Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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      Whenever we learn something, the structure of our brain changes - that is, the connections between some of the neurones in our brain change. Jack Challoner, in his fascinating book The Brain, explained:

      The neurone is the fundamental unit of the brain. Neurones produce or conduct electrical impulses that are the basis of sensation, memory, thought and motor signals that make muscles work to produce movement. There are other types of cell present but they only give support and nourishment to these cellular workhorses. Neurones are like other cells in many ways: they have a nucleus and a membrane, for example. However, they differ in the way they function. A neurone has long fibres, called axons, coming from its cell body. Emanating from the axons or from the cell body itself are other, smaller fibres called dendrites. Neurones communicate with each other: electrical signals pass along the axon and dendrites, and the brain is constantly buzzing with these signals.²

      These signals are actually both electrical and chemical, but just how they operate is not yet understood. This is why the statement, ‘Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain’ is a nonsense, or, as David Healy, Reader in Psychiatry, University of Wales, called it, ‘a myth’. He added in an endnote, ‘There are variations in serotonin levels and serotonergic receptors from person to person, and these may make us more or less sensitive to the effects of SSRIs [drugs] and even to stress. SSRIs do act on serotonin, but there is no evidence of a serotonergic abnormality in depression.’³ David Wallis, Professor of Physiology at Cardiff University, explained:

      Classical theory has it that the brain uses chemicals - neurotransmitters - to convey ‘information’ between nerve cells. These chemical messages have either a positive or negative effect on the nerve cell receiving them, dictating whether or not it will become momentarily excited.

      But over the past twenty years or so, we’ve discovered [that] chemical interactions between nerve cells are far more varied and subtle than we thought. A whole second level of communication exists, in which chemicals change the properties of nerve cells or synapses in ways other than simple fast excitation. For instance they might alter the protein in a nerve cell. These types of interaction, known as neuromodulation, are much harder to pin down than classical neurotransmission.⁴

      We are born with almost as many neurones as we are ever going to have but all these neurones have a vast array of possible connections with each other. What changes and develops over time is the connections between the axons and dendrites of the neurones. Just what connections are made, and whether a connection remains and strengthens or disappears, depends on our experience - that is, on what we learn. As Susan Greenfield wrote in her book The Private Life of the Brain, ‘The degree of meaning that we covertly apportion to each person, object, event as we blunder around in the outside world will, in turn, be matched by a corresponding degree of neurone connections.’⁵

      No two people ever have the same experience. Thus no two brains have identical patterns of connections between neurones. ‘It is the personalization of the brain,’ wrote Susan Greenfield, ‘crafted over the long years of childhood and continuing to evolve throughout life, that a unique pattern of connections between brain cells creates what might be called a “mind”.’ She went on, ‘My particular definition of mind will be that it is the seething morass of cell circuitry that has been configured by personal experiences and is constantly being updated as we live out each moment.’⁶

      This seething morass of cell circuitry is the physiological basis of what we experience as our thoughts and feelings, our memories, our desires, needs and fears, our beliefs, attitudes, prejudices and opinions. All of these are ideas, some of which we can put into words, some of which we know only as visual, auditory or bodily images. Some of these ideas are conscious, some are not. All of these ideas form a picture of ourselves, our world and our life in its past, present and future, and give us our sense of being a person.

      Very few of these ideas we can rightly hold with absolute certainty. We can be absolutely certain of the feelings we are experiencing in the here and now - provided we do not lie to ourselves. We can be sure that right now we are angry or right now we are sad, but if we feel that these emotions are unacceptable we can tell ourselves that we feel frightened when actually we are angry, or we can deny our sadness and pretend to ourselves and others that we are happy.

      Doing this, we lose the only absolute certainty we can ever have. All the other ideas we have about what happened in our past and what will happen in our future, what the world is like, what other people think and feel, and what they do when we cannot see them, are guesses, theories about what is going on.

      To live safely in the world we have to try to construct theories which represent a reasonably accurate picture of what is actually going on. Every time you drive a car or cross a busy street you have to form a reasonably accurate theory about the traffic on the road, or else you are likely to come to grief. When we daydream we can form the most fantastical theories, but if we want to turn our daydreams into reality we have to take account of what actually goes on in our world.

      When our meaning structure is a reasonably accurate picture of what is actually happening, we feel secure. As soon as we discover that a part of our meaning structure is not reflecting sufficiently accurately what is going on, we feel anxious. Sometimes we can delineate precisely which bit of what is going on we could be wrong about. We can be anxious that we have not predicted accurately enough what questions will be on our forthcoming exam paper, or whether the people we are about to meet will like us. Sometimes we cannot name a reason for our anxiety because we suspect that some disaster is about to befall us but we do not know what it will be. Amplified, this kind of anxiety becomes angst or dread. When a great disaster does befall us and everything in our life becomes uncertain, we feel terror.

      Whether anxiety, angst, dread or terror, all these states of fear are states of uncertainty, and uncertainty is what we cannot bear. Uncertain, we feel helpless, a prey to forces we cannot control. We want to be secure and in control.

      Yet in fact there is very little over which we do have control. We can work hard and take sensible care of the money we earn, but we have no control over the worldwide financial forces which, amongst other things, determine exchange and interest rates and levels of employment.⁷ We can eat sensible food and exercise regularly, but our body can still betray us. We can try in all kinds of different ways to get other people to behave as we want them to behave, but they will still fail to meet our expectations. We can try to see ourselves and our world as clearly and accurately as possible, and yet we will still get it wrong. Things are rarely as they appear to be.

      The only way to cope with all this uncertainty is to accept that it is so. This is the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu and Buddha. Lao Tzu advised:

       True mastery can be gained

       By letting things go their own way.

      It can’t be gained by interfering.⁸

      Suffering, Buddha taught, was our attempt to make something permanent in a world where nothing remains the same. Such wisdom can be hard to acquire when we are intent on surviving as a person - that is, on keeping our meaning structure whole.

      If we understand that our sense of being a person is a meaning structure made up of ideas, then when events surprise us we know that we have to go through what СКАЧАТЬ