Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love
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Authors: Giovanni Frazzetto
Tags: #Medical, #Neurology, #Psychology, #Emotions, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Neuroscience
PENGUIN BOOKS
JOY, GUILT, ANGER, LOVE
GIOVANNI FRAZZETTO
was born and grew up in the southeast of Sicily. In 1995, after high school, he moved to the UK to study science at University College London, and in 2002 he received a PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. Since he was a student, he has worked and written on the relationship between science, society, and culture, publishing in journals such as
Nature
. He now lives and works between London and Berlin.
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First published in Great Britain as
How We Feel
by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, 2013
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2014
Copyright © 2013 by Giovanni Frazzetto
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Excerpt from “This Be The Verse” from
The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin
, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-14-312309-5
ISBN 978-1-101-59559-6 (eBook)
Version_1
To Berlin’s river tour company Reederei Riedel
and in memory of
Yehuda Elkana
(1934–2012)
Contents
3 | Anxiety: Fear of the Unknown
4 | Grief: Presence in the Absence
5 | Empathy: The Truth Behind the Curtains
7 | Love: Syndromes and Sonnets
Prologue
W
hen I worked in a neuroscience laboratory, the rhythm of experiments paced the hours. The lab was an island, a hideaway that felt distant from reality. It was a world of its own, one I had desired to set foot in ever since I turned sixteen. Inside, there was always quite a lot to do: exact solutions to prepare, delicate dissections to perform, precious molecules to purify and animals to take care of. Tightly parcelled one after the other as in a chain, these were some of the tasks that punctuated the flow of my daydreaming and at the same time pointed to big research questions. In between, I filled my lab journal with notes, diagrams and calculations. Trying to understand something as ineffable and intimate as emotions and the mind, I amassed minute fragments and discrete units of technical information.
Venturing into the secrets of the human brain became an opportunity for deep reflection. It was like interrogating an unfamiliar aspect of myself. It was like deciphering a tale written in code about the mind that I myself, with my experiments, was contributing to writing. Brain tissues, neurons and stretches of DNA were the protagonists of a story that, fact after fact, revealed new truths.
Every evening, with my lab coat dirty, my lab journal stained with chemicals, and standing in front of empty glassware piled up in the sink, I would assess the progress I had made. Usually my thoughts were also in need of a rinse. No matter how much I had laboured at the bench, there always seemed to be something left undone. One question demanded another, every experiment begged for confirmation, the results could use a second round of analysis. But the next chapter of the story was always scheduled for the following day.
When I made my way home, the characters from the lab would stay behind and I would latch on to another story still in progress, that of my own emotional life, of which I was the only protagonist, with my own script, the lines and movements of which were also still to be discovered. At home, I was face to face with my emotions.
Emotions, even the most fleeting, pervade every portion of our lives. One minute we are sad, the next we are beaming with hope. Some emotions chase us, others elude us. Every so often, emotions may leave us wounded, or they may consume us. On other occasions they lift us or transport us afar. This is why, sometimes, we think it would be useful to know how to rid ourselves of some of our emotions, or at least learn how to tame them. Occasionally, as in the case of joyful emotions, we wish we could make them recur on demand.
While I was writing this book, whenever I revealed to new acquaintances that I work as a neuroscientist, they, no matter their field, would want to know more. If I then mentioned emotions, there was no risk of failing to strike up a conversation. I found that people would ask me for advice on how to control their temper, how to forget unpleasant memories, how to overcome fears and cultivate joy, and even how to fix or save their love relationships. And they were unfailingly surprised when,
even though I studied the brain
, I didn’t always have answers for them.
We have it from the ancient wisdom of Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, that discovering the exact causes of a phenomenon does not concurrently reveal its meaning for us and our lives. It seems that in the last days before his death, around 399
BC
, Socrates read a book by Anaxagoras, a leading contemporary scientist. He had heard the news that Anaxagoras had discovered an element called
nous
(mind) that explained the nature of all things.
1
Socrates hoped to learn the riddles of existence with the help of that book. However, when he realized that
nous
was only a force that ordered nature’s elements – air, for instance, or water – and could not tell him much about the meaning of life, let alone how it should be lived, he was filled with disappointment. Science was no road to self-knowledge.
This question – how to harvest scientific knowledge so as to learn how to live, or to know oneself, for that matter – grew no less urgent in the millennia to come. At the end of graduate school I came across a revealing essay: the transcript of a lecture delivered in 1918 by the German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber (1864–1920) and entitled ‘
Science as a Vocation’
.
2
Going by its title, I was hoping to find there an echo of my passion for research. In the essay Weber addresses an audience of young students on the meaning and value of science for both personal and broader questions in life. Its take-home message was not encouraging. For Weber, science was responsible for a process of profound intellectual rationalization, which he termed a disenchantment – in German,
Entzauberung
. Science meant human progress, yes, but it was not necessarily synonymous with a life full of existential meaning, because science teaches us only how to master life ‘by means of calculation’. I had a strong reaction to that essay. How could science ever be meaningless, or of no value?
My wonder at science remained unscathed, but Weber’s question about how it could help me understand life, or myself, resonated loudly.
In fact, almost a century later, that question grows ever more pressing for us. At the dawn of the second millennium, we live in a world that is profoundly pervaded by science and technology. The incredible amount of information about the brain at our disposal delivers the resounding message that what counts most in us is a web of neurons and that, if we learn how those neurons work, we will come closer to understanding who we really are. An enthusiastic belief reverberates: deciphering the mysterious code of the brain would let us adhere to the ancient dictum ‘Know Thyself’, proving Socrates wrong by successfully using science to throw light on our existence – even in that most private and shadowy territory, our emotions.
But can the neural script of the brain indeed tell us how we feel?
This book unfolds as a collection of stories that contribute to answering that question. While providing a version of what neuroscience has unravelled about our emotions, I shall also tell you what such discoveries have meant to me as I studied the brain and walked the spine of life. Chapter by chapter, I will disclose when the neural subtext to the emotions I experienced clarified and embellished some of their qualities, but also when it remained a mere appendage to what I felt. Episodes of anger, guilt, fear, sadness, joy and love will reveal how the neural tapestry of an emotion can be an endless source of wonder, but also leave us with knots to untangle.
1
Anger: Hot Eruptions
Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy
ARISTOTLE
I
t was one of those mornings when you know the day is going to turn ugly and everything will go wrong.
You know it already, because you’ve been kept awake all night by a neighbour’s barking dog, mosquitoes have somehow managed to seep through the window nets and, when you’ve finally succeeded in falling asleep, a misdialled call wakes you at the crack of dawn. And if all that weren’t enough, once up and on your feet, you spill hot coffee over yourself. Yet you have no alternative. You need to start your day, accept that life is hard and venture into the unknown, come what may. In fact, what lay ahead was not at all a terrible prospect. I was taking a holiday in Rome and friends had kindly organized a one-day trip to their country home, not far from the centre of town, to chill out and spend a long afternoon together.
‘Bruce is going to pick you up,’ they told me.
I sipped an espresso and waited for the stranger outside the hotel. It was hot and temperatures were sure to rise further.
‘Nice to meet you, Bruce!’ I said openly when his car stopped in front of me. ‘How is it going?’
‘We don’t have much time, there is a lot of traffic in town and we need to hurry up. Get in the car, quick!’
Right, someone else has had a rough night, I thought, and I obeyed the order, already looking forward to reaching our destination.
The roads were indeed packed and everyone seemed in a rush. It took us an hour to leave the centre, zigzagging between erratic cars and through a swarm of revving mopeds coming from all directions. A few minutes into the journey I had a clear lesson in physics. I came to realize that in Rome the real duration of the infinitesimal moment, the shortest period of time, is the span between the green light and the person in the car behind you pressing the horn and yelling. In the meantime, Bruce wouldn’t stop complaining about everything: all other drivers were either too slow or too fast, idiots and jerks. As we finally reached the motorway, our air-conditioning system broke down and ahead of us was an endless sea of cars.
‘Great, what else now?’ Bruce barked.
Things certainly didn’t look promising, I thought, but pulled down the car window and leaned back, yielding to the helplessness of the situation.
But Bruce didn’t relax. He began tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. Each tap a unit in a pounding countdown, like the last drops of his ebbing patience.
‘Everything all right, Bruce?’ I dared to ask.
He didn’t really pay attention to what I said, his eyes fixed on the cars stretching ahead. He started to honk aggressively, pulling down his window. A series of expletives were hurled at the other cars, as if the honking and his verbal eruption could together make the queue recede.
Half an hour later, when miraculously we reached our exit, someone who had cheekily been driving along the emergency lane emerged from one side, cut us off . . . and gave us the finger!