Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  The Biochemistry of Spouses’ Loyalty

  In the long-term routine of couples in intimate relationship, due to the long-lasting interaction, each one of the spouses shapes the other’s brain. In this context, it is said that the loving person declares that he loves his loved one not only because of who she is but, also, because of who she makes him be when he is with her. In other words, it is the unique tune that the fingers of her presence play on the piano of his brain.

  An interesting study found that, in a stable, happy relationship, the common ratio between experiences that are followed by positive emotional resonance and those that are followed by negative emotional resonance, in terms of interactions between the spouses, is about five to one (in favor of the positive ones). Five to one, in favor of good relationship.

  Throughout the lifetime of successful relationship, the spouses move from the stage of excited infatuation to the stage of supportive, intimate relations as the level of dopamine decreases and, on the other hand, the levels of oxytocin and vasopressin increase.

  The vasopressin is the male version of oxytocin, and it induces a need for social closeness and attachment in the brain of human males. There is a larger amount of vasopressin receptors in men’s brains and a larger number of oxytocin receptors in women’s brains. The male brain requires both the effect of oxytocin and vasopressin in order to adhere to a romantic relationship.

  Testosterone increases the production of vasopressin and the intensity of orgasm.

  Vasopressin increases the level of attention and vitality, but also the level of aggressiveness among men.

  Among various types of mammals, including human beings, it seems that an increase in the level of the neurotransmitter oxytocin in the brain prepares the females’ heart to select a spouse and adhere to it, whereas an increase in the level of the neurotransmitter vasopressin induces the same tendency among males.

  An accurate, reality-compatible view of things shall not dismiss the great complexity of the structural bedding (i.e., the brain structure) on which this “simple chemistry” operates. Its “simplicity” is enabled due to the structural complexity. Nevertheless, the ability to affect a complex behavior by spraying some oxytocin or vasopressin around the nostrils of the owners of a human brain evokes some thought. Various commercial companies also recruit this esoteric knowledge—exactly the type of knowledge that might be used cynically and unfairly—and implement it on romantic dates (such as using a spray called “Liquid Trust,” which is marketed commercially).

  Oxytocin was named “the trust hormone.” In a study conducted in Switzerland, it was found that participants who received nose spray that contained oxytocin tended to offer the other participants sums of money that were twice as big as the sums offered by the participants who received a spray that did not contain any active substances (placebo).

  Among people who suffer from autism, a low level of oxytocin was found, and it is possible that this fact contributes to certain behavioral characteristics, including their difficulty in feeling empathy and trusting the other.

  The monogamous party (a party of loyalty between spouses) represents a minority of five percent in the parliament that includes all types of mammals on the planet. Oxytocin is probably the ticket to entering this club, since it has a major role in inducing emotional relations between spouses.

  Length matters: some look for the code of loyalty in the genes. It was found that the longer the gene version for the receptor for vasopressin among men is, the greater their tendency toward monogamy and active fatherhood; thus, it seems that the dream of any young bride should be that her groom is a carrier of the longer version of the gene.

  The Brain and Parenthood

  The Birth of Parents

  During the last three months of pregnancy, the brain of the woman decreases a little in size. It does not occur in a unified pattern, since certain areas become thicker while others thin out. This condition starts to change about two weeks before giving birth and goes back to the original state within six months after labor, so it seems that this process does not involve loss of neurons, which is an irreversible process in most brain areas, but, rather, takes place due to general changes in the tissue, such as an increase in the volume of cells—a reversible process.

  Neurohormones—hormones that affect the activity of neurons directly—have a major effect on inducing a parenthood state of mind among young parents.

  The Birth of a Mother

  Oxytocin induces maternal behavior in a manner of chemical imprinting.

  Babies and the changes they induce in our brain, which are followed by changes in our behavior, sometimes seem like an evolutionary adaptation in a movie that might be called The Invasion of the Brains Abductors.

  A newborn baby is equipped with powerful methods of psychological impact, in order to manipulate others to fulfill its needs, and which are mostly designed to trigger caring parental instincts.

  According to certain studies, breastfeeding, which has numerous advantages, might induce a condition of lack of focus and attention deficit in the breastfeeding mother. It seems that the constant flow of prolactin and oxytocin might be the cause of that. These phenomena are reversible, and when the woman quits breastfeeding, and the amount of hormones decreases, these phenomena vanish.

  Mothers’ falling in love with their babies shares a common pattern with any other kind of falling in love, and the brain of mothers also experiences spurts of dopamine and oxytocin when they look at their babies or when they are close to them. This cocktail, as always, dims critical and judgmental thinking and is at the basis of maternal attachment, which, at its peak, is totally free of selfishness.

  In most cases, the button of maternal pleasure is pressed time and time again, and the love for the offspring becomes a routine state of mind.

  Stress containment, or serenity, induced by the people who take care of the baby, which is a type of “epigenetic imprinting”—one that is not imprinted in the genes themselves—is imprinted in the babies’ state of mind and might pass from one generation to the next, in human beings and in other mammals.

  It seems that there is a higher level of “internalization” of the neural surrounding of the parents among female babies. Parents who frequently express signs of stress cause an epigenetic imprinting of stressed-out dealing with the challenges of life among their babies, and girls are probably more sensitive, in this respect, than boys.

  The Birth of a Father

  In praise of the male’s brain capacity for empathy, a domain in which there is a tendency to consider the man as a “deprived boy,” one can indicate the couvade syndrome, in which future fathers experience pregnancy symptoms similar to those experienced by their pregnant spouses, such as severe morning nausea (various expressions of this syndrome were reported among two-thirds of future fathers!).

  The brains of numerous future fathers showed an increase in the production level of prolactin up to 25 percent, and a reduction the level of testosterone in the weeks prior to the estimated date of birth. Some claim that pheromones (volatile molecules that can potentially change behavior) from the pregnant spouse’s body contribute to the induction of this condition.

  Aspects of Mother-Baby Communication

  The Maternal Magic Touch

  The heartbreaking experiments of researcher Harry Harlow on infant monkeys, who were separated from their parents and put in isolation, showed that they clearly preferred a dummy simulating the mother monkey, made of soft cloth but without a nourishing nipple filled with milk, to a dummy made of wires that had a nourishing nipple filled with milk. The little monkeys sucked quickly from the nipples of the wire mother and returned to the silent but soft bosom of the dummy mother made of soft cloth, where they spent hours. According to the words of the experimenters, “the touch variable was far more important than the feeding variable.” The soft touch of the still, silent dummy, however, was not sufficient. The infant monkeys who grew up in the bosom of the cloth mother b
ut were deprived of the company of their own kind during the first months of their life suffered from severe behavioral disorders at later stages of their lives (such as great hostility expressed during interactions with other monkeys, and lack of “parental skills” when rearing their own offspring), which prevented them from integrating in an environment of monkeys who were reared the natural way in the arms of their real monkey mothers.

  We can infer from that that parental warmth, in general, and maternal warmth, in particular, is essential to the development of basic social skills and constitutes a role model for the mirror cells. It seems that these cruel experiments broke the little monkeys’ hearts so that their “skills of the heart” were irrecoverably damaged. The implication for human infants is self-evident.

  History has provided a tragic illustration of the validity of the hypothesis regarding the importance of critical, age-dependent windows of development in terms of social functioning skills among humans as well.

  In 1966, Nicolae Ceausescu, former ruler of Romania, published a decree that prohibited abortions. The only exceptions were for women over the age of forty or women who had at least four children, who were allowed to have an abortion. Until 1989, when his rule ended, two million babies, called “the decree babies,” were born in Romania, and many of them were sent to government orphanages. At the end of Ceausescu’s rule, about 170 thousand children were living in more than six hundred huge institutions—the government orphanages in which there was an extreme shortage of caregivers. As a result, thousands of babies lay deserted all day long in their cradles—fed by a bottle attached to their beds, at the appropriate height for their mouths—without human touch, maternal voice, or caressing hand. This lasted for years. When the magnitude of the horror was revealed, the wrongs were partially corrected, but the scarred souls of many of the graduates of these orphanages could not be cured. Many of them suffered (and still suffer) from severe impairments in terms of social functioning. Many of them had a hard time integrating into the working world, building a family, and functioning as parents. In general, they had difficulties in integrating into cycles of normative social functioning. Many of them continued to live at the margins of society, suffering from a high percentage of mental impairments and functioning difficulties. The absence of a caressing voice and hand, touch and play, had irreversible effects on the development of social skills, and it also led to developmental delay, irreversible at times, at the intellectual level, as well.

  Speaking “Motherese” means adjusting the voice’s tone and melody to create a pleasant, reassuring echoing in babies’ brains. Prosody (the manner of pronouncing the syllables—the melody of words) is similar in all cultures. “Motherese” is a universal language that crosses cultural borders. The main aspects of this language are high, cheerful vocal sounds (major) uttered in a rising-falling tone. The maternal body language is in harmony with the speech prosody. Mothers who speak Motherese well are, in most cases, mothers who manage to create energetic compatibility with their babies.

  Speech addressed to babies is rich in “prosodic clues,” since the semantic contents do not constitute a significant component at this stage. This is how the emotional message of intentions is conveyed.

  Babyese—the Esperanto of Babies

  Language serves to convey information through prosody, syntax, and semantics (the meaning represented by words). Young babies have yet to master the secrets of language in the syntactic and semantic sense, but they are very attentive to the prosody and the emotional messages it represents. Thus, “Babyese” (the language of babies) is a sort of “Esperanto of world babies,” and its characteristics are similar in different human cultures. The sounds of speech, addressed to babies, are higher, in most cases, and the pace of speech is usually slower. Thus, for example, words that mean prohibition are uttered in a low pitch, and vice versa: words that mean approval are “played” in a high pitch. “Babyese” stresses the vowels and increases the distinction between them in the scope of vowels (stretching the scope of vowels), which creates a sort of caricature-like speech.

  An interesting fact is that adults who listen to speech in an unfamiliar language are, to some extent, in a position that is similar to babies’ position, since there are not enough syntax and semantic clues to decipher the information, and they rely on prosodic clues, as babies do.

  The crying of a human baby accelerates the amygdala in the parent’s brain to a maximum level of activity within a shorter time than the time needed for a modern sports car to go from zero to a hundred kilometers an hour. Analysis of the magnetizing influence of a baby’s crying showed that the unexpected fluctuation in terms of pitch (called “vibrato”) is strumming the strings of emotions very powerfully. The crying sounds, to the parent, like the ultimate emergency call, and it was also found to be the most effective method of ordering “take away” food.

  Faces That Capture the Heart

  A structural characteristic of a human face that can be seen as a characteristic of universal beauty is its level of resemblance to a baby’s face. This insight, first defined by ethologist Conrad Lorentz, was confirmed in fMRI studies. It was found that when we look at faces with a high “index of childishness” (round face, big eyes), we experience aesthetic pleasure, which is reflected in intensified activity in the area of the nucleus accumbens in the brain.

  Pleasure and the One That is Bigger than It

  Taking care of the offspring saturates the mother’s brain in generous amounts of dopamine and oxytocin, which might be a possible (and partial) explanation for the fact that new mothers often do not feel the need for other relationships that (potentially) saturate the brain with the same cocktail. The decrease in new mothers’ interest in sex is a well-known phenomenon. Taking care of the offspring sends virtual, though powerful, fingers to the maternal pleasure button and decreases the potential of other interactions to press it with similar force.

  The offspring’s needs become the biological commandment for the mother.

  Blue Brain, Pink Brain

  The saying “Anatomy is not destiny” is well known, and, in this context, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir claimed in her book The Second Sex that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (which, naturally, can also be implied for men). It seems that these sayings are partially true. The repertoire of gender-dependent behaviors is woven out of the dialogue between the innate (genes’ dictate) and the acquired (cultural influences).

  Language and Sound in the Mirror of a Woman’s Brain and in the Mirror of a Man’s Brain

  Talking Facts

  The number of neurons in the centers of language processing and hearing in the brain is 10 percent bigger, on average, among women compared to men. Typical differences in language formulation between girls and boys (gender-dependent dialect) are expressed in the fact that boys tend to use imperative or threatening tones, whereas girls tend to use wording that encourages cooperation. Though it is a generalization, which might not be correct with respect to an individual, truth can often be detected in it on the average.

  There are observations that suggest that the lingual repertoire of the average man is, in most cases, poorer than a woman’s repertoire, but a comprehensive study, which is considered very thorough, showed that both men and women “produce” a similar amount of words daily; both men and women said about sixteen thousand words a day on average.[52]

  The range of prosody (distinction of nuances in the tone) among women is more diverse; women are capable of detecting vocal nuances, such as the range of frequencies, with better resolution, compared to men. On average, women’s brains are more capable of detecting nuances that map the emotional state of others.

  Feminine Brain and Masculine Brain

  Although the origin of both sexes is the same planet (which is not Mars or Venus), their brains, on average, have different tendencies. A typical gender-dependent behavior is a result of innately different brain wiring and reciprocal relations with the enviro
nment.

  According to common hypothesis, the feminine brain excels over the masculine brain, on average, in empathy skills and mindsight of the other. On the other hand, it is commonly assumed that the masculine brain is more prone to systemic understanding of basic rules at the basis of complex mechanisms. We might claim that women are stereotypically viewed as “wired to relationship” and men as “wired to competition.”

  According to a cynical cliché, women get lost in foreign cities and men get lost in relationships.

  Many men and women have a “balanced brain,” which represents a similar mix of systemic understanding, a tendency to compete, and empathy skills. According to a common supposition, the brains of about 5 percent of the population have extreme “feminine” characteristics or, alternately, extreme “masculine” characteristics. According to the famous autism researcher professor Baron-Cohen, people who suffer symptoms of soft autism (called “Asperger’s syndrome”) are, in fact, the owners of a brain characterized by extremely “masculine” characteristics.[53]