Emotion and Spirituality 1/5

We have been robbed of our poetry, and of much of our imagination. We used to think that our emotions came from within, from our hearts and from our guts. They seemed to express our feelings, our nature, our spontaneity, and therefore our sincerity: my emotions are my freedom, I am what my feelings say about me. Reality is much less romantic than that. Contemporary studies of the workings of the human brain give us a very different idea of the ‘production’ of the emotions and of their ‘nature’. The vocabulary used by specialists in the neurosciences is unsettling: in the new geography of the brain, there is no question of a landscape that gives our inner life and our imagination free reign; it is much more like a railway station or even a military camp in which every movement is tightly controlled and fits into a clearly defined hierarchy. Signals are emitted by our sensory receptors and sent to the thalamus, which analyses the content of the information it has received. That information is then passed to the neo-cortex (once known as the ‘thinking brain’) where it is recorded and sorted before decisions are taken. Emotion-related data is sent to the limbic brain, where the amygdala (which is located at the top of the cerebral trunk) reacts on the basis of the information it receives and ‘produces emotion’. It triggers the secretion of hormones, stimulates the cardio-vascular system, and mobilizes the nerve-centres that control movement. The amygdala is the ‘seat of the emotions’ and sends out signals to the rest of the brain. As norepinephrine is secreted, the reactivity of the brain increases, and the senses are sharpened. The information sent to the cerebral trunk increases the heart rate, raises blood pressure, slows down breathing and produces facial expressions (joy, fear, etc.). Not long ago,
American neurologist Joseph LeDoux discovered the existence of a bundle of neurones which connect the thalamus directly to the amygdala, bypassing the neocortex. A certain number of the signals that produce emotional reactions therefore do not pass through the centre of the ‘thinking brain’ and take a shorter route through a single synapse to the amygdala, which triggers immediate reactions. According to LeDoux, the system that controls the emotions can act independently of the neocortex. This, he argues, explains why our emotions can sometimes take over our reason and cause us to act in uncontrolled, exaggerated or seemingly insane ways. At such times, we are under the sway of our emotions because the neo-cortex has been taken unawares: its power has been short-circuited by the immediate reactivity of the amygdala.

This the vocabulary of an army camp in which all ranks are subject to orders and directives, and in which information and power centres can lose control of the whole system (when certain signals – data – no longer go through the chief executive office, namely the neo-cortex or thinking brain). So our emotions are nothing more than that: they are physical reactions to signals, stimuli or the secretion of hormones, and their intensity depends upon which pathway of clusters of neurones a signal takes to reach the limbic brain. So what has become of the heart’s impulses, the depth of our sincerity, to which our obvious joy or continuous floods of tears so obviously bear witness? What has become of the beauty of our spontaneous and freely expressed emotions? All that would appear to be merely a matter of neurones, synapses and hormones inside a brain where the administration experiences great tensions and where two agencies compete for power. The neo-cortex tries to control the data and to allow the subject to control how it reacts to the signals received by the senses, whilst the amygdala produces immediate secretions that can take possession of the brain and make it lose control of the situation. The American psychologist Daniel Goleman actually uses the phrase ‘an emotional coup d’état’ to describe how the authority of the neo-cortex can be overthrown, and how the balance of power can be completely inverted when the amygdala takes control of the greater part of the brain. The subject loses all self-control and is completely under the sway of the emotions. The subject can no longer take any decisions . . . the emotions are in control of the subject’s reason and ability to take decisions. A real coup d’état has indeed taken place in the army camp that was designed to maintain a strict internal order so as to prevent it from coming under attack from outside. It transpires that the potential enemy or real danger comes from within the system itself and from conflicting internal authorities. We are a long way from the poetry of the emotions and the spontaneous impulses of the free imagination. Our emotions are primarily responses to signals and stimuli. Struggles for influence and tensions are always there in the amygdala, which is the seat of the emotions. Depending on the intensity of the signals that are carried by the respective neuronal bundles, we may even see palace revolutions. When that happens, the individual becomes a slave to her or his affects. Neurology tells us about physiological characteristics that are of great interest in psychological and philosophical terms: emotion is the result of a relationship, sometimes controlled and sometimes quite conflicted, between the seat of thought and the seat of affectivity. It is the speed or immediacy of the reaction that allows the emotions to be expressed with such speed and intensity. Tension, reactivity, intensity and immediacy: these are some of the characteristics of emotion. What we have lost in terms of poetry, we have gained in objective knowledge, and we have to make the best of it. The paradox – and the illusion – of the affects has to do with the fact that we thought that we used them to freely express the spontaneity of our being, but neurology reminds us that it is quite the opposite: the emotions, which can vary in intensity, are always products of a reactivity over which we have little or no control, and which determines the modalities of our actions at the very moment when we are least free.