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

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СКАЧАТЬ research showed that the output of any individual neuron depended not just on a stimulus but on what was happening in the rest of the brain – that is, on what the brain was thinking at the time. According to John Maunsell, one of the neuroscientists carrying out this research, ‘We are coming to the end of one generation of effort. The next generation is going to have to look at the whole system [and] understand the effect that plans, decisions and actions can have on what neurons do.’¹⁸

      If the brain did operate like a computer then, when nothing was happening, the brain would be a blank screen. In fact, even in a brain which seems to be doing nothing there is a steady tick-over of cell activity of at least three or four spikes a second. This might be just a leakage of current, but those scientists using a dynamic model of the brain argue this background firing maintains a certain level of tone in the brain and presumably creates some meaning. It is possible that ‘the brain stores memories as patterns of connections between cells – new experiences prompt the strengthening of old connections, or the growth of new ones. The tick-over firing echoing around the brain could be a defocused representation of everything you have ever learnt or known.’¹⁹

      ‘Everything you’ve ever learnt or known’ – that sounds very much like all the meanings you’ve ever created. These meanings altogether form a pattern or structure – your meaning structure.

Your Meaning Structure

      The brain is a dynamic system which operates and evolves. There is no little person sitting in the brain telling it what to do. There is no special part of the brain which organizes and operates the rest of the brain. The brain is a self-generating, self-running system. It learns, it stores memories, it creates meanings. Old meanings create new meanings. Meanings evolve and change, but all are stored and linked together into a structure. You know the structure very well because your meaning structure is you. You are your meaning structure.

      You are, in effect, your memories and your hopes and expectations. To paraphrase Picton and Stuss, quoted earlier, ‘Your brain forms and maintains a model of the world and yourself within that world. This model uses itself to explain the past events and predict the future.’ Like your brain, your meaning structure is a self-generating, self-running system. There is no little self sitting inside it, running it. Your meaning structure is your self.

      Your meaning structure operates with two basic rules:

      1. Every part interconnects with every other part;

      2. The aim of the meaning structure is to maintain its structure.

      Some of the interconnections in your meaning structure are easy to recognize when you remember how hard it is to think about one thing only and not be distracted by other thoughts. A simple task like drawing up a shopping list can easily involve, say, a memory of once disliking the tea that you now cannot live without, a feeling of anxiety about the size of next month’s credit card bill, irritation at the fuss your family makes about the wrong kind of muesli – which leads you on to irritation with the way in which your children leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, a fantasy about escaping from all of this and living on a South Sea island and a brief meditation on the state of your best friend’s love life.

      The connections which are not so easy to discern are the meanings which underlie the decisions you make. When you’re drawing up your shopping list you accept or reject the idea of buying yourself some treat and might not recognize your underlying meaning of how you feel about yourself. This could be ‘I’ve made a mess of things, therefore I don’t deserve a treat’, or it could be ‘I’ve done really well so I deserve a treat’, and thus this meaning, which you need not make conscious, determines whether or not the treat goes on your list.

      Another underlying meaning which is often hard to identify concerns what you regard as your absolute top priority in life. You might, like Ian, have as your top priority gaining a sense of achievement, organization and control, or you might, like Helena, aim to establish and maintain good relationships with other people. In either case, your top priority can lead you to put ‘thick bleach’ on your list, in order either to remove disorder and establish organization and control or to make sure that people will not reject you because your house is dirty.

      Our meaning structure must maintain its structure as a unified whole because it is this wholeness which gives us our sense of existence. Out of this sense of existence comes our experience of consciousness and our notion of ‘I’. When we talk of ‘holding myself together’ it is not just a matter of keeping our emotions and our behaviour under control. It is a matter of holding our meaning structure together so that our sense of ‘I’ does not dissipate and our sense of existence fall apart.

      The aim of our meaning structure to maintain itself as a whole is so much present in our lives that we are not always aware of its existence. We are aware that we have to survive physically, as a physical body. So we take vitamin pills and look both ways when we are crossing the road. We are not always aware that we have to survive as a person because we are always using one or other of the range of well-practised defences we have created to prevent our meaning structure from falling apart. These defences range from the practical, like organizing clocks, watches and diaries to keep time under control, to lifetime strategies, like never making a commitment to anyone and thus preventing anyone from finding out how awful we really are.

      Thus it is that many of us do not discover how essential it is to survive as a person until one day we discover that we have made a major error of judgement and we feel ourselves – our meaning structure – falling apart.

      Our meaning structure is always in danger of falling apart because at any moment life can reveal a huge discrepancy between our picture of what is going on and what is really happening. It could be that you have always seen your environment as solid and reliable, and one day it convulses into an earthquake. It could be that, even though you know that people die, you didn’t think that meant you, and one day you’re in a car accident and barely survive. It could be that you expect to spend the rest of your life in one loving relationship, and one day your lover leaves you for ever. It could be that you have always prided yourself on being a good judge of character, and one day the friend and colleague you trusted most betrays your trust.

      In these and many other situations you can discover that you have made a major error of judgement. You think, ‘If I was wrong in that I could be wrong in every judgement I have ever made.’ Such a thought undermines your meaning structure. It starts to shake and fall apart, just as a strong building will shake and shatter as the earth beneath it begins to shake and crumble.

      If you understand that you are your meaning structure you will know what is happening and be prepared to ride out the storm until you can get yourself together again, but if you do not understand this you will feel that you yourself are shattering, crumbling, even disappearing. This experience is utterly, utterly terrifying.

      A friend once told me what had happened to her when she discovered that she had made a major error of judgement. She was a senior social worker and, as I well knew, prided herself on her feet-on-the ground, common-sense approach and especially on her ability to sum people up and see through the artifice which hides deceit. One day she discovered that one of her clients, a man whom she had seen as a good father and husband battling illness and other harsh circumstances to provide for his family, was in fact a key figure in the local drugs syndicate with a hobby of beating up women.

      She said, ‘The implications for me were enormous. It wasn’t just the official inquiry about what had gone wrong. I wasn’t the only person СКАЧАТЬ