Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ often used when I was trying to understand the meaning a person has given to a situation is, ‘If you could paint a picture of what you’re feeling, what sort of picture would you paint?’ Answers to this question often reveal a discrepancy between the person’s statement about his meaning and the underlying image. The image accompanying the words ‘I’m upset’ might be ‘I feel that everything around me is crumbling and I can’t hold it together’.

      The meanings we create often exist both as words and as images. Sometimes the words can give the better account of that meaning, and sometimes the image is the best rendition of the meaning. But the meanings we create do not exist in isolation. They are always linked to all the other meanings we have created.

      Some of the links are associations formed from past experiences. My meaning that I call ‘Australia’ I link with ‘the wide brown land’ from a poem all Australian children learn at school,¹² but for many English people ‘Australia’ links only with the soap operas Neighbours and Cell Block H.

      Some of the meanings are in hierarchies of value judgements. Asking the question, ‘Why is that important to you?’ can reveal these hierarchies.

      When I asked Helena, ‘Why is personal growth important to you?’ her answer had to be a more general statement of a principle. She replied, ‘Through personal growth I expand myself and become better in my relationships with other people. I blossom as a person, and people can get to know me and I can get to know them.’ I then asked, ‘Why is it important to you that people get to know you and you get to know them?’ Helena looked at me in surprise. It was as if I had asked her why it was important to her to breathe. She said, ‘That’s what life’s about, isn’t it? Having friends, caring about other people.’ Helena’s home was always awash with people and cats in need of comfort.

      The word ‘spiritual’ has become very fashionable, but it seemed to have as many meanings as there were people using it. I asked Ian what he meant by ‘spiritual’ and he talked about a close relationship with God, but not a God who was a person. It was a blending with everything that exists, but it was not the merging whereby individuality vanishes, as the eastern philosophies teach, but a kind of enlarging and developing of his own individuality. Part of this was becoming a better person and part the gaining of knowledge and power. As Ian talked, Helena looked increasingly stricken. Ian was talking of a striving towards an achievement in individual development which had no place for other people. It was clear that he enjoyed the company of friends whom he found interesting, and what he wanted was someone like Helena to look after him and do the necessary socializing for him so he could continue striving for his goal.

      This, of course, was not enough for Helena, and so their friendship faltered and failed. Such is the power of the meanings we create.

The Meanings in Our Brain

      The brain, it seems, is the most complex object on this planet and exactly how it works no one knows. There are lots of ways of examining the brain – looking at brain tissue, planting electrodes in an animal’s brain, using X-rays and various scanning techniques – and lots of interesting things have been discovered, but the great problem is to construct a suitable model of the brain. Our brains think in a peculiar way. To understand anything we have to decide what it is like. We have to find something from our past experience which is similar to what we are examining. If you have to describe a pizza to someone who’s never seen one you might start by saying, ‘It’s something like a pie but without a top.’ The trouble with the brain is that there is not anything like it. It operates with various chemicals, but not in the way our heart and lungs do. It uses electrical impulses, but not like any piece of electrical equipment that has been devised. People who love computers often liken it to a computer and there are Artificial Intelligence experts who believe that if they make a sufficiently large and clever computer it will turn into a conscious brain, but such a view is based on a supreme ignorance of how human beings actually operate. Models of the brain have now become a growth industry in science and philosophy but nothing satisfactory has yet been devised.

      However, one way of thinking about the brain seems to be full of possibilities. Back in 1949 the psychologist Donald Hebb suggested a model for understanding the functions of the neurons in the brain. It seemed that the more two neurons communicated with one another the easier communication became. The neurons seemed to set up a relationship which Hebb called a neural net.

      This has proved to be a most useful way of thinking about the brain’s activity, especially with the development of scanning techniques like positron emission tomography (PET), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetencephalography (MEG). Because human subjects can tell researchers what they are doing – looking at something, daydreaming, silently doing sums or reciting a poem – while they are being scanned many interesting relationships between thinking and brain activity have been observed.

      For instance, Petry and Meyer showed how when we are perceiving the world around us and when we are imagining or dreaming we are using much the same regions of our brain.¹³ Whether we are lost in imagination, or asleep and dreaming, or looking at the world around us our brain is creating a picture in our heads. We have the task of deciding whether what we are experiencing is the world around us or an image inside us. Most of the time we get it right but sometimes we do not. If something utterly unexpected happens, be it a tragedy or the best of good fortune, the world around us can take on a dreamlike quality, and we turn to others for assurance that what seems to be happening is real. If, on the other hand, we feel totally overwhelmed by events and utterly powerless to make reasonable sense of what is happening to us we can lose the ability to distinguish between the voices of our thoughts in our head and the voices of people around us. Our thoughts seem to be the voices of unseen people around us. These voices might be friendly and comforting, but often they are criticizing us and urging us to commit terrible acts. When this happens to us we need real people around us who will not tell us that we are mad but rather will assure us that our voices are simply our thoughts and help us find ways of keeping our thoughts in order. Singing can quieten the voices, as can telling them loudly and firmly to shut up. If you have to do this in public a mobile phone can be very useful.

      In research on the functioning of the brain there is still a big gap between scanning an active person’s brain and looking at the firing individual neurons. The images from scanning might not be showing the mental processes themselves, but only emissions from them, somewhat analogous to showing emissions from a car’s exhaust rather than the functioning of the internal combustion engine. However, Hebb’s neural net has provided the key to finding what might be a suitable model for understanding how the brain creates meaning. Susan Greenfield defined the model of a neuronal gestalt as ‘a highly variable aggregation of neurons that is temporarily recruited around a triggering epicentre. Not all neuronal assemblies are gestalts but all gestalts are neuronal assemblies.’¹⁴ A stimulus produces an epicentre of arousal in the brain and a group of neurons firing in a particular pattern form around the epicentre. If the stimulus is repeated the pattern of the epicentre and the neurons is repeated. Further repetitions of the stimulus turn what was a transient pattern into a gestalt, a schema where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. (A common example of a gestalt is that particular positioning of an oval shape, two dots and two straight lines which to our eyes is a picture of a face.)

      Neurons communicate with one another by using a chemical transmitter to empty into the synapse – that is, the gap between the axon terminals of one cell and one of the dendrites of another cell, where the transmitter binds to a target molecule. In the transmitting neuron the electrical signal is put into a chemical code and, when it crosses the synapse, it is decoded back into an electrical signal in the neuron СКАЧАТЬ