Woman: An Intimate Geography (56 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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tranquillity. Both states are characterized by a dampening of the sympathetic nervous system, a lowering of blood pressure, a declination of stress. Nirvana is defined as an ideal condition of rest, harmony, stability, and joy. A meditative state can be attained through measured, rhythmic breathing. Love and joy are at once animating and restorative. They are built on harmonics, a vivid wave form that can be maintained with a minimal investment of energy at the point of origin as close as we'll come to the impossible dream, a perpetual motion machine.
"Patterns are beginning to emerge," says Uvnas-Möberg. "I think we're going to find subgroups of people who have high levels of oxytocin and low levels of anxiety and low blood pressure. Well, should that surprise us? You wouldn't be surprised if I told you that people with high cortisol or adrenaline levels were more stressed. The opposite is probably true as well. We just haven't looked for that systematically. But anecdotally, everything fits. Women with high anxiety levels also have low oxytocin levels. Children with recurrent abdominal pain who come to the hospital often have extremely low oxytocin levels. Recurrent abdominal pain is a classic symptom of anxiety in children."
The gut knows more than we realize, and it keeps the brain apprised of what it has learned. It speaks in the language of hormones, among them cholecystokinin, a metabolic hormone known to foster a feeling of satiety. "A lamb becomes bonded to its mother by the act of suckling," says Uvnas-Möberg. "That suckling motion does a number of things. It releases oxytocin in the lamb's brain, and it releases cholecystokinin in the lamb's gut. If you block oxytocin release, you prevent the lamb from attaching to its mother. The same for cholecystokinin. Block its release, and you interfere with the lamb's ability to bond.
"The brain and gut are linked," she says. "Psychologists know the importance of the gut to learning. Babies take something into the mouth to know it, to understand it. We say we know something in our gut. We say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. We become pleasant and generous once we've eaten. It's hard to be pleasant and generous when we're feeling hungry." And now we see another reason that a person who refuses an offer of food is a person we are wary of. The person doesn't want to be calmed. The person wants to stay alert,

 

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high-strung. The person is a threat. No wonder we dislike eating in the company of somebody who forgoes food. We can't afford to be unilaterally lulled. Hold the cholecystokinin, please. There will be no oxytocin klatches tonight.
The body attaches us with the strength of every sense and substance at its disposal. Extreme stress plays the midwife to deep devotion. A woman gives birth yowling and screaming, begging that this creature, this Willy the Whale, be freed, goddamn it, be removed by enema if necessary. For the baby the passage is no smoother, and during birth its stress hormone output shoots up to impossible heights, a hundred times the level seen in a normal human being. And not long afterward, there the two of them are, fastened to each other, warmed and beaming, Buddha and her bodhisattva.
Smell too is a subcognitive minister, preaching bonds that we are at a loss to describe or understand. A human newborn is helpless, pathetically uncoordinated, but if you place the infant on the mother's stomach after birth it will inch its way up to her breast, driven almost entirely by olfactory cues; and if one breast is washed and the other left unwashed, the infant will seek out the unbathed nipple. The fontanel of a baby's head, where the plates of the skull have not yet fused together, is rich in sweat glands that exude odors, and a mother smells the fontanel often, lowers her head without thinking and takes a sniff. Parent and child may become bonded to each other prenatally, through an exchange of odors or odorlike molecules. The fetus secretes its signature scent into the urine that makes up the amniotic fluid of the womb. The fluid is turned over and excreted into the mother's urine, and thus she gets to know her baby's smell before birth, and the father may become familiar with his gestating infant's smell as well, by being in close proximity to the mother. Fathers love their newborns as profoundly as mothers do, even without the physical and hormonal changes that come with pregnancy. Ambient fetal odor types may serve to indoctrinate the circuits toward a receptive and compliant condition. John Money, a caliph of sexology research, has said that a person who is anosmic who has no sense of smell can feel lust but cannot form attachments. When one spouse dislikes the other spouse's smell, the marriage is doomed to fail. "'Don't marry Hermengard,' Pope Stephen III wrote to Charlemagne. 'She stinks like all the Longobards.' Charlemagne married

 

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her anyway, and ended up repudiating her," Guido Ceronetti writes in
The Silence of the Body
. "He couldn't stand her stench."
Touch, taste, smell: in the solicitation of love, no sense is left unseized. And because we are above all a visual species, babies play on this by pleasing the eye by being almost too cute, literally, to bear. During the very last weeks of pregnancy, a human infant lays down a layer of subcutaneous fat. The difference between a slightly premature and a full-term baby is largely a matter of two pounds of fat tissue, and the extra bulk makes the birth harder for the mother. A gorilla baby is born with almost no fat on it and instead starts gaining fat and weight postpartum. Why a human baby arrives prefattened isn't clear; there's no obvious physiological justification for the adipose stores. Some have proposed that the fat is there for the sake of the brain, but if great doses of lipids were needed to stoke the infant's fast-growing brain after birth, we would expect to see a high fat content in human milk. Instead the opposite is true, and human milk is comparatively low in fat. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that babies are fat to make them look adorable. Fat is an aesthetic epoxy. We are drawn to the sight of a chubby, soft, rounded baby, with its round cheeks, round buttocks, fleshy arms and thighs. The visual seductions of a baby, its cuteness quotient, may magnify its power to win the warmth, the nose, the touch, the low-fat holy water of its mother. What comes round stays around.
Rounded too is the sound of love, the rising and falling voice with which we coo at babies and at a mate. Babies respond most strongly to a voice modulated in clear highs and lows. They must learn language. They must wrap their brains around language, and they learn through well-defined pitches and ups and downs and each word spoken clearly and spoken to them. If baby talk sounds warm, it is a transfer of another sort of warmth, for through baby talk a parent gives a baby mind food, gives the founder units of language, the surest source of human strength. As adults, we coopt the warmth of baby talk to win a lover's affections. We step ontogenically backward, offering through burbles, coos, swoops, and fey nicknames of our own invention.
We know when we are in a groove, and it feels good, and it feels as though we can go on with it forever. A loved one sedates us when we are frazzled and elates us when we have lapsed into inertia. A well-bonded pair of old marrieds are synchronized watches. Their faces have become

 

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alike, because their facial muscles have taken to mimicking, unconsciously, the motions of the other. Their speech rhythms are similar. They walk at the same pace. When a husband or wife dies within a few days or weeks of his or her long-term spouse, we infer that the second person dies of grief or shock. But often there is no sign of shock or despair, for after all, the couple has lived long lives and known that death is there. Instead, one death may follow the other coincidentally. Over the years, the cells of the spouses had assumed a similar rhythm, were beating apace, and so ran out of molecular time in tandem.
There are the stimuli of attachment that we know of, and those that slip in unsung and unknowable. Years and years after a woman has delivered a child, she continues to carry vestiges of that child in her body. I'm talking about tangible vestiges now, not memories. Stray cells from a growing fetus circulate through a woman's body during pregnancy, possibly as a way for the fetus to communicate with the mother's immune system and forestall its ejection from the body as the foreign object it is. The fetal-maternal cell dialogue was thought to be a short-lived one, lasting only as long as the pregnancy. Recently, though, scientists have found fetal cells surviving in the maternal bloodstream decades after the women have given birth to their children. The cells didn't die; they didn't get washed away. They persisted, and may have divided a few times in the interim. They're fetal cells, which means they've got a lot of life built into them. A mother, then, is forever a cellular chimera, a blend of the body she was born with and of all the bodies she has borne. Which may mean nothing, or it may mean that there is always something there to remind her, a few biochemical bars of a song capable of playing upon her neural systems of attachment, particularly if those attachments were nourished through a multiplicity of stimuli, of sensorial input the hormonal pageantry of gestation, the odors of fetal urine, the great upheaval of delivery, and the sight and touch of the newborn baby.
For all the reasons that I remain a staunch supporter of abortion rights, for all the reasons that a woman is entitled to her full sexuality regardless of the unreliability of birth control and of the human heart, here is another one. It is vicious to force a woman to bear a baby she doesn't want, to prod her vengefully through the compound priming of pregnancy and force her to be imprinted through every physiological

 

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contrivance at evolution's disposal with an infant she can't keep, an infant that will remain forever stuck in her blood, an antigen to the attachment response, try as she will to shed her sad past. The "adoption option" is fine if a young woman chooses it and is at peace with it. But option it must remain, for the body is a creature of habit, and the longer it has been exposed to the chemistry of bondage, the more prone it becomes to emotional flashbacks, to recurrent neuroendocrine nightmares, the sort of nightmares where you keep returning to your childhood neighborhood and you're not sure why, and you know you don't belong there anymore, yet still you return, step up to your old door, and ring the bell. Nobody answers. It's the wrong house. Your house is gone.
All is fair in love, and love knows that, and love conquers all with anything it can get its tender talons into, at forty strokes per minute. There are multiple, interlacing neural systems of attachment, and the gut jumps in, and the heart plays too, through the graces of stress. But love is more than a gut feeling or a raw emotion. It has its cognitive side as we. Too often we ignore the thoughtfulness of love. We may even deride the intellect when we talk of love, accusing somebody of being too "cerebral" or "analytical" about love, as though cognition were the antithesis of emotion. It is not. Thought can strengthen love as readily as it can allow the passive-aggressive rationalist poseur to weasel out of love. A thought alone can arouse the entire sensorial panel of love. When a lactating mother is away from her baby and imagines nursing it, her chest grows warm and she may start secreting milk. Susan Love described a colleague of hers, a surgeon, who said that once she started thinking about her baby in the middle of performing an operation, and within moments breast milk had leaked through her clothes and onto her unconscious patient.
Cort Pedersen has pointed out that we humans can maintain with our mind's eye the neuronal state of attachment, which other animals need their real eyes, noses, and ears to keep alive. We rarely can sever all components of an intimate bond, he says. We have photographs. We have friends who mention the loved one. We walk the same streets and eat in the same restaurants where once we strolled and dined and released cholecystokinin with the loved one. We have Sam playing that song, you
must
remember this. We have too any senses and systems

 

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eager to reenact the past, and we have too much memory. Again and again the pathways of old love are reignited. Our analytical minds feed and protect the circuits of attachment. The human capacity for thought and memory keeps love alive long after the lower brain, the
Rattus
brain, would have thrown love away. Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death.

 

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