Nov 25, 2015
Emotions evolved for a reason, but how simple are they? The fun really starts when we discover that what we call ’emotions’ are only a couple of hundred years old. How can this be, and what came before?
In this talk, Richard will embody the voice of Thomas Wright, a 17th Century English Catholic missionary whose book, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, influenced many including some bloke called Shakespeare. Through him, he will explain what feelings came before ’emotions’ and where modern ’emotions’ came from.
Richard will also discuss lost emotions – the ones that have disappeared that we no longer understand – and will do his best to get us to feel feelings we feel we’ve not felt before (or maybe we have, but have forgotten).
Richard Firth-Godbehere first became interested in emotions, and especially disgust, while his wife was suffering from a phobia for vomiting, emetophobia. Since then, he has been studying what emotions are and were, and trying to find a way through the academic minefield that is the study of emotions. Richard is a Wellcome Trust Scholar in the Medical Humanities at Queen Mary University of London