[repost] The brain wants what it wants, 🧠♥️
or else it does not care. Emily Dickinson was wrong about anatomy but right about love. (THE BODY IS THE SOUL #6)
Friends,
For a little while longer, I’m still on hiatus at PLAY IT BY EAR and hard at work developing a new career hustle. (I’m learning to compose and produce music for film and other media…and may be about to land my first actual job in this field, we’ll see.) On this holiday of questionable relevance to our lives at any given moment, I’m reposting my 2023 essay below.
Its snarky yet serious vibe was fueled by my then status as an uncoupled person. I remain really grateful for that extended time of post-divorce solitude, even when my intermittent attempts at dating left me annoyed, frustrated, and sometimes deeply sad.
But what a difference a year can make. Toward the end of last summer, it became clear to me and a certain fellow writer-type that our 30-year friendship was leaning toward romance…and a more or less immediate sense of commitment. We decided to let it fall in that direction. It landed with thunderous emotional triumph. He might phrase that differently—writers, ya know—but I know he’d agree with the sentiment. (Happy Valentine’s Day, babe.)
~S
♥️
Audio for everyone today. Wheeeee! I had too much fun with this one not to “give it away, give it away, give it away now….”
Happy Valentine’s Day! or maybe I just mean Have Yourself A Valentine’s Day! without assigning it a particular emotional valence.
From a site calling itself History.com, I bring you a tale that is possibly ahistorical and perhaps even about someone who never existed, therefore more along the lines of a legend. But if he did exist and if the following story bears any passing resemblance to the truth, this man should be considered a brave political martyr rather than a religious saint.
On February 14, around the year 270 A.D., Valentine, a holy priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, is said to have been executed.
Under the rule of Claudius the Cruel, Rome was involved in many unpopular and bloody campaigns. The emperor had to maintain a strong army, but was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. Claudius believed that Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families.
To get rid of the problem, Claudius banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.
When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Valentine was arrested and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14, on or about the year 270.1
Now when I was a young churchgoing gal I never quite understood what was meant by Jesus Christ having allegedly died for our sins—a concept that didn’t become clear to me until some years later when I read a secondhand description of the 19th-century Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer’s study in comparative religion called The Golden Bough. I believe the description was in a novel by William Gaddis called The Recognitions, but that’s unimportant here. Through Gaddis, I learned that Frazer had discovered the universality of the practice of scapegoating, i.e. making a blood sacrifice of a beast or a human to appease, mollify, and essentially bribe the gods to please take away some form of pestilence they’ve sent to any given community. I decided then to interpret the Christ legend as a rarefied example of scapegoating and I’ve had no personal need to look much further. But it seems to me that this man Valentine deserves the epigraph “died for our sins” in a much earthier and more specific manner. The dude was executed for offering churchly imprimatur to the wants and needs of horny third-century teenagers. In the same instance, as a bonus form of speaking truth to power, he probably kept a few young males from becoming the medieval equivalent of cannon fodder. Why call him a saint? Maybe he’s better described as a peace activist.
♥️
Several days ago I was trying to come up with something fun and frothy to say on this occasion, but my thoughts turned earnest instead. At some point over the years, I seem to have picked up the belief that it’s not very intellectual to write about romance, and that you should especially avoid doing so if you’re a woman or else you’ll be pink-ghettoized. This notion vaguely bedevils me despite a thorough university-level grounding in the poetic fragments of Sappho of Lesbos (~610 BC), Plato’s Symposium (~385 BC), and the Shakespearean sonnets (17th century, of course); a passing familiarity with the romantic fables of ancient Mesopotamia (6,000 years ago), China (3,000 years ago), and India (about the same); and at least a little exposure to the Arabic/Persian traditions of mystic love poetry (1,500 years old).
Even then, the academic approach to the literature of love tends to focus on its cultural, historical, and theological significance—for example, reducing the world’s great tragedies of star-cross’d lovers to cautionary tales about politics and morality, or insisting that hot, explicit passages in the Song of Solomon or the Rg-Veda are mere allegories of spiritual devotion. To speak directly on so-called matters of the heart (an inaccurate location, but we’ll get to that shortly) feels like coming down several notches from the big important ideas to dwell on domestic trivialities. Evince a little too much passion for the subject of passion, and you are in effect devolving from The New York Review of Books to Us Weekly and risking a further downward trend toward TMZ.
Well, fuck that nonsense. Love is love, important to us because it’s important to us. “The world must be peopled,”2 and so forth. But more to the point, love—and I do mean eros, sexual love as opposed to familial or communal—is deeply political. Denying so is not just foolish but I suspect dangerous. I’ll get to that point later on.
In my ongoing quest to understand the neurobiology of emotions, I went scuttling through current psychological research abstracts on the chemicals most involved in sexual and emotional bonding—dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin—and stumbled across a reference to an apparently out-of-print book from 2008 called Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. I immediately paid a whopping thirty bucks for the Kindle edition and read the whole thing in several long stints over the weekend.
(I wouldn’t recommend this kind of thing for an entire lifetime, but if you don’t have a ready-to-hand favorite person to occupy your Saturday-into-Sunday during the second week of any given February, a good book will do.)
Its author, Semir Zeki, is a British neuroscientist now in his 80s whose early research focused on mapping specific types of visual perceptions (e.g., color, motion, direction) first in primate brains and later in their human counterparts using imaging technology (fMRI and PET scans). He eventually developed a certain idea about the relationship between our inborn, evolutionary sensory capacities and our “affective states”—in other words, between our perceptions and our emotions.
The brain, he argues, is primarily involved in the formation and expansion of concepts, into which we categorize the information we receive via our senses. His principal thesis is that this concept formation is
a ubiquitous operation that the brain performs continuously throughout post-natal life, on almost everything that it encounters. It applies it to simple perceptual experiences such as that obtained by viewing, for example, a house or a car, as well as to more abstract entities such as love and beauty. This seemingly effortless capacity, which is supported by a neurological machinery of immense complexity, is a splendid evolutionary triumph of neural engineering, allowing the brain not only to obtain but also to generalize its knowledge. But there is often a heavy price to be paid in return for this exquisite capacity, which is that of misery.3
Wait, what did he just say? Yes, Professor Zeki just took a linguistic leap from neuroscience to heartbreak in a few short sentences. I love it when a seasoned thinker demonstrates such stark clarity and authority. Here’s the gist of his argument. To begin with, we have to accept that concepts come before particular instances. Plato was right about our minds possessing a priori “ideal forms” of things we encounter in the world, but these concepts don’t come from the divine realm, they come directly from our gray matter. Human brains have evolved with inbuilt categories to help us discern and catalog incoming information. We also possess a ratio-taking or approximating apparatus such that when we encounter certain stimuli—for example, the color of a leaf, which we’ve come to call green—we recognize it as the same color even if we see that leaf at sunrise when it’s bathed in deep red wavelengths or at high noon when it’s resplendent in full-spectrum white light. Specific areas of the deep brain and the cortex are activated when a person is shown the same green object-color even in different light settings: the category for green is there but includes some spectral leeway. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to recognize that the leaves we see on the trees in the morning are the exact same leaves we see at noon.
We have also evolved, Zeki argues, a similar inbuilt concept for romantic love, subject to individuation by our experiences, that can and has been described as the urge to be unified with our beloved. This same yearning for unity or oneness is evident all over the world regardless of historical epoch or specific culture. It is universal and inherited, but also allows for a range of recognition, such that each person is driven to find a beloved but no two people perceive a potential beloved in exactly the same manner. We each have our types, affected by historical, cultural, and familial particulars.
This is not, by the way, an argument for or against monogamy: the mechanism works the same for people whether they are parsimonious or prolific in their urge to merge. Although the desire to become one with the beloved is not yet as readily discernible—in terms of specific brain activity via fMRI—as perception of the color green, the remarkable consistency of this desire as evoked in world literature, art, and music proves, Zeki argues, that there must be a singular set of neural activations for passionate love common to all normally operating human brains.
As an evolutionary biologist might do, but a researcher in the “hard” sciences might avoid doing, Zeki is working backward from a cultural observation to make a strong claim about neurobiology. This is a gutsy move, one which he admits, in his first chapter, might offend some of his colleagues. I do wonder if this heterodox, interdisciplinary approach helps explain why such a powerful work has not been reprinted by JJ Wiley and has relatively few readers and reviewers at Amazon and other online booksellers. In an anti-intellectual culture like ours, where specialists tend to operate in silos, how many people are willing to range among….illustrated discussions of cortical cell function, descriptions of paintings by Cezanne, considerations of sculptures by unnamed ancient Etruscans, and literary analyses of Rimbaud and Thomas Mann?
(And how many of those folks would spend Super Bowl weekend immersed in such an eclectic brew? The answer to that particular question may help explain why I don’t have a date for Valentine’s Day. But I digress.)
My summary here is a bit facile, so I highly recommend this book to all of us wannabe deep thinkers on the matter, even at its elevated out-of-print prices. Trust me when I say that Zeki is a very elegant writer and his argument is dense but not hard to follow.
It comes down to this. We are born addicted to love—literally, by which I mean, neurologically. Why say addicted? Because we seek and seek but can never actually have what we want: we can never fully become one with our beloved. That perfect state can’t be achieved while we’re alive, except in brief moments, perhaps only in the throes of early infatuation or at the height of mutual orgasm. The brain newly in love exhibits very different electrochemical patterns than the brain in a long committed partnership. Researchers are only beginning to understand the complex interplay of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin at various love-related events, but they are the same type of pleasure, motivation, and reward sensations we might receive from various psychotropic substances like cocaine or ecstasy…or good-quality chocolate. And like any other mind-altering substance, we can get a dose of blessed oneness from time to time, but sooner or later the effect wears off. We come down off our high and remember again that we are individuals. Individuals, alas, are also born with an inbuilt capacity to judge, measure, weigh, compare…and to find the other person lacking in some way. We crave an impossible perfection, and hence we are doomed to be miserable.
And yet, for the most part, most of us keep trying. Einstein’s quote about the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting different results is on the money here.
♥️
We are built for love, and not only the maternal kind (although the different parts of the brain activated by romance and a mother’s love sit very near each other and exhibit certain similar patterns). We are built also to be eternally disappointed in love. Out of that disappointment, Zeki argues, comes creativity not just in formal artistic endeavors but in all types of human problem-solving. Our brains are designed to further our own genetic lineage for the survival of its related individuals, but also to frustrate us enough in our search for oneness that we sublimate those primal urges in communal work that ensures the survival of the entire species.
Here’s how I’ve restated Zeki’s startling idea for my own amusement: The misery of heartbreak gets compensated by the delight of ingenuity. (You can tell I’ve pretty much fallen in love with this topic, right?)
A priest named Valentine, we are told, understood the primacy of romantic love and risked his life to allow its consummation. In the Symposium, Plato theorizes that all humans begin life cleaved in two parts and must spend their entire lives looking for their other half, whether of the same sex or the opposite. And today, we should all know by now that being able to love whomever one loves—among consenting adults, of course—is not just a tragic thing to deny but a deeply risky one.
How many more closeted, self-hating gay men or outwardly chaste libertines of any orientation do we need in the business of promoting patriarchal autocracy? How many white supremacists obsessed with “the great replacement” might be reacting against their own culturally verboten but neurologically determined attraction to black and brown individuals, in exactly the way James Baldwin limned in that terrifying short story “Going To Meet The Man” almost 60 years ago? When will we let love be love and promote rather than fear its full expression?—support romance alongside a heavy dose of sex education, regular ol’ liberal education for the mind and soul, a commitment to let creative humans be creative, and the wide availability of shame-free contraception and reproductive healthcare? (Hey, it’s supposed to be a dreamy holiday so let the woman dream…)
Early in the Trump presidency, there was a social media post making the rounds written by a woman claiming to be the former high school friend of a prominent American neo-Nazi. I can’t find the post again to link it so I won’t name names. But this man was apparently once an openly gay, singing-and-dancing, musical-theater-loving teenager. His parents sent him to a brutal anti-gay “conversion therapy” camp, but the only conversion that took place, it would seem, is that his natural capacity to love and be loved was broken and replaced by so much rage, he decided to make racial and religious hatred his professional trade. I’m guessing this same basic life story is repeated thousands of times over, in one form or another, among many of the most violent human beings who hold the vilest ideologies.
Our brains are wired to love just as surely as they are wired to see green leaves on trees. Maybe it’s time to start treating romantic love as a matter of dire collective concern, and not only in terms of family stability and individual liberty. I don’t mean rationing out suitably docile sex partners to in-cels, of course. I don’t know exactly what I mean, or what a healthy, thriving, romance-respecting society would look like. Something tells me that is not at all what we have right now. I can’t support this notion with evidence yet, but I feel that we in the USA are still pointlessly stuck between puritanical hatred of our bodies on the one hand and pornographic, passion-free anti-humanism on the other. I feel as if we don’t love love enough.
Call me old-fashioned but I really hope the preferred solution doesn’t involve advanced AI robotics or cloning. Even if your One doesn’t turn out to be your One forever, you probably want there to be only one of them walking around in the world at any given time. Maybe I’m basing this assumption on the 2013 Joaquin Phoenix/Scarlett Johansson movie called HER by Spike Jonze, or maybe I’ve seen an episode of Black Mirror even worse than that, but I would think a desire for unity with a unique individual is one of the unchanging quirks of our addictive love capacity.
Now, having decided once and for all that eros is a perfectly worthy topic for further intellectual examination, I suppose I will put some more creative mental effort toward it. I’ve got no Beloved One of my own at the moment, but instead, I’ve got plenty of time and energy to sublimate. Why be miserable when you can be prolific?
♥️
Benedick’s famous self-justification for falling in love with Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
Zeki, Semir. Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness 1st Edition. Kindle version, page 1.
A marvelous read--thanks Sandy! Reposts are a surprisingly wonderful necessity sometimes.