Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (28 page)

Finally, laughter is definitely a social expression of emotion rather than a solitary activity. We may occasionally laugh on our own in front of an amusing comedy, but laughter is mostly a social affair. When the psychologist Robert Provine asked a group of students to keep a regular diary of their laughing during a whole week, the results were clear. The entries for their laughs revealed that they laughed thirty times more in the presence of others than in solitude.
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Laughing with others assumes all sorts of social meanings. We laugh to agree with others, to bond with them, to show them our trust and our love.

I must confess something. I enjoy a good laugh, especially with friends, but in me the true sign of joy is whistling. If I am in a good mood, or I want to get into one, I can whistle you a whole symphony.

An entanglement of pleasure and intellect

Let’s go back to my fleeting pleasurable moment of creation at the dawn of a New York City day. Writing a poem, composing a song and other kinds of intellectual and creative endeavour are indeed pleasurable activities. I did gain gratification from chiselling out my sonnet at five o’clock in the morning. But how did it happen that I came to make sense of random thoughts and images, and finally grasp what was missing in the poem?

Personally, so long as it keeps happening with sufficient regularity, I prefer to keep a good part of that creative process as an unyielding mystery. However, research is beginning to uncover some of the mechanisms behind such mental processes and the findings, even if perhaps preliminary, are fascinating. One main lesson emerging from laboratory data is that positive mood is coupled to the achievement of sharpness in the mind. Even just a short lift of mood improves our capacity to think and our creativity.

I will concentrate on this later, but for now let’s take a step back and explore the basic anatomy of pleasure. The brain has a centre dedicated to pleasure that is habitually called the ‘reward system’. Because of the ancient evolutionary purpose of sensory pleasure, the reward system is a primordial device that has been an essential part of the brain, and not just in humans – to give you an idea, bees, rats, dogs and elephants all have comparable reward systems. If in a bee the reward system consists of a single neuron, in higher animals it comprises several tissues.
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In Fig. 15 I have highlighted the relevant tissues in the human brain: the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens (NA). The VTA is part of the brainstem that covers the top of the spinal cord – in Latin
tegmentum
means cover. The NA takes its name from the fact that it leans –
accumbens
– towards the septum, a smaller region of the brain just above it.

Fig. 15 The nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area are part of the reward system

The proper functioning of the reward system makes sure that essential behaviours such as eating or sex are experienced as satisfying, and hence likely to be repeated, allowing survival and reproduction. Rewards coming from given stimuli and actions reinforce our desire to increase the frequency and intensity of those stimuli and actions.

The pleasure-inducing capacity of the reward centre was first observed in rats in the 1950s. The researchers gave the rats a mild electrical stimulus each time they moved to a given corner within their cage. The current was delivered through an electrode inserted in the septum area – that is, behind the rats’ nose – that reached down to the reward areas. The stimulation turned out to be pleasurable for the rats because instead of avoiding it, they spontaneously returned to the same corner repeatedly.

Later, the researchers connected a lever to the source of the electrical current so that if the rats pressed it they would stimulate themselves. The rats were so avid to receive the stimulus that they couldn’t stop pressing the lever. They would press it hundreds of times an hour – it’s a conditioning process similar to the one I described in chapter 3, but this time the stimulus is pleasurable not painful, hence carrying a positive incentive.
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One of the ways the neuronal cells in the reward circuit communicate with each other is by sending and receiving a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which acts as a messenger in the same sort of way as serotonin – which I described in chapter 4.

Briefly: upon stimulation, dopamine is released from a neuron into the synapse. Once there, it relays the message to the neuron on the other side of the synapse by binding to dopamine receptors. Once the message has been delivered, the dopamine is dislodged from the receptors and taken up again through a dopamine-specific transporter, the embankments on the neuron of origin.

The circulation of dopamine has the power to send us on a euphoric trip. It makes us hyperactive, it nurtures our volition and gives us motivation. One of the experiments that established the stimulating power of dopamine involved monkeys and apple juice. When the monkeys were given drops of apple juice after having served in an experiment, their dopaminergic neurons screamed, as proof of their excitement at the treat.
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It has now become increasingly clear that the release of dopamine is not associated with the enjoyment of the reward itself. It rather accompanies moments of hopeful anticipation of a reward. Say you are expecting a charming goodnight text message, you have been promised a nice long handwritten letter from a friend, or you may have been invited to a dinner party where you know you’ll meet people you like to hang out with or you see the perfect ending to a poem right before your eyes. The prediction of an imminent reward carried by all such promising events is underscored by the production of dopamine. Several experiments have revealed this. When the reward of the apple juice was consistently preceded by the presentation of a light, the monkeys learnt to associate the visual cue with the promise of the juice. The result was that their neurons would fire as soon as the light went on, then not as much when they actually got the juice.

The same was observed in a different kind of appetitive eagerness: sexual anticipation. Levels of dopamine sky-rocketed in male rats lured by the sight of a female kept behind a separating see-through screen. After they copulated with her, their dopamine sank back to baseline levels but surged again at the sight of a second female partner.
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Such is the power of dopamine-enhanced lust.

But dopamine also helps us focus. It sharpens attention and biases our concentration and actions. To make this clear, I’ll tell you a little story about bees. Bees relish pollen. They will travel considerable distance to find a meadow full of flowers. Despite their small nervous systems, bees are quick at learning and processing new information and this helps their foraging abilities.
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They are able to associate the scent, colour and shape of a flower with the quality of its nectar and this kind of appetitive learning conditions their search for good fields. The experience of finding good nectar involves the bees’ reward system. An inviting flower makes their reward neuron produce a bee equivalent of dopamine, called octopamine, and this marks the decision of having chosen that flower as rewarding. It motivates the bee to go back there.
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In the bees, this basic system works well enough to satisfy their foraging needs. But in higher animals, it has achieved greater sophistication and the anticipation and detection of pleasure can indeed take us far. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the loftiest department of the brain. It’s a place where we can entertain abstract ideas, but also a temporary lounge for items in our memory. The reward system is well connected to the PFC and this is important for integrating pleasure with our cognitive abilities. The two parts of the brain process information differently. The reward system is a more crude and immediate type of learner. As we have seen, it is great at detecting and storing rewarding experiences. The PFC learns more slowly and needs exercise. Collaboratively, these two systems catalyse the formation of beautiful thoughts.
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Now, in general, a good mood improves solving skills and the creative process. Scientists have probed the effect of positive feelings on the solution of problems and cognitive tasks, including the specific case of word association.
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In a set of studies, participants were challenged to find connections between words. They were shown a succession of three-word groups and asked in each case to come up within a short period of time with a single word that would fit with all three words in the group. The tasks varied in levels of difficulty. For instance:

MOWER ATOMIC FOREIGN ________

In this case, the correct answer was ‘power’. If the participants had been given a small gift before the task, say a candy and other refreshments, or if they had watched a short comedy film, their rate of success at filling the blanks improved.
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In a related study a small unexpected reward improved the participants’ capacity to come up with unusual word associations. Those who had been given gifts were more adventurous in their word associations.
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The current biological model in explaining how such mental processes are facilitated credits the importance of connections between the reward centre and frontal structures in the brain. Were I to apply this model to what happened to me as I composed the sonnet, my moment of pleasurable inspiration could be explained more or less as follows. For some inexplicable reason, the new environment I was in, the excitement about being in New York, and even the stars in the sky and the view of the Hudson were the hook for my progress. They were unexpected rewards, sudden incentives, the flowers with the best and most abundant nectar if you want, that carried the potential of something good and demanded that I linger on them. After being stuck with the same few unfinished lines and unfruitful words, my mind finally landed on something promising. Energized and motivated, I didn’t let the inspiration dissipate and I concentrated on finishing the sonnet. I sprinted as if I were being chased because I knew I had to bring all the pieces together with renewed poise and a good dose of self-confidence. The rewarding inspiration fitted with the general idea of the poem and therefore grew roots. What had been floating freely in my mind finally found a good landing spot, and somehow I gained access to a productive channel of flexible creation. The ideas were judged worth pursuing and achieved a better organization. Importantly, the regularity and fixed pattern of the sonnet form must have helped in the process. The solutions I came up with found confirmation within a given structure, and were aided by my knowledge of and experience with the sonnet rules.

The ongoing dialogue between the pleasure centre in the brain and my prefrontal cortex is something I merely now assume was going on in my brain, based on my subsequent reading about the neurobiological infrastructure of the creative process. On the other hand, I can tell you exactly how the sonnet came about because I remember how I built it and my notebook documents the gradual progress, line after line, syllable after syllable, stress after stress. The scribbles and erasures on paper mark the tempo of its production. I remember fondly the ecstatic moments that separated me from the completion, the distance travelled from the suspicion of a solution to the actual realization, and the triumphant high originating in the accomplishment of the sonnet. Knowledge that something specific, and incredibly sophisticated, is happening to my brain while I’m entirely intent on shaping a few lines is extremely fascinating, and definitely reassuring. However, it’s an approximation that frames the process, an enterprise parallel to but independent from my own undertaking. What I mostly take from it is that incitements make me a little keener.

The real thing

Who knows, maybe the sonnet would have been different, or better for that matter, if I had composed it under the effect of drugs.

Creation of all kinds is aided by the use of stimulant and recreational drugs.

Dopamine levels in the brain increase drastically – up to a thousandfold – after the ingestion of cocaine, which vastly amplifies the motivational high I described above. At the molecular level, cocaine increases dopamine levels by preventing its clearance from between the cells in the reward circuit. It inhibits dopamine’s re-uptake through the embankments on the pre-synaptic neurons.

Stimulants such as amphetamines work by a similar mechanism and real poets have exploited their power to sharpen focus and boost concentration while letting fatigue dissipate. In post–Second World War New York, the Beat generation of writers that included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs experimented widely with amphetamines. In his iconic poem
Howl
, Ginsberg says: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix . . . ’
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