Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (27 page)

Susp
e
nded
i
n such sp
e
ll, we . . . ?

The tr
u
th desc
e
nded fr
o
m our y
e
arning eyes

? . . . Res
i
sting
a
fterth
ou
ghts, . . . ?

The final couplet was missing in its entirety, too. But I knew I could find a solution, if I hung on.

I raised my head from the notebook and paced up and down the room a couple of times. As I walked, I sensed some cracks on the wooden floor beneath my feet. Then I stood by the window and looked up to the sky; a strip of the Hudson was visible in the far distance. It had been misty all evening, but the wind had pushed the clouds away. The whole city was about to wake up. How I simply loved being in New York. As most lights in the buildings went off, I gazed at the last fading stars. And that’s when ideas started to come back. The cracks on the floor. Cracks are like the scars of desire that I was longing to heal. And the stars . . . Of course. Stars rhymes with scars. I still didn’t know exactly how, but I knew that was the road to take in order to fix the lines, and that it made sense to do so. Truly, never had the sky been so beautiful and full of promise. So, I set to finish, trying not to let the momentum fade away.

The missing piece in the puzzle finally surfaced. Scattered fragments united to form a continuous sentence without gaps. Chaos surrendered and made space for more order. Dissonance blossomed into a song and I even found the words for the concluding couplet. The poem was finished and it sounded well, at least well enough to me:

Suspended in such spell, we won high tides

Embraced the water, gazed upon the stars

The truth descended from our yearning eyes

Resisting afterthoughts, erasing scars

Here, tears are sweet, well then what gives to cry?

At sea, through the night, you and I fly high

Each time I conclude a piece of creative writing – any piece of writing, in fact – I can’t believe what has just happened to me. I didn’t have a mirror, but I bet my forehead was relaxed, and a sparkle of light must have tinged my eyes, coating them with pride. When, after an erratic wandering of the mind, the right word is on the page, a sentence takes shape before my eyes on paper, I feel a gush of joy. A blow of satisfaction. Perhaps, the joy originates in the clarity of mind. Excited as I was, how could I go to bed? Despite being tired, I was willing to celebrate the event, so I walked to the river, whistling all the way.

Last but not least

We are finally dealing with enjoyable emotions. I have first covered negative emotions and left the positive ones to the end, because I naturally thought it would be best to challenge you at the beginning and then leave you with a sweet taste in your mouth rather than the other way around –
dulcis in fundo
, as the Romans would say. It is also true that, unfortunately, science hasn’t dedicated as much attention to enjoyable emotions as it has to the negative ones. We know much more about anger, fear, disgust and sadness than we know about emotions that uplift us, such as joy. Fear is by far the emotion that has been studied most extensively. Research on joy and happiness really only started to be undertaken seriously in the 1990s. The reason for such discrepancy may simply lie in the aspiration to understand negative emotions so that we can best avoid or interfere with them.

At the beginning of the book, I briefly mentioned that, as biological creatures, we have two basic survival mechanisms at our disposal as we navigate through our emotional life: approach and avoidance. Such mechanisms are opposed strategies that have been shaped by years of evolutionary development and are shared by organisms as diverse in their complexity and sophistication as are an amoeba and a human being. The rules are pretty simple: pain is to be avoided, pleasure is to be pursued. These two fundamental tenets have been pillars of shifting scientific and philosophical theories for millennia. Even of psychoanalysis. Freud summarized this polarized view of emotional regulation when he pondered what men and women demanded of life: ‘The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.’
¹

It helps to regard ourselves as organisms who constantly seek to be in a fine equilibrium with the environment. We strive for a balance – which in scientific language is called
homeostasis
– and our actions and behaviour are movements that make us swing from one experience to the next in search of this equilibrium of well-being. Life is full of obstacles as well as reasons to be happy and we veer from one type of incident to the other. Some episodes are more painful than the average. We encounter the pain and we run away from it, towards a more pleasurable experience, but then we might incur pain again. Say we find shelter from the pouring rain under a tree. Everything seems great until a mosquito bites us. Or we wake up in a great mood, we run to the bakery to fetch an amazing fresh croissant, bump into a friend and then we sit down at the desk to start work only to find that our computer has crashed – this did really happen to me once. Viewed from this angle, pleasure is what we gain from a swift departure from pain as we approach the equilibrium again.

Indeed, pleasure can become painful and pain can occasionally give satisfaction. Sadistic sexual activities can provide joy to those who practise them. The sight of a delicious chocolate cake in a baker’s window is pleasure, but if we ate an entire cake on our own, that same cake would probably be a source of discomfort. Love is a reason for joy as it is for sadness, especially when it ends, causing grief. Also, the intensity of pleasure and pain is always related to what state of pain or pleasure we are in already. If we are in deep pain, what would normally be a small pleasure can elevate us to an ecstatic state.

I am going to tell you about some of these peculiar aspects of pleasure, as well as some of the roads that can help us reach joy. But first, as I have done for all the other emotions dealt with so far, I want to tell you what joy looks and sounds like.

Signs of joy

A smile gives joy away. Intuitively, one would think that the manifestation of a smile is accomplished around the mouth. Indeed, one of the muscles at work in a smile is the zygomaticus major, the muscle that extends from the cheekbones down to the corner of the lips. But the contraction of this muscle alone is not enough to produce a recognizable genuine smile. The first to report this was Duchenne, the French doctor who stimulated facial expressions by placing galvanizing electrodes on people’s faces and whose pictures Darwin used to illustrate his book. What led Duchenne to identify the rest of the scaffolding behind a truthful smile was the telling of a joke. When the French doctor applied his electrical stimulus to the zygomaticus major alone, his subject’s resulting facial expression looked unnatural and the smile false. When instead Duchenne told the man a joke, the amusement painted a totally credible smile on his face.
²
Guess where the difference lay. In the man’s eyes. When a smile is sincerely joyous, the muscle around our eyes, called the orbicularis oculi, also contracts. What all this means is that while you can voluntarily thin and extend your lips to produce a smile that communicates politeness, for instance, you can’t just move the orbicularis on demand. Hence, you can’t fake a joyful smile. Only true enjoyment produces a complete smile, which is still referred to as a ‘Duchenne smile’. Such fine distinction is reminiscent of the importance of the contraction of the muscles between the inner ends of your eyebrows, in addition to the down-turning of the lips, for a complete expression of sadness.

 • • • 

There are few things more embarrassing than finding yourself laughing uncontrollably when you really should be keeping a straight face. Unfortunately, it happens. Someone you are interviewing shakes your hand and introduces himself as Constant Pain. Your boss greets you after the lunch break unaware of the fact that a tiny piece of spinach is stuck right between his front teeth. Somebody falls clumsily in front of you.

Laughter is not only a sign of joy or amusement. Laughter can be cynical, malevolent, deriding. It may even accompany violent acts, such as killing.

But in any case, laughter is also more than just an open grinning face. When we laugh our lungs, larynx and the muscles in between our ribs are at work. So when examining laughter, we also explore the sound of emotion, in addition to its visual appearance. Laughter has a voice. And laughter, if listened to carefully, has a distinct acoustic signature. The psychologist Robert Provine has dissected the structural components of laughter.
³
To do that, he had to listen to a lot of laughing. It’s not easy to have people laugh on command, but one of the strategies he adopted was to go around meeting people in public spaces, telling them he was studying laughter and asking them to laugh. The reaction to that statement was often a spontaneous laugh and he recorded those. When he unreeled the tape and analysed the sounds in a laboratory, using an instrument called a spectrograph, he noticed a distinct pattern. Laughs are made up of a series of vowel emissions – mostly ha or ho – which are repeated at evenly ordered intervals of time. The duration both of the laughing syllables and of the intervals is to be measured in milliseconds. Another interesting characteristic he could observe is that laughs are not scattered in disorderly fashion into our conversations. They often follow sentences, they don’t interrupt them. They work like punctuation marks. In general, Provine believes that we must have developed distinct neural circuits that make us detect and process the structure of laughter and then generate it via the same type of vocalization, making the contagious aspect of laughter possible.

Besides being contagious, laughter is also universal. There are sounds of laughter across the animal kingdom. For instance, chimpanzees laugh, although the breathing pattern in their laughs is different from the pattern observed in humans. Even rats laugh, especially when they are young. Their laugh is obviously nothing like ours, neither are rats renowned for having a sharp sense of humour, but they do emit measurable ultrasound vocalizations in pleasurable circumstances. When ‘adolescent’ rats are at play with one another and when they are tickled on their back, neck or belly, they emit distinct ultrasound vocalizations, squeaky noises with a frequency – about 50kHz – which is higher than the frequency of vocalizations emitted in anticipation of aversive, unpleasant circumstances (about 20–30kHz).
⁴

The cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott, of University College London, has for a long time been interested in understanding how we communicate with one another, both through the production and perception of speech and through other forms of non-verbal exchange. She and her team have generated beautiful data on laughter.

Two of her collaborators travelled far to find proof of the cross-cultural nature of emotions. This time, their interest wasn’t in facial expressions, but the sounds of emotion. They reached a few remote, isolated villages in North Namibia, where the inhabitants, the Himbas, had never been exposed to cultures other than their own and, therefore, were not familiar with the emotional signals of Western Europeans.
⁵
Basically, they had never had the chance to hear a Londoner cry or laugh. The experiment went as follows. The Himbas listened to stories (in their language) that focused on a few basic emotions, such as fear, anger, sadness, disgust or amusement. Then for each story they heard two sounds produced by English speakers – one matched the story (and the emotion), the other did not – and they were asked to identify the right one. When the researchers returned to London, they brought back with them recordings from the Himbas and tested an English group of participants in the same way. Both the English and the Himbas group of listeners recognized the sounds connected to the emotions quite consistently. In the case of amusement, which was exemplified by a tickling scenario, both groups unequivocally matched laughter to it. The Brits detected and recognized the laughter of the Himbas and the Himbas recognized that of the Brits without fail, both associating laughter with tickling, which, as we know, is often a source of joy, even for rats. Laughter, then, is the acoustic equivalent of the smile. It is another marker for joy as a universal emotion.

Sophie Scott has also deepened her understanding of positive emotions by looking for the neural clues to the strong contagious aspect of laughter. In chapter 5, I talked about the power of mirror neurons to propagate emotions between actors and an audience and in general about the power of facial mimicry to imitate expressions. As one might expect, laughing in the presence of others entails incredible mirroring activity. But Sophie Scott and her collaborators showed that even the sound of laughter, and not just a visual stimulus for laughter, can engage mirroring parts of the brain and generate homologous facial expressions in the perceivers.
⁶
In fact, of the many emotional sounds she used to probe the auditory capacity of the mirroring system, laughter was the most powerful. Basically, just hearing someone laugh can prompt a smile on your face.