (down~dynamic), dipshit (down/solid), drop dead (down~static), you suck (inward), sucker (inward), dull, loser, halfwit (less).

It’s worth noting that we regularly use such expressions entirely for amusement, some of them as much as we use them directly against each other as insults, and that under the right circumstances they can also be affectionate. Highly offensive insults having to do with parts of the body, behavior and other aspects of human life we consider vulgar are left out of the lists, although many of them could be included.

Almost all of these expressions are literally nonsensical. They refer to characteristics that don’t actually apply to the people being insulted. “A hot mess” refers to a person who behaves unpredictably, hence the term “mess,” perhaps, but that person isn’t literally hot. Adding heat implies someone is more chaotic than if they were only a mess, which works based on the fact that we associate high temperature with disorder, and because the qualities add together in an unpleasant way. Likewise, “airheads” have nothing, literally, to do with air, “hotheads” don’t have hot heads, “crackheads” don’t have cracked heads, “stiffs” don’t differ in their physical consistency from non-stiffs, “deadbeats” aren’t dead, “lowlifes” aren’t low and “suckers” (inwardness) don’t suck.

Insults invoking perceptual opposites are skewed so that qualities from list 2 are applied to “lower” intelligence, as in the solidness of “bonehead,” “numbskull,” “meathead,” “knucklehead,” “shit for brains,” “thick” and “dense,” the stasis of “stiff” and “slow,” the downwardness of “lowlife” and “dipshit,” the darkness of “dimwit” or the numerical decrease of “halfwit.” Meanwhile, “higher” intelligence is assigned qualities from list 1: “quick wit,” “bright,” “brilliant” and “sharp.” The duality intelligent~unintelligent is aligned with primitive perceptual opposites from lists 1 and 2 because we understand more derived concepts in terms of earlier, preexisting psychological dualities.

The pattern carries over to longer insults such as “not the brightest bulb in the box,” linking low intelligence to darkness, “elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor,” linking it to lack of upwardness, “not the sharpest tool in the shed” (lack of spikiness), and “one card short of a full deck” (smaller quantities).

Insults like these are of interest in themselves from an aesthetic standpoint. We can use them as a joke and an insult at the same time. It’s remarkable how many portray a contrast between a quality from list 1 and its opposite from list 2 (slow~fast, dim~bright, dull~sharp, short~full), or couple a list 1 quality with negation, which is presumably less exciting than affirmation (not~sharp, not~full, not~bright, not~fast), or with containment, a type of inwardness: “not the quickest bunny in the forest” (dynamic inwardness), “not the brightest crayon in the box,” (bright inwardness) and “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” (spiky inwardness).

Differential Excitement in Humor

Some types of humor are structured explicitly as juxtapositions between more and less excitement. Sarcastic fake enthusiasm is this way, and so is fake indifference. Both strategies create a contradictory excitement differential between an experience and a reaction, and so do some of the most famous jokes.

Consider, for instance, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer arguing that painting a fence is exciting to trick other boys into doing the job for him, or Twain himself famously saying, after hearing the news he had died, that “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” later paraphrased, more memorably, as having been “grossly” or “greatly exaggerated.” In Aristophanes’ Wasps, it wouldn’t be funny if the old man Philocleon was addicted to something exciting, like sex or gambling. The joke is that he’s hopelessly addicted to jury duty. In the classic Norm Macdonald joke about a pig with a wooden leg, the pig is more exciting than the usual disabled pig, performing heroic acts on the farm, then the punchline contradicts how excited the farmer claims to be about the pig throughout the rest of the joke.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote plays on the fact that we expect a great knight to perform spectacular feats on the battlefield by replacing it with the sad scene of a man who thinks he’s performing such feats when he’s actually fighting a harmless windmill. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is humorously disappointing when the supercomputer Deep Thought works for seven and a half million years on the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” only to give the answer as “42.”

Hierarchical Humor

On the assumption that high status is more exciting than low status, humor that inverts or disrupts a hierarchy incorporates differential excitement. This would include self-deprication and putting other people down, both of which we do for fun, and amusing scenarios in which a person, animal or object is elevated to a high position. Saturnalia does this with people, temporarily inverting the status of slaves and masters. Fables, puppets, shows and movies do it with animals, “The Frog Prince” being a famous example, and so do comics like Gary Larson’ The Far Side.

Universality

Although we tend to think of every humorous event as unique and independent, they must be related in some way because we respond to them automatically and universally with laughter. We don't laugh at just anything, and more often than not we agree about what's humorous, or at least meant to be, so there’s something we all recognize in humor, despite its diversity, something that makes it perceptually and psychologically different from seriousness.

Whatever it is that funny things have in common, the nature of laughter: loud, often high-pitched outbursts punctuated by short periods of silence, implies contradictory stimulation in the brain, in that high sounds and silence are opposites. Laughter mixes these qualities in intricate ways, and so do music, song and language. This is evidence of an aesthetic origin of laughter, although most biologists would probably say it evolved as a social device that increased survival, despite that we can’t currently imagine the reasons. They might say laughter’s purpose is demonstrating to a potential mate that we have the capacity to utter a range of sounds, but this could be accomplished in any number of alternative ways, and the advantage to a mate of having a way to gauge this ability doesn’t come close to justifying the consistency of human laughter, the scale on which it occurs, or the fact that it’s practiced so widely outside the context of courtship.

The Fluidity of Humor

The word “humor,” from Latin meaning “moisture,” was used for centuries to describe various fluids, as with the concept of humorism in which behaviors were thought to arise from fluctuation in the levels of four types of fluids in the body. This suggests jokes, like “flowers” compared to leaves, come across as fluid-like compared to seriousness, boringness or “dryness.” The connection is a clue to how funny things are special. The expression “dry humor,” for jokes delivered in a serious tone, is another indication we relate them to fluids (and seriousness to dryness). “Deadpan,” with a meaning similar to “dry humor,” referring literally to the stasis of death and the solid inwardness of a pan, reflects that by default we relate jokes to fluidity, dynamism and outwardness, and seriousness to their primitive perceptual opposites.

Humor and Primitive Opposites

In addition to fluidity, we associate jokes with heat, disorder, speed, brightness, upwardness, outwardness and spikiness, as in “on fire” (of a comedian), “a sick burn,” “broke as a joke” (jokes=disorder), “cracking me up” (jokes=upward disorder), “wisecrack”(jokes=disorder), “busting up” (jokes=upward disorder), “bust a gut,” “dirty joke,” “break out in laughter” (jokes=outward disorder), “break the ice,” “pull a fast one,” “a quick wit” (jokes=speed), “make light of,” “uproarious,” “out of control,” “that's going too far” (jokes=outwardness) and “a sharp wit” (spikiness).

“Breaking the ice,” socially, humorously or otherwise, implies something is cold and hard about reality, independently of the common phrase “cold hard truth,” and in accordance with fantasy being, oppositely, like heat and fluidity. Consider, also, that we say extreme seriousness is “dead” and “down to earth,” or static, downward and solid. We also tell each other to “shape up,” and call overly serious people “squares,” as though they’re related to simple geometric order. The language of humor thus demonstrates universal unconscious associations between fluidity, disorder, dynamism, and the directions up and out, while that of seriousness demonstrates associations between coldness, solidness, stasis, shape and downwardness. This is another example of the way we understand relatively recent opposites, seriousness and humor in this case, by way of primitive sensory opposites.

Funniness often represents a moment of departure from reality into chaos and fantasy, contradicting associations of qualities within categories of excitement, making normal language and interactions more complicated and enjoyable than they would be otherwise. The reversal of social norms (politeness, manners) in jokes could be interpreted as such a disruption, undermining less exciting, familiar, expected behavior with more exciting novelty, unpredictably and contradiction. Disorder on its own can be funny, especially when it’s harmless and in orderly contexts such as formal settings, as the comedian Steve Martin pointed out:

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

— Steve Martin (Zhang 2023)

Assuming chaos is more exciting than order, the combination chaos/chaos is more exciting than the mixture chaos~order, while the combination order/order is relatively boring, and also not funny. Thus, in this respect humor, unquestionably an aesthetic phenomenon, is describable as a mixture of more and less excitement, supporting the present thesis.

Myths and Stories

So first she tasted the porridge of the Great, Huge Bear, and that was too hot for her. And then she tasted the porridge of the Middle Bear, and that was too cold for her. And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that; and that was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right; and she liked it so well, that she ate it all up.

— Little Silver-hair, “The Three Bears” (Cundall 1869)

How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
on the heights of Zaphon;
I will ascend to the tops of the clouds,
I will make myself like the Most High.”
But you are brought down to Sheol,
to the depths of the Pit.

—The Bible, Isaiah (Coogan et al. 2018)

Extreme expressions of list 1 qualities often get people in trouble in myths and stories, when they're punished by gods for obtaining fire, breaking rules, shining too bright, making too much noise, building too high or multiplying too much. Occasionally the gods kill entire groups, or almost everyone, in massively disproportionate responses to these kinds of acts. In other cases characters that express high excitement qualities, concepts or emotions such as anger, dominance or hubris suffer losses or death at the hands of other characters, or simply as a result of attempting to do something particularly exciting.

Perhaps the most famous example of this in Greek myth is Icarus, who can’t resist the thrill of disobeying his father and flying too high. His story is similar to that of Phaethon, “the shining one,” who’s struck down by Zeus with a thunderbolt for driving his father Helios’ flaming horse driven sun chariot chaotically across the sky, scorching the earth and evaporating rivers. In another case of elevation being problematic, Poseidon’s son Bellerophon tries to ride Pegasus to the top of Mount Olympus and Zeus sends a gadfly to bite the horse, who throws Bellerophon off. He survives the fall but wanders lame and humiliated around the Aleian plain for the rest of his life. In some versions Pegasus continues to Olympus and resides with the gods, carrying Zeus’ thunderbolts and assisting the Muses by kicking a rock to release a stream at Mount Helicon that flows with poetic inspiration, as though there’s something fluid-like about poetry.

The opening quote from Isaiah is part of a “taunt-song” about the inglorious decline of an angry, wrathful, pompous king of Babylon who tries to achieve divinity. The passage mockingly calls him “O day star,” or the planet Venus, “lucifer” in Latin, meaning “light bringer.” Although it almost certainly wasn’t meant to be interpreted as such, it’s widely considered an allegorical description of the angel Lucifer’s attempted rebellion and exaltation in Heaven, which results in God casting him down into Sheol, the Hebrew underworld. In Ezekiel 28 there’s a similar episode, also interpreted as commentary on Satan, in which the “prince if Tyre” is cast down and burns from the inside into ashes for having become too proud, amassed too much gold and silver, covered himself with and walked among “stones of fire,” committed violent sins, dared to call himself a god, and claim he should “sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas.”

Characters are often advised by other characters to avoid list 1 and list 2 extremes, as when Daedalus tells Icarus to fly at a moderate height so his wings won’t be compromised by the spray from the sea or the heat of the sun. In some stories choosing moderation over extremes is the main subject, and the reason we find them amusing. It’s difficult to imagine the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears becoming as famous as it is without an element of comparison between three pairs of primitive perceptual opposites (hot~cold, big~small, hard~soft), and Goldilocks rejecting the extremes and selecting her favorite versions: moderate temperature, size and consistency. Goldilocks’ name (previously Little Silver-hair) has come to stand for ideal moderation generally. A planet with liquid water, moderate temperature and the potential for life is in the “Goldilocks zone.” A Goldilocks economy is growing at a moderate pace, not too fast or too slow. In neuroscience it means a state marked by balance between activity and stability, noise and rigidity, excitiation and inhibition.

Good and Evil

More exciting qualities are typical features of evil characters such as monsters, and we’re more tolerant of the death and suffering of those who express them, to the extent that a character with these features doesn’t necessarily need to have commited any other offenses we would normally consider it fair to kill them over. Good characters, on average, feature more list 2 qualities than those who are evil. We want them to live and thrive, and it’s iteresting when they develop to express more exciting qualities as the story goes on, as when a regular person becomes a superhero through an accident or magic and defeats a villain.

Antagonists tend to be disorderly, loud, spiky, oversized, outward and unpredictable by comparison to protagonists. Some villains exemplify almost every quality in list 1. The Devil, some would say the most evil character of all, is variously conceptualized in popular culture as hot, deformed, shapeshifting, bright, red, spiky and long, with horns, talons, wings, a long tail, multiplied features, and he’s often on fire.

Biblically, Satan masquerades as an angel of light, in some interpretations as the snake in the Garden of Eden, and in Revelations he’s a “a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads,” with a tail that “swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth” (Coogan et al. 2018). Dante’s version, also gigantic, has six wings, three faces, three mouths and six eyes, and he’s forever flapping and chewing, sending winds through the central sphere of Inferno and eating Judas Iscariot and Caesar’s assassins, although he’s embedded in ice.

Visits of gods to the human world (theophanies) are normally preceded or accompanied by increases of list 1 qualities and their conceptual relatives, in part because gods appearing without some kind of excitement feels inconsistent with their power and importance. In theophanies gods are accompanied by fire, clouds, storms, earthquakes, bright lights, thunder and, surprisingly often, by gangs of monsters, demons, angels or exciting animals. There are instances of gods being so exciting to behold that seeing them is deadly, as with YHWH in the Bible and Zeus’ incineration of Semele in Metamorphoses.

Pairs of characters often differ with respect to excitement and primitive perceptual qualities, one of them being somewhat more disorderly, brighter, a different color, taller or thinner (longer) than the other, creating an overall mixture of opposites, as when a hero is accompanied by a trickster. In stories with mythological twins there’s a theme in which they express properties from opposites ends of dualities such as immortal~mortal, evil~good or creation~destruction.

Perhaps the ultimate example of a contrast between a less exciting protagonist and a more exciting antagonistic is the story of Siddhartha Gautama and his adversary Māra. Siddhartha sits motionless in lotus position under the Bodhi tree at the central, “immovable spot,” touching the ground with his left hand in meditation. He’s renounced his royalty, removed the golden jewelry he’d worn previously, and shaved his head. As he sat, Siddhartha said (Campbell 2014):

Let my skin, sinews, and bones become dry, and welcome; and let all the flesh and blood of my body dry up; but never from this seat will I stir until I have attained the supreme and absolute wisdom!

Siddhartha is static, quiet, downward, round, central, dry and generally unaroused while Māra, Lord Desire, is depicted with long hair, wearing a crown and extravagant jewelry, surrounded by fire, sitting on a “bellowing war elephant” with long, spiky tusks, accompanied by his sons Confusion, Gaiety and Pride and his shapeshifting daughters Lust, Delight and Pining (Campbell 2014). He wields arrows named “Exciter of the Paroxysm of Desire, Gladdener, Infatuator, Parcher, and Carrier of Death.” Māra and his companions express list 1 qualities in an extreme way, and represent the most arousing human emotions. Having attempted and failed to disrupt Siddhartha’s meditation with an arrow so powerful it had been used to ignite the sun, he tries unleashing a massive army of demons:

And immediately putting off his infatuating aspect as the Lord Desire, that great god became the Lord Death, and around him an army of demonic forms crystallized, wearing frightening shapes and bearing in their hands bows and arrows, darts, clubs, swords, trees, and even blazing mountains; having the visages of boars, fish, horses, camels, asses, tigers, bears, lions and elephants; one-eyed, multi-faced, three-headed, pot-bellied, and with speckled bellies; equipped with claws, equipped with tusks, some bearing headless bodies in their hands, many with half-mutilated faces, monstrous mouths, knobby knees, and the reek of goats; copper red, some clothed in leather, others wearing nothing at all, with fiery or smoke-colored hair, many with long, pendulous ears, having half their faces white, others having half their bodies green; red and smoke-colored, yellow and black; with arms longer than the reach of serpents, their girdles jingling with bells: some as tall as palms, bearing spears, some of a child’s size with projecting teeth; some with the bodies of birds and faces of rams, or men’s bodies and the faces of cats; with disheveled hair, with topknots, or half bald; with frowning or triumphant faces, wasting one’s strength or fascinating one’s mind. Some sported in the sky, others went along the tops of trees; many danced upon each other, more leaped about wildly on the ground. One, dancing, shook a trident; another crashed his club; one like a bull bounded for joy; another blazed out flames from every hair. And then there were some who stood around to frighten him with many lolling tongues, many mouths, savage, sharply pointed teeth, upright ears, like spikes, and eyes like the disk of the sun. Others, leaping into the sky, flung rocks, trees, and axes, blazing straw as voluminous as mountain peaks, showers of embers, serpents of fire, showers of stone. And all the time, a naked woman bearing in her hand a skull, flittered about, unsettled, staying not in any spot, like the mind of a distracted student over sacred texts.

Even this isn’t enough to distract Siddhartha, and Māra goes away defeated, his shoulders slumping in disappointment. Siddhartha continues meditating until he’s awakened, becomes the Buddha and discovers an ideal “middle way” between the “unworthy, unprofitable,” more and less exciting extremes of sensual pleasures, such as those represented by Mara, and total asceticism and self-mortification, which he’d been practicing for six years.

Natural Events

Natural events fall into more or less exciting categories depending on their content with regard to lists 1 and 2. The summer, because it’s relatively hot and bright, is more exciting than the winter. The summer solstice is naturally more exciting than the winter solstice. The relative hotness and brightness of the sun make it more exciting than the moon, and the full moon is more exciting than the new moon. Spring is more exciting than fall, morning is more so than evening, noon more so than midnight and so on. Because of the position and apparent motion of the sun, in the northern hemisphere south should be more exciting than north, and vice versa from the southern hemisphere, while east should be more exciting than west everywhere.

Astronomical cycles appear to cause cycles of arousal in animals that result in important biological rhythms related to sleep and reproduction. On average, any animal living above ground is going to be more excited by more light in the middle of the summer and less so by less light in the middle of winter. For humans, above the equator, the yearly cycle of brightness and temperature probably has something to do with the placement of certain exciting celebrations in darker, colder seasons, gods being born around the winter solstice, for instance, or celebrating Halloween, the most evil holliday, in the fall.

Jesus said ‘I am the light of the world.’ And they just loved that image of the light of the world becoming visible on the darkest day of the year on the winter solstice. That image spoke to them very deeply. And we see this come up repeatedly in Christmas sermons, in other topics regarding Christmas. And I think that that was the factor that made December 25th win out over other possible dates. There was this beautiful, from their perspective, profound symmetry and imagery involving this date.

— Thomas C. Schmidt, “Why Is Christmas on December 25th?” (2025)

Sp Words

Certain letters or letter combinations tend to be used in the names of certain types of phenomena. Words with the letters s and p are used for fluids, for instance: “splash,” “spill,” “spray,” “splatter,” “spout,” “spit,” “spirit,” “spirits,”“splurge,” “spurt,” “spew,” “spritz,” “sputter,” “perspire,” “inspire,” “aspirate,” “spa” and “wisp.” They’re also found in words related to other list 1 qualities, as with heat or warmth in “spring,” “spice” and “spark,” dynamism in “speed, “sprint,” “spin” and “sport,” disorder in “sporadic,” “spiral,” “spasm,” “spaz,” “spar,” “a spat” and “spoiled,” brightness in “sparkle,” spikiness or length in “spiky,” “spire,” “spear,” “spade” and “spaghetti,” outward in “spread,” “spend,” “sprung,” “span,” “sprawl” and “disperse” and excitement itself in “spirited” or “splendid.”

While it’s long been suspected that “sp” has some psychological relationship to the perception of moving liquids, or “the discharge of liquid in a more or less haphazard manner” (see Weisler and Milekic 2000), it seems clear that these letters are related to excitement more generally, including high pitch in the sense that the sound of “sp” is especially high.

Experiential Versus Innate Associations

The usual way to explain a widespread psychological association is common experience, to presume there’s a consistent environmental cue that people in general might notice, internalize and then reproduce in the structure of culture. For instance, within conceptual metaphor theory, the link in language between happiness and elevation would presumably result from general observations that happy people are elevated, standing upward and moving in upward ways by comparison to sadder people, who tend to assume more downwardly oriented postures.

It’s just as likely, however, and more parsimonious, that sadness is downward in both gestures and language because the direction is associated with being sad by default, and that the same is true regarding happiness and upwardness. In this view, happy people are more excited and feel like both moving upward and speaking with reference to upwardness regardless of whether or not they’ve seen that pattern in others. Sad people feel like doing the opposite because they’re less excited, not because they’ve seen others orient themselves into depressed configurations when they’re unhappy. This explanation avoids the step in an experiential process of an association being transferred from behavior to observer, and the need to explain the evolution and survival value of happy or sad people assuming an upward or downward posture in the first place.

The experiential hypothesis relies on a process with at least four steps: (1) a pattern in behavior evolves, often for unknown reasons, (2) we all tend to notice the pattern during development, (3) we develop a psychological bias with the same structure as the pattern and (4) reproduce it in our behavior and communication. None of these steps are inevitable. Some are unlikely, and there’s a potential circularity problem in that step 4 can feed back into step 1, and in some interpretations step 1 relies on step 4.

Regarding “happy is up” and “sad is down,” from a traditional perspective step 1 would be caused either by an evolutionary survival advantage or by developmental experience. In the former scenario happy people behaving upwardly and sad people behaving downwardly outlive those who act the opposite way. This could potentially be attributed to advantages in avoiding predators or disease, finding food, or to a social dynamic in which people killed or rejected those who didn’t fulfill the given metaphors, in which case the reason such people are so undesirable remains to be determined. The question turns to why we prefer those who fulfill the metaphor over those who don’t, especially to the point of eliminating them from society, and we’re no closer to an ultimate answer. The preference, which would have evolved before step 1, and ultimately causes all the subsequent steps, is still a mystery.

Ecological factors seem implausible as mechanisms behind the associations in question, as they are for many other expressions of emotion, such as humor, song and dance. This is in part because expressions of happiness and sadness are social phenomenon. Smiling and frowning, for instance, upward and downward movements of the mouth indicating happiness and sadness, are hardly going to protect a person against a lion.

In the hypothesis of innate association, ideas of upwardness and happiness might be internalized as we experience them, but the association is predetermined; it happens automatically. Assuming we know what upwardness is, when we come to understand what happiness is we put it in the same mental category by default and thereafter think of it as upward or higher than lack of happiness. The same thing happens with downwardness and sadness, and the two associations reinforce each other, giving the duality happy~sad a vertical dimension in the mind. The automatic step of categorization is what makes associations universal, and leads to cross-cultural patterns, rather than patterns causing associations. Steps 1 through 3 of the thesis of experiential association become unnecessary, and it’s more probable that step 4 will take place because variation in personal experience doesn’t prevent it from following step 3.

The metaphors “happiness is bright” and “sadness is dark” help demonstrate how certain associations are connected to internal arousal instead of outward experience. Darker colors don’t consistently occur together with sadness in our observations, and happiness isn’t observably brighter. Happy people are the same color as sad people. Darkness is, however, congruent in our experience with lower arousal, and brightness with higher arousal, in that we wake up during the day and sleep at night. The current thinking seems to be that people learn darkness is less arousing than brightness and transfer the concept to the dimension happy~sad because it has the same structure with respect to arousal, which is in line with the idea of innate associations.

The same probably goes for the metaphors “sadness is hard,” “sadness is blue,” “sadness is dark,” “sadness is small,” “happiness is bright,”and so on. They don’t reliably co-occur in experience, but they do so in mental categories. Thus, it seems for most metaphors of these emotions experiences can’t be the explanation, and it would be unusual if they happened to explain the associations up/happy and down/sad.

Assuming a person has observed fire, but not anger, if they then observe anger, they automatically have the impression that the two things are alike, despite that in reality fire and anger are very different in most respects aside from being exciting. If they’ve seen anger, and not fire, then when they see fire it will instinctively remind them of anger. If a person has experienced calmness, when they encounter fire it will seem like its opposite, and when they encounter the coldness, hardness and stasis of ice they will know it’s a better metaphor for calmness than fire. One could argue that temperature associations result from the fact that, when we’re angry or passionate, we ourselves are hotter than when we’re content or dispassionate, but that argument is almost the same as the present proposition. The heat we speak of when calling someone angry or alluring is an expression of internal physical excitement rather than external observations.

Anger, passion and other intense emotions are likely related to all the close conceptual relatives of heat, not just fire, and to the conceptual relatives of other list 1 qualities. Summer seems more angry and passionate than winter because it’s hotter and brighter. The sun is naturally closer to anger and passion than the moon for the same reason. Blood, speed, chaos, redness, screaming, sharpness, upward and outward actions and orientations are more aligned with high arousal emotions than their opposites mostly because they’re similarly more exciting, rather than because we encounter them consistently in conjunction with the display of such emotions in others.

Perhaps the biggest problem with experiential explanations is that they don’t work for the majority of the connections between concepts and primitive perceptual qualities. There’s nothing observably cold or solid about the truth, hard about having a hard time, breaking or flashing about news, broke about a joke, buzzing about having a buzz, upward and dynamic about a toss up (uncertain outcome), and so on. In general, there are no reasonable experiential cues available from which to learn most of the conceptual metaphors we use universally, even though the cues would also need to be universal and should, therefore, be easy to establish.

This isn’t to say experience isn’t part of the process by which associations are formed. One can’t very well associate dryness with boredom, for instance, unless they’ve actually experienced both. The idea is that we’re almost inevitably destined to think of phenomena in the same category of excitement as related once we come to understand them. Also, clearly, experience is extremely important in shaping our predilections. Fluidity becomes more exciting than it is by default for a person lost in a desert, for instance, and one might come to associate fluidity with boredom and solidness with excitement if they were lost at a sea.