Who Am I and If So How Many? (7 page)

The various facets of the self as seen by neuroscience are useful classifications, but these kinds of constructs cannot always be cleanly divided, nor do they necessarily add up to an overall state of mind that can be called a stream of consciousness, as some neuroscientists argue. So why not just call it the ‘self,’ pure and simple?

One of the oddities in the field of brain research is that many neuroscientists dispute the existence of the self, all the while examining its origins. The self is frequently the bête noire in the laboratory that has to be postulated in order to be combated, so that brain researchers can provide a detailed picture of how a personality – and hence the self – is formed. The limbic system arises in the early embryonic stage. After birth, the brain establishes contact with the outside world and is revolutionized all over again. The brain structures adapt, reducing the number of neurons and coating the paths. At the age of eighteen to twenty-four months, a sense of self develops, and toddlers are able to recognize themselves in photographs. Only later does a ‘person’ in the social and legal sense of a responsible member of society take shape. Some of these abilities and characteristics do not develop in the brain
until puberty and beyond. All these descriptions explain the growth of the personality and are at the same time inextricably linked to the sense of self, because people say ‘I’ when referring to themselves. Approximately one-half of this personality
development
, it is generally assumed, is closely linked to innate abilities. About 30 to 40 percent depends on impressions and experiences before the age of five. And only 20 to 30 percent of this development is significantly influenced by later influences in the home, at school, and so forth.

Demystifying the self is a problematic undertaking. When Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun, he discovered a hitherto unknown fact, and the old notion of the Earth as the center of the universe was refuted once and for all. When Darwin showed that all living creatures developed from primitive ancestors and that man was no exception, he was quite obviously describing a fact, and the assumption that man is God’s unique creation was clearly false. But if neuroscientists today seek to do away with the self, they are not necessarily establishing a new fact. The old notion that man is held together mentally by a supervisor named Self is not refuted. This self is a complex matter; even if it can be broken down into various selves, it is still a perceived reality that science cannot simply dispense with. Isn’t the fact that we feel we have a self enough to establish that there is one? ‘Man is an individual,’ Niklas Luhmann wrote, ‘simply because man claims to be one. And that is sufficient.’ The same could be said of the self.

‘The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity.’ Ernst Mach was correct on that score, unless we should find evidence of what some neuroscientists like to refer to as a ‘frame.’ But it is rather unlikely that our sensation goes ‘a-roaming by itself in the world.’ The self is like a reasonably attentive schoolchild – on the ball, caring, and alert. People do not have a core, a ‘true self’ that can be pinned down in some specific spot. But even if we were to find one, it would not mean much, because the true demystification would have been to find a mechanism of the self,
slap it down in front of it the philosophers, and declare:
this is it!
Instead, we have an inscrutable, multilayered, and
multiperspectivist
self. Brain research does not prove that there is no self, but rather that the self we recognize represents an incredibly complex and amazing process in the brain. Neuroscience is still miles – or rather, decades – away from solving the mystery of the nature of our selves, assuming it ever gets there. If the observation of simple emotions was the moon landing of neuroscience, the journey to the self is a manned voyage to Jupiter at the very least. As of now, we can only imagine what we will find …

The year is 2267, stardate 3417.3. The starship
Enterprise
is off on a new mission. The planet Omicron Ceti III is in deep trouble, having been bombarded by berthold rays, which have wiped out all animal life on the planet, and the
Enterprise
is being sent to ascertain the whereabouts of the surviving colonists, although there is little cause for hope. Omicron Ceti III has been showered with rays for three years, seemingly too long to allow for any survivors, yet when Captain Kirk beams down onto the planet with a landing party, he is astonished to find the colonists alive and well. It turns out that the spores of a mysterious plant have protected them from the berthold rays. But the effects of these spores extend well beyond their protective function; they also transform the colonists’ entire outlook on life. Anyone who breathes in the spores is suddenly infused with a great sense of peace, coupled with a desire never to leave the planet again. In this galactic Shangri-La, even Spock, the Vulcan who is otherwise impervious to human emotions, undergoes a transformation. Feelings take over his brain, which had been capable only of rational thought. Spock falls in love with a young colonist, and the confirmed rationalist turns into a hopeless romantic. The entire
Enterprise
crew eventually give in
to their feelings, and Captain Kirk wages a solitary battle against the emotional pull of the planet. Duty calls, but the crew members refuse to return to their posts. Kirk figures out that he can neutralize the effect of the spores by raising the crew’s adrenaline levels. On some pretext he lures Spock back into the
Enterprise
, then taunts the Vulcan until he flies into a rage. As his adrenaline rises, Spock regains his foothold on reality. Kirk and Spock come up with a method to combat the effect of the spores. They send a subsonic frequency down to the planet that will spark quarrels among the remaining happy-go-lucky crew members of the
Enterprise
. The therapy does the trick, and everyone returns to the business of flying through the galaxy.

‘This Side of Paradise,’ filmed in 1967, is an episode from the first season of
Star Trek
. Philosophy is front and center in the episode. Spock would seem to be a veritable ideal toward which all apostles of reason since Descartes have been striving. Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and many other philosophers would have encouraged man to attain the emotional sobriety of the Vulcan. The story of the expulsion from the Neverland serves as a nice little lesson, too: don’t give in to feelings and dopy notions of peace, love, and happiness; they are just delusions. In real life, everyone has to fulfill his mission and carry out his duties.

But as we take a closer look at the episode, doubts creep in. How believable is the figure of Mr Spock? In contrast to earthlings, Vulcans neither express nor fall victim to feelings, but they must have at least some
potential
for feelings. If Spock is capable of love under the influence of spores, he must have what it takes to feel love, otherwise his feelings could not have been activated. In fact, Spock continually reveals feelings in other
Star Trek
episodes. His predominant disposition is a strong
feeling
of duty and
responsibility
. He is loyal and cooperative, and in order to size up conflicts, he needs to know what is more ‘valuable.’ He has to weigh human lives against risks, orders against destinies. All these considerations occur on the basis of values. And moral values are never
emotionally neutral (we will return to this point later). In other words, despite Spock’s rather odd facial expressions and body language, he is a person like you and me. And he is living proof of what he was evidently invented to disprove: that a human or humanlike creature without feelings is inconceivable.

The reason is simple: feelings and reason are not opposites. In everything we do, these partners of the mind work in concert. Their interaction is smooth at times and quite bumpy at others, but they cannot function independently of each other. Feelings can sometimes get by without too much involvement of reason, but without feelings, reason gets stranded, because feelings orient thought. Without an emotional impetus, one’s thought process cannot get moving. Without a feeling of duty, Mr Spock would not be able to think strategically.

Feelings are the glue that binds us together and are therefore anything but superfluous. Nor are they harmful, bothersome, or primitive per se, and they do not stand in the way of what really matters, as many philosophers would have us believe. Of course feelings can sometimes get in the way and have the potential to muddy clear thinking. During heated confrontations, I often find that I can’t manage to come up with good arguments until later, when I’ve calmed down. When I was head over heels in love with my high school girlfriend, I couldn’t think about anything else, and Latin class was a total waste of time. But even though we may often wish feelings away, a life without them would be catastrophic. It is better to have been beside yourself with joy, overwhelmed with fury, or rattled with jealousy at some points in your life than not to have known these vexing elixirs of our existence at all. Life without emotions would be pitiful; we would be absolutely incapable of action and have no idea what to think. Our neurons would no longer have anything to fire them up. Even a resolution to be totally rational and disregard feelings is emotionally based. Our thoughts, be they joyous, unsettling, devastating, dismaying, romantic, or somber, are invariably colored by our feelings.

But what are feelings? Where do they come from, where do they go, and what do they do in the interim? Philosophers have been pondering these questions since antiquity – although it must be admitted that feelings aren’t exactly philosophers’ favorite subject. It is very difficult to get at the root of feelings by means of contemplation. And many philosophers gloss over, dismiss, or disparage anything that doesn’t fit neatly into their scheme.

Nevertheless, even the ancient Greeks and Romans tackled the subject of feelings. Their vocabulary of feelings centered on
pathos
and
passio
, words that originally connoted suffering. The English
emotion
sounds somewhat more neutral, but it comes from the Latin word
movere
– move – thus indicating that feelings are something that ‘move’ a person. And the French distinguish between
sentiment
(for complex feelings) and
sensation
(for simple stimuli).

So feelings begin as physical stimuli – and very useful ones at that. Some feelings – for example, fear – can prove essential to survival. Flight reflexes are indispensable in the lives of primates, and they have endured. The same applies to most emotions: they contribute to survival and adaptation to the environment and to others of their species. Anyone lacking one of the basic feelings, such as fear, is not likely to live long. A person who is unable to experience disgust might wind up poisoned or gravely ill. Those who do not feel affection for others are isolated in the community, and a lack of sympathy arouses suspicion and dismay in others.

Passions, drives, instincts, and emotions serve a vital biological function. They promote individual survival and group solidarity. Whether the issue is hunger, the need for sleep and warmth, the impulse to attack or flee, or the desire for sex, basic feelings – whether in response to external events or arising from within –
invariably
boil down to one of two things:
pursuing
or
avoiding
something. On the one hand, emotions help us to react appropriately to an external stimulus, and on the other, they regulate our state of mind. When my emotional pendulum swings wildly in one direction, there is almost always a counterswing to restore my emotional equilibrium. It is nearly impossible to remain
furious, or sexually aroused, for an entire week, from morning to night, and even the most profound period of mourning or melancholy is bound to let up over time.

Many of us are frustrated by how hard it is to turn feelings on and off. People who are pigeonholed as impassive wish they could be more spontaneous and impulsive, and quick-tempered people often wish they could be mellower and more serene. It is not easy to control our feelings, although they certainly control us. Actually, they do more than that. In the same way that we don’t just
use
our brains to think but rather
are
our brains, so, too, when it comes to our feelings: we
are
our feelings, in a sense. But in which sense?

This is no easy question for philosophers, and it is no wonder that in recent years neuroscience has taken it up instead. Since magnetic resonance imaging and computer monitors have made it possible for us to see and observe manifestations of arousal in the brain, the study of emotions has become
the
hot topic among neurobiologists. They have gotten into the habit of differentiating between emotions and feelings, like the French when they speak of
sentiment
and
sensation
. Neuroscientists define emotions as the complex interaction of chemical and neuronal reactions. They construct patterns that often look quite similar in humans and in animals. Emotions are rather stereotypical and automatic processes. Feelings, on the other hand, are a far more complicated matter, involving a major dose of consciousness. Feelings can be hidden, and people can try not to let them show. That is difficult with emotions, because we have no control or influence over them. Feelings are a special mixture of emotions and ideas. They have a personal quality to them and unfold as if within a private spot inside of us. Lizards, magpies, and bats feel hunger and have flight reflexes, like humans, but they do not experience the human emotions of a broken heart, nostalgia, or melancholy.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, long before the dawn of neuroscience, the new field of psychology explored the nature of feelings, which had been neglected by philosophers, and began to conduct systematic research. And it did what
psychologists love to do: generate lists! The crucial question was: how many different emotions are there? The idea was to distinguish a fixed set, a basic repertoire common to all cultures of the world. They knew there would be few basic emotions, because it was assumed that it would be highly unlikely for a new one to be developed or invented.

Even so, psychologists could not agree on what they were. At about the turn of the century, Wilhelm Wundt identified three central contrastive pairs: pleasure-displeasure, arousal-serenity, and tension-relaxation. But isn’t there significant overlap among the pairs? Can we always differentiate between pleasure and arousal? Later psychologists favored lists with pairs of ‘basic emotions,’ and in the 1920s, a list of twelve was developed: happiness, grief, anger, fear, disgust, gratitude, shame, love, pride, sympathy, contempt, and fright. More recently, Paul Ekman, an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, proposed a list of fifteen: amusement, anger, contempt,
contentment
, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, sadness/distress, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, and shame. One can continue this game in various ways, but perhaps one ought not to attach too much significance to it, because all these emotions get distorted when expressed in linguistic terms. Every language has a different mode of expression, and someone in China or Kenya might well compile different lists even if their basic emotions are identical to those of Paul Ekman.

Neuroscientists also encounter these translation problems when they interpret and describe emotions and feelings. It is easier and more fruitful to track down the chemical substances that trigger our emotions and to study the neurotransmitters that relay information from one neuron to another. The transmitters of emotions – acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, and others – act as stimuli.

Neurotransmitters have astonishing capabilities, some of which have yet to be fully analyzed. Acetylcholine might be thought of as the athlete and coach among the transmitters, conveying stimuli
between nerves and muscles and activating the sweat glands. But it can do much more. It is clearly involved in learning, and it has a direct connection to Alzheimer’s disease, which is characterized by a severe depletion of acetylcholine. Dopamine prods and
motivates
; it has a major role in blood flow and regulating the hormone balance. Very low blood pressure can be raised with dopamine. In its effect on the hormones, this neurotransmitter is also closely associated with psychoses and other disorders; it is assumed that an excessively high level of dopamine is responsible for schizophrenia. Serotonin is a diplomat and mediator that promotes blood flow and regulates blood pressure. In the lungs and kidneys, serotonin is vasoconstrictive, but in the skeletal muscles it is vasodilatory. This neurotransmitter also regulates circadian rhythms and evens out stress. If the serotonin level gets off track, there are pleasant and less pleasant consequences. People in love appear to experience a rise in the level of serotonin, which conveys a sense of well-being and contentment. Low serotonin levels can cause migraines and other maladies. Noradrenaline is a race-car driver and accelerator, primarily in the arteries. Like dopamine, it raises blood pressure. In emergency rooms it is used to treat shock and to accelerate blood flow when poisoning results in paralysis.

All four neurotransmitters are found throughout the limbic system and are also used elsewhere in the body. The three major components of the system, the periaqueductal gray (PAG, also called the ‘central gray’), the hypothalamus, and the amygdala, are centers of innate affective states and behavior patterns. The periaqueductal gray controls aspects of our sexual behavior, aggression, and defense as well as feelings of hunger and modulation of pain. The hypothalamus is also involved in the intake of food and fluids as well as in sexual behavior and in aggression and defense. Additionally, it helps regulate circadian rhythms and circulation. Noteworthy for our sexuality is the fact that a nucleus of the hypothalamus, the nucleus praeopticus medialis, is more highly developed in men than in women, making
it one of the few striking anatomical gender differences in the brain. It has a major role in both aggressive behavior and in sexuality, which are closely linked here. As small as the amygdala is, it is hard to overstate its role in regulating our emotional stability. Neurologists have been showering attention on it, yet the amygdala remains elusive. It contains substantial quantities of noradrenaline and serotonin, and the concentration of
acetylcholine
is particularly high. The amygdala is the fear center of the brain, and it also has a role in learning new facets of our emotions. Emotions can indeed be learned; something that throws us the first time we experience it may no longer do so by the tenth time.