by David Brooks
“This behavior is a good example of the limits of pure reason,” Damasio writes in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. It’s an example of how lack of emotion leads to self-destructive and dangerous behavior. People who lack emotion don’t lead well-planned logical lives in the manner of coolly rational Mr. Spocks. They lead foolish lives. In the extreme cases, they become sociopaths, untroubled by barbarism and unable to feel other people’s pain.
Out of these and other experiences Damasio developed a theory, which he called the “somatic marker hypothesis,” on the role of emotion in human cognition. Parts of the theory are disputed—scientists differ about how much the brain and the body interact—but his key point is that emotions measure the value of something, and help unconsciously guide us as we navigate through life—away from things that are likely to lead to pain and toward things that are likely to lead to fulfillment. “Somatic markers do not deliberate for us. They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous or favorable), and eliminating them rapidly from subsequent consideration. You may think of it as a system for automated qualification of prediction, which acts, whether you want it or not, to evaluate the extremely diverse scenarios of the anticipated future before you. Think of it as a biasing device.”
As we go about our day, we are bombarded with millions of stimuli—a buzzing, blooming confusion of sounds, sights, smells, and motions. And yet amidst all this pyrotechnic chaos, different parts of the brain and body interact to form an Emotional Positioning System. Like the Global Positioning System that might be in your car, the EPS senses your current situation and compares it to the vast body of data it has stored in its memory. It reaches certain judgments about whether the course you are on will produce good or bad outcomes, and then it coats each person, place, or circumstance with an emotion (fear or excitement, admiration or repugnance) and an implied reaction (“Smile” or “Don’t smile”; “Approach” or “Get away”) that helps us navigate our days.
Let’s say someone touches your hand across a restaurant table. Instantly, the mind is searching the memory banks for similar events. Maybe there was a scene in Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart touched Ingrid Bergman’s hand. Maybe there was a date in high school long ago. There was a distant memory of Mom, reaching across and holding hands with you during a childhood visit to McDonald’s.
The mind is sorting and coding. The body is responding. The heart speeds. Adrenaline rises. A smile opens up. Signals are flowing from body and brain and back again in quick intricate loops. The brain is not separate from the body—that was Descartes’ error. The physical and the mental are connected in complex networks of reaction and counter-reactions, and out of their feedback an emotional value emerges. Already the touch of the hand has been coated with meaning—something good, something delicious.
An instant later, a different set of loops open. This is the higher set of feedback routes between the evolutionarily older parts of the brain and the newer, more modern parts such as the prefrontal cortex. This set of information flow is slower, but more refined. It can take the reactions that have already been made by the first system and make finer distinctions among them. (“This hand reaching to touch me across the table is not quite like my mother’s hand. It’s more like the hand of other people I wanted to have sex with.”) It can also flash warnings that lead to intelligent restraint. (“I’m so happy right now I want to pick up this hand and start kissing it, but I’ve got these other memories of freaking people out when I do things like that.”)
Even through much of this stage there is still no conscious awareness, argues Joseph LeDoux, another prominent researcher in these vineyards. The touch of the hand has been felt and refelt, sorted and resorted. The body has reacted, plans have been hatched, reactions prepared, and all this complex activity has happened under the surface of awareness and in the blink of an eye. And this process happens not only on a date, with the touch of a hand. It happens at the supermarket when you scan an array of cereal boxes. It happens at the jobs fair when you look over different career options. The Emotional Positioning System is coating each possibility with emotional value.
Eventually, at the end of these complex feedbacks, a desire bursts into consciousness—a desire to choose that cereal or seek that job, or to squeeze the hand, to touch this person, to be with this person forever. The emotion emerges from the deep. It may not be a brilliant impulse; emotion sometimes leads us astray and sometimes leads us wisely. And it doesn’t control. It can be overridden, but it propels and guides. As LeDoux writes, “The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake.”
Implications
This understanding of decision making leads to some essential truths. Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.
Further, the mind or the self is no one thing. The mind is a blindingly complicated series of parallel processes. There is no captain sitting in a cockpit making decisions. There is no Cartesian theater—a spot where all the different processes and possibilities come together to get ranked and where actions get planned. Instead, as Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman put it, the brain looks like an ecosystem, a fantastically complex associative network of firings, patterns, reactions, and sensations all communicating with and responding to different parts of the brain and all competing for a piece of control over the organism.
Finally, we are primarily wanderers, not decision makers. Over the past century, people have tended to conceive decision making as a point in time. You amass the facts and circumstances and evidence and then make a call. In fact, it is more accurate to say that we are pilgrims in a social landscape. We wander across an environment of people and possibilities. As we wander, the mind makes a near-infinite number of value judgments, which accumulate to form goals, ambitions, dreams, desires, and ways of doing things. The key to a well-lived life is to have trained the emotions to send the right signals and to be sensitive to their subtle calls.
Rob and Julia were not the best-educated people on earth, nor the most profound. But they knew how to love. As they sat at the restaurant, focusing more and more attention on each other, their emotions were sending a rapid stream of guidance signals and shaping whole series of small decisions, and thereby gradually reorienting their lives. “All information processing is emotional,” notes Kenneth Dodge, “in that emotion is the energy that drives, organizes, amplifies and attenuates cognitive activity and in turn is the experience and expression of this activity.”
Rob and Julia were assigning value to each other. They felt themselves swept along in some strong and delightful current that was carrying them toward someplace they deliriously wanted to go. This wasn’t the sort of dissecting analysis Julia’s inner smart-ass had used when she first glimpsed Rob. This was a powerful, holistic appraisal that followed an entirely different set of rules. Julia would fall in love and then invent reasons for her attraction later. That day she and Rob began wandering together down a path that would be the most rewarding of their lives.
CHAPTER 2
THE MAP MELD
ROB AND JULIA WERE WONDERFULLY HAPPY IN THE FIRST few months after their wedding, but they were also engaged, as newly-weds must be, in the map meld. Each of them had come into the marriage with a certain unconscious mental map of how day-to-day life worked. Now that their lives were permanently joined, they were discovering that their maps did not entirely cohere. It was not the big differences they noticed, but the little patterns of existence that they had never even thought of.
Julia assumed that dishes should be rinsed and put in the dishwasher as they are soiled. Rob assumed that dishes should be left in the sink for the day and then cleaned all at once in the eve
ning. Julia assumed that toilet paper should roll clockwise so the loose sheets furl out the front. In Rob’s house the toilet paper had always rolled counterclockwise so that the sheets furled out the back.
For Rob, reading the morning paper was a solitary activity done in silence by two people who happened to be sitting together. For Julia, the morning paper was a social activity and an occasion for conversation and observations about the state of the world. When Rob went to the grocery store, he bought distinct meal products—a package of tortellini, a frozen pizza, a quiche. When Julia went to the store she bought ingredients—eggs, sugar, flour—and Rob was amazed that she could spend $200 and when she came back there was still nothing for dinner.
These contrasts did not really bother them, for they were in that early stage of marriage when couples still have time to go running together and have sex afterward. In this mode, they slowly and sensitively negotiated the bargain of their new interdependence.
First came the novelty phase, when they were tickled by the interesting new habits each brought into the other’s lives. For example, Rob was fascinated by Julia’s ferocious attachment to sock wearing. Julia was game for any naked erotic activity he could fantasize about, so long as she was permitted to wear socks while performing it. She could work herself up into a sweaty, panting heat, but apparently blood flow didn’t extend to her lower extremities, and if you really wanted to remove those white anklets, it would be like prying a rifle from the president of the NRA—you were going to have to rip them from her cold, dead toes.
Julia, meanwhile, had never seen anybody so much in the habit of buying toothpaste during every trip to the drugstore. Rob bought a tube a week, as if Martians were about to invade us for our Crest. She was also tickled by his pattern of attention. Rob was intensely interested in any event happening thousands of miles away, especially if it was covered by SportsCenter, but any event directly impinging upon his own emotions and inner state entered the zone of negative interest. He was incapable of focus.
Gradually they entered the second stage of map melding, the stage of precampaign planning. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Both Rob and Julia subliminally understood that the quirks that seemed so charming and lovable in the early stages of marriage—Julia’s tendency to fire up the laptop in bed at six a.m., Rob’s feigned Laddie Helpless in the face of any domestic chore—would cause the other to harbor homicidal urges once the first blush of matrimonial bliss expired.
And so they began to make little mental checklists of Things That Would Have to Change. But they were sensitive enough not to be Maoist about it. They had somehow absorbed the fact that cultural revolutions lead to angry backlashes or prolonged bursts of passive-aggressive withdrawal, and so reforming the other person’s habits would have to be a gradual process.
Especially in the first few months, Julia watched Rob the way Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees, with rapt attention and with a sense of constant surprise about the behavior patterns he exhibited. The man had absolutely no interest in artisanal cheeses or any subtle flavors, yet get him within 150 yards of a Brookstone store in the mall, and suddenly he became rapt at the thought of indoor putting greens with automatic ball return. He considered himself a neat man, but neatness for him consisted of taking everything that had been cluttering the countertops and shoving them willy-nilly in the nearest available drawers. He never laid out the pieces he would need in preparation for some assembly project. His simply dove right into the project and spent hours in the middle of it trying to figure out where everything was. He was apparently smarter than every football coach he had ever watched, but lacked the foresight to see that leaving your shoes in the path that leads from the bed to the bathroom might create problems in the middle of the night.
Then there was the night of the movie ticket. One night, Rob was walking home from work and he walked past a theater that had seats available for a film he had wanted to see. He bought a ticket impromptu, as he had done many times during his bachelorhood, and called Julia to let her know that he’d texted some buddies to join him and that he’d be home late that night. He called in a happy, haphazard mood, and was utterly stunned when he sensed that the temperature on the other end of the call had dropped two hundred degrees. He could hear Julia doing the sort of breathing exercises one does when one is trying to restrain an impulse to put an ax in another person’s head. It soon became clear that, in fact, he would not be going to the movies that night. It became clear that these sorts of spontaneous larks would no longer be a regular feature of his life and that marriage was not simply an extended phase of boyhood, but with serving dishes and regular sex.
Rob was made to understand, in phrases—interrupted by long glacial pauses—of the sort one uses when trying to explain something to a particularly stupid preschooler … that life from now on was going to involve a different level of commitment and joint planning and that a certain sort of carefree, what-do-I-want-for-myself-at-this-moment thinking would have to go.
Once this unconscious paradigm shift occurred in Rob’s head, the relationship progressed relatively smoothly. Both issued their own domestic Monroe Doctrines, parts of their lives that they considered sacred, and where external meddling would be regarded as an act of war. Both were pleased by the loving acts of compromise each made on behalf of the other. Rob admired his own selfless nobility every time he remembered to put the toilet seat down. Julia silently compared herself to Mother Teresa every time she pretended to enjoy action movies.
And so commenced the division of marital labor. Both gravitated to areas of superior passion. For example, Rob somehow took control of all vacation planning, because he secretly considered himself the Robert E. Lee of the travel excursion, the brilliant tactician who could rise to any canceled flight, airport snafu, or hotel screwup. This meant Julia had to endure his Bataan Death March vacation schedule—six vineyards before lunch. But to her that was better than sitting down with a travel agent and going through hotel reservations. Julia, meanwhile, took over all aspects of the material surroundings. If Rob was unwilling to engage in discerning commentary during their trips to funky yet casual furniture stores, he could hardly expect to render the final judgments when the purchase decisions had to be made.
Marital satisfaction generally follows a U-shaped curve. Couples are deliriously happy during the first years of marriage. Their self-reported satisfaction declines and bottoms out when their children hit adolescence, then it climbs again as they enter retirement. Newly wed, Rob and Julia were indeed phenomenally happy and quite well suited for each other. And on most days they had sex.
Procreation
One day, about six months after their wedding, Julia and Rob woke up late and had brunch at a neighborhood place with country furniture and distressed wooden tables. Then they went shopping and grabbed sandwiches, which they ate on a bench in the park. They were alive to sensations of all sorts: the way the bread felt in their hands, the feel of stones they tossed into a pond. Julia absentmindedly watched Rob’s hands as he used a little plastic knife to spread mustard across his sandwich. Her conscious thoughts were on the story she was telling him, but unconsciously she was becoming aroused. Rob was listening to her tale, but without even thinking about it, he was looking at a soft small crease in the skin of her neck.
In the back of his mind he was ready to have sex right then and there, if a conveniently sized bush could be found. People used to argue that men and women had the same desire for sex, but, on average, that’s not true. Male desire is pretty steady and only dips in response to some invisible awareness of their partner’s menstrual cycles. Studies in strip clubs have found that dancers’ tips plunge 45 percent while they are menstruating, though the explanation for the drop is not clear.
That particular day in the park, Rob wanted Julia with all his body and all his soul. This wasn’t merely a Darwinian reflex. Rob had all sorts of internal barriers that made it hard for him to express his emotions. His feelings were there, but the
y were hidden somewhere inside in a place where he couldn’t easily grasp or understand them. Even in those moments when he did have a sense of what he was feeling, the words wouldn’t come to help him express it. But during sex, his internal communication barriers dissolved. In the throes of passion, he went into a mental fog. He was no longer aware of his surroundings, or how he might be perceived. His emotions for Julia surfaced with their full force. He could feel his own emotions directly and express them unselfconsciously. The quickie acts of copulation that Julia sometimes granted him as a favor didn’t really do this for him. But when they were both in the throes of passion together, Rob experienced the bliss of unencumbered communication that was the real object of his longing. There’s something to the old joke that women need to feel loved in order to have sex and men need to have sex in order to feel loved.
Julia’s desire was even more complicated. It was like a river with many tributaries. Like most women, Julia’s interest in sex was influenced by how much testosterone her body produced at any given moment and by how she processed serotonin. It was influenced by the busyness of her day, her general mood, and the conversations she’d had with friends at lunch. It was influenced by images and sensations she wasn’t even aware of—the sight of a piece of art, a melody, a field of flowers. Julia enjoyed looking at male bodies, female bodies, or anything in between. Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellant.
Julia’s sexual tastes were more influenced by culture than Rob’s. Men want to do the same sexual acts regardless of education levels, but female sexual preferences differ by education, culture, and status level. Highly educated women are much more likely to perform oral sex, engage in same-sex activity, and experiment with a variety of other activities than less-educated women. Religious women are less adventurous than nonreligious women, though the desires of religious men are not much different than those of secular ones.