Tag: neuroscience

The cult(ivation) of self

 

The following video was recently shared by Glen Brauer of Philosophy Dinners. I think it is a good synthesis of mindfulness, philosophical enquiry and the state of knowledge in the neuroscience of emotions, and so it is a good starting point for an exploration of the limits of some pervasive concepts in the world of what is often called self-development.

Now obviously I have nothing against self-development per se, or I wouldn’t be writing this blog. And I think Chade-Meng Tan sets the idea of self-awareness out, in the video, in a contemporary manner which already avoids some of the traps, even if he is still constrained to some extent by language. Thus it is obvious that what he means by “mindfulness” is not an awareness only of the mind or of cerebral processes, but also, to the extent possible, of somatic processes and in particular of emotion. This idea (“bodyfulness”) in itself already takes us beyond the mind/body split which we inherit from Hellenistic philosophy, and I think it is very valuable. He also indicates that the result of self-awareness should be an increased flexibility in ones mental range of action: that the ego becomes a tool and not a driving force. So far I agree. However, before zeroing in on what seem to me still to be some limitations in this paradigm, a brief excursus is required.

The Socratic exhortation to self-knowledge is historically inseparable from an exhortation to self-discipline, as Plato’s development of it, and its political economy, make clear. Socrates in no way was advocating a truly open-ended spirit of self-enquiry. Plato and Aristotle assume all number of things about the universe, none of which is founded in sensory data. In my opinion, there is nothing in the Western philosophical tradition before modern times which encourages or even allows for a phenomenologically based calling into question of social institutions. The dictates of logos, imagined to be self-evident, apparently led everyone to conclusions which are now mostly incompatible with major swathes of scientific knowledge about the human condition. The exhortation to follow the promptings of conscience was in reality an exhortation to conform, and one which led to no revolutionary insights at all, and no degree of authentic being.

There have been, of course, dissenting voices to the Socratic tradition, even if they have been marginalized by history: the Epicureans, the Cynics, Boethius…. But each of these has (of understandable necessity) sought a consolation compatible with the established order, even as they rejected it. The French Revolution was doubtless the first time that philosophy played any sort of a role in a mass political uprising, and it was hardly in the driving seat.

I know next to nothing about the history of Zen Buddhism, but the question arises of whether the particular form of the movement and its characteristic doctrines do not represent a similar accommodation. To ask this question, I would argue, is to answer it. Therefore, we should be on our guard for likely omissions in the doctrine which would have rendered it marginalized or existentially endangered, and thus have not survived to this day or are, like liberation theology, only in the process of formulation.

Primitive societies would struggle to understand our concept of self-awareness. To them it would be utterly alien to imagine that not only could an “I” exist separate from the tribe but that it could be so much an object of attention and cultivation that the tribe disappears almost entirely from view. At times it might seem like the whole spiritual tradition of “civilized” societies is a roundabout, almost absurd means to rediscover and enter into an unio mystica which to a hunter-gatherer is so immanent as to be self-evident. The hunter-gatherer, whose senses are already honed to perfection to his/her environment and peers, has no need of a doctrine of self. Perhaps we only privilege it because we have lost all else?

This view is more radical than I am able to be right now. However, it affords a neat perspective against which to evaluate some of the claims of even a progressive theology of mindfulness, and especially its equation with self-awareness. Tan’s presentation seems to draw on models of the emotions within neuroscience which embody an implicit limitation in the scope of knowledge to the self, at least de facto. This seems to pit self-awareness against other-awareness in a manner which betrays significant cultural bias and I am not sure survives a phenomenological audit. Tan seeks in this way to obtain “mastery” over experience. But who is it, in this case, that masters, and in the name of what? What scope does this leave for rapture and for the numinous? To give just one example, but which is telling, is one seeking to “master” the sexual act? Is this the mode of experience of it which is most authentic and most felicitous? Intuitively it seems not. And when we are “honest” about our limitations, are we as aware as we should be that what we really lack is a not a self-audit, but a critical perspective on society?

I think Tan is at least guilty (judging only on the basis of this presentation) of allowing his audience to persist in cultural biases which he might have helped them to overcome. If that cultural bias predisposes to individually and collectively unhappy outcomes, which I believe in the aggregate it does, his disciples can listen to their bodies and emotions all they like, they will still be zombies walking a path to global ruin.

It may be objected, of course, that we have nothing else than sense-data, and hence that Tan’s position is a tautology. I do not dispute this; but everything is in how matters are framed. I could quote Bourdieu at this juncture, but I will content myself with Rumi, whose precocious prefiguration of social constructivism is breathtaking. “Speak a new language, so that the world will be a new world.“

The neuroscience of fear

Continuing my interest in the neuroscience of emotion, I recently finished reading neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s book “The Emotional Brain”(*). This is a quick review and synopsis, in particular of those points relevant to psychotherapy.

LeDoux is one of the best known figures in the field, alongside Antonio Damasio, whose work I have also delved into, but found rather indigestible. Although I found Ledoux more readable than Damasio, I have two major gripes with the book. The main one is the title: there is not a lot in the book about emotions in general; Ledoux rapidly zeroes in on the single emotion of fear, which is his area of specialism. On this subject he is relatively enlightening, but it wasn’t what I expected or hoped for. In addition, some of the statements he does make about emotions in general, even if they may apply to fear are not obviously true of all emotions.

Additionally, the blurb suggests a book which is highly readable, but I did not find this to be really the case. It’s fairly readable, but has a tendency, especially in the later chapters, to get lost in detail. I would say it is not ideally pitched to the non-specialist reader (though likely at the same time to be oversimplified for a specialist), and does not belong to the best in science writing. Having been written in 1998, it is of course also somewhat dated by now, though I have not come across anything more recent.

LeDoux argues convincingly – but it is not very surprising – that there is no single “emotional system” in the brain, but we have to look at each emotion separately. As i said, he focuses on fear, which presumably is one of the easier emotions to study because it has a much longer evolutionary history than some of the “higher” emotions like love and joy which seem more particularly to relate to human experience. It is quite hard to read any conclusions across from fear to these other emotions.

LeDoux argues that we typically have little reliable insight into the factors which trigger our emotions, but a great tendency to make up stories about them and to believe in these stories. Indeed, we are unreliable in our reports of our emotional states as such. Emotions, unlike cognition, are intrinsically linked to the body and prompt bodily response; they evolved as “behavioral and physiological specializations” (p.40). The characteristic “feel” of emotions  reflect their different physiological signatures.

Emotions operate below the level of consciousness. This is illustrated by the phenomenon of “emotional priming” whereby the response to an explicit stimulus is influenced by a preceding stimulus the duration of which is too short for it to be captured in conscious memory (p.59). Mere exposure is sufficient; there is no need for any logical connection between the two stimuli.

The study of fear has, of course, a particular relevance to psychotherapy and some of LeDoux’s arguments bear consideration in this context, as he himself notes, though does little to develop. LeDoux argues that fear, and comparable emotions, are registered in the amygdala from where they govern programmed physiological reactions; at the same time there is a feedback loop to cognition which passes via the hippocampus. This latter circuit is obviously much more developed in humans than in lower mammals, but in all species it is notably asymmetric: the hippocampus, which is where new memories are created, has the equivalent of a broadband connection to the medial prefrontal cortex, but the available bandwidth is much less in the opposite direction. This, LeDoux argues, makes it difficult to reprogram the association made in the hippocampus between certain remembered events and the fear response. This sounds plausible, and may reflect experimental observations on the persistence of conditioned fear responses in rodents as well as the observed difficulties of therapy, but it is no more than suggestive of the conclusion which LeDoux draws.

Fear conditioning is the process which “turns meaningless stimuli into warning signs” (p.141). Some stimuli are preprogrammed: “laboratory-bred rats who have never seen a cat will freeze if they encounter one” (p.143). But most, of course, are learned. The simultaneous presence of two stimuli of which only one, the “unconditioned stimulus” (US) is intrinsically unpleasant is sufficient to form a link between them, on the basis of which the second or conditioned stimulus (CS) is subsequently sufficient to evoke the fear response, regardless of its intrinsic link to the US. This link is highly persistent and may indeed be impossible to forget completely even if, subsequently, no link between the stimuli is observed for a protracted period. The best that can be done is to extinguish it by presenting the CS repeatedly in the absence of the US, but there is always the risk of recurrence if relevant circumstances, such as re-exposure to the unconditioned stimulus, or simply a high level of ambient unrelated stress, arise. A CS may be almost anything: a place, a gesture, an expression, a tone of voice… Of course, the atomicity of these candidate stimuli is hard to determine : is being in exactly the same place necessary to evoke the conditioned response, or is it sufficient that a place bear some resemblance and, if so, in what respects?

In stressful situations, memory formation by the hippocampus is impaired. This would imply that traumatic events might not leave a memory trace, but still result in fear conditioning. In such cases, there may be no way to “reverse-engineer” the event out of the conditioned reaction. This has the clear implication that going after memories of traumatic events may be a fruitless strategy, and that resolution of trauma might happen without those underlying events ever being recalled, even if they occurred past the stage of childhood amnesia. However, the stress hormone cortisol has the opposite effect on the amygdala. Thus it is “completely possible that one might have poor conscious memory of a traumatic experience, but at the same time form very powerful implicit, unconscious emotional memories” (p.245). At the same time, recreating the emotional state conditioned does facilitate recall of explicit memories (p.212).

LeDoux’s analysis of conditioning and memory therefore sheds some light on problems encountered in therapy and on effective therapeutic strategies. I learnt something from  this book, but I suspect that a general book on recent contributions of neuroscience to psychotherapy might have gotten me more rapidly to my goal.

———————————————–

(*) References are to the 1999 paperback edition published by Orion books.