Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick

Author:John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Theory of Mind, and Then Some

Among chimps, an aggressor who has attacked and bitten another, but who is now intent on reconciliation, will often look directly at the spot where he injured the other, inspect it, then begin to clean the wound. Bonobos, who, at least in captivity, often have sex face to face, carefully monitor and respond to the expressions and vocalizations of their partner.

The Germans have a word for closely attuned perception of another’s emotional state. They call it Einfühlung, meaning “feeling into.” But can we say that bonobos form an emotional connection when mating? Was Kuni displaying virtue in her attempts to save the starling? Even scientists who share de Waal’s views of animal expressiveness are cautious about taking the assignment of human characteristics to other species—anthropomorphism—too far.

I will leave the question of virtue to the philosophers, but in brain science, the word “emotion” carries a fairly dry definition: It is a neural or endocrine response to a stimulus, the function of which is to regulate the organism’s inner world in keeping with the outer world of its environment. According to the taxonomy popularized by Antonio Damasio, an emotion is a physical sensation. A “feeling” is an awareness of having an emotion. “Consciousness” is our awareness of the “self” that is having that feeling.

Between Kanzi’s impulse to help his sister and the exquisite subtlety of emotion expressed in Shakespeare’s sonnets or Molly Bloom’s soliloquy lies a fairly broad gulf, and somewhere between the two is where we find the roots of the emotions associated with human loneliness.

We have seen how pleasant physiological sensations motivate us to engage in prosocial behaviors that enhance survival and help perpetuate our genes. We have seen how aversive sensations (loneliness) redirect us away from isolating behaviors that diminish survival and thereby diminish the propagation of our genes. We have also worked our way through a fair number of constituent elements of this pleasure/pain, approach/withdraw system: genetic biases, rewards and punishments from within the social group, the hormones and neurotransmitters that convey the messages that link genes to behaviors and behaviors to genes, and the social feedback loops of co-regulation that complete the circle.

But knowing that birds get around by flying, and that birds have feathers and light bones in order to fly, still does not provide a particularly useful understanding of how birds actually get off the ground. If you want to build a flying machine, it helps to know some aerodynamics. If you want to build more satisfying social connections, it helps to know more about how “emotional connection” occurs in a functional sense, which is to say, how one human brain gains access to the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of another. It also helps to know how and why that system can become overwhelmingly confused.

Theory of mind, which is what we call the ability to have insights into other people’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions, develops in humans when we are about two years old. This is the same time when we begin to recognize ourselves in mirrors.

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