The Social Animal (6 page)

One day, about six months after their wedding, Julia and Rob woke up late and had brunch at a neighborhood place with country furniture and distressed wooden tables. Then they went shopping and grabbed sandwiches, which they ate on a bench in the park. They were alive to sensations of all sorts: the way the bread felt in their hands, the feel of stones they tossed into a pond. Julia absentmindedly watched Rob’s hands as he used a little plastic knife to spread mustard across his sandwich. Her conscious thoughts were on the story she was telling him, but unconsciously she was becoming aroused. Rob was listening to her tale, but without even thinking about it, he was looking at a soft small crease in the skin of her neck.

In the back of his mind he was ready to have sex right then and there, if a conveniently sized bush could be found. People used to argue that men and women had the same desire for sex, but, on average, that’s not true. Male desire is pretty steady and only dips in response to some invisible awareness of their partner’s menstrual cycles. Studies in strip clubs have found that dancers’ tips plunge 45 percent while they are menstruating, though the explanation for the drop is not clear.

That particular day in the park, Rob wanted Julia with all his body and all his soul. This wasn’t merely a Darwinian reflex. Rob had all sorts of internal barriers that made it hard for him to express his emotions. His feelings were there, but they were hidden somewhere inside in a place where he couldn’t easily grasp or understand them. Even in those moments when he did have a sense of what he was feeling, the words wouldn’t come to help him express it. But during sex, his internal communication barriers dissolved. In the throes of passion, he went into a mental fog. He was no longer aware of his surroundings, or how he might be perceived. His emotions for Julia surfaced with their full force. He could feel his own emotions directly and express them unselfconsciously. The quickie acts of copulation that Julia sometimes granted him as a favor didn’t really do this for him. But when they were both in the throes of passion together, Rob experienced the bliss of unencumbered communication that was the real object of his longing. There’s something to the old joke that women need to feel loved in order to have sex and men need to have sex in order to feel loved.

Julia’s desire was even more complicated. It was like a river with many tributaries. Like most women, Julia’s interest in sex was influenced by how much testosterone her body produced at any given moment and by how she processed serotonin. It was influenced by the busyness of her day, her general mood, and the conversations she’d had with friends at lunch. It was influenced by images and sensations she wasn’t even aware of—the sight of a piece of art, a melody, a field of flowers. Julia enjoyed looking at male bodies, female bodies, or anything in between. Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellant.

Julia’s sexual tastes were more influenced by culture than Rob’s. Men want to do the same sexual acts regardless of education levels, but female sexual preferences differ by education, culture, and status level. Highly educated women are much more likely to perform oral sex, engage in same-sex activity, and experiment with a variety of other activities than less-educated women. Religious women are less adventurous than nonreligious women, though the desires of religious men are not much different than those of secular ones.

They say that foreplay for a woman is anything that happens twenty-four hours before intercourse. That evening, they watched a movie, had a drink, and before long they were playfully, then passionately, making love, heading toward the usual climax.

An orgasm is not a reflex. It’s a perception, a mental event. It starts with a cascade of ever more intense physical and mental feedback loops. Touches and sensations release chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin, which in turn generate even more sensory input, culminating in a complex and explosive light show in the brain. Some women can achieve orgasms just by thinking the right thoughts. Some women with spinal cord injuries can achieve orgasm through the stimulation of their ears. Others can achieve orgasms through stimulation of the genitals that, because of a paralyzing accident, they are supposedly unable to feel. A woman in Taiwan could experience temporal-lobe seizures and shattering orgasms merely by brushing her teeth. A man studied by V. S. Ramachandran at UC San Diego felt orgasms in his phantom foot. His foot had been amputated, and the brain region corresponding to the foot had nothing to do. Since the brain is plastic and adaptive, sensations from the penis spread into the vacant real estate and the man felt his subsequent orgasms in a foot that didn’t exist.

As they made love, Rob and Julia sent rhythmic vibrations through their minds and bodies. Julia had the mental traits that are associated with ease of orgasms—a willingness to surrender mental control, the ability to be hypnotized, the inability to control thoughts during sex—and she felt herself once again heading in the right direction. A few minutes later, their frontal cortexes partially shut down, while their senses of touch became ever more acute. They lost all remaining self-consciousness—any sense of time or where each other’s bodies ended and theirs began. Sight became a series of abstract patches of color. The result was a pair of satisfying climaxes, and eventually, through the magic of the birds and the bees, a son.

MINDSIGHT

IT IS
SAD
TO
REPORT
THAT
EVEN
IN
HER
LATE
TWENTIES
,
JULIA
kept her Spring Break personality alive and on call. Responsible and ambitious by day, she would let her inner
Cosmo
girl out for a romp on Saturday nights. In these moods, she still thought it was cool to be sassy. She still thought it was a sign of social bravery to be a crude-talking, hard-partying, cotton candy lipstick-wearing, thong-snapping, balls-to-the-wall disciple in the church of Lady GaGa. She still thought she was taking control of her sexuality by showing cleavage. She thought the barbed wire tat around her thigh was a sign of body confidence. She was excellent entertainment at parties, always first in line for drinking games and bicurious female kissing. Ensconced in late-night throngs of group inebriation, she would walk perilously close to the line of skankdom without ever quite going over.

Up until well into her pregnancy, it is fair to say that a truly maternal thought never crossed her mind. Harold, who was just forming in her womb at this point, was going to have to work if he was going to turn her into the sort of mother he deserved.

He began that work early and hard. As a fetus, Harold grew 250,000 brain cells every minute, and he had well over 20 billion of them by the time he was born. Soon his taste buds began to work, and he could tell when the amniotic fluid surrounding him turned sweet or garlicky, depending upon what his mother had for lunch. Fetuses swallow more of the fluid when sweetener is added. By seventeen weeks he was feeling his way around the womb. He began touching his umbilical cord and pressing his fingers together. By then he was also developing greater sensitivity to the world beyond. A fetus will withdraw from pain at five months. If somebody were to direct a bright flashlight directly at Julia’s belly, Harold could sense the light and move away.

By the third trimester, Harold was dreaming, or at least making the same sorts of eye movements that adults make when they dream. It was at this point that the real work of Operation Motherhood could begin. Harold was still a fetus, with barely any of the features of what we would call consciousness, but already he was listening, and memorizing the tone of his mother’s voice. After birth, babies will suck hard on a nipple in order to hear a recording of their mother’s voice, and much less hard to hear a recording of another woman’s voice.

He wasn’t only listening to tones, but also to the rhythms and patterns he would need to understand and communicate. French babies cry differently than babies who have heard German in the womb because they’ve absorbed the French lilt of their mother’s voices. Anthony J. DeCasper and others at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro had some mothers read
The Cat in the Hat
to their fetuses over a period of weeks. The fetuses remembered the tonal pattern of the story, and after they were born they’d suck more calmly and rhythmically on a pacifier than when they heard another story in a different meter.

Harold spent his nine months in the womb, growing and developing, and then one fine day, he was born. This wasn’t a particularly important event as far as his cognitive development was concerned, though he had a much better view.

Now he could get to work on his mother in earnest, eliminating Julia, the party girl, and creating Supermom Julia. First, he would have to build a set of bonds between them that would supersede all others. A few minutes old, wrapped in a blanket and lying on his mother’s chest, Harold was already a little bonding machine, and had a repertoire of skills to help him connect with those he loved.

In 1981 Andrew Meltzoff ushered in a new era of infant psychology when he stuck his tongue out at a forty-two-minute-old infant. The baby stuck her tongue out back at him. It was as if the baby, who had never seen a tongue in her life, intuited that the strange collection of shapes in front of her was a face, that the little thing in the middle of it was a tongue, that there was a creature behind the face, that the tongue was something other than herself, and that she herself had a corresponding little flap that she too could move around.

The experiment has been replicated with babies at different ages, and since then researchers have gone off in search of other infant abilities. They’ve found them. People once believed that babies were blank slates. But the more investigators look, the more impressed they have become with how much babies know at birth, and how much they learn in the first few months after.

The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice.

But it is all information, and it all flows from the dead through us and to the unborn. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and its many currents and tributaries, and it exists as a creature of that river the way a trout exists in a stream. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. So even a newborn possesses this rich legacy, and is built to absorb more, and to contribute back to this long current.

Though he still had no awareness of himself as a separate person, little Harold had a repertoire of skills to get Julia to fall in love with him. The first was his appearance. Harold had all the physical features that naturally attract a mother’s love: big eyes, a large forehead, a small mouth and chin. These features arouse deep responses in all humans, whether they are on babies or Mickey Mouse or E.T.

He also had the ability to gaze. Harold would lie next to Julia and stare at her face. After a few months, he developed a seductive sense of timing—when to look to attract Julia’s gaze, when to turn away, and then when to look back to attract her again. He would stare at her and she would gaze back. At an amazingly early age, he could pick out his mother’s face from a gallery of faces (and stare at it longer). He could tell the difference between a happy face and sad face. He became extremely good at reading faces, at noting tiny differences in muscular movements around the eyes and mouth. For example, six-month-old babies can spot the different facial features of different monkeys, even though, to adults, they all look the same.

Then there was touch. Harold felt a primeval longing to touch his mother as much and as often as possible. As Harry Harlow’s famous monkey experiments suggest, babies will forgo food in exchange for skin or even a towel that feels soft and nurturing. They’ll do it because physical contact is just as important as nourishment for their neural growth and survival. This kind of contact was also a life-altering deliciousness for Julia. Human skin has two types of receptors. One type transmits information to the somatosensory cortex for the identification and manipulation of objects. But the other type activates the social parts of the brain. It’s a form of body-to-body communication that sets off hormonal and chemical cascades, lowering blood pressure and delivering a sense of transcendent well-being. Harold would lie there on Julia’s chest, suckling at her nipple, forging a set of intimate connections that stimulated the growing cells in his brain. Julia would find herself suffused with a deep sense of fulfillment that she had never imagined before. Once, she actually caught herself wondering, “What do I need sex for? This is so much more satisfying.” This came from the woman who was voted “Most Likely to Appear in a
Girls Gone Wild
Video” while in college.

Then, and maybe most powerfully, there was smell. Harold just smelled wonderful. The subtle odor that arose from his hot little head penetrated deep into Julia’s being, creating a sense of connection she had never imagined before.

Finally, there was rhythm. Harold began imitating Julia. Just a few months old, Harold would open his mouth when Julia opened hers. He’d move his head from side to side when she moved her head from side to side. Soon, he could copy hand gestures.