Who Am I and If So How Many? (8 page)

Our feelings, thoughts, and actions are prompted by chemical signal substances; the quality of all feelings and stimuli is
neurochemically
determined and neurochemically controlled. It is actually quite plausible for Mr Spock’s rude awakening from his endorphin and serotonin high on Omicron Ceti III to have been triggered by a release of adrenaline, but that would suggest that he has the same basic neurochemical apparatus as any normal human being, and if he does, it has to be linked to his higher brain functions, that is, his thinking – unless Vulcans have some kind of dopamine and noradrenaline block, which is unlikely, because it would make them lethargic, sluggish, and aimless.

But is that all we need in order to explain emotions and feelings? Hardly. Only a naïve neuroscientist would lean back at this point and say:
there you have it!
So far we have explored only the grammar of feelings, but not the timbre and range of meaning of the spoken language. As indispensable as invigorating dopamine molecules, soothing serotonin molecules (the Spock molecule), and
stimulating
noradrenaline molecules are, they are not activated on their own. They are messengers that have to be sent out from one neuron to the next and from one brain center to another. When they arrive at their destination, they trigger specific reactions – slowing down, speeding up, motivating, or blocking. In short, transmitters relay and trigger meanings when they arrive, but they do not themselves initiate the thought process.

A full-blown feeling entails complex interactions among specific regions or centers in the brain, including the sending and receiving features of the neurons, the transmitters, a complex connective pattern with other brain structures, and of course the
environmental
stimuli that the senses introduce into the system. Why do some people feel uplifted by a certain kind of music while others can’t stand the racket? Why do some people love the taste of oysters while others can’t stomach them? And how can we feel flashes of hatred for those we think we love? Feelings are quite simple to explain on a chemical level, but figuring out how they come about, and how they appear and disappear, is no easy matter. Many neuroscientists must entertain fantasies of how much easier things would be if we were more Vulcan – the way Dr McCoy does on the
Enterprise
. When Spock, whose otherwise matter-of-fact thinking is muddled by the spores, sends the crew an emotionally charged lyrical message, McCoy is taken aback:

If feelings, rather than Vulcan rationality, are indeed the glue that binds us together, then do feelings hold the ultimate sway? Are we ruled by our subconscious rather than by conscious thought? And what is the subconscious, anyway?

He was a difficult man. He used cocaine, neglected his children, had a terrible attitude toward women, and did not tolerate any opposition from his followers, and his scientific studies later proved to be anything but scientific. Yet he was a key figure of his day and one of the most influential thinkers of all time.

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born in 1856 in Příbor, Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire and now in the Czech Republic. His father was a Jewish wool merchant who went bankrupt shortly after the birth of his son. One of eight children, Sigismund grew up poor. The family moved to Leipzig, and soon after to Vienna. As the eldest son, he was the apple of his mother’s eye, and he proved an excellent pupil. He passed his final secondary school examinations with distinction, and in the fall of 1873 enrolled in the medical school of the University of Vienna. Freud made a study of freshwater eel testicles and switched to the Physiological Institute at the University of Vienna, where he was awarded a doctorate in medicine in 1881 with a dissertation titled ‘The Spinal Cord of Lower Fish Species.’ But financial constraints made it impossible for him to remain at the university. With a heavy heart, he joined the staff at the Vienna General Hospital, where he
remained for three years. As a medical resident under the supervision of the renowned neuropathologist Theodor Meynert, he continued to examine fish brains, primarily of the lamprey. At the time, he was also experimenting with cocaine, which he thought could be used to treat hysterical nervous diseases. The ambitious young scientist wanted to make a name for himself, but even though he published five studies about cocaine, he failed to achieve the breakthrough he was after. His attempt to cure his friend of a morphine addiction with cocaine had also failed, a detail Freud (who had shortened his first name to Sigmund by this point) opted not to disclose in his writings. In 1885, he left for a study trip to Paris brimming with self-assurance, writing in a letter: ‘Oh, how wonderful it will be! I will come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo … and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases.’ In Paris, Freud met Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses,’ who was the leading expert in the field of nervous diseases. He opened Freud’s eyes to the nonphysiological, psychological causes of many mental disorders and introduced him to the art of hypnosis and suggestion. After his return to Vienna, Freud set up a neurology practice on Rathausgasse. At the same time, he headed the neurology department in the First Public Children’s Hospital. He married Martha Bernays, from a respected family of rabbis and scholars, and they had six children. But Freud was not a warmhearted, loving father; for the most part, he remained aloof from his children. In the early 1890s, the thirty-five-year-old, who was still researching the anatomy of the brain, wrote an essay about speech impediments that resulted from brain diseases, and he realized what a colossal future brain research would have in solving many problems of the mind. But his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895), an attempt to explain the ‘psychic apparatus’ using Ramón y Cajal’s new neuron doctrine, was never completed.

Neurology had a long way to go before it could be used to cure nervous diseases and, as Freud was hoping, to alleviate psychic disorders. Ramón y Cajal’s insights into the function and
interaction of neurons in the brain were too abstract and too general to be useful. Ramón y Cajal studied the brains of cadavers laid out on a dissection table in Madrid as a basis for his ‘rational psychology,’ while Freud analyzed the brains of living subjects as they lay on a couch in Vienna. The latter practice resulted in the new science of psychoanalysis. In 1889, Freud had gone to Nancy to visit Hippolyte Bernheim, who was conducting experiments using posthypnotic suggestion, and Freud concluded that there had to be an unconscious mind that was responsible for many human actions.

The term ‘unconscious’ was not new. In 1869, the young philosopher Eduard von Hartmann had written
Philosophy of the
Unconscious
, a rather simplistic study that was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer (see ‘The Libet Experiment,’ p. 111). The book, which became a bestseller, brought together many of the issues to which materialist philosophers in the mid-nineteenth century took exception in the reason-based philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Nietzsche, who criticized the same philosophers from a similar position, was terribly upset, primarily because the less astute Hartmann enjoyed far greater success than he. But Hartmann did not coin the term ‘unconscious’ either. That distinction went to the doctor and naturalist Carl Gustav Carus, a friend of Goethe, who described the ‘unconscious’ and ‘unconsciousness’ as the essential basis of the psyche in his 1846 book
Psyche
:
On the History
of the Development of the Soul
.

Freud’s earnest attempt to explore this unconscious
systematically
set him apart from his predecessors. He had a rough idea of where it was located; he assumed it was in the subcortical centers of the endbrain and the brain stem, as his teacher Meynert had established. But the brain research tools available in the 1890s were inadequate to investigate the unconscious. In 1891, Freud moved to Berggasse 19 in Vienna, where he lived and worked for the next forty-seven years. He used the term ‘psychoanalysis’ for the first time in 1896, adopting it from an ‘intricate exploratory procedure’ used by his friend and colleague Dr Josef Breuer, who had
motivated his traumatized patient Bertha Pappenheim to open up and talk about her emotional pain. Freud went on to investigate sexual abuses his patients – primarily women – had endured by getting them to talk about their experiences. In his male patients, he diagnosed an early childhood sexual attachment to the mother, a condition he called the Oedipus complex. Later he used this and other ideas to construct a highly controversial theory of drives and instincts, which he went on to modify quite often, but its sweeping statements were eventually refuted. Between 1899 and 1905, Freud wrote four books about the power of the unconscious, and these books ensured his lasting fame. Their topics were dreams, the psychopathology of everyday life, including slips of the tongue (‘Freudian slips’), jokes, and sexuality. In 1902, Freud was appointed associate professor at the University of Vienna, and he founded the Psychological Wednesday Society, which later came to be called the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.

In light of the controversy surrounding his publications and his tepid reception in the scientific community, Freud’s
self-confidence
was astonishing. In 1917, he placed his discoveries about the unconscious on a par with the theories of Copernicus and Darwin. All three of them, he declared, had rocked mankind. Copernicus had shifted the earth from the center of the world to the margins; Darwin had replaced the divine nature of man with that of monkeys; Freud had shown that man’s conscious mind did not rule the roost, because the unconscious was far more dominant. Freud contended that about 90 percent of human decisions are unconsciously motivated.

In 1923, Freud developed the idea of a tripartite psyche to explain how the unconscious controls consciousness. In this scheme of things, three components determine our emotional life: the id, the ego, and the superego. Freud claimed this triadic division as his own achievement, although Nietzsche had used all three concepts in much the same way. The
id
corresponds to the unconscious, instinctual element of the human psyche and is controlled by hunger, the libido, envy, hate, trust, and other
involuntary feelings. Its adversary is the
superego
, which embodies the norms, ideals, roles, models, and views of the world we acquire from the time of our childhood. Between these two lies the
ego
, a rather pathetic intermediary worn down by overpowering
opponents
. As the servant of three masters – the id, the superego, and the social environment – the ego tries to resolve and reconcile conflicts that arise from these opposing forces, but it is relatively weak. As a rule, the id wins out, which eludes consciousness and thus escapes control by the ego. Unconscious drives and early childhood formative experiences are not manifest and are therefore difficult to classify.

Freud developed this model relatively late in life, and he certainly did not base all his later writings on it, but he did stick to the view that the primary motivation underlying human behavior arises from the unconscious conflict between instinctual impulses and reason, which is often overburdened in the process. He applied this idea not only to individuals but also to the dynamics of drives and instincts in human society as a whole.

He suffered terrible physical distress while writing his next books, which were critical of contemporary culture. By the 1920s, Freud enjoyed international renown, but cancer of the soft palate took a heavy toll on him and greatly limited his mobility. After the National Socialist accession to power, Freud’s writings were banned and burned. When German troops marched into Austria in March 1938, he was forced to emigrate to London. Four of his five sisters remained in Vienna and were taken into custody and murdered by the Nazis in concentration camps. On September 23, 1939, a critically ill Freud took his life in London with a fatal dose of morphine.

What is Freud’s legacy? First of all, it is to his great credit to have made feelings, psychic conflicts, and the unconscious the center of the study of man. The form of therapy Freud adopted from Breuer and honed continues to be used throughout the world, even though psychoanalysis has been fragmented into numerous schools that have distanced themselves from Freud to one degree or
another. As far as Freud’s scientific contribution to the exploration of the human psyche is concerned, he had fine instincts, but that is as far as it went. He journeyed through the psyche of his patients like a cartographer who has no ships to survey the continent he is drawing and has to make do with knowledge passed on by others. Freud’s smug attitude came from his realization that no one else had come as far with his methods as he had. The unconscious was a new continent, and he was the leader of the expedition. But Freud understood that his days at the forefront were numbered. Brain research, which he had once abandoned because it was not useful to his work, was beginning to come into its own, and it would eventually surpass his achievements; the question was only how many of the coastlines, rivers, mountains, and islands he had sketched onto the map would remain. His book about the pleasure principle sounded uncharacteristically self-critical in concluding that it would be up to biology to unravel the mysteries of the mind with surprising new revelations, and these might ‘be such as to overthrow the whole artificial structure of hypotheses.’

Psychoanalysis is not a science but a method, and its assumptions cannot be verified scientifically. Thirty years after Freud’s death, neuroscience and psychoanalysis seemed irreconcilable.
Psychoanalysis
was then in its heyday, and neuroscience, at the height of its electrophysiological phase – when every emotion was rendered in micrometers and millivolts – seemed just as far-fetched to Freud’s followers and disciples as psychoanalysis did to
neurobiologists
, who regarded it as an unscientific and naïve pursuit no better than reading tea leaves. Now that neurobiology has gained widespread acceptance, some brain researchers are beginning once again to pay tribute to Freud’s achievements.

Matters that remained speculative to Freud are plainly evident to neuroscientists, who can look at the brain and identify regions in the associative cortex that are responsible for consciousness. And there are regions that create and store unconscious processes, namely the brain stem, the cerebellum, the thalamus, and the subcortical centers of the endbrain. As Freud had assumed, there is
a clear anatomical distinction between the conscious and the
unconscious
. Even so, neuroscience steered clear of exploring the unconscious for quite some time, and neurobiologists found the unconscious difficult to grasp and describe. Unconscious processes often unfold quite rapidly, and they are – as Freud knew – not communicable in language, precisely because the person is not aware of them. So the psychotherapist has no choice but to read between the lines and try to decipher the unconscious – or to send a patient into a CAT scanner and observe what reactions to specific test questions activate the regions of the brain responsible for the unconscious.

Although it is easy enough to name the regions of the brain responsible for the unconscious, its composition can be quite varied. Our field of perception is full of impressions of which we are entirely unaware, and of events that are experienced
subliminally
. Our attention can focus on only a fraction of what we actually see, hear, and feel. The rest ends up in our subconscious mind. Some of that is stored deep down, but we have no control over what winds up where. We focus selectively on what suits our task at hand or our goal or needs. A person who is hungry is more likely to notice everything pertaining to food or restaurants, and a tourist views a city differently from someone who is looking for a job. The more you train your attention on one thing, the less you notice everything else, as is evident, for example, in the aftermath of car accidents, when drivers claim not to have seen the other vehicle.

When our attention is focused on one thing, our brain often fails to register other elements in our surroundings, even bizarre ones that ought to leap to our attention. One well-known example is the gorilla suit experiment conducted by psychologists Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard. Two teams of basketball players face each other, one dressed in white and the other in black. The players pass the ball to others on their own team while a group of test subjects observe the action on video. Their job is to count how
many times the ball is passed among the members of the white team. Most of the test subjects have no problem completing the assignment and supplying the correct number. The scientist conducting the experiment, however, is looking for a different piece of information. He wants to know whether the viewers picked up on anything out of the ordinary. More than half the test subjects do not. Only when they see the video for a second time, without concentrating on the counting, do they become aware, to their amazement, that a woman in a gorilla suit strode straight across the court, stood still in the middle, and thumped her chest. Most of the viewers were so busy counting during the first round that they failed to notice the gorilla at all. When psychologists conducting the same experiment ask the test subjects to count how many times the ball was passed by the team dressed in black, only a third of them fail to spot the gorilla. The woman in the gorilla suit catches the eye of the viewers of the black team because her costume is also black. The film is a very striking example of how our attention screens what we perceive even though we are largely unaware of it. Our attention is a spotlight that illuminates only a portion of the total picture, and the dark remainder ends up in our unconscious.