Читать книгу Beyond Fear - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 12

The brain is the most complex object known to us. Perhaps there are more complex objects in other parts of the universe but we have yet to encounter them. Over the last fifteen years, how scientists talk about the brain has changed dramatically. Two words have entered their language - neuroscience and neuroscientist. Anyone called a neuroscientist could be a neurologist, a physiologist, a biologist, a chemist, a psychologist, an electrical engineer or even a quantum physicist. People skilled in all these different bodies of knowledge are needed in the attempt to understand this most complex object.

There has been a subtle but important shift in how neuroscientists talk about the brain. They used to talk in terms of how the brain functions, in vision, hearing and the other senses - that is, in terms of perceiving the world. Now they talk, not in terms of the brain looking at reality, but in terms of how the brain creates a picture of reality. Our brain does not show us reality. It creates a picture of reality, and the kind of picture it creates depends on the kind of experiences we have each had. No two brains ever create exactly the same picture.

The importance of experience in what individual brains do has led neuroscientists to look more closely at what individuals do. Neuroscientists used to be concerned with simple actions, such as how we distinguish different shades of colour or two different pitches of sound. Now scientists are interested in complex behaviour. They have even ventured to discuss the problem of consciousness, something which up till recently had been banned from scientific discourse because it was ‘subjective’, and scientists should always be ‘objective’. This was why psychologists and psychiatrists studied what people did, not what people thought about what they did and why they did it.

The study of complex behaviour immediately raises the question of how humans and animals learn. Psychologists have always favoured very mechanical explanations. They described learning in terms of reward and punishment, and assumed that what they saw as a reward or a punishment would pertain for all their subjects, whether human or animal. They thought that for all rats a sweet substance would be a reward, sour a punishment. For all children a gold star would be a reward, being deprived of sweets a punishment. Rewards and punishments were seen as levers which propelled humans and animals in certain ways. It did not occur to these psychologists that a reward was a reward and a punishment a punishment only if the person or animal receiving them thought that this was so. Some children think that gold stars are rubbish, and some children do not like sweets. From his studies of how rats learn, Dr Anthony Dickenson, of Cambridge University, concluded that rats, though they are probably not self-aware, do operate with schemas - that is, ideas about what they want. These desires, said Dr Dickenson, have to be learnt. They are not innate mechanisms in the brain.¹

One of the excuses which some people use when they do not want to take responsibility for their actions is that they cannot help doing something because they have been ‘conditioned’ to act in this way. Such an excuse has no scientific basis. Whatever we do follows from a wish, a desire, a need, perhaps to possess or to avoid something. We may not be consciously aware of these wishes, needs and desires, but they are ideas which we have learnt from our experience.

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 can be a painful, unsettling period until our meaning structure can reorganise itself in a way more in keeping with what is actually going on. If we do not understand that we are our meaning structure, then when the unexpected happens we feel ourselves falling apart and are terrified lest we be annihilated as a person. Not understanding, we build up all kinds of defences to hold ourselves together when we feel ourselves in danger of falling apart.

The tool we use in building these defences is a very cunning one and represents one of the functions of the meaning structure. It is the tool of pride. How pride functions has interested me for quite a long time.

By the late seventies, through listening carefully to what depressed people were telling me, I realised that the essence of depression was the sense of being alone in some kind of prison where the walls were as impenetrable as they were invisible. I could see that the depressed person had certain attitudes or beliefs which served to cut him or her off from other people and from everything that makes life worth living. These attitudes and beliefs preceded the person’s depression, and they provided the person with all the building blocks necessary to build the prison of depression. I wrote about this in my first book, which is now called Choosing Not Losing.⁹ I came to realize that the many and various beliefs which depressed people held could be summarised as six attitudes which, if held as absolute, unquestionable truths, would create the prison of depression. These beliefs were:

1 No matter how good and nice I appear to be, I am really bad, evil, valueless, unacceptable to myself and other people.

2 Other people are such that I must fear, hate and envy them.

3 Life is terrible and death is worse.

4 Only bad things have happened to me in the past and only bad things will happen to me in the future.

5 It is wrong to get angry.

6 I must never forgive anyone, least of all myself.¹⁰

These are not bizarre, idiosyncratic beliefs but are held at least in part by many members of every society, and are often taught by parents to children. They are pessimistic beliefs, but not unreasonable because life is far from easy. However, it seemed to me at first that it could be possible to help a depressed person moderate these beliefs, to be less harsh on themselves and to find it easier to take other people on trust. However, this proved not to be the case. Depressed people, I found, even though they were suffering dreadfully, resisted any suggestion that they might change their beliefs because such a change meant going from certainty to uncertainty. Indeed, they took pride in these beliefs, even though they caused them to suffer. I wrote:

But you want absolute certainty and you have too much pride to admit that you could be wrong. You take pride in seeing yourself as essentially bad; you take pride in not loving and accepting other people; pride in the starkness and harshness of your philosophy of life; pride in the sorrows of your past and the blackness of your future; pride in recognizing the evil of anger; pride in not forgiving; pride in your humility; pride in your high standards; pride in your sensitivity; pride in your refusal to lose face by being rejected; pride in your pessimism; pride in your martyrdom; pride in your suffering.

Pride, so Christian theology teaches, is the deadliest of the seven sins since it prevents the person from recognizing his sins and repenting and reforming. Sin or not, it is pride that keeps you locked in the prison of depression. It is pride that prevents you from changing and finding your way out of the prison.¹¹

It is not just depressed people who possess a pride that prevents them from changing. All of us, to some greater or lesser extent, allow pride to prevent us from changing. To change in some particular way or other would put our sense of being the person that we want to be at risk. We hang on to political or religious beliefs which are clearly not in our interests, or we think of ourselves fondly as being a great singer or a great golfer even though there is much evidence to show that we are not. Moreover, the world is full of people who would rather be right than happy. It is this particular preference which creates most of the suffering in the world, both the suffering we inflict on other people and the suffering we inflict on ourselves.

This became the subject of my book Wanting Everything,¹² and here I returned to the question of pride. I described the pride that some people take in their high standards. Anything less than perfection is not acceptable to them. Their world has to be perfect and they have to be perfect. When the world fails to be perfect they become angry and try to force people and events to do and be what they want. When they fail themselves to live up to their own impossible standards, they turn against themselves and hate themselves. I pointed out that:

Pride will allow us to believe all kinds of nonsensical things, and the belief in perfection is one of these. It overlooks the fact that we can perceive anything only when there is some kind of contrast or differential. We know light only because there is dark, heat only because there is cold, life only because there is death, and perfection only because there is imperfection. If we lived in a perfect world we would not know it was perfect.¹³

Pride can operate in very subtle ways. It can provide an assumption on which we can build beliefs about being humble and unselfish, such as are involved in feeling responsible for everybody and everything. Just what the extent of our responsibility is can often be hard to decide, but in general we can be responsible only for those things over which we have control. When we say we are responsible for something we are implying that we have control over that thing. Claiming to be responsible for everybody and everything is a claim to great power, and such a claim is an act of pride.¹⁴

When we feel responsible for certain matters but fail to prevent disaster we feel guilty. Guilt is the fear of punishment, and, uncomfortable though it may be, many people prefer to feel guilty than to feel helpless. Guilt implies that you could have kept these matters under control but you failed to act. Helplessness is a recognition of how little in the world we do in fact control and how chance-filled life can be, and this understanding can be very frightening because through it we know that we can be struck by disaster at any time and that our ideas about what is happening can be proved wrong.

Thus, when disaster strikes and we ask, ‘Why in the whole scheme of things has this happened?’ we seek an answer which will show a clear pattern of cause and effect. Such an answer will remove uncertainty and keep our meaning structure whole. As a result the answer ‘It was my fault’ can be preferable to the answer ‘It happened by chance’.

Many of us begin our struggle with such questions when we are young. In a television series a mother, Nicky Harris, described the guilt she felt when her second child, a baby boy called Jordan, suddenly died. She discovered that her four-year-old daughter Jessica was also struggling with questions of guilt and responsibility. Nicky said:

I realized soon after he died that she was feeling the same guilt that I was feeling. We always talked, and about a month after he died she said to me, ‘Mummy, I know why Jordan died,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘I bounced the bouncy chair too hard. Do you remember when you told me not to do that?’ And I felt the guilt flowing out and I was able to deal with it. I just totally knocked that theory on the head. It had nothing to do with it. I thought I’d got that over with, and then a couple of weeks later she came back to me and she said, ‘Mummy, I think I’ve definitely worked it out now.’ This is a four-year-old child talking to me. She said, ‘When Grandma was sitting over there and you were sitting over here, and I was hugging Jordan, and Grandma said, ‘Don’t hug him too tight, you’ll kill him.’ She said, ‘That was it. I must have hugged him too tightly.’ Inside I was crying for her for I felt the same way.¹⁵

Here was a four-year-old prepared to take responsibility for her brother’s death because she saw that as being preferable to knowing that terrible things can happen at any time and that neither she nor her mother could prevent them. Yet, even though pride may have provided her with an explanation which showed that this event did not happen by chance, this explanation would ensure that she could never be happy. Happiness, she would have come to believe, was something she did not deserve.

I continued to study the functions of pride, and by the time I came to write Friends and Enemies¹⁶ I was thinking in terms of two kinds of pride - moral pride, which is a way of thinking which develops as we create a conscience, and primitive pride, which is an integral part of the functioning of the meaning structure. Both kinds of pride aim to maintain the integrity of the meaning structure and thus prevent us from changing, and both can work together and enhance each other, but, while moral pride can be a spur to unselfishness, tolerance and a love of truth, and be amenable to logic and reason, primitive pride is always utterly selfish, utterly ruthless and impervious to the demands of reason. Nicky Harris described how, while she knew quite well that she was not responsible for her son’s death, she could not help expecting and indeed wanting the police to arrest and punish her.¹⁷

Any working system has within it certain forms or mechanisms which enable the system to function. I wrote:

The meaning structure is a self-regulating system. All self-regulating systems have within their structure some mechanism which maintains the integrity of the system, preventing it from grinding to a halt or shattering to pieces. Our body, a self-regulating system, has a number of such mechanisms. The mechanism which forms blood clots to stem the flow of blood through a wound is one. In the meaning structure primitive pride is the form of thought or mechanism which selects from within the individual meaning structure a collection of meanings; when put together, these meanings serve to give immediate protection to the integrity of the meaning structure. This collection of meanings may have little relationship to what is actually happening or in the long term be an adequate defence. Indeed, it usually creates more problems than it was assembled to solve. Its importance is that it can be assembled immediately, in the blink of an eye.¹⁸

In psychology no one ever discovers anything which is completely new. Many people have noticed pride’s function in survival as a person, though they may not have called it pride. Psychoanalysts have described the defence of rationalization, and one analyst, Karen Horney, wrote about what she called ‘pride systems’. More recently two American psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, uncovered what they called a ‘psychological immune system’, which was ‘an army of rationalizations, justifications and self-serving logic’.¹⁹ Many psychologists working with people who are experiencing a psychosis now see hallucinations and delusions as methods of trying to maintain ‘self-esteem’.²⁰

‘Self-esteem’ is a jargon term for a complex of ideas concerning how we feel about ourselves - that is, how much we care for and care about ourselves, how much we value ourselves, on what values we judge ourselves and how harshly we judge ourselves. When we are fond of ourselves, look after ourselves, when we value ourselves and judge ourselves reasonably and in a kindly manner, we feel self-confident, and so when we encounter a crisis or disaster we see it as a challenge which we shall master. When we do make a mistake both moral and primitive pride can comfort us. If, for example, you make some arithmetical errors in your income tax return and someone points this out to you, you can comfort yourself by thinking, ‘Well, I mightn’t be good at maths but I really know how to put words together.’ Or, when someone is unpleasant to you, instead of trying to work out why, you can simply assume that actually, underneath, that person really does like you.

The more we despise and hate ourselves the greater the degree of comfort pride has to create, and the greater the degree of comfort we need the less realistic that comfort becomes. Thus we can take pride in having impossibly high standards, or we can take pride in being the object of a worldwide conspiracy of influential people, or in possessing some vast mystical power which controls the universe. Our pride can indeed comfort us, but we can become so attached to that comfort that we refuse to give up our comforting delusions, even though these are the very ideas that create great distress for us because they are so removed from a realistic appraisal of ourselves and our world. We hang on to our comforting delusions, not just because they comfort us, but because they protect us from our greatest fear.