Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (9 page)

Greene and his colleagues used brain imaging to understand how the brain operates when people face dilemmas of this kind. The difference in the degree of ‘personal relevance’ and ‘emotional proximity’ showed up in the brain images they collected. Indeed, judgements over situations like the child drowning in the stream engaged brain areas that are associated with emotion, while decisions about situations like sending money to third-world countries did not.

In light of their results, Joshua Greene and others have argued that there is an evolutionary reason why we would hasten to save the child in the stream and put away the donation letter instead. In evolutionary terms, receiving a letter, or an email for that matter, asking one to donate money for a child far away is a modern scenario, facilitated by today’s large global networks of communication. Our biological ancestors were more likely to have found themselves in the situation of having to rescue someone who was in danger by putting themselves at risk. Our brains, and in particular the circuits of our brains that mediate emotion, have been trained for thousands of years to respond to moral situations of that kind. By contrast, our reactions to the more distant cry of children in remote places haven’t had the reinforcement of years of evolution.
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The decision to act towards saving their lives involves more sophisticated reasoning.

The deep seat of guilt

Guilt is central to dilemmas such as the one described above. Not helping the child would be an incredibly heavy burden to carry, whereas not donating the money allows us to comfortably go on with our lives and spend money on luxuries and surplus commodities we don’t need, with a lesser sense of guilt.

As I said earlier, guilt is essentially about choices that can directly or indirectly have an impact on others, or violate norms that are agreed upon in a given society, either explicitly, such as in criminal codes, or implicitly, as in customs or conventions.

For a long time, guilt was a scientific subject for psychology, not neuroscience. It was about testing decision-making, attitudes and behaviour in given moral choice scenarios, in individual settings or in simulated social groups. Scientists are now trying to integrate those tests with contemporary brain science. These days, that normally involves using brain-imaging technologies, in particular functional magnetic resonance, or fMRI. A means by which measurements of blood flow in the brain can be captured and translated into images, fMRI has evolved as a key research method to visualize the brain’s operations as they take place in real time. This is indeed a daunting task.

Metaphors of guilt’s overpowering and long-lasting nature would easily lead us to construe images of guilt occupying a deep seat in our brain, engraved in hidden neural grooves, and constantly pounding, like the pang of an irrepressible bad memory. But if we feel guilty about something, does that mean that some part of our brain will be continuously sparking guilt? After all, despite guilt’s incessant effect, we feel it more keenly when we are reminded of our bad deeds.

Studies investigating the neural seat of guilt have consisted in monitoring what happens in the brains of participants in a variety of moral scenarios. In some cases, they were asked to judge hypothetical scripts of social and moral actions, similar to the dilemma discussed above, or to choose whether or not to cause harm to someone. In other experiments participants were exposed to emotionally charged scenes representing social violations, such as physical assaults, while in yet others they simply read or listened to guilt-laden sentences.
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Ullrich Wagner and colleagues at the Charité Institute in Berlin, Germany, conducted a different kind of study. The singularity of their experiment was the exploration of the neural seat of a personal, self-conscious sense of guilt, the one that germinates in the remembrance of guilt-associated events, like Beckett’s pungent memory of the accidental killing of the hedgehog.
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Another particular element in this study is that it aimed at mapping the brain’s specific nook for guilt, by comparing what happened in the brain during the recollection of guilt with what happened in the brain during the recollection of shame, guilt’s false friend, and sadness, a less related emotion. To do that, they asked over a dozen people to first specify in a list events from their past (since the age of sixteen) marked by a deep and powerful private sense of guilt, as well as by the other two emotions.

Without mentioning by name the actual emotions in question, the team of scientists sought to obtain from the participants descriptions that for instance involved the transgression of rules or damage to others in the case of guilt, situations that jeopardized personal honour or reputation in the case of shame, or themes of loss in the case of sadness. This way, the entries of all participants for each emotion would share basic commonalities but would be free of bias arising from each individual’s personal definition or conception of those three emotions. For each event on their list, the participants then also provided keywords that were supposed to trigger recall of that event. Someone who had cheated in a history exam, say, might have given ‘history’ as their keyword, but they could also have said ‘rain’ if it had been raining during the episode they described. During the scanning procedure, people were prompted with the memory-laden keywords and asked to try to relive the emotion experienced during the guilt-stained event. A similar procedure was used for the other two emotions.

As you would expect, since the experiment involved evoking memories, when Wagner and his colleagues analysed the brain-imaging data they noticed activity in areas of the brain participating in memory retrieval. But the imaging results also pointed to areas in the anterior part of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex. Roughly speaking, part of the orbitofrontal cortex and parts of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex were engaged during the elicitation of guilt, but, importantly, not during the recollection of shame and sadness (Fig. 4). From what we have learnt about these two regions in the prefrontal cortex, these results are not surprising. Since guilt has to do with choice and moral decision-making, we would expect it to be at work in brain areas that are in general involved in inhibitory control of behaviour, which is necessary when we calculate the consequences of wrongdoing or causing harm.
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But can a brain scan indeed convey a deep sense of guilt? And what does it mean to have identified regions in the brain that ‘light up’ when guilt is recalled?

Fig. 4 Brain activation for guilt. From Wagner
et al.
, 2011, Cerebral Cortex, by permission of Oxford University Press

It would be hazardous to claim that by the means of brain imaging we have narrowly mapped the deep seat of guilt, let alone that a particular region is responsible specifically for the feeling of guilt and not, for instance, shame or regret.

The image of a brain scan that is supposed to have trapped guilt in the brain is not particularly helpful either in understanding why it is so hard to get rid of a nagging sense of guilt, still harder to assuage it.

But while I was in Rome, I gained a better grasp of the meaning of guilt from another image, a timeless painting in a museum.

A restless genius

From Piazza del Popolo, I climbed the many steps of the Pincian Hill. Before my trip to Rome, a sculptor friend of mine, who had a passion for the painter Caravaggio and had developed an interest in guilt, suggested I go to see some of the master’s paintings at the Galleria Borghese. In particular, he recommended I should look at
David with the Head of Goliath
, a canvas depicting the biblical story of David’s triumph over the Philistine giant Goliath (Fig. 5), which hangs in a relatively small room packed with many other works.

Fig. 5 Caravaggio,
David with the Head of Goliath
© Alinari Archives/CORBIS

After a long queue outside, I finally made my entry into the building and was happily thrown back in time among extraordinary pieces of Renaissance and Baroque art. Tourists swarmed in the hot rooms, pacing the magnificent marbled floors and walking around statues. When I reached my intended destination, a small crowd was gathered around the painting, so I waited until it vanished and I could stand in front of the picture by myself. The view is difficult to erase from one’s mind. It is a dark, intensely penetrating picture you sense is hiding something sinister. Caravaggio’s renowned mastery of chiaroscuro – that is, the sharp contrast between light and dark – works perfectly here. A sombre meaning emanates from every inch of the canvas. A severed head still dripping blood swings by the hair from the hand of David, who holds the gleaming sword with which he perpetrated the decapitating blow.

Art is extremely powerful at summoning emotions and at instigating a dialogue between an object and its viewer.
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The effect on me of that viewing was immediate. I was enraptured by it and found it resonated with some of the difficult thoughts I had entertained that morning. This became all the more evident after I learnt more about the circumstances of its creation and the life of this extraordinary master of painting.

Born in Milan and raised in a small town called Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi (1571–1610) – who later was simply named after his village of origin – arrived in Rome when he was about twenty, keen to find success and the appropriate milieu in which to develop his talent as an artist. Within a few years, he became the most famous painter in the city.
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Caravaggio was definitely not an easy-going chap. He was arrogant, uncompromising, irritable and touchy. No stranger to the courtroom, Caravaggio had a criminal record that rivalled his artistic achievements, for it seemed that when he wasn’t painting he was getting himself into one brawl after another. During his life in Rome he was accused of harassing women, messing with guards, attacking waiters – he once threw a plate of artichokes at one. He was also put on trial for libel.

The painting of David and Goliath originates from a crucial specific episode in Caravaggio’s life. On the night of Sunday, 28 May 1606, at the age of thirty-five, this genius of the Roman artistic world became involved in a sword fight that culminated in his opponent’s death and left him a hidden fugitive for the rest of his life.

A capital sentence –
a
bando capitale
– was imposed upon Caravaggio as the murderer. This sentence meant that anyone who found him was entitled to report him to the authorities or even kill him and deliver his head – his
caput
.

While away, Caravaggio never ceased longing for a return to the bustle of the city of Rome. During this period, he also painted incessantly. The exile was one of the darkest and hardest phases of his existence. In spite of that, or indeed because of his gloomy desolation, he created some of his most expressive images, among them the painting I stood in front of.

A very important detail about the image must be revealed. Before Caravaggio, several artists had painted themselves as David. Caravaggio’s version of this celebrated scene of good victorious over evil is unique in that it is the severed head of Goliath that is Caravaggio’s self-portrait. In Caravaggio’s painting, David bears a candid appearance and shows no exultation in his victory, but rather expresses compassion and pity. Caravaggio’s face is tormented and heavily disfigured by death.

By serving his severed head to the viewer, Caravaggio is expressing his repentance for his actions and attempting to assuage his sense of guilt.

On David’s sword, on the side of the hilt, is an acronym, barely readable unless you move close to the painting: H. OC. S. These letters stand for the Latin words
humilitas occidit superbiam
, that is: humility kills pride. It is supposed to be a sentence taken from St Augustine’s reflection on Psalm 33 in which he compares David’s victory over Goliath to Christ’s triumph over the devil.
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Good prevails over evil. In one painting we have a whole host of moral emotions. Guilt, backed up by humility, promises to restore good conduct.