Recordings of encephalographic 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 so-called 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 today’s science. The more we discover, the more we find that we do not know.
If the attachment fabric of 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 of limbic modulation they can lay hands on. Their hungering brains will seek satisfaction from a variety of ineffectual substitutes — alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and their cousins.
Many people conceive of evolution as an upward staircase, an unfolding sequence that produces ever more advanced organisms. From this perspective, the advantages of the neocortex — speech, reason, abstraction — would naturally be judged the highest attributes of human nature. But the vertical conceptualization of evolution is fallacious. 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. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so. The same is true today. We are free to label ourselves the end product of evolution not because it is so, but because we exist now. Expunge this temperocentrist bias, and the neocortical brain is not the most advanced of the three, but simply the most recent.
The United States alone sports an inventive spectrum of psychotherapeutic sects and schools: Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians; narrative, interpersonal, transpersonal therapists; cognitive, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral practitioners; Kohutians Rogerians, Kernbergians; aficionados of control mastery, hypnotherapy, neurolingustic programming, eye movement desensitization- that list does not even complete the top twenty. The disparate doctrines of these proliferative, radiating divisions, often reach mutually exclusive conclusions about therapeutic propriety: talk about this, not that; answer questions, or don’t; sit facing the patient, next to the patient, behind the patient. Yet no approach has ever proven its method superior to any other. Strip away a therapist’s orientation, the journal he reads, the books on his shelves, the meetings he attends- the cognitive framework his rational mind demands – and what is left to define the psychotherapy he conducts?
Himself. The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is.
A number of scientists now believe that somatic concordances like these are not just normal but necessary for mammals. The mammalian nervous system depends for its neurophysiologic stability on a system of interactive coordination, wherein steadiness comes from synchronization with nearby attachment figures.
Encountering an early series of consistent instances can implant an erroneous generality in a child's mind. This mental machinery distills and does not evaluate; it cannot detect whether the larger world runs in accordance with the scheme it has drawn forth from the emotional microcosm of a family. Just as grammatical English emerges from our lips automatically, a structured pattern of emotional relatedness emanates from each of us.
Proof that expressions are intrinsic is closer at hand than the South Pacific. As Darwin knew, a congenitally blind baby will smile while interacting pleasurably with his mother. Such a smile comes from a developing creature unable to speak, walk, or even sit up, but he already knows how to express happiness through a configuration of muscular contractions he has never seen on anyone’s face. His knowledge has to be innate.
Arising somewhere between 100 million and 150 million years ago, monotremes demonstrate the beginnings of the departure from a reptilian way of life. Although it was far from obvious to early taxonomists, the feature that distinguishes mammals from reptiles is the appearance of a new brain within their skulls — the limbic brain. The echidna possesses not only nature’s most primitive uterus, but also her most primitive limbic apparatus. Of all mammals, echidnas alone lack one limbic process: they do not dream during sleep.
The neurally ingrained Attractors of one lover warp the emotional virtuality of the other, shifting emotional perceptions — what he feels, sees, knows. When somebody loses his partner and says a part of him is gone, he is more right than he thinks. A portion of his neural activity depends on the presence of 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 neurostructural alterations into each other’s networks. Their limbic tie allows each to influence who the other is and becomes.
Because other mammals have expressions, does that mean they have feelings — a subjective experience of the emotional states they display? That idea was scientifically risible not so long ago. Now some emotion scientists endorse the proposition that other mammals possess emotional consciousness — that they feel. This reversal delights animal advocates eager to make an argument for panprotoplasmic parity. But when the zoophile Mark Derr writes, “The question of whether animals possess consciousness, intelligence, volition, and feelings has long been settled in the affirmative,” he must be reporting the consensus from a species other than our own. Animals may have decided the matter to their own satisfaction, but human beings, as far as we know, are still debating it.
Mutuality has tumbled into undeserved obscurity by the primacy our society places on the art of the deal. The prevailing myth reaching most contemporary ears is this: relationships are 50-50. When one person does a nice thing for the other, he is entitled to an equally pleasing benefit – the sooner, the better, under the terms of this erroneous dictum. The physiology of love is no barter.
Cultural messages inform the populace that if they aren't perpetually electric they are missing out on the pinnacle of relatedness. Every pop-cultural medium portrays the height of 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 of that prelude is as inevitable as it is desirable. True relatedness has a chance to blossom only with the waning of its intoxicating predecessor.