Exuberance: The Passion for Life (22 page)

The great joy-filled Christian hymns continue the songs of praise from the Old Testament. It would be difficult to find more exuberant anthems than those filling the Christian hymnal, although despair and anguish are also present in full measure. It is
not just the triumphant hymns of Easter or the joyous carols of Christmas that ring with joy. Exuberance, it would seem, is the inherent response of those who are moved deeply by nature and who delight in assigning its glories to a Creator. It is, as well, the response of those who have no such belief but nonetheless exult in the beauty of the world they see around them.

Music activates the same reward systems in the brain that are activated by play, laughter, sex, and drugs of abuse. Brain imaging studies show that pleasurable music creates patterns of change in the dopamine and opioid systems similar to those seen during drug-induced euphoric states. If experimental subjects are asked to listen to music and some are given Naloxone, a drug used to treat addicts by blocking opiate receptors in the brain, and others are given a placebo, those who receive Naloxone report a significant drop in the pleasure they experience while listening to music. Those who are given a placebo do not.

Music not only activates the reward system, it
decreases activity in brain structures associated with negative emotions. Music is an expansive pleasure, one that both reflects and generates joy. As the English psychiatrist Anthony Storr has written, “
Music exalts life, enhances life, and gives it meaning.… Music is a source of reconciliation, exhilaration, and hope which never fails.” It is, he argues, “an irreplaceable, undeserved, transcendental blessing.”

Exultant states are often a part of religious as well as musical experiences. William James, of course, wrote about this brilliantly. “
Man’s extremity,” he believed, “is God’s opportunity,” and James brought a sympathetic temperament to the study of those for whom religion exists “not as a dull habit, but an acute fever.” There are individuals, he observed, for whom religion in its “highest flights” is an “infinitely passionate” thing. “It adds to life an enchantment… [that] is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can
fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command.” The capacity to experience ecstasy cannot be willed; it is a gift, an ability like a fine wit or a way with shapes and spaces.

The ecstasy associated with religious experiences is transient, more often measured in minutes than in hours, but it shares with exuberance the sense of well-being, expansiveness, joy, upliftedness, and a conviction of significance. Such moments bring with them intense mental and bodily sensations and a feeling that one has entered a new world of meaning. Many things can trigger ecstasy. Marghanita Laski, in her study of secular and religious ecstasies, found that nature, art, sexual love, and religion were by far the most frequent triggers of ecstatic experiences, and she suggested that such ecstasies, in turn, give value to that which triggers them. They serve as points of departure for spiritual journeys, creative quests, or explorations of the mind.

C. S. Lewis, in
Surprised by Joy
, describes his ecstasy in seeing for the first time an illustration in
Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods
. The long winter, he said, “
broke up in a single moment.… Spring is the inevitable image, but this was not gradual like Nature’s springs. It was as if the Arctic itself, all the deep layers of secular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly, into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water.” To have this experience once, Lewis says, sets one on a pursuit to recapture what has been and disappeared: “
I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.” He felt as a result of knowing “Joy” that he knew nature differently; his knowledge was direct, not apprehended from a distance or learned of from a book. Ecstatic joy was for him an “imaginative Renaissance” that lured him toward his subsequent spiritual journeys. As the Australian banksia plant needs fire to release its seeds, so Lewis needed joy.

The religious impulse, which for some includes the capacity for ecstasy, can be at its best a cohesive force in society. In
Darwin’s Cathedral
, the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argues that religion confers an adaptive advantage on those groups who have it. He believes that the religious impulse is innate and that it makes cooperation, and therefore a common defense and survival, more likely. Faith, he states, “
allows you to keep going in the absence of information.” Depending upon the reality of the circumstances, this is a good or a not-so-good thing. As the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley wrote in 1886, the same words in both Hebrew and Greek “
denote the ravings of insanity and the often equally unintelligible ravings of the diviner or revealer of divine things.”

The exuberant outpourings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century mystic and scientist, illustrated for Maudsley how religious enthusiasm is differently construed by believers and skeptics: “
The visitation [of Swedenborg’s hallucinations] was the forerunner of an attack of acute mania, on recovery from which he was what he remained for the rest of his life—either, as his disciples think, a holy seer endowed with the faculty of conversing with spirits and angels in heaven and hell … or, as those who are not disciples think, an interesting and harmless monomaniac, who, among many foolish sayings, said many wise and good things, attesting the wreck of a mind of large original endowment, intellectual and moral.” (Perhaps weighting one side of the argument would be Swedenborg’s fervent belief that he could converse with the inhabitants of all the planets, except for those of
Neptune and Uranus, which had not yet been discovered.) Indeed, mania and excited religious states have much in common—euphoria, a sense of intense well-being, and a heightened sensory awareness, among other things—and religion is the most common theme of both
manic delusions and hallucinations.

For some, exuberance comes by way of madness or revelation. For others, it is sown into their dispositions as melody is in a songbird. Most, however, experience great enthusiasms only fitfully: when they fall in love, at times of personal triumph or national festivity, at a racetrack, in a bedroom, at war’s end, on a playing field, or with a newborn. These occasions are frequent and sustaining enough for most. But not for all. The history of our species shows that we have used every imaginable means to generate even more exuberance.

We are not the only species to seek high moods. Sloths intoxicate themselves by eating fermented flowers and chewing coca leaves, and elephants get high on fermented fruit and vines. Reindeer ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms, water buffaloes graze on opium poppies, and llamas and monkeys, like sloths, ingest the stimulant from coca leaves. Gorillas, wild boars, porcupines, and spider monkeys eat intoxicating or hallucinogenic insects, fungi, berries, and grains. Pleasure-seeking and a desire for novelty must be a part of the reason for this behavior, but the UCLA pharmacologist Ron Siegel suggests that
self-medication is also involved. (Elephants, he believes, use alcohol not only as a source of calories and energy but also to relieve the stress produced by having poachers and tourists in their territory. It is not obvious how one could easily test this hypothesis, but it is an intriguing one.)

We, too, have a diverse hankering for intoxicants and hallucinogens. We, too, have been fond of the coca leaf and fermented grains, eaten seeds of the white-flowered morning glory, and enjoyed the magic of wild mushrooms. Many have smoked hashish or tobacco, and others have made ritual drinks of fermented honey and tree bark. A curious few have ingested hallucinogenic caterpillars. Ritual enemas, not to everyone’s taste, brought delight to the Aztecs and Mayans, who discovered that such nether-route intoxication was more rapid than drinking or smoking and the side
effects were fewer. The Incas used enemas to experience the psychological effects of hallucinogenic seeds, and sixteenth-century Lowland Indians used them to take in tobacco.

There are many nonchemical routes to the high mental states, as well. The ethnobotanist Peter Furst chronicles a rather remarkable variety, including fasting, thirsting, self-mutilation, sleep deprivation (which can also trigger mania in susceptible individuals), exposure to the elements, exhaustive dance, bleeding, immersion in ice water, flagellation with thorns or animal teeth, hypnosis, meditation, rhythmic drumming and chanting, pungent or aromatic scents, and Indian sweat lodges.

The ingenuity of these nonpharmacologic methods notwithstanding, drugs dominate the history of our search for exuberant and ecstatic states. Even the oracle at Delphi who, it is said, spoke for the gods, appears to have owed her prophecies and trances more to earthly intoxicants than to divine inspiration. Indeed, reports the
New York Times
journalist William Broad,
the ancient Greeks were the first to suspect that sweet-smelling gases rising up from the floor of the temple might set off the oracle’s frenzies. Before prophesying, the oracle breathed in “sacred fumes.” Scientists have recently discovered that the Delphi temple sits directly on top of a fault line through which ethylene, a euphoriant gas, escapes. The future had been seen through a vapor.

Drugs and gases can heighten energy and alertness or dull them; they can intoxicate, induce vivid living dreams, stir warlike rages, kill pain, or unite the disparate in a common cause. Drugs bring on exuberant and ecstatic states, as well. Alcohol, of course, which releases dopamine and serotonin in addition to the brain’s own naturally occurring opioids, has been used for thousands of years to exhilirate, to disinhibit, and then to numb. But many other substances have also been used.

In the late eighteenth century a truly remarkable gas was discovered
by Joseph Priestley. It exuberated. Nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” gained wide popularity through the experiments of the great English chemist Sir Humphry Davy. Many of these experiments were conducted upon himself. The “pleasure-producing air,” he wrote, “
absolutely intoxicated me … made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.” His friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, no stranger to the sweet effect of drugs, spoke of its “great extacy,” its “voluptuous sensation.” Coleridge’s fellow poet Robert Southey was even less restrained: “
Such a gas has Davy discovered!” he said. “It made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger tip.… It makes one strong, and so happy! So gloriously happy!… Oh, excellent air-bag!… I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder-working gas of delight!” Yet another admirer of nitrous oxide said that the sensations experienced under its influence were like the great choruses of
The Messiah
played on the “
united power of 700 instruments.” Nitrous oxide was taken at dinner parties, and there were “laughing gas evenings” at London theaters. Predictably, P. T. Barnum put together exhibitions for the public and, just as predictably, the crowds flocked in. In the best tradition of science and pleasure-seeking, medical students at Yale administered it to their classmates.

Seeking new sensation was not the only way the “pleasure-producing air” was put to use. William James said that his own experience taking nitrous oxide brought about an intense metaphysical illumination. “
Depth beyond depth of truth,” he wrote, “seems revealed to the inhaler.… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” Things seemed more “
utterly what they are, more ‘utterly utter’ than when we are sober.” One’s soul, he said, will “sweat with conviction,” and regions of the universe will open. No map would be provided.

Like the results of most drug-induced states, the philosophical insights gained under the influence of nitrous oxide and similar drugs were often more intense than lastingly profound. Sir James Crichton-Browne, in his 1895 Cavendish Lecture, remarked that the thoughts one had while inhaling nitrous oxide were in “
nine cases out of ten connected with some great discovery, some supposed solution of a cosmic secret.” But such revelations, he wrote in the
Lancet
, usually prove illusory:

Cocaine—known also as California cornflakes, happy trails, sleigh ride, and nose candy—is another euphoriant. Eaten, sniffed, injected, or inhaled, cocaine quickly causes euphoria
by stimulating a part of the brain (the dopamine-containing projection from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens) that regulates pleasure. The brain floods with dopamine. The enjoyable effects of cocaine—greater energy and heightened sensitivity of sight, touch, and sound; high mood; increased talkativeness—are not unlike those of the early, mild stages of mania, but they are less intense and of far shorter duration (lasting minutes or hours, not days or weeks). Like most mind-altering drugs, however, cocaine supplies a pleasure freighted with costs. The same neurons that are activated by dopamine and give delight eventually become desensitized to it. Depression and apathy follow.
Prolonged cocaine use, which diminishes dopamine functioning, gives support to the general rule that external sources of exuberance are ultimately overruled by the brain’s inclination to seek out equilibrium.