Surprise!

Psychologist Paul Ekman theorizes that all humans experience what he calls six "basic emotions": happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise.

We can quibble over Ekman's list. For instance, many suggest that anger is most often a product of sadness or fear. Others are sure that happiness and disgust are likewise a product of something else. And what about curiosity? Where does that fit in? Is it even an emotion? I have a friend who rejects this sort of list as an anti-human simplification, asserting that there "thousands of basic emotions," some of which we haven't even named yet. And, of course, human emotion is not this simple. Just look at the libraries full of books, fiction and nonfiction, about happiness and how to get it, or sadness and how to get rid of it, or anger and how to manage it, or fear or disgust and how to overcome it. 

But what about surprise? I don't recall reading much about surprise. And that's perhaps not surprising.

One of the most important recent discoveries about the human brain is that it is not, as we long believed, a kind of logic, or at least reasoning, machine. It does not passively take in information from our senses in an orderly way, then react according to the data it receives. No,  we now know that brains function as predictive systems. Most of what we think we perceive is actually our brain filling in the blanks based on experience. Indeed, it's estimated that what we perceive is actually 90 percent self-deception. It makes sense, both mechanically and from the perspective of evolution. After all, there is that tiny lag between when we sense something and when we actually perceive it. This means that we are forever living slightly in the past. If we don't anticipate, if we don't predict, say, that the crouching tiger is liable to pounce, we're lunch.

Surprise, however, is the emotion we feel when something is so out-of-the-ordinary that it cuts through our self-deception to defy our predictions. Surprise, as we often think of it, can be a startling heart-thumping experience, like when someone shouts, "Boo!" as they jump out from behind a door. I would assert that this is a kind of lower-level surprise, a mechanical reaction. At a higher level, however, surprise is the emotion associated with awe and inspiration, like when we round a bend on a hiking trail to find ourselves suddenly face-to-face with the beauty of the vista. Surprise is often an aspect of epiphany, those moments when it all suddenly becomes clear, when we discover something new about ourselves or the world. Surprise and awe leads to wonder and curiosity and learning.

By definition, surprise is not something we can predict which is why it confounds the predictive system in our heads. You can't go out with the intention of being surprised. We might hope to be surprised. But we can never know when or what because if we did, it wouldn't be a surprise. 

Our brains must predict. It's necessary for survival. But when surprise is scarce, life has a tendency to become dulled by habit and routine as our brains try to make everything predictable. Our brains can even blind us to those things that really ought to surprise us because they have already, in advance, fit whatever it is neatly into the hum-drum. I think this is what Henry David Thoreau was contemplating when he wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That, it seems to me, is the inevitable fate of a person living a life bereft of surprise. And it's a real danger in this world increasingly controlled by lawyers, insurance companies, and risk-avoidance managers.

We may not be able to force surprise, but there are things we can do to increase the odds that we will experience the life-affirming emotion of surprise. Engaging with the risk of trying something, anything, new, is a classic way to open the door to surprise. Another is to spend more time in nature. Yet another is to engage with art, poetry, or (especially) comedy. And, of course, travel is always full of surprises. But perhaps the best way to court surprise is to do what those of us who work in early childhood know so well: spend time with young children.

Being new humans, our children are much more readily surprised than us. Their brains are still learning to predict. For a baby, even a light breeze can spark amazement. For us seasoned veterans of life, that same gust might show up as a hair mussing annoyance, if we notice it at all, but in the company of a child, we experience for the first time as the awesome, surprising thing it is.

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