A general theory of Love - notes
Traditional versions o f the mind hold that Passion is a troublesome remnant from humanity's savage past, and the intellectual
subjugation of emotion is civilizations triumph. Logical but dubious derivations follow: emotional maturity is synonymous with
emotional restraint. Schools can teach children missing emotional
skills just as they impart the facts of geometry or history. To feel
better, outthink your stubborn and recalcitrant heart. So says convention.
In this book, we demonstrate that where intellect and emotion
clash, the heart often has the greater wisdom. In a pleasing turnabout, science—Reasons right hand—is proving this so.The brains
ancient emotional architecture is not a bothersome animal encumbrance. Instead, it is nothing less than the key to our lives. We live
immersed in unseen forces and silent messages that shape our destinies. As individuals and as a culture, our chance for happiness
depends on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolves—
invisibly, improbably, inexorably—around love.
More than three hundred years
ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its
reasons whereof Reason knows nothing.
"Man is a credulous animal and must believe something," wrote
Bertrand Russell. "In the absence of good grounds for belief, ht
will be satisfied with bad ones." Wherever and whenever they are,
people vastly prefer any explanation (however flawed or implausible) to none.
As physicists and mathematicians delved deeper into the stuff of reality, they collided
wich the end o f objectivity's jurisdiction. "O body swayed to
music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from
the dance?" asked William Butler Yeats in 1928. The poet was in
perfect harmony with the science o f his age, which was reeling at
the impossibility o f dividing—as traditional science demanded—
the knower from the known. Those hard-won lessons in scientific
subjectivity can help us to understand why our age is at last on the
brink of a revolution in humanity's vision of its own heart.
Tracing the initiation of movement further back into the tangled
undergrowth of the neural jungle soon reveals the brains propensity
for frustrating such facile conceptions as a neat locus of control.
Recordings of encephalography electrical waves show, amid their
jagged spikes and hieroglyph swirls, a signature downward dip signifying that a neuronal mandate for motion is under way: the socalled readiness wave. While the motor cortex produces motion, the readiness wave appears to signal intent. So we should look here for
will. When experimenters placed their subjects in front of a clock,
however, they found that the conscious experience of a decision to
move occurs after the readiness wave has already passed. What we
feel as the conscious spark of resolve in this case proves to be an afterthought, not the majestic nexus of initiative we might imagine.
Just where and how the early glimmers of intention coalesce, like
glittering dust motes into the swirling jinni of action, remains beyond the ken of todays science.The more we discover, the more we
find chat we do not know. As E. E. Cummings observed: Always a
more beautiful answer that asks a more beautiful question.
Another gift that the neocortex bestows is the skill of abstraetion:
every task that calls for symbolic representation, strategy, planning,
or problem-solving has its headquarters in the neocortical brain.
T he power to symbolize arose not to grant the gift o f gab but
because it can keep an animal alive. Abstraction invents the possibility o f a mental future. Because it can travel into the realm o f the
hypothetical, the neocortical brain can envision where and how a
plan ends, allowing its possessor to strategize—rehearse and refine
without betraying his intention prematurely, thereby allowing fictive mistakes whose corporeal counterparts he could not afford.
T h e neurophysiologist W. H. Calvin has proposed that the cerebral
neocortex originally developed to serve ballistic movements—
complicated, one-shot actions that occur too rapidly to be modified as they uncoil, requiring planned precision. Th e modern
Hom o sapiens on the verge o f shooting a crumpled paper ball into
a distant wastebasket or lobbing keys to an acquaintance may experience today that moment o f imaginative hesitancy before release, the preliminary, practice demitoss that sharpens aim. A talent
for visualizing what-ifs may better someone's rock-throwing as
much as his skill at chess. The former aptitude is what secured for
the neocortex a lasting place.
Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the
shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no
basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system
is moving.
After limbic ablation, adult hamsters
ignored the calls and cries of their young; a limbectomized pup
would repeatedly walk on top o f the others "as though they did
not exist." In addition to erasing the recognition o f others, removing limbic tissue robbed these mammals o f responsiveness to the
playful overtures of normal littermates.
In humans, the neocortical capacity for thought can easily obscure other, more occult mental activities. Indeed, the blazing obviousness of cogitation opens the way to a pancognitive fallacy: I
think, therefore everything I am is thinking. But in the words o f a
neocortical brain as mighty as Einstein's: "We should take care not
to make the intellect our god; it has, o f course, powerful muscles,
but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve."
Because people are most aware of
the verbal, rational part of their brains, they assume that every part
of their mind should be amenable to the pressure o f argument and
will. No t so. Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least
two brains out o f three. Much of one's mind does not take orders.
"From modern neuroanatomy," writes a pair of neuroscience researchers, "it is apparent that the entire neocortex o f humans continues to be regulated by the paralimbic regions from which it
evolved." The novelist Gene Wolfe makes an identical, albeit lovelier, observation:
We say, "I will," an J "I will not," an J imagine ourselves (though w*
ohey the orders oj some prosaie person every day) our own masters,
when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us,
and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto
unguessed part oj ourselves.
A person cannot direct his emotional life in
the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will
himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be
happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times.
People lack this capacity not through a deficiency o f discipline but
because the jurisdiction o f will is limited to the latest brain and to
those functions within its purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded. Our society's love affair with
mechanical devices that respond at a button-touch ill prepares us
to deal with the unruly organic mind that dwells within. Anything
that does not comply must be broken or poorly designed, people
now suppose, including their hearts
As elegant as his insight may be, it is the force of Archimedes' emotion that calls to us down the centuries. His thrill, not his intellectual dexterity, is what has given his theorem its notoriety. The real
principle behind his principle is that most people will never
fathom its mathematics—but his exuberance they do understand.
That rush o f joy comes to some from seeing an out-of-the-park
home run, to others in the colors o f the sun setting into the Pacific, or in the eyes o f a newborn baby. Archimedes' delight transmits itself across two millennia in a heartbeat.
W h y should we feel a kinship with Archimedes' enthusiasm, even
if his physics leave us tepid? To answer that question, we would first
have to know the answers to these: what are emotions? How do they
work? Where do they come from, and what are they for?
emotions
do more than color our sensory world; they are at the root o f
everything we do, the unquenchable origin o f every act more complicated than a reflex
Greed and ambition run beneath the surface o f economics; vengefulness and
reverence under the veneer o f justice. In all cases, emotions are humanity's motivator and its omnipresent guide.
As his title
suggests, Darwin considered emotions an evolutionary adaptation
of organisms, no different from a host of other bodily modifications—claws, legs, stingers, gills, scales, wings. Natural selection
should favor emotionality for the same reason that it does any feature—enhanced survival. Organisms with an advantageous somatic
structure gain a competitive edge and live to pass their genes on to
the next generation, while those less equipped fade into the paleontology texts.
Convincing proof of universal emotional expressions came
when Ekman reviewed 100,000 feet o f movie film shot o f isolated,
preliterate tribes in New Guinea. The footage revealed that Ne w
Guineans make the same facial expressions as Americans.
Human beings, as tool-making animals, are prone to associate
importance with durability. The columns of the Parthenon or the
massive stone blocks o f looming pyramids easily elicit our wonder
and awe. The momentousness of emotions in human lives stands
in befuddling contrast to their impossible brevity. Emotions are
mental mayflies, rapidly spawned and dying almost as quickly as
they arise. High-speed videography shows that facial expressions
begin within milliseconds o f a provocative event, and they fade immediately
Rising activity in the emotion circuits produces not sound, but (among other things) a facial expression. When the neural excitation exceeds a shadowy threshold
of awareness, what emerges is tjetling—the conscious experience o f
emotional activation. As neural activity diminishes, feeling intensity decreases, but some residual activity persists in those circuits
after a feeling is no longer perceptible. Like the ghost of Hamlets
father, an emotion appears suddenly in the drama of our lives to
nudge the players in the proper direction, and then dissolves into
nothingness, leaving behind a vague impression o f its former presence.
In
our usage (adapted from Ekman), a mood is a state of enhanced
readiness to experience a certain emotion. Where an emotion is a
single note, clearly struck, hanging for a moment in the still air, a
mood is the extended, nearly inaudible echo that follows.
The most common precipitant of this reiceranc emotionality is
cognition: people tend to think about emotionally arousing occasions afterward, recirculating the experience and stimulating the
consequent emotion just as if the inciting event had actually reoccurred. The human penchant for this post hoc cogitation can magnify the physiologic impact o f an emotion many times. Anger
sharply increases blood pressure on a short-term basis, for instance, but it may well be the recurrent stewing over provocative
events that causes sustained hypertension in touchy people like
type A executives. The neocortical brains tendency to wax hypothetical then becomes a deadly liability. The limbic brain, unable to
distinguish between incoming sensory experience and neocortical
imaginings, revisits emotions upon a body that was not designed to
withstand such a procession.
In its present form, the limbic brain is not only the seat of
dreams, but also the center of advanced emotionality.
Th e
face is the only place in the body where muscles connect direcdy to
skin.
With its power to weave and unravel abstractions, the neocortex
produces language—a string of arbitrary symbols that convey a
message. While having emotions is under limbic control, speaking of
them falls under the jurisdiction of the neocortex. Tha t division of
labor creates translation troubles. On e of the neural mechanisms
that bridges the gap is prosody—a process the neocortex borrows to
inflect its dry concepts with emotional relevance.
Wernicke's area translates the whistles and clicks o f inbound
speech into meaning, while Brxxa's area spins thoughts into a steady
string o f words. People with damage to Wernicke's area cannot understand what is said to them, though they can express themselves
verbally, while those with damage to Broca's area can no longer
talk, but they can still comprehend others who do.
T he mirror-image areas o f the right temporal neocortex perform
the same functions on the emotional content o f speech. People
with damage to these areas evidence aprosodia: a significant fraction
o f them can no longer discern the emotional meaning o f speech,
while others cannot deliver emotional nuances in spoken language.
Thes e are crippling deficits, because sentences with identical semantic structure can easily have opposite meanings when they differ in prosody. Sarcasm owes the whole o f its existence to cone. A
sentence as apparently straightforward as "That's a nice haircut" is
thoroughly ambiguous without prosody—the words can convey
anything from "I'd like to go to bed with you" to "You look like a
fool."
. In mammals, emotionality vaulted to a vastly more sophisticated level. A young crocodilian can sense a possible predator
behind a wavering frond, and it can mobilize its physiology to
evade the threat. But a mammal can turn its advanced neural sensor
not only on the inanimate world but also on other animals that
are emotionally responsive. A mammal can detect the internal state
of another mammal and adjust its own physiology to match the
situation—a change in turn sensed by the other, who likewise adjusts. While the neural responsivity of a reptile is an early, tinny
note o f emotion, mammals have a full-throated duet, a reciprocal
interchange between two fluid, sensing, shifting brains.
Within the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a
capacity we call litnbu resonance—a symphony of mutual exchange
and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to
each others inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking
into the face o f another emotionally responsive creature a multilayered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain
our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors
placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections
whose depths recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs
over a gap o f yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze o f
another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.
Spitz had rediscovered that a lack o f human interaction—handling, cooing,
stroking, baby talk, and play—is fatal to infants
A mammal in protest shows a distinct physiology. Heart rate
and body temperature increase, as do the levels of eateeholamiius and
Cortisol. Catecholamines (like adrenaline) elevate alertness and activity. A young mammal who has lost his mother ought to stay alert
long enough to find her, and the rise in catecholamines during
protest promotes his vigil. This part of the ancient attachment machinery may also keep a human being staring at the ceiling all night
after a breakup.
Adults remain social animals: they continue to require
a source o f stabilization outside themselves. That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable
on their own—no t should or shouldn't be, but (ant be. This
prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes
individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a
daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge o f the limbic
brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and
staying near them
The lack of an attuned
mother is a nonevent for a reptile and a shattering injury to the
complex and fragile limbic brain of a mammal.
the process whereby che brain undergoes struccural
change from experience. Memory does noc travel a straight line,
and neither does the human heart.
But have
no doubt—unconscious emotional knowledge Joes exist. A shadow
does lie across the landscape of memory, but that darkness is not
the sinister specter of censorship.
As we move through the world we tend to presume that success
comes from understanding. The brightness o f rationality's narrow
beam makes this supposition nearly inescapable. "Reason is the
substance o f the universe," Hegel crowed in an age when science
still expected to explicate everything. But these memory studies
have intuition leading comprehension by a country mile; they reveal our lives lit by the diffuse glow of a second sun we never see.
When confronted with repetitive experiences, the brain unconsciously extracts the rules that underlie them
Th e medieval definition o f setientia was just that: ccgnitio per causas, knowing the cause. Th e science
o f our day is confirming the utility, even the supremacy, o f
knowing that X is so without why. Comprehensions proper role is
icing on the cognitive cake. Reason, as Pascal observed, is the
slow and tortuous method by which those who do not know the
truth discover it
The poec Charles Baudelaire once wroce chac che devil's finest
trick is convincing the world he doesn't exist. Implicic memory has
done the same.
He owes the ignorance o f his own heart not to repression but to the brains dual memory design.
Tolstoy was right: Happy families are blandly
similar (much in che way chac healchy bodies are), and unhappy
families unique in che exacc and varied configuracions of their
pachology.
Only a person o f surpassing wisdom
doubts his own mind enough to remark, as the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson once did when reversing himself on a point o f
law, "The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then."
Limbic Attractors spawn a vexing and fascinating aspect o f
emotional life—"transference," Freud's term for the universal
human tendency to respond emotionally to certain others as if
they were figures from one's past.
The teach of limbic Attractors stretches beyond the moment. The
situ qua non of a neural network is its penchant for strengthening neuronal patterns in direct proportion to their use. The more often you
do or think or imagine a thing, the more probable it is that your
mind will revisit its prior stopping point. When the circuits are sufficiendy well worn such that thoughts fly down them with little friction or resistance, that mental path has become a part of you—it is
now a habit of speech, thought, action, attitude.
In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its
partner. This astounding legacy o f our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the
emotional parts o f the people we love, as our Attractors activate
certain limbic pathways, and the brains inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.
W h o we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we
love.
Scientists have proven, for example, that good mothering can override a disadvantageous temperament They arranged for especially
nurturing monkey mothers to adopt baby monkeys genetically
prone to anxiety. Anxious young monkeys usually become inhibited, low-ranking adults. The substitution o f an attentive mother
reversed their fates—once on a genetic path to a lifetime of timidity, these well-loved monkeys became dominant in their troops.
T he inverse also holds: inadequate nurturance can disrupt a
healthy limbic inheritance, imposing anxiety and depression on
someone who had the genetic makings o f a bappy life.
A limbically attuned mother can tell a fearsome fall
from a harmless one. When a child senses his mothers fear, his
anxiety rises or falls in harmony with hers. H e looks to his mother
as a piano tuner looks to the sound o f pure C. After he compares
what he feels with what his mother shows, a child's emotional read
on the world moves closer to hers.
Fuzzy people exist, he tells us in this
scene, people whose selves, not their bodies, are painfully indeterminate. Such a person enters psychotherapy because he does not
know who he is. To people who do know, the predicament sounds
improbable. But a person cannot know himself until another
knows him. Omit skilled limbic resonance from the life o f a child,
and he will emerge with a psyche as indistinct as the blurry habitus
of Allen's character. If a parent actively hates a child, if she affirmatively knows him in the punishing clarity of her fury—that child
will fare better than one who languishes in the dim ether of emotional ignorance.
. To sustain a living relationship, limbic regulation demands sensory inputs that are
rich, vivid, and frequent.
If a parent loves him in the
healthiest way, wherein his needs are paramount, mistakes are forgiven, patience is plentiful, and hurts are soothed as best they can
be, then that is how he will relate to himself and others. Anomalous
love—one where his needs don't matter, or where love is suffocating or autonomy intolerable—makes its ineradicable limbic stamp.
Healthy loving then becomes incomprehensible.
It is attachment that makes familiarity trump worth. A golden
retriever thrills only to his owner. He is amiably and helplessly indifferent to passersby who may be kinder, fonder o f walks, quicker
with treats—he does not, he cannot value them. Everyone is in the
same limbic boat as those patient, expectant dogs.
a different trio cooperates: attachment
implicit memory, and scrong Attractors. There one can read love
stories like this: boy meets girl, who (reminiscent o f his mother) is
needy and scifles his independence; chey struggle bitterly over the
years and resent each other a little more every day. Some people
carry chat tale in their hearts, and whether they find a player for the
part or not, the piece can only come to grief.
Despite the longevity o f Attractors and the waning o f neural
flexibility, the emotional mind can change in adulthood. The old
patterns can undergo revision, although the task is not easy. Y
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but
in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
And so, left to his own devices, a child who
knew and loved a deceitful, selfish, or jealous parent does not often
learn to love differently at age twenty, forty, or sixty.
T h e mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. Whe n a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning
a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state o f relatedness. Evolution has sculpted mammals into their present form:
they become attuned to one another's evocative signals and alter
the structure o f one another's nervous systems. Psychotherapy's
transformative power comes from engaging and directing these ancient mechanisms. Therapy is a living embodiment o f limbic
processes as corporeal as digestion or respiration. Without the
physiologic unity limbic operations provide, therapy would indeed
be the vapid banter some people suppose it to be.
In this chapter we will examine how loves three neural faces—limbic resonance, regulation,
and revision—constitute psychotherapy's core and the motive force
behind the adult mind's capacity for growth.
T h e first part o f emotional healing is being limbicatly known—
having someone with a keen ear catch your melodic essence.
Early emotional experiences knit long-lasting patterns into the
very fabric o f the brain's neural networks. Changing that matrix
calls for a different kind o f medicine altogether.
The neocortical brain collects facts quickly.
T he limbic brain does not. Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force o f another person's Attractors reaching through the doorway o f a limbic
connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal
can restructure the limbic brain o f another.
Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator
sport; it demands the messy experience o f yanking and tinkering
that comes from a limbic bond. If someone's relationships today
bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection
to revise it.
An attuned therapist feels the lure o f a patients limbic Attractors. H e doesn't just hear about an emotional life—the two o f
them Im it. Th e gravitational tug o f this patient's emotional world
draws him away from his own, just as it should. A determined therapist does not strive to have a good relationship with his patient—
it can't be done. If a patient's emotional mind would support good
relationships, he or she would be out having them. Instead a therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open, into
whatever relationship the patient has in mind-—even a connection
so dark that it touches the worst in him. He has no alternative.
Whe n he stays outside the other's world, he cannot affect it; when
he steps within its range, he feels the force o f alien Attractors. He
takes up temporary residence in another's world not just to observe
but to alter, and in the end, to overthrow.
Through the intimacy a
limbic exchange affords, therapy becomes the ultimate inside job.
Nabokov was setting forth the requirements for reading a novel,
but he might as well have been describing the oudook most congenial to apprehending che parallel limbic realities o f the people
around us. A capable cherapisc shares much wich a good reader:
he muse willingly suspend his belief in the rules he knows and
approach a personal universe whose workings should be unimaginable to the uninitiated. If he is able to accain a state o f sufficient receptivity, a therapist can allow che ocher mind co burst
onto the scene like great art does—"as a more or less shocking
surprise."
That makes selecting one's therapist a life decision with (in mild
terms) extensive repercussions. An uncomfortably large number of
therapies yield neutral results; the only record of their existence is
time spent, words spilled, and money that changed hands. But if
therapy works, it transforms a patients limbic brain and his emotional landscape forever. The person o f the therapist will determine the shape of the new world a patient is bound for; the
configuration of his limbic Attractors fixes those o f the other. Thus
the urgent necessity for a therapist to get his emotional house in
order. His patients are coming to stay, and they may have to live
there for the rest o f their lives.
Wha t Richard Selzer, M.D., once wrote o f surgery is as
true o f therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act o f
two madmen.
"The one thing in the worid of value," Emerson observed,
"is the active soul—the soul free, sovereign, active. This every man
is entided to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn."That second effusion
of life is the work of childhood; love and security are the patient
midwives whose ministrations bring forth a new soul.
An ironic revelation
o f the television-computer age is that what people want from
machines is humanity: stories, contact, and interaction. (Nature
took a few billion years t o create that kind o f mechanism from
scratch, so perhaps we should not wait for Silicon Valley to produce one any time soon.) Today s machines deliver not a limbic
connection but imprecise simulations. Small wonder that Internet use in adults actually causes depression and loneliness. "We
were surprised to find that what is a social technology has such
anti-social consequences," said that study's author. However enticing their entertainment value, mechanical companions are unworkable relationship substitutes for adults and children alike.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: the
difference between a caretaker who tunes in to a child and one who
almost tunes in is as great as the difference between lightning and a
lightning bug.
An infant s brain is designed for ongoing attunement with the people predisposed to find him the
most engaging o f all subjects, the most breathtakingly potent axis
around which their hearts revolve. Instead he finds himself competing with half a dozen peers for the emotional focus of an understandably unimpassioned surrogate. Will a parents infatuation
and the divided attentions o f sequential strangers exert a comparable effect on the developing brain? The pull to believe so emanates
from wishful thinking rather than the plausibility o f the hypothesis itself.
In a dazzling vote o f confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness o f being in love while discounting the importance o f loving.
A child tunes in to the emotional patterns o f parents and stores
them. In later life, if he spots a close match, the key slides in the
psychobiologic lock, the tumblers fall home, and he falls in love. Th e
accuracy o f limbic architecture astounds. In a city o f 5 million
people, in a country o f 27 0 million, in a world o f 6 billion, people pick partners emotionally identical to their predecessors and
swoon. In love twists together three high-tensile strands: a potent
feeling that the other fits in a way that no one has before or will
again, an irresistible desire for skin-to-skin proximity, and a delirious urge to disregard all else. In the service o f that prismatic blindfold, in love rewrites reality as no other mental event can. "Whos o
loves," wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "believes the impossible."
Every popcultural medium portrays the height o f adult intimacy as the
moment when two attractive people who don't know a thing about
each other tumble into bed and have passionate sex. All the waking
moments of our love lives should tend, we are told, toward that
throbbing, amorous apotheosis. But in love merely brings the players together, and the end o f that prelude is as inevitable as it is desirable. True relatedness has a chance to blossom only with the
waning of its intoxicating predecessor.
Lovtng is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love
depends critically upon knowing the other. In lave demands only che
brief acquaincance necessary Co establish an emocional genre buc
does noc demand chac the book of the beloved's soul be perused
from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and decailed surveillance o f a foreign soul.
Because loving is reciprocal physiologic influence, it entails a
deeper and more literal connection than most realize. Limbic regulation affords lovers the ability to modulate each other's emotions, neurophysiology, hormonal status, immune function, sleep
208 A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE
rhythms, and stability. If one leaves on a trip, the other may suffer
insomnia, a delayed menstrual cycle, a cold that would have been
fought off in the fortified state o f togetherness.
T h e neurally ingrained Attractors o f one lover warp the emotional virtuality o f the other, shifting emotional perceptions—
what he feels, sees, knows. Whe n somebody loses his partner and
says a part o f him is gone, he is more right than he thinks. A portion o f his neural activity depends on the presence o f that other
living brain. Without it, the electric interplay that makes up him has
changed. Lovers hold keys to each other's identities, and they write
neutostructural alterations into each other s networks. Their limbic
tie allows each to influence who the other is and becomes.
Mutuality has tumbled into undeserved obscurity by the primacy our society places o n the art o f the deal. Th e prevailing myth
reaching most contemporary eare is this: relationships are 50-50.
Whe n one person does a nice thing for the other, he is entided to
an equally pleasing benefit—the sooner the better, under the terms
o f this erroneous dictum. Th e physiology of love is no barter.
Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets
the needs o f the other, because neither can provide for his own.
Such a relationship is not 50-50—it's 100-100 . Each takes perpetual care o f the other, and, within concurrent reciprocity, both
thrive. For those who attain it, the benefits o f deep attachment are
powerful—regulated people feel whole, centered, alive. With their
physiology stabilized from the proper source, they are resilient co
the stresses o f daily life, or even to those o f extraordinary circumstance.
T he contrast between that culture and our own could not be
more evident. Limbic pursuits sink slowly and steadily lower on
America's list o f collective priorities. Top-ranking items remain the
pursuit o f wealth, physical beauty, youthful appearance, and the
shifting, elusive markers o f status. There are brief spasms o f pleasure to be had at the end o f those pursuits—the razor-thin delight
o f the latest purchase, the momentary glee of flaunting this promotion or that unnecessary trinket—pleasure here, but no contentment. Happiness is within range only for adroit people who
give the slip to America s values. These rebels will necessarily forgo
exalted titles, glamorous friends, exotic vacations, washboard abs,
designer everything—all the proud indicators o f upward mobility—and in exchange, they may just get a chance at a decent life.
A person who lacks a stable center feels an urgent need to fill the
gap—he needs something to orient himself as he tries to navigate
the wodd. Since he cannot use the limbic tools that penetrate to
the core of self and others, he will look to external cues—those he
can be sure about. Thwarted attachment and limbic disconnection
thus encourage superficiality and narcissism. People who cannot see
content must setde for appearances. They will cling to image with
the desperation appropriate to those who lack an alternative. In a
culture gone shallow, plastic surgery supplants health; photogenicity trumps leadership; glibness overpowers integrity; sound bites
replace discourse; and changing what is fades before the busy label-
swapping o f political correctness. Whe n a society loses touch with
limbic bedrock, spin wins. Substantive aspirations inevitably suffer.
If the attachment fabric o f a civilization frays, if people cannot
get from their relationships the emotional regulation that those
bonds were designed to furnish, they will commandeer whatever
means o f limbic modulation they can lay hands on. Their hungering brains will seek satisfaction from a variety o f ineffectual substitutes—alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and their cousins. As a society
produces more people who lack access to the neural process that
engenders emotional balance, the ranks o f street drug users will
grow.
Debates on solving America's drug epidemic typically alternate
between conservatives demanding longer prison sentences and liberals calling for more treatment programs. Both sides are reluctant
to admit that neither approach has come anywhere near to ridding
this country of our gargantuan problem. Consigning users to a
penal system that combines a plentiful supply o f drugs and the incentive to use them is not a convincing prescription for ameliora- J
tion. Treating addiction has proved subscancially more effective,
when legislators are in a mood co fund ic—and, since addiccs lack
lobbyiscs, chac is noc very often.
Will lectures on
the evils o f chemical dependency deter teenagers from a life o f
substance dependence? Don't believe it. Whil e their end is worthy,
such talk targets the neocortical brain, not the limbic one. Pain is
too potent a motivator for facts to undo. Pretending otherwise is a
threadbare illusion convincing only to chose who already feel basically well. The insouciance o f Just Say N o assumes that the human
brain and will are separable. They are not. Limbic instability undermines the neural capacity for resolve that jaunty slogans call
upon.
Raising children attentively, thoroughly, and patiently immunizes their brains against stress like
Salks potion protects their bodies from polio. Love is and will always be the best insurance against the despair for which street
drugs are the obvious antidote.
Today's most treacherous false attachment springs up between
human beings and corporations. In this era o f downsizing and its
euphemistic equivalents, the tale of the dedicated worker abrupdy
terminated after years o f loyal service has become archetypal. Behind the stark outlines of the tale are thousands o f people who
pour their hearts into jobs, give beyond their monetary recompense
out o f team spirit, and later are unceremoniously dumped. Many
such people are waylaid by the attachment mechanisms that should
promote well-being but trap them instead.
Natural limbic inclinations include loyalty, concern, and affection. "When you love," wrote Ernest Hemingway, "you wish to do
things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." Within
their designed environment—a family—these impulses make fertile ground wherein healthy relatedness takes root and grows. The
workplace bears strong resemblance to the home—indeed, for
most of humanity's history, the work environment wtv the home.
In both settings, one encounters amiable companions, authoritative
overseers, shared travails.
Whe n the tobacco industry delivers death
more efficiendy than any war machine in history, it does so to our
own people—because our own is a limbic, not a corporate, precept.
Whe n the Johns Manville Corporation covered up the lethal effects o f asbestos, the company sent to their unknowing deaths not
strangers, but hundreds o f their employees. Any reptile would have
done the same. Assuming mutuality where none exists is a mammals grave and occasionally fatal error.
The urge to embed oneself in a family—to hold an endeavor in
common with others, to be part of a team, a band, a group that
struggles together toward a common victory—is an indomitable
aspect o f the human mind and brain. In a culture whose members
are ravenous for love and ignorant o f its workings, too many will
invest their love in a barren corporate lot, and will reap a harvest of
dust.
Chddren who get minimal care can grow up to menace a negligent
society. Because the primate brains intricate, interlocking neural
barriers to violence do not self-assemble, a limbically damaged
human is deadly. If the neglect is sufficiendy profound, the result
is a functionally reptilian organism armed with the cunning o f the
neocortical brain. Such an animal experiences no compunctions
about harming others o f its kind. It possesses n o internal motivation not to kill casually from minor frustration or for minimal
gain. One young offender who crippled his victim during a mugging accounted for his actions in this way: "What do I care? I'm
not her."
I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time I just wish he would
brood on my situation for perhapsfive minutes, that he would give me
his whole mind just once, be bonded with mefor a brief space, survey
my soul as well as my flesh to get at my illness…. I'd like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate. Without
such recognition, I am nothing but my illness.
Western medicine dismissed these tools o f healing as expendable
hand-holding, a luxury that busy schedules could not permit.
"Bedside manner" became a cursory interchange thought mildly reassuring but inessential, particulady when compared to the real science o f pathophysiology.
Medicine lost sight o f this truth: attachment is physiology.
T he wholesale desertion o f limbic attentiveness, once as much a
part o f medicine as the stethoscope, has been cosdy. A 199 4 proposal in The Lancet, Europe's most respected medical journal, advocated teaching acting techniques to medical students. The
proposed utility of adding theatrical training to the curriculum?
Providing physicians with che means to feign concern for patients,
since their incapacity Co care is coo embarrassingly evidenc. "We
would suggest that if physicians do feel antipathy [toward patients], they should at least act as if they cared," wrote the medical
thespians.
Patients (mammals that they are) sensed the limbic void in
American medicine and deserted en masse. Even while traditional
medicine eschewed emotional aspects o f healing, multiple groups
sprang up to accommodate them: acupuncturists, chiropractors,
masseuses, body workers, reflexologists, herbal therapists, and a
host o f others. Th e "alternative" healers proliferated in response to
the demand for a context o f relatednes
S o deep is the divide between neocortical and limbic medicine
that it extends to the pills people are willing t o take. Th e warm
welcome given alternative practitioners has emboldened manufacturers to market alternative meditations—so-called neutraceuticals,
herbal or natural remedies for ailments ranging from AIDS to
menopause.
Th e bustling neutraceutical business—now with $ 5 billion per year in U.S.
sales—is an economic testament to the depth o f yearning for an
earlier, more trustworthy, more humane brand of medicine.
Medicine s movement away from limbic considerations abrupdy
accelerated in the 1990s, as solo practitioners and fee-for-service
physicians congealed into the large corporate mass known as managed care. The emotional revamping was drastic: medicine was
once mammalian and is now reptilian.
The administrative framework of medicine formedy permitted at
least the possibility of human relationships between the participants,
even if technology tended to get in the way. But the corporate
takeover o f the doctor-patient relationship fatally compromised
medicines ailing emotional core. A corporation has customers, not
patients; it has fiscal relationships, not limbic ones. Like crocodiles
incapable o f an aversion to cannibalism, HMO s prosper whether or
not customers are consumed in the process. Individual doctors can
care about patients, but all too often they do not have authority to
implement the decisions that could protect those patients from
harm. In todays market, ER meets Jurassic Bark. "Caveat emptor" has
given way to "Horvescat emptor"—let the buyer be scared.
If you think that patients are not falling ill from preventable diseases, losing organs and limbs to deliberate delay, and dying from
systematic inattention, then think again.
The Ne w York State Health Commissioner discovered a
short while ago that an HM O was using its data on cardiac surgery
death rates to improve the selective routing o f patients to Ne w
York hospitals. Did the insurer send its patients to the most dependable institutions? O f course not. Instead, administrators used
the statistics to bargain for basement-Tate prices from the most
lethal centers. Then, coaxing along cherished dividends, they diverted patients to the cheapest facilities available, where those customers were likeliest to suffer and di a
No t so. Reason's
last step, wrote Blaise Pascal, u mcgnizing thai an infinity of things surpass
it. As a new millennium commences, science is beginning to approach that pinnacle of perspicacity.
Because we are emotional beings, pain is inevitable and grief will come; because the world is neither equitable
nor fair, the suffering will not be distributed evenly. A person who
intuits the ways o f the heart stands a better chance o f living well.
A society o f those who do so holds a promise we can only guess at.
Whil e we cannot alter the nature o f love, we can choose to defy its dictates or
thrive within its walls. Thos e with the wisdom to do so will heed
their hearts and draw strength from their relatedness, and they will
raise their children to do likewise.
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
jacobvanloon
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
blakekathryn
prguitarman
