Mother chimps never feed solids to their children. If the little chimp wants to eat something besides milk, he has to get it himself. And he can, because he has built the essential circuits by the time he’s big enough to need the extra nutrition. She doesn’t show him or push him explicitly. He learns because food is rewarding, and because he has seen her choosing food over and over. When weaning time comes, he’s wired to choose the plants she has chosen. By the time his mother is gone, he has the skills he needs to survive without her.
Researchers have found that chimpanzees can recognize more than a hundred different kinds of leaves. They even select leaves with medical properties when they are sick. But the reward that counts in a chimp’s life is protein, such as nuts, insects, and meat. These foods are relatively difficult to obtain. Still, children are not provisioned. They only get the reward if they execute the skill.
A young chimp can take years to succeed at cracking open a nut. He gets interested because he tastes the crumbs his mother leaves in the shells of her nuts. His dopamine soars because the fat content is so much higher than the food he typically encounters. In the state of nature, good feelings surge when something is good for your survival. But when the young chimp tries to imitate his mother’s nut-cracking movements, the darned thing doesn’t open. He persists because dopamine gushes when big rewards are expected. He observes the nut-cracking efforts of others and tries again.
I once spent ten minutes watching a young capuchin monkey fail to crack a nut over and over. I was overwhelmed by an urge to “help.” I looked for a zookeeper, and when I found one, she told me I shouldn’t worry about it because the monkeys are well fed and this behavior is natural. If I were running the “education” of monkeys, they wouldn’t learn survival skills and the species would die out.
Building Social Skills
Social skills are learned the same way a primate learns foraging skills. Sitting on mother’s lap, he sees her interact with others. He sees her dominate some of the time and submit some of the time. He doesn’t need to label these responses. His mirror neurons simply trigger fear when she fears, dominance when she dominates, and trust when she trusts. This builds pathways that guide him in his quest for good feelings and his avoidance of bad feelings. He begins to interact directly with others, and by the time he’s grown, he’s wired to survive within the social expectations of his troop.
Chimps are not born preprogrammed with necessary survival knowledge. Their mothers invest five years in each child before reproducing again. The survival of the mother’s genes clearly benefits more from the extended nurturing than it would from having another child. But the young chimp’s education is not guided by the mother’s conscious intent. It’s guided by the urge for the good feelings of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, and the urge to avoid the bad feeling of cortisol.
Human Learning
These neurochemicals guide our early learning as well. We learn some things consciously, like long division and punctuation, but we learn a lot from our neurochemical responses. The two strategies often work together because we feel good when we master a skill with conscious intent. We feel bad when we fall short of a goal we consciously pursue. Without our knowing it, the quest to feel good builds circuits that prepare us to meet our needs.
This is most evident when we speak of a person’s “passion.” Consider the child who watches a doctor cure a sick family member and then decides to become a doctor. That child built a big circuit because a life-and-death experience triggers a big neurochemical surge. We are not always aware of the neurochemical origins of our passions. They’re built in childhood with a child’s view of survival. For example, if you got respect from your basket-weaving teacher, the surge of good feeling might motivate you to devote your life to basket weaving. If you grow up watching rock stars get respect, you might long to be a rock star. In adulthood you might realize that your passions do not promote survival, but by then the major highways to your happy chemicals are already built.
People often complain that “we don’t learn from experience,” but we do—it just may not be in the way you imagine. Experiences that are neurochemical or repeated build circuits that endure. Experiences in youth build supercircuits. If you invest a lot of energy seeking approval from people who reject you, that habit probably helped you survive in your youth. If you invest yourself in conflicts with authority figures, you probably got rewards or avoided pain by doing that in your youth. If you have a circuit that gets you into trouble, you can be sure that it got rewards or avoided pain in your past.
Discovering What Triggers the “On” Switch of Your Happy Chemicals
By the time you reach adulthood, you have a neural network that tells you what is good for you. It is not the network you’d design today if you started with a blank sheet of paper. It’s the tangle you connected one neuron at a time from the moment your senses began taking in information.
The Burden of Numerous Neurons
Genes have a role to play. An amazing example is the laboratory mouse that started digging the first time she touched dirt. Her ancestors lived in cages for thirty to sixty generations, but she hit the ground digging, and she dug burrows that were much like those of her wild counterparts. The circuits for this survival behavior seem to be inborn.
But mice brains are different from ours. Their cortex is tiny, which means their ability to learn from experience is tiny. Our cortex is huge because we are designed to fill it with acquired knowledge. We are not meant to run on preloaded programs.
Every creature in nature runs on as few neurons as possible because neurons are metabolically expensive. They consume more oxygen and glucose than an active muscle. It takes so much energy to keep a neuron alive that they make it harder to survive—unless you really get your money’s worth out of them. Natural selection gave humans a gargantuan number of neurons, which means we must use them with gargantuan advantage over inborn knowledge. We are designed to trust the neural networks we’ve built. This is why it’s so hard to ignore them, even when they lead us astray.
You Do Most of Your Neural Learning in Childhood
Childhood evolved to give a creature time to build its neural networks. The length of a creature’s childhood is directly correlated with the size of its cortex, and a human childhood is by far the longest. Small-brained creatures have short childhoods because their operating system boots up quickly. A mouse is a parent by the time it’s two months old. A giraffe “hits the ground running” because it crashes four feet from the womb to the ground, and in a few weeks it can do almost everything an adult can do. Primates have a very long childhood by comparison. A monkey’s childhood is about three times as long as a gazelle’s. An ape’s childhood is triple that of a monkey. A human childhood triples an ape’s. The more neurons you have to maintain, the longer it takes to connect them in ways that promote survival.
Childhood is metabolically expensive because it reduces the number of offspring a mother can have. But natural selection does not favor shorter childhoods as you might expect. Longer childhoods evolved over time because natural selection rewards survival skills learned from life experience.
Childhood frees an organism from the burden of meeting its needs so it can learn to meet its needs gradually by interacting with its environment. Animals with short periods of early dependency need inborn survival skills, so they can only survive in the ecological niche of their ancestors. They typically die outside that niche. Humans are born ready to adapt to whatever niche they’re born into. But once you build those adaptations, you’re designed to rely on them as if your life depends on it. This is why it’s hard to unlearn a happy-chemical strategy once you’ve learned it.
Look Back at Your Childhood to Find the Source of Your Circuits
We don’t usually associate childhood with survival skills. After all, children don’t learn how to get a job with good benefits, or a mate that will impress your friends. We often presume childhood habits have nothing to do with adult life
. But early experience tells you how to feel good and avoid feeling bad, and that is the navigation system that pilots a brain through adult challenges. When your boss makes you feel bad, you may want to fight or flee, but your navigation system reminds you that you need support, so you reconcile with your boss. You are always weighing your options with the network of connections built by your life experience.
Sophisticated adults don’t imagine themselves navigating with childhood circuits, but if you examine your likes and dislikes, you will see where they came from. I discovered a curious example in myself when I noticed that I get excited about opportunities to choose colors. Since this is not an obvious survival skill, I tried to make sense of it. Early experiences involving color flooded back to me. When I was twelve, my mother inherited $2,000 (about $15,000 in today’s money). It was a lot of money to my mother, and it came from the father who had abused and abandoned her, so she decided to spend it redecorating. She showed me color swatches and asked my opinion.
This felt good because my mother didn’t respect my opinion very often. The happy chemicals told my brain that this was important survival information. I didn’t consciously say “choosing colors is a way to get respect”; I didn’t need to. The respect simply triggered serotonin, which connected all the neurons active at that moment.
More important, my mother was happy and my mirror neurons took it in. She was not happy often, so this was significant information for my brain. Without a conscious interest in decorating, I wired myself to expect more good feeling in this particular way. Of all the ways to feel good in the world, the ones you’ve already connected are the ones that get your attention.
Curiously, my brain had already been primed for this information. When I was in elementary school, my mother gave me a lot of paint-by-number kits. I also made art by gluing mosaic tiles and colored pebbles in the manner popular in the early 1960s. These crafts gave me a feeling of accomplishment and helped me focus on something other than the unpleasantness around me. Repetition and emotion trained my brain to sift and sort colors and feel good about it. Though picking colors is not an important survival skill, my happy chemicals were wired by my unique experience. Of course, I had many other experiences, and together they tell me where to expect rewards and where to expect pain.
When I was in high school, I wanted to be an interior decorator when I grew up. Then I got to college and learned that materialism is bad, and “girl jobs” are bad. Saving the world is good, I learned, so I dropped the decorating idea fast. I thought I had become a better person, but now I know I was just mirroring my professors the way I had mirrored my mother.
When I got an apartment, I started decorating it. I moved a lot in my twenties, and each time, the joy of decorating a new place eased the pain of starting over. When I finally put down roots, I had a curious urge to redecorate again and again. After a while, I realized that another remodeling project would not really meet my needs. So I set out to understand the urge instead of acting on it. I traced the links between one experience and another until the connections made sense. Then I realized that my happy-chemical pathways are just accidents rather than eternal truths. My brain connected decorating to survival because it connected my mother to survival.
When I figured this out, I looked at color in a new way—as a tool I could use to add pleasure to my work. I enjoy adding color to my website, my slide presentations, my meals, and my clothing. I allow myself to linger over details I’m wired to enjoy. I make good use of the happy-chemical infrastructure I have, which activates my happy chemicals without redecorating. I redirect my circuits toward today’s needs instead of the needs of my past.
We all end up with quirky circuits like mine because we build on the connections that are already there. Our happy chemicals pathways feel important so it’s hard to realize that they are just accidents. Anything that turns on your happy chemicals feels precious, which can lead to behaviors that are hard to make sense of. It can even lead to behaviors that are destructive. Though you can’t just delete an old circuit, you can connect it in new ways that are better suited to your present reality. It won’t happen effortlessly the way it did when you were young. But repetition and emotion can make it happen.
The Role of Happy Chemicals in Social Learning
A mammal’s survival depends on social skills as much as physical skills. Small brains are born with the social skills they need, while big brains build social skills from repetition and emotion.
Social skills are essential to reproductive success. Though reproduction is not your definition of success, it’s what mattered in the world our brains evolved in. The skills involved in reproductive success vary for males and females:
A female can only birth a limited number of offspring, and in the past many of those perished before puberty. The survival of a female’s genes depends on her ability to keep her children alive. Social skills can help a female get protection, nutrition, and better paternal genes.
A male mammal can promote his genes by creating more offspring and investing less in each one. The quantity strategy rewards males skilled at attracting females and competing with other males.
The male and female strategies overlap, of course, and evolution tends to increase the overlap.
For both genders, getting respect from your peers promotes survival. Monkey studies show that individuals with more social alliances have more mating opportunities and more surviving offspring. So it’s not surprising that the brain built by natural selection seeks social trust by rewarding it with a good feeling. A young mammal builds social skills without effort or intent as it seeks ways to feel good and avoid feeling bad. Children build social skills without insight into their long-term needs. A child seeks social support to meet immediate needs, and when it succeeds, happy chemicals flow. That paves expectations about future social support.
Social Learning in Your Childhood and Adolescence
Anything that works gets wired in, even behaviors that could be counterproductive in the long run. If a bad behavior gets a reward, a young brain tags that behavior as useful for survival. If a child gets support when he is aggressive, and the support disappears when he’s cooperative, a brain can easily learn that aggression is a good survival strategy. If a child gets rewarded when she’s sick, and she loses rewards as she gets well, lasting links get built. Your brain doesn’t learn from parenting experts and etiquette manuals. It learns from neurochemical ups and downs. Each time you felt rewarded or threatened, you added to the infrastructure that tells you where to expect respect, acceptance, and trust in the future.
Adolescence added a layer to your infrastructure. Whatever won respect or attention in your teen years developed big fat circuits because you experience more myelination then. Likewise, any threats to your respect and attention during these myelin years made a lasting impression. Any success at building social alliances built a pathway, and any threats to your social alliances built a pathway too.
Your social circuits are richly interconnected with your other circuits. Social learning even affects basic physiological functions like walking, eating, and even breathing. For example, an infant learns to regulate his breathing when he’s held against his mother’s chest and he feels her breathe. A newborn lacks a fully developed breathing response, so even breathing requires social support to develop properly.
Self-management is also affected by social learning. Children learn to manage their neurochemistry when they experience the responses of those around them. Adolescence adds a layer of self-management circuits, as we experience new social rewards, new social pain, and new social influences. These circuits shape our responses in the present, whether or not we remember the experiences that created them.
EXERCISE: WHAT ARE YOUR EARLY PATTERNS?
List early experiences of happiness and unhappiness, and notice the circuits they paved:
Before age eight
In adolescence
List early experiences that were repeated often an
d notice the circuits they paved:
Before age eight
In adolescence
Remodeling Your Neural Pathways
Most adults end up with some circuits they’d rather not have. And most people wish they could have more happy chemicals with fewer side effects. You cannot build new circuits in the effortless way it happened the first time. But you can build them with repetition and emotion.
Rebuilding via Repetition vs. Emotion
Emotion is a Catch-22. Anything that feels good now will have side effects later. Good feelings exist because of their side effects, thanks to natural selection. So the quest to feel good does not always lead to survival improvements. It can lead to weight gain when you quit smoking, or a new phobia when you conquer an old phobia. Emotion works fast, but it brings trouble.
Repetition works slowly, but it can build behaviors with fewer side effects. If you expose yourself to something over and over, it can “grow on you.” You can come to like things that are good for you even though you don’t like them instantly.
Habits of a Happy Brain Page 11