I just finished the book The
Tale of the Dueling Neuroscientists by Sam Kean which Kenny bought for me and surreptitiously snuck in my luggage. I really enjoyed it. It
did a great job of explaining the various parts of the brain and also what
happens if something goes wrong with one part of the brain.
The most interesting one, in my opinion, was CapgrasSyndrome where patients believe that their loved ones have been replaced by
“doubles” kind of like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
What happens is that
the brain has two ways of recognizing faces, one conscious that recognizing
this person is someone you know etc and the other subconscious that goes
directly to the emotional centers of the brain. These people have a problem
with the subconscious communication that results in a sense of strangeness to people
that they should have an emotional response. To compound problems they also
have problems with their right hemisphere communicating with the left and this
results in the left brain coming up with plausible explanations for why who
they’re seeing doesn’t elicit the response they know they should be
experiencing. Thus the body double.
This even happens to the patients when they look at
themselves in the mirror and many people have to cover up mirrors because they
fear being attacked. Kind of reminds me of beta-fish.
Side-bar: If you
don’t know this trick, put up a mirror in front of a beta-fish(i.e. a Japanese
fighting fish) and it will see itself and think it’s an enemy and will try to
attack it.
Okay back to Capgras. In addition to the obvious scariness
of this for the patients, it’s also sad for their loved ones who are now
treated with distrust or apprehension(Not always though: Kean uses an example
of one Capgras patient whose sex life increased because his wife’s body was" electrifyingly new every few weeks").
Originally this was thought to be a psychological issues and often attributed to schizophrenia. However, it was soon discovered that patients had corresponding brain lesions that appeared to be eliciting this odd delusion. And it was also occurring in many patients who were otherwise fully
functional: their memory, motor function, speech, humor and even their emotions
were all intact. Even if the patient talks on the phone to their loved one they
will have that emotional connection but as soon as their vision kicks in and
they have the conflict between conscious and subconscious perception: they
start back with the body double thing.
This is a rare and mysterious disease, but I’d argue that
many of us spend a good portion of each and every day not recognizing
ourselves. (I know that wasn’t the smoothest transition, but hey! Give me a
break. ) In this I mean that how our body is responding to our environment, how
we unconscious respond to sensory cues and stimuli, and the stress we allow our
bodies to be exposed to all happens without our knowledge. As mentioned above,
the brain is very good at coming up with stories for why we are the way we are.
So as you’re walking along and you smell something that
reminds you of that time when you got in a fight with your friend, you may all
of a sudden become angry. But you’re likely not to attribute it to that memory
but come up with a story for why you are upset(maybe the car that just cut in
front of you). The same thing can and does happen with our bodies. We may be
standing hunched over the sink for 45 minutes and then all of a sudden our back
starts hurting. Do we attribute it to that action? Oftentimes no. We attributed
it to our “bad backs”. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard: oh I’ve got degenerative disk disease
that’s why my back always hurts. Well… first of all, I doubt that it always
hurts. It’s very easy to say that but most likely there are many parts of the
day where there is no pain. Secondly, this is a convenient story that confirms
their feelings without really getting at the root of the problem, which may be
bad body mechanics, muscle imbalance, over-(or under) doing things etc.
In both of these instances, we experience a sensation and
then our mind comes up with a story for it. If we can become cognizant of these
feelings, and cut off those stories(or at least create a more empowering positive story), we may be able to avoid blowing up at our
friends or catastrophizing our pain and creating persistent problems that don't need to be occurring.
Update: apparently this is called the Lazarus theory and researchers have concluded that “thoughts appear to act as fuel that stirs up the emotional fire and leads to a prolongation of the episode”. So evidence does support that we experience a physiological experience and then the stories we tell ourselves is what creates our emotional response....
It all goes back to mindfulness and getting to know our bodies and minds better. That way when we experience something it's not so frighteningly new to us.
Until next time,
Danny
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