The Limbic Brain

This has pretty much been movie week. I saw The Nun's Story last night (Audrey Hepburn tries very hard to be a nun in 1930's Belgium and the Belgian Congo but finally concludes that her conscience is more important than obedience to her order) and Enchanted today (cartoon prince and princess-to-be become real-life characters in NYC and cross paths with a lawyer and his fiancee-to-be; can you guess who ends up with whom, and who ends up rescuing whom?).

I do not know if The Nun's Story accurately portrays life behind convent walls. The film depicts an order in which ritual trumps faith, and human religious leaders are stand-ins for Jesus who must be venerated and obeyed without question.

Even worse, in the film nuns' quest for purity, they cut themselves off from human touch (no hugs, just like Seinfeld). There is no evidence of human love, comfort, or tenderness. If they are indeed giving everything up for the love of Jesus, it does not fill them with joy. Even in worship, they do not show anything other than obedience.

Audrey Hepburn's character is one of the nuns who are called to the ministry of nursing. But the nuns in the film are not supposed to talk unnecessarily, so often decline to speak to their patients where a kind or reassuring word might do wonders. As nurses, they are (I would think) at a disadvantage because they are forbidden to make the connections craved by the limbic brain.

In A General Theory of Love, psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon argue that the limbic brain -- which desperately desires to connect with others -- is critical to the health and well-being of mammals. They describe (as did Rev. Rock coincidentally in his sermon today) how children who are not held and spoken to face-to-face suffer, and may even die. Other reports have suggested that adults who lack a strong social support structure tend to get sick more often (I think the researchers were looking at incidence of the common cold).

I read A General Theory of Love earlier this year, and found it intriguing:

Love alters the structure of our brains. All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. ...Ongoing exposure to one person's limbic [patterns] does not merely activate neural patterns in another—it also strengthens them. Long standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel emotional parts of the people we love...Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

I'm not sure how a multi-year crush fits into that schema, other than to suggest that probably my affection for him is probably permanently hard-wired into my brain at this point. Great. Rev. Martha Niebanck of First Parish in Brookline has nicely distilled some of the key premises of A General Theory of Love as follows:

Early mammals evolved from small lizardish reptiles and developed another brain, the limbic brain, which is draped over the reptilian core. The limbic brain transformed the mechanics of reproduction and the orientation toward offspring: “Detachment and disinterest mark the parental attitude of the typical reptile, while mammals can enter into subtle and elaborate interactions with their young...Mammals form close-knit mutually nurturant social groups, —families and clans and tribes—in which members spend time touching and care for one another.” (25) Reptiles abandon their eggs, unhatched. Newborn reptiles are silent lest the sound of their vulnerability invite the attention of their carnivore parents. Vulnerability is no asset to a reptile.

Mammals, on the other hand, vocalize to each other, sing, and play. Mammals cry in distress when separated from a parent or the pack. Mammals sing and coo and reach out with their voices when reunited. Mammals live in a sea of social interchange. Our limbic brains are adjusting to each other continuously—your facial expression is taken in by my eyes, translated into a feeling, translated into a thought and a facial expression in response. This back and forth tuning is called “limbic resonance.” If I meet you and you are frowning, I am more likely to frown with you. We share our moods and we change each other with our moods.