I know you.

I watched an elephant brain be dissected on a television show about elephants. The brain was being chopped up to further support that elephants have good memories. Their ability to know a lot about the places they go, the things they see, and the elephants they roam around with is very important to their society.

This made me wonder -- a bit tangentially -- if, maybe, memory is vital to the creation of emotions in beings. Do emotional attachments naturally spring from deep understandings of things and beings?

Is to know, know, know him, truly, to love, love, love him?

Today I think that familiarity with a thing needn't breed opinions and feelings for that thing. ...Familiarity doesn't, necessarily, cause value judgments to be made.

But I think they are in most cases.

(But I'm quite likely to think the opposite tomorrow.)

*Addition, November 2: Insects are the most successful animals of this age, and they must intimately understand their surroundings, places in social hierarchies, etc, but they exhibit no emotional attachments.

I'm now calling this one as: Mammals tend to form emotional ties and opinions of things because their brains are constructed in such a way as to make forming them likely.

New one: Do emotions make a species more or less fit for its environment (for survival, long-term) due to the display of emotions being a something mammals do simply to attract mates?

--But first: Do emotional displays attract mates? Is that what they're for?

("Obviously not" is my immediate reaction. ...More attention will be given to this in a future post. This post is likely to start out with me writing that the two questions I asked in the above paragraph were stupid.)