Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (37 page)

At first, you might notice a duck’s beak, then a rabbit’s pair of ears, or maybe the other way around. What you see are not just two different animals. Each can be taken to represent a coherent system of looking at the world. Say one is science, the other is the arts and the humanities – you choose which is which. These two world-views intersect at once harmoniously and discordantly. There may be people who only see the duck, others only see the rabbit. But most of us, at least if made aware of the double aspect of the picture, should be able to easily switch from one version to the other. What we must remember is that truths are fleeting. One day the rabbit may disappear or even gulp down the duck. Until we can favour one version and drop the other, the two interpretations of the same phenomenon will coexist, and neither is more or less meaningful or valid as explanation than the other. Rather than bringing either enchantment or disenchantment, each vision complements the other and shapes a thorough world-view.

While neuroscience explains emotions through figures and measurements, predicting causes and outcomes, how we understand emotions will always rely on more than just science. It is possible to be at once scientific and lyrical when we attempt to understand ourselves and how we feel.

Acknowledgements

C
arrie Kania, my literary agent, earns the first mention. I still remember the evening she sat down with me in a London restaurant to encourage me to write this book. I thank her heartily for her warm generosity and friendship and I salute her sharp wit and unflagging enthusiasm about books and ideas. I also thank Patrick Walsh for his precious advice at the dawn of the project and Alexandra McNicoll, Henna Silennoinen and Jake Smith-Bosanquet at Conville and Walsh for their kindness and invaluable work.

I am enormously grateful to my editors Doug Young, from Transworld Books, and Allison Lorentzen, from Penguin, for eagerly embracing the idea of this book and for all their support and advice.

Noga Arikha, Stephanie Brancaforte, Allen Frances, Helga Nowotny, Steven Rose and Donna Stonecipher provided me with illuminating comments and criticism on manuscript drafts. I am indebted to them for their precious time and insights.

During its long period of gestation, this book benefited from the help of two institutions and their libraries: the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

There are several mentors who throughout the years have been central to my intellectual and creative path. They have all turned into splendid friends and have my deep respect and gratitude. I owe to Halldór Stefánsson, from the Science and Society programme of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the initial impetus to frame science within a larger context. Helga Nowotny has generously offered friendship, acute advice, as well as continuous and encouraging guidance on many of my choices, even the most adventurous. Cornelius Gross, my post-doctoral supervisor at EMBL, opened the doors of his laboratory to me and was always available for broad engaging discussions about neuroscience.

Nikolas Rose and Ilina Singh at the BIOS Centre of the London School of Economics took me under their wings in an unfamiliar world. Suzanne Anker from the New York School of Visual Arts has been a great chaperon in the visual art world.

Many thanks also to my colleagues from the European Neuroscience and Society Network, especially Linsey McGoey and Scott Vrecko and all the alumni of the transdisciplinary Neuroschools, for all the shared efforts and great times spent building a forum for innovative discussions across neuroscience, the social sciences and the humanities.

Many thanks to the one and only Ben Crystal for his friendship and endless chats about theatre, Shakespeare and love; to Donna Stonecipher for her help with poetry metrics. Chapter 2 is dedicated to Alexander Polzin whom I thank for his input on Caravaggio. I also thank my friend Sabin Tambrea for having inspired sonnets and for the many fascinating theatre evenings at the Berliner Ensemble.

Café Bondi in Berlin Mitte provided all the daily caffeine needed to start my writing in the morning.

There are many friends with whom I have traded tales on emotions and who, near or far, have provided great company and encouragement as I wrote the manuscript: Stephanie Brancaforte, Dominique Caillat, Stephen Cave, Rose-Anne Clermont, Elena Conti, Zoran Cvetkovic, Patrizia D’Alessio, Larry Dreyfus, Amos Elkana, Allen Frances, Valentina Gagliano, Frank Gillette, Marco Giugliano, Manueal Heider de Jahnsen, Christoph Heil, Christine Hill, Stephanie Jaksch, Carlos Kraus, David Krippendorf, Babette Kulik, Luisa Lo Iacono, Sharmaine Lovegrove, Donna Manning, Jimmy Nilsson and Ilaria Cicchetti-Nilsson, Petr Nosek, Alan Oliver, Moritz Peill-Meininghaus, Elisabetta Pian, Marcello Simonetta, Sabin Tambrea, Anne-Cécile Trillat, Simon Van Booy, Candace Vogler, Mathew Westcott, Katharina Wiedemann, Bonnie Wong.

Silvia Curado was especially there from across the pond for emergency Skype conversations when there was a particular emotional incident, sad or joyful, to figure out.

Noga Arikha was an irreplaceable source of deep, tenacious, truthful exchange on the many beauties and oddities of life.

Roberto and Massimiliano showed up when I had just started to write this book and their joyful company helped ferry it to the right shore.

My loving gratitude goes to Avi Lifschitz who, without knowing it, pointed to what really mattered.

Enza Ragusa has been a rock upon which I have stood since I was just a kid of nine. I thank her for her truthful friendship and unconditional support.

My parents, Giuseppe and Salvina Frazzetto, as well as my sister Antonella, are the recipients of my warmest gratitude for their unwavering trust.

I wish my two smart, sweet, irreplaceable young nieces, Alice and Eva, a life ripe with many great and unforgettable emotional adventures.

Yehuda Elkana partook of this project since its germination, but unfortunately did not live to see it in print. He was a dear and loyal friend, an endless source of strength, joy and wisdom. He is terribly missed and this book is dedicated to his memory, with all my heart.

Notes and References

Prologue

1
. The episode refers to a passage in Plato’s
Phaedo
.

2
. Weber, M. (ed. D. Owen and T. B. Strong),
The Vocation Lectures
, Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

Chapter 1

1
. Darwin, C.,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(originally published 1872), in Wilson, E. O. (ed.),
From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin
, Norton, 2006. Some of Darwin’s theories on behaviour and emotions also appeared in his earlier notebooks.

2
. Prodger, P.,
Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution
, Oxford University Press, 2009.

3
. For an eloquent and thorough contemporary insight into emotions as evolved neural circuits and their study in lower animals, see LeDoux, Joseph, ‘Rethinking the emotional brain’,
Neuron
, 73 (2012), 653–76.

4
. This distinction, in somewhat different terms, had already been made at the end of the nineteenth century by the American psychologist William James, whose work I mention in chapter 3. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has greatly refined and extended this through his own work. See Damasio, A. R.,
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
, Penguin, 2005, and
The Feeling of What Happens
, Harcourt Brace & Co., 2000.

5
. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the psychologist Paul Ekman collected an extensive set of pictures and data from remote places, such as Papua New Guinea, to confirm Darwin’s theory and to map the expression on several face muscles. See Ekman, P.,
Emotions Revealed
, Henry Holt and Company, 2003.

6
. Smith, C. U. M., ‘The triune brain in antiquity: Plato, Aristotle, Erasistratus’,
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences
, 19 (2010), 1–14.

7
. Freud, S.,
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, W. W. Norton and Company, 1933.

8
. For a thorough account of a triune neuropsychology, see Paul McLean’s seminal book
The Triune Brain
, Plenum Press, 1990.

9
. For an interesting and detailed explanation of the evolution of the neocortex, see Rakic, P., ‘Evolution of the neocortex: Perspective from developmental biology’,
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
, 10 (2010), 724–35.

10
. It is important to mention another, complementary way of classifying our emotional and thinking selves. The brilliant psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between two main systems at our disposal for processing facts and knowledge and for making decisions. System One is fast, intuitive, unconscious and irrational. System Two is slow, logical, conscious and rational. System One makes us take decisions in a fraction of a second, while System Two is more critical and formulates judgements after careful consideration. The latter is evolutionarily younger than the former and it also consumes more energy. System One and System Two may even be loosely compared to Freud’s id and ego. See Kahneman, D.,
Thinking Fast and Slow
, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011. For an explanation of the differences between Kahneman and Freud’s thinking, see Dyson, F., ‘How to dispel your illusions’,
New York Review of Books
, 22 December 2011.

11
. For a full description of the accident, see Damasio,
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
.

12
. For the excellent report on the analysis of Phineas Gage’s skull, see Damasio, H.,
et al.
, ‘The return of Phineas Gage: Clues about the brain from the skull of a famous patient’,
Science
, 264 (1994), 1102–5; for the original report by Gage’s doctor, see Harlow, J.,
Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society
, 2 (1868), 327.

13
. While I was writing this chapter a man in Brazil had an accident similar to that of Phineas Gage. This new patient was not a miner, but simply had his brain perforated by a rod that entered from above. This new case might finally give Gage a rest, but, of course, it will take time until the behavioural consequences of the accident become prominent and can be studied with scientific rigour. See MacKinnon, Eli, ‘Eduardo Leite dubbed modern-day Phineas Gage after pole pierces his brain’, HuffPost Science website, 22 August 2012.

14
. Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., and Damasio, A. R., ‘Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy’,
Science
, 275 (1997), 1293–5.

15
. Interview by David Brooks on FORA.tv: http://fora.tv/2009/07/04/ Antonio_Damasio_This_Time_With_Feeling

16
. It is important to note that the prefrontal cortex is anatomically and functionally heterogeneous, so that different ‘sectors’ in it, if damaged, have variegated consequences. It is also useful to bear in mind that the lesions observed in Gage and other patients encompass large sections of the prefrontal cortex. When scientists examine the lesions using modern visualization techniques, they do their best to localize them and define their perimeter as closely as possible in order to assign shadings of behaviour to several sub-territories. For a good review of the prefrontal cortex and violent individuals, see Yang, Y., and Raine, A., ‘Prefrontal structural and functional brain imaging findings in antisocial, violent, and psychopathic individuals: A meta-analysis’,
Psychiatry Research
, 174 (2009), 81–8; for a review of the role of the PFC in social cognition, see Amodio, D. M., and Frith, C. D., ‘Meeting of minds: The medial frontal cortex and social cognition’,
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
, 7 (2006), 268–77.

17
. Blair, R. J. R., and Cipolotti, L., ‘Impaired social response reversal. A case of “acquired sociopathy” ’,
Brain
, 123 (2000), 1122–41.

18
. Interestingly, patients who had the frontal regions of their brains compromised in infancy or childhood had lifelong and more severe behavioural changes in comparison with those documented for Phineas Gage or patients such as Elliot or Jay, whose brains were injured in adulthood. The greater severity of their insensitivity to moral and social rules and their inability to learn social cues may mean that the regions of the brain that were injured also play a role in the acquisition of social knowledge. For a report on two cases of patients with prefrontal cortex lesions that occurred in infancy, see Anderson, S. W., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., and Damasio, A. R., ‘Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex’,
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
, 2 (1999), 1032–7.