Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love: What Neuroscience Can—and Can't—Tell Us About How We Feel

282 Pages·2013·3.79 MB·English

by  Giovanni Frazzetto

PENGUIN BOOKS
JOY, GUILT, ANGER, LOVE
GIOVANNI FRAZZETTO was born and grew up in the southeast of Sicily. In 1995, after high
school, he moved to the UK to study science at University College London, and in 2002 he
received a PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.
Since he was a student, he has worked and written on the relationship between science,
society, and culture, publishing in journals such as Nature. He now lives and works between
London and Berlin.

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A Penguin Random House Company First published in Great Britain as How We Feel by Doubleday, an
imprint of Transworld Publishers, 2013
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2014
Copyright © 2013 by Giovanni Frazzetto Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity,
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Excerpt from “This Be The Verse” from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett.
Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
LLC.
ISBN 978-0-14-312309-5
ISBN 978-1-10159559-6 (eBook)
Version_1
To Berlin’s river tour company Reederei Riedel
and in memory of
Yehuda Elkana
(1934–2012)
Contents
Author Bio
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
1 | Anger: Hot Eruptions
2 | Guilt: An Indelible Stain
3 | Anxiety: Fear of the Unknown
4 | Grief: Presence in the Absence
5 | Empathy: The Truth Behind the Curtains
6 | Joy: Fragments of Bliss
7 | Love: Syndromes and Sonnets
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes and References
Bibliography
Index
Prologue
W
hen I worked in a neuroscience laboratory, the rhythm of experiments
paced the hours. The lab was an island, a hideaway that felt distant from
reality. It was a world of its own, one I had desired to set foot in ever since I
turned sixteen. Inside, there was always quite a lot to do: exact solutions to
prepare, delicate dissections to perform, precious molecules to purify and
animals to take care of. Tightly parcelled one after the other as in a chain, these
were some of the tasks that punctuated the flow of my daydreaming and at the
same time pointed to big research questions. In between, I filled my lab journal
with notes, diagrams and calculations. Trying to understand something as
ineffable and intimate as emotions and the mind, I amassed minute fragments
and discrete units of technical information.
Venturing into the secrets of the human brain became an opportunity for
deep reflection. It was like interrogating an unfamiliar aspect of myself. It was
like deciphering a tale written in code about the mind that I myself, with my
experiments, was contributing to writing. Brain tissues, neurons and stretches of
DNA were the protagonists of a story that, fact after fact, revealed new truths.
Every evening, with my lab coat dirty, my lab journal stained with
chemicals, and standing in front of empty glassware piled up in the sink, I would
assess the progress I had made. Usually my thoughts were also in need of a
rinse. No matter how much I had laboured at the bench, there always seemed to
be something left undone. One question demanded another, every experiment
begged for confirmation, the results could use a second round of analysis. But
the next chapter of the story was always scheduled for the following day.
When I made my way home, the characters from the lab would stay behind
and I would latch on to another story still in progress, that of my own emotional
life, of which I was the only protagonist, with my own script, the lines and
movements of which were also still to be discovered. At home, I was face to face
with my emotions.
Emotions, even the most fleeting, pervade every portion of our lives. One
minute we are sad, the next we are beaming with hope. Some emotions chase us,
others elude us. Every so often, emotions may leave us wounded, or they may
consume us. On other occasions they lift us or transport us afar. This is why,
sometimes, we think it would be useful to know how to rid ourselves of some of
our emotions, or at least learn how to tame them. Occasionally, as in the case of
joyful emotions, we wish we could make them recur on demand.
While I was writing this book, whenever I revealed to new acquaintances
that I work as a neuroscientist, they, no matter their field, would want to know
more. If I then mentioned emotions, there was no risk of failing to strike up a
conversation. I found that people would ask me for advice on how to control
their temper, how to forget unpleasant memories, how to overcome fears and
cultivate joy, and even how to fix or save their love relationships. And they were
unfailingly surprised when, even though I studied the brain, I didn’t always have
answers for them.
We have it from the ancient wisdom of Socrates, the great Athenian
philosopher, that discovering the exact causes of a phenomenon does not
concurrently reveal its meaning for us and our lives. It seems that in the last days
before his death, around 399 BC, Socrates read a book by Anaxagoras, a leading
contemporary scientist. He had heard the news that Anaxagoras had discovered
an element called nous (mind) that explained the nature of all things.1 Socrates
hoped to learn the riddles of existence with the help of that book. However,
when he realized that nous was only a force that ordered nature’s elements – air,
for instance, or water – and could not tell him much about the meaning of life,
let alone how it should be lived, he was filled with disappointment. Science was
no road to self-knowledge.
This question – how to harvest scientific knowledge so as to learn how to
live, or to know oneself, for that matter – grew no less urgent in the millennia to
come. At the end of graduate school I came across a revealing essay: the
transcript of a lecture delivered in 1918 by the German sociologist and
philosopher Max Weber (1864–1920) and entitled ‘Science as a Vocation’.2 Going by
its title, I was hoping to find there an echo of my passion for research. In the
essay Weber addresses an audience of young students on the meaning and value
of science for both personal and broader questions in life. Its take-home message
was not encouraging. For Weber, science was responsible for a process of
profound intellectual rationalization, which he termed a disenchantment – in
German, Entzauberung. Science meant human progress, yes, but it was not
necessarily synonymous with a life full of existential meaning, because science
teaches us only how to master life ‘by means of calculation’. I had a strong
reaction to that essay. How could science ever be meaningless, or of no value?
My wonder at science remained unscathed, but Weber’s question about how
it could help me understand life, or myself, resonated loudly.
In fact, almost a century later, that question grows ever more pressing for us.
At the dawn of the second millennium, we live in a world that is profoundly
pervaded by science and technology. The incredible amount of information
about the brain at our disposal delivers the resounding message that what counts
most in us is a web of neurons and that, if we learn how those neurons work, we
will come closer to understanding who we really are. An enthusiastic belief
reverberates: deciphering the mysterious code of the brain would let us adhere to
the ancient dictum ‘Know Thyself’, proving Socrates wrong by successfully
using science to throw light on our existence – even in that most private and
shadowy territory, our emotions.
But can the neural script of the brain indeed tell us how we feel?
This book unfolds as a collection of stories that contribute to answering that
question. While providing a version of what neuroscience has unravelled about
our emotions, I shall also tell you what such discoveries have meant to me as I
studied the brain and walked the spine of life. Chapter by chapter, I will disclose
when the neural subtext to the emotions I experienced clarified and embellished
some of their qualities, but also when it remained a mere appendage to what I
felt. Episodes of anger, guilt, fear, sadness, joy and love will reveal how the
neural tapestry of an emotion can be an endless source of wonder, but also leave
us with knots to untangle.