A General Theory of Love

I recently had coffee with my friend Janet Feldman. Janet is a senior coach/consultant at LeaderSource.

In our chat, she mentioned her favorite book of 2002: A General Theory of Love written by three brain experts (Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., and Richard Lannon, M.D.; see photo below). Janet was so passionate about the book that I was propelled to order it from Amazon.com. I shocked my wife by reading it in bed at night instead of watching TV, and finishing it in a couple of days.

The book's back cover includes this summary: "This is a fascinating account of the psychobiology of love. Drawing on new scientific discoveries about the human brain, the authors describe the workings of our ancient, pivotal urge for intimacy, revealing that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood our brains actually link with those of the people close to us in a silent rhythm that makes up the life force of the body."

My one warning, if you read it is this: I found the first chapter tough going as the writing style was almost too rich, like some Christmas cookies I had recently. If you get into chapter two, I think the rest of the book will fly by.

Below are a few of the passages I highlighted as I read this book.

Chapter 1: The Heart's Castle
 Science Joins the Search for Love

[JE: First, here's the opening paragraph:]

Some might think it strange that book on the psychobiology of love opens with a poem, but the adventure itself demands it. Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding — and so does the bulk of emotional life. More than three hundred years ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing. Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why. Centuries later, we know that the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives. The same rift makes the mysteries of love difficult for people to penetrate, despite an earnest desire to do so. Because of the brain's design, emotional life defeats Reason much as a poem does. Both retreat from the approach of explication like a mirage on a summer's day.

From Chapter 2: Kits, cats, Sacks, and Uncertainty
How the Brain's Basic Structure Poses Problems for Love

[JE: I should first mention that the authors describe the brain's three main divisions: Reptilian, the oldest and most primitive part; Limbic, the emotional center of the brain and the book's focus; and the Neocortical, the rational, thinking part of the brain.]

The swirling interactions of humanity's three brains, like the shuttling of cups in a shell game, deftly disguise the rules of emotional life and the nature of love. 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 of argument and will. Not so. Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least two brains out of the three. Much of one's mind does not take orders.(p 32-33)

The scientist and artist both speak to the turmoil that comes from having a triune brain. 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 of discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.(p 33)

Frost wrote that a poem "begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with." Neither does love begin with a thought. Anatomical mismatch prevents intellectual talons from grasping love as surely as it foils a person who tries to eat soup with a fork. To understand love we must start with the feelings—and that is where the next chapter begins. (p 34)

From Chapter 3: Archimedes' Principle
 How We sense the Inner World of Others Hearts

In all cases, emotions are humanity's motivator and its omnipresent guide. (P 36)

The first scientist to devote himself to the study of emotion was Charles Darwin...the essence of Darwin's approach was right on the mark. Emotions have a biological function —they do something for an animal that helps it to live, and if we study emotions carefully enough, we might find out what. (p 37-38)

Thirty years ago, emotion scientists Paul Ekman and Carrol Izard, working separately, confirmed a central proposition in darwin's evolutionary theory of emotions: facial expressions are identical—all over the globe, in every culture and every human being ever studied... An angry person appears angry to everyone worldwide, and likewise a happy person, and a disgusted one. (p 39)

But emotions require no thinking at all. (p 42)

Moods exist because of the musical aspect of an emotion's neural activity... In our usage, 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... And so the provocative events of the day may leave us with emotional responsiveness waiting beneath our notice.

If emotions are ephemeral, how can we account for the person who feels sad all morning or frustrated all day? The smooth impression of a lengthy emotion is often created by serial evocation, a repetitive string of one brief feeling that rings out its plangent tones again and again.

The most common precipitant of this reiterant 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 of an emotion many times....The neocortical brain's 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. ... No one yet knows what causes the brain to get stuck on a single emotion, and in many cases, getting it unstuck is no simple matter. (p 45-46)

When anxiety becomes problematic, most people try vainly to think their way out of trouble. But worry has its routs in the reptilian brain, minimally responsive to will. ... The brute force of will cannot undo temperament. (p 49-50)

Because the last brain in the evolutionary sequence directs the abstract mind, we must credit the neocortex for the towering human achievements in cognition—language, problem-solving, physics, mathematics. ... 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. (p 56-57)

The limbic brain is another delicate physical apparatus that specializes in detecting and analyzing just one part of the physical world—the internal state of other mammals. (p 62) [emphasis added by JE]

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. (p 63)

From Chapter 4: A Fiercer Sea
 How Relationships Permeate the Human Body, Mind and Soul

More than twenty years ago, developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth investigated mothers and their newborn infants and found that the kind of mother a baby has predicts his emotional traits in later life. (p 73)

Ainsworth found no simple correlation between the length of time a mother spent attending to her child and his ultimate emotional health....Ainsworth observed instead that secure attachment resulted when a child was hugged when he wanted to be hugged and put down when he wanted to be put down....Wherever a mother sensed her baby's inarticulate desires and acted on them, not only was their mutual enjoyment greatest, but the outcome was, years later, a secure child. (p 75)

But because human physiology is (at least in part) an open-loop arrangement, an individual does not direct all of his own functions. A second person transmits regulatory information that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, immune function, and more—inside the body of the first. (p 85; emphasis added by JE)

That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own—not should or shouldn't be, but can't be. (p 86, emphasis added by JE)

Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. (p 86)

From Chapter 5: Gravity's Incarnation
 How Memory Stores and Shapes Love

[JE's note: The following referrers to our implicit memory system and intuition:] Behind the familiar bright, analytic engine of consciousness is a shadow of silent strength, spinning dazzlingly complicated life into automatic actions, convictions without intellect, and hunches whose reasons follow later or not at all. It is this darker system that guides our choices in love. (p 112)

The brain's division of memory labor upholds the adage: you never forget how to ride a bike. People don't forget any capacity that depends on feel rather than fact. (p 114)

To the neocortical brain, rich in the power of abstractions, understanding makes all the difference, but it doesn't count for much in the neural systems that evolved before understanding existed. Ideas bounce like so many peas off the sturdy incomprehension of the limbic and reptilian brains. The dogged implicitness of emotional knowledge, its relentless unreasoning force, presents logic from granting salvation just as it precludes self-help books from helping. (p 118)

From Chapter 6: A Bend in the Road
 How love changes who we are and who we can become

When an emotional chord is struck, it stirs to life past memories of the same feeling. ...

If an emotion is sufficiently powerful, it can quash opposing networks so completely that their content becomes inaccessible—blotting out discordant sections of the past. within the confines of that person's virtuality, those events didn't happen. To an outside observer, the person seems oblivious to the whole of their own history. (p 130)

Because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought. (p 141)

No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought. (p 141)

From Chapter 7: The Book Of Life
 How love forms, guides, and alters a child's emotional mind

A toddler lurches across the grass with a determination that his unsteadiness renders positively quixotic. Inevitably gravity catches up with inexperience; he teeters and falls. At once he checks a parent's face: if she shows alarm or concern, he cries, and if she is amused he may smile at her, even laugh. he trusts her assessment of his tumble more than his, and he does so with good reason. He can feel his pain and fright and disappointment but cannot gauge them. If his tumble is big enough to be awful or small enough to be negligible, he may realize that. But at all levels in between, he holds his emotions open to an expert's interpretation. (p 155)

Attachment is not a critic: a child adores his mother's face, and he runs to her whether she is pretty or plain. And he prefers the emotional patterns of the family he knows, regardless of its objective merits. As an adult his heart will lean toward these outlines. The closer a potential mate matches his prototypes, the more enticed and entranced he will be—the more he will feel that here, at last, with this person, he belongs.

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 of walks, quicker with treats—he does not, he cannot value them. Everyone is in the same limbic boat as those patient, expectant dogs. (p 160-161)

Childhood chisels its patterns into pliable neural networks, while later experience wields a weaker influence on the evolving person. Why should this be? In theory, the same learning so influential in casting the emotional core of the self could take place later in life. But often the only emotional learning one sees after childhood is the reinforcement of existing fundamentals.

Unfortunately, the brain's biology and its mathematics both oppose adult emotional learning. (p 163)

From Chapter 8: Between Stone and Sky
 What can be done to heal hearts gone astray

The first part of emotional healing is being limbically known—having someone with a keen ear catch your melodic essence. (p 170)

Our neural architecture places relationships at the crux of our lives, where, blazing and warm, they have the power to stabilize. When people are hurting and out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations: groups, clubs, pets, marriages, friendships, masseuses, chiropractors, the Internet. All carry at least the potential for emotional connection. Together, those bonds do more good than all the psychotherapists on the planet. (p 170-171)

The neocortical brain collects facts quickly. The limbic brain does not. Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force of another person's Attractors reaching through the doorway of a limbic connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic brain of another. (p 172)

A person cannot choose to desire a certain kind of relationship, any more than he can will himself to ride a unicycle, play The Golden variations, or speak Swahili. The requisite neural framework for performing these activities does not coalesce on command. ... When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it. (p 177)

Therapy's transmutation consists not in elevating proper Reason over purblind Passion, but in replacing silent, unworkable intuitions with functional ones. Patients are often hungry for explanations, because they are used to thinking that neocortical contraptions like explication will help them. But insight is the popcorn of therapy. (p 179)

You can't tell someone with faulty Attractors to go out and find a loving partner—from his point of view, there are none. Those who could love him well are invisible. (p 180)

The neocortex rapidly masters didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition. No one expects to play the flute in six lessons or to become fluent in Italian in ten. ... [The acquisition of emotional and relational knowledge] requires an investment of time at which our culture balks. (p 189)

From Chapter 9: A Walk in the Shadows
 How culture blinds us to the ways of love

The limbic brain bestows experiential riches denied simpler creatures, but it also opens mammals up to torment and destruction. An alligator never feels the pain of loss, and a rattlesnake never suffers illness or death upon separation from its parents or progeny. Mammals can and do. (p 191)

What we do inside relationships matters more than any other aspect of human life. (p 192; emphasis added by JE)

Several researchers have shown that day care in excess of twenty hours per week for children under a year old increases the risk of insecure attachment and its negative emotional effects. (p 201)

The simple equations of love: relationships live on time. (p 205)

Some couples cannot love because the two simply don't spend enough time in each other's presence to allow it. (p 205)

If somebody just jettison a part of life, time with a mate should be the last on the list: he needs that connection to live. (p 206)

A couple shares in one process, one dance, one story. Whatever improves that one benefits both; whatever detracts hurts and weakens both lives. (p 209)

Happiness is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America's values. (p 209)

Medicine lost sight of this truth: attachment is physiology. Good physicians have always know that the relationship heals. (p 221)

The emotional revamping [of modern medicine] was drastic: medicine was once mammalian and is now reptilian. (p 223)