Seven - THE BOOK OF LIFE

Seven

THE BOOK OF LIFE

HOW LOVE FORMS, GUIDES, AND ALTERS

A CHILD’S EMOTIONAL MIND

When Dr. John Watson moves into the flat at 221B Baker Street, he happens to pick up a journal belonging to his new roommate. An article boldly entitled “The Book of Life” has been marked in the table of contents, and there Watson reads the following lines on what is called the Science of Deduction:

From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. . . . By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirtcuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent inquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.

“What ineffable twaddle!” Watson says, slapping the magazine down on the table. “I never read such rubbish in my life.” The author of the piece, he discovers, is the man whose exploits he will devote his life to chronicling: the celebrated supersleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

The same sort of challenge that Holmes relished—where one is “compelled to reason backward from effects to causes”— confronts anyone who attempts to trace the emotional mind’s development. The limbic detective begins not with fingernails or trouser-knees but with discernible emotional attributes—a disposition to chronic depression, an inability to assert oneself, a lifetime spent loving inattentive partners. The task is to formulate a historical sequence that accounts for the presence and precise conformation of those traits in one human mind.

How does a personality come into being? An infant undergoes a startling metamorphosis as his brain develops. He starts as a wide-eyed creature with an inborn knack for reading emotions, but before long he blossoms with elaborate emotional attributes and skills. An identity as definite and distinct as a fingerprint takes form, so palpable we can sense its mental ridges and whorls. When we meet an adult we can know without too much difficulty whether he is generous or stingy, treacherous or trustworthy, intimidating or obsequious. We can know if he is able to trust, to compete, to know himself and others, to love. How does the limbic brain coalesce into a coherent structure? Beginning as diffuse neural propensities, how does an infant become a person?

Holmes felt he could conduct most investigations without leaving the relaxing confines of his armchair. Freud, Holmes’s contemporary and epigone, shared his conviction and may have been tempted into emulation. Based on his reasoning skills and the clues he derived from his seat at the head of the analytic couch, Freud erected an immense and ornate palace of deductions about emotional development and the agencies that bring about a child’s mind. His confidence in his edifice rivaled Holmes’s faith in his intellectual acuity.

Unfortunately, the Holmesian method of investigation is entertaining but impossible fiction. The sleight-of-hand artist who draws a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill from his assistant’s ear is not minting new money; the bill is exactly where he placed it and knew it to be all along. Likewise the enigmatic clues that Holmes so cunningly pierces to Watson’s dumbfounded amazement—every such scene was crafted by a writer who knew a priori the identity of the criminal and the means of his nefarious activities, who knew the one implication his hero must snatch from millions if the plot was to proceed.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” for instance, Holmes observes several scratches on the side of Watson’s shoe. From this and this alone, he concludes that the good doctor has been tramping around in the mud, and that he must have hired a new housekeeper who scored the soles while clumsily scraping off the residue of his master’s muddy perambulations. Holmes brandishes the deduction, and Watson slavishly confirms it. The two neatly bypass hundreds of equally likely permutations: Watson stepped on a rake and scratched his shoes, or marred them in cleaning them when he was drunk, or left his good shoes at the club and had to dig a worn pair out of an old and cluttered closet—and so on, almost ad infinitum.

When Holmes inspects a coat-sleeve or shirt cuff and points his unwavering finger at a murderer, he arrives at his conclusions in a fashion so simple and time-honored that one might describe it as elementary: he cheats.

The investigator of the emotional mind is denied that considerable shortcut; its Creator has not provided him with the answers in advance. A logical observer cannot start with an adult’s emotional traits and forge a chain of deductions, extending backward in time to one culprit cause. Such armchair detecting is a sport that requires an impractical degree of omniscience. Instead, modern seekers must take advantage of science and the light it brings to questions about how and why a mind matures.

In the last four chapters, we recounted the different faces of the physiologic bond that unites relationship partners, including parents and children: limbic resonance, regulation, and revision. In this chapter we describe how those forces combine and conspire to create, from an infant’s unadulterated vulnerability and promise, a human being and an emotional identity.

The full history of any life contains additional players whose roles we will not consider here: chance, trauma, physical illness, intellectual prowess, athleticism, poverty, race, and many more. Significant as these are in selected lives, our purpose is not to detail the influence of every factor capable of impinging on a malleable mind. Such an exhaustive (and exhausting) enterprise would, in its cacophony of contributing voices, drown rather than draw out the story of this chapter: how aspects of parental love shape a young mind.

THE BIG PICTURE

Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others.

The brain thus takes shape as a compromise between unyielding limits and nearly infinite freedom. It is like a snowflake or a sonnet, whose innumerable members remain bound to an eternal integer. The polarity of water molecules constrains a snowflake to be a six-sided polyhedron, and a sonnet comprises fourteen lines. The universe does not contain a seven-sided snowflake or a sonnet with five quatrains. But within the expanse of these restrictions lie endless permutations of beauty.

In the brain, a genetic blueprint directs the raising of rough neural scaffolds that serve as the cores of various subsystems. DNA thus reins in the riotous proliferation of designs that a hundred billion cells could freely generate. One brain, one plan: no brain sports three temporal lobes, and none registers anger with an upward turn to the lips. But, as in a topiary, variety flourishes within walls. Early experience trims a scaffold’s semiadjustable outline into a neural template: an assemblage of neurons and connections fine-tuned for function in a particular environment. Genetic information lays down the brain’s basic macro- and microanatomy; experience then narrows still-expansive possibilities into an outcome. Out of many, several; out of several, one.

After the template takes form, neural flexibility wanes, but often not to zero. And here the brain is like a sonnet that undergoes eternal editorial correction or a snowflake that follows a perpetual tumbling path, always adding crystals to hexagonal wings. Ongoing experience continues to mold neural connections, ensuring that one’s personality never rests. As Heracleitus wrote several thousand years ago, “We do and do not step into the same river. We are, and are not.”

A neural learning machine has a natural tendency to emphasize the influence of its youth. The young brain teems with far more neurons than it ultimately keeps. Most of these bloomers die out over the course of childhood as luxuriantly populated scaffolds slim down to leaner templates. Because the doomed cells and links could have stored data, their demise represents the loss of information a brain might have encoded. When billions of neurons depart, as they do in the brain’s prolonged pruning phase, pages disappear from the mind’s book forever.

Why do certain neurons survive the first years of life where multitudes perish? The life-sustaining power of attachment for mammals is mirrored on a microscopic level in the brain: here, too, connectedness ensures survival. Neurons that establish strong interconnections with their fellows—those participating in Attractors—make it through the winnowing phase. Those that do not join in stable bonds wither and drop from the consolidating template.

Consider how a baby learns to discern mere noise from the clicks, whistles, and burbles of speech. The human vocal cords, pharynx, tongue, lips, teeth, and palate can make thousands of distinct bits of sounds—phonemes— that meld seamlessly into words. An infant brain can hear and distinguish all possible phonemes; his genes carry the design for this mechanism. His panphonemic capacity prepares him to meet all human languages, but soon it becomes neural extravagance. Any language uses only a small subset of phonemes. English gets by with forty. Consequently, a toddler’s brain contains Attractors for the phonemes that match his native tongue; only those linguistic sounds can he correctly hear and vocalize. Auditory experience has whittled his multipurpose scaffold into a purposeful template.

After the unused neurons expire, the truncated network no longer represents certain bits of knowledge. Japanese does not differentiate between the English sounds of “r” and “l,” and a child steeped in Japanese hears no difference between them. French has no “th”—the Gallic world usually approximates the unpronounceable sound with “z”—stocking Pepé Le Pew’s amorous entreaties with zee, zis, and zat. French poses similar sonorous barriers to English speakers: the gravelly, guttural “r” or the short, sharp “u” (not at all like the “oo” in tube or even the “yoo” in unique). And the vowel sound in the French word for “eye” —oeil—English has never heard its like. Only the exceptionally rare Anglo will pass Parisian muster on these pronunciation points.

This developmental progression—general scaffold, vigorous neuronal thinning, specialized template, and evolving configuration—unfolds in most neural systems, including limbic ones. An infant’s emotional scaffold provides for temperament and for innate abilities like reading facial expressions. Limbic contact with his parents hones that pluripotential structure into the template of emotional life—the neural core of emotional identity. Once this quintessence is firm, we can say that a person exists, and we can know the individuated attributes of his emotional self. Ongoing experience gradually transforms his neural configuration, changing him from who he was into who he is, one synapse at a time. Emotional identity drifts over a lifetime—if fast and far enough, one may encounter a stranger’s heart where a friend’s or a lover’s once dwelt.

Alfred de Musset, on seeing the novelist George Sand (the nom de plume of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant), long after their love affair ended:

My heart, still full of her,

Traveled over her face, and found her there no more . . .

I thought to myself that a woman unknown

Had adopted by chance that voice and those eyes

And I let the chilly statue pass

Looking at the skies

IN THE BEGINNING

The first influence on the emotional mind is the origin of life itself: the double spirals that make up DNA. One filament, the sense strand, contains the linear sequence of instructions for building proteins. Its mirror image, the nonsense strand, encodes for nothing at all. Split the two, and fresh, complementary filaments assemble: across from sense the matching nonsense strand forms, and opposite nonsense, newly fashioned sense floats into existence. Even at this gritty biochemical level the duality of information, the practical and the poetic, lives. Half of the DNA doublet seems to signify nothing, but within its apparent biochemical inutility resides pure potential. The nonsense strand is always one cell division away from generating anew the pragmatic protein-building algorithm of its alter ego. This magical quality allows DNA to replicate, as it has for billions of years. And for the past hundred million years or so, when the echidna’s ancestor diverged from the reptilian line, successful mammals have passed on the genes that built their limbic brains—to every one of us.

Genes can generate a limbic scaffold slanted toward shyness or a short temper as assuredly as they do long bones or a fair complexion. Dogs can be bred for their emotionality and usually are: breeders rely on the genetic transmission of temperament as they select for docility in the spaniel and ferocity in the pit bull. Certain strains of mice are thirty times more anxious than others; so are some human families. One brain’s blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another, pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive.

Is the gene train a juggernaut? Not at all. The limits to the genetic influence on personality are inscribed along the ovoid curve of the female pelvis. Over the last few million years, the primate brain has expanded faster than the bony outlet that is the baby’s portal to an air-breathing world. If an infant is to squeeze out while his head still fits, his brain at birth can be only a fraction of its final size. He must defer most of his neural maturation until he leaves the womb—when his physiology is no longer flying solo but joins his parents’ through their shared limbic nexus. His neurogenetic inheritance then becomes subject to the power of parental love.

CASTING THE MOLD

While genes are pivotal in establishing some aspects of emotionality, experience plays a central role in turning genes on and off. DNA is not the heart’s destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the cards in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play. Scientists have proven, for example, that good mothering can override a disadvantageous temperament. They arranged for especially nurturing monkey mothers to adopt baby monkeys genetically prone to anxiety. Anxious young monkeys usually become inhibited, low-ranking adults. The substitution of an attentive mother reversed their fates—once on a genetic path to a lifetime of timidity, these well-loved monkeys became dominant in their troops. The inverse also holds: inadequate nurturance can disrupt a healthy limbic inheritance, imposing anxiety and depression on someone who had the genetic makings of a happy life.

Like most of their toys, children arrive with considerable assembly required. A child’s brain cannot develop normally without the coordinating influence that limbic communication furnishes. The coos and burbles that infants and parents exchange, the cuddling, rocking, and joyous peering into each other’s faces look innocuous if not inane; one would not suspect a life-shaping process in the offing. But from their first encounter, parents guide the neurodevelopment of the baby they engage with. In his primal years, they mold a child’s inherited emotional brain into the neural core of the self.

LEARNING TO SEE

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note, But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise, Who in despite of view is pleas’d to dote; Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted, Nor tender feeling to base touches prone, Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited To any sensual feast with thee alone; But my five wits, nor my five senses can

Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee, Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man, Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be: Only my plague thus far I count my gain, That she that makes me sin awards me pain.

The list of the five senses cited in this sonnet is now passé. Based on an analysis of peripheral nerve endings, neuroscientists tabulate a longer list of independent senses: smell, sight, sound, taste, light touch, deep touch, the abilities to apprehend vibration, pain, and the position of one’s joints. The poet who penned these lines did so in ignorance of this late-breaking news, but he knew something more important: emotionality is a different kind of sensory capacity, supplementary and integrative. The limbic brain relies on information supplied by the traditional inroads of perception, but it converts these data into a higher-order experience that goes beyond a catalogue of visual, auditory, or tactile qualities. The emotional whole—love’s bottom line—is more than the sum of its sensory parts.

Consider the notorious Necker cube:

A two-dimensional bug crawling on the page could enumerate the essential elements of this figure: twelve straight lines, meeting at right, obtuse, and acute angles. True. But a bug from Flatland cannot see the scattered segments convening to depict the third dimension, rising out of the page and extending back into it. Because our brain is wired for 3-D, what we see extends beyond a dozen lines—so much that we cannot will ourselves to see only listless sticks. Now suppose the two-dimensional bug is a reptile, and let the lines represent the inner states of other organisms. Reptiles remain woodenly unresponsive to limbic dimension. Emotionality lifts our life experience out of reptilian Flatland; it makes the state of another creature’s insides matter.

A child is born with the hardware for limbic sensing, but to use it skillfully he needs a guide. Someone must sharpen and calibrate his sonar; someone must teach him how to sense the emotional world correctly. Nor should this surprise us: experience is a necessary ingredient for normal sensory neurodevelopment. A child’s brain will not germinate the neural machinery necessary for depth perception without input from both eyes. Limbic systems also need training on the right experiences to achieve full potential. These orienting experiences originate from an attuned adult. If a parent can sense her child well—if she can tune into his wordless inner states and know what he feels—then he, too, will become skilled in reading the emotional world.

A child makes constant use of his limbic link to adjust his impressions. The drama plays out a dozen times each summer afternoon at a local park. A toddler lurches across the grass with a determination that his unsteadiness renders positively quixotic. Inevitably gravity catches up with inexperience; he teeters and falls. At once he checks a parent’s face: if she shows alarm or concern he cries, and if she is amused he may smile at her, even laugh. He trusts her assessment of his tumble more than his, and he does so with good reason. He can feel his pain and fright and disappointment but cannot gauge them. If his tumble is big enough to be awful or small enough to be negligible, he may realize that. But at all levels in between, he holds his emotions open to an expert’s interpretation. A limbically attuned mother can tell a fearsome fall from a harmless one. When a child senses his mother’s fear, his anxiety rises or falls in harmony with hers. He looks to his mother as a piano tuner looks to the sound of pure C. After he compares what he feels with what his mother shows, a child’s emotional read on the world moves closer to hers.

Emotional experience begins as a derivative; a child gets his first taste of his feelings secondhand. Only through limbic resonance with another can he begin to apprehend his inner world. The first few years of resonance prepare this instrument for a lifetime’s use. One of a parent’s most important jobs is to remain in tune with her child, because she will focus the eyes he turns toward inner and outer worlds. He faithfully receives whatever deficiencies her own vision contains. A parent who is a poor resonator cannot impart clarity. Her inexactness smears his developing precision in reading the emotional world. If she does not or cannot teach him, in adulthood he will be unable to sense the inner states of others or himself. Deprived of the limbic compass that orients a person to his internal landscape, he will slip through his life without understanding it.

In Woody Allen’s film Deconstructing Harry, an actor develops a sudden case of the blurs. At first his film crew thinks the lens is dirty, but they clean the camera and determine that the outline of the actor himself is smudged. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you . . . you’re out of focus,” a coworker tells the mortified player. “Mel—now, look—I want you to go home, and get some rest. See if you can just sharpen up,” advises his director. At home, matters are not improved: “Daddy, you’re all blurry!” says his dismayed child.

Allen’s ability to concretize the abstractions of the human condition, rendering them simultaneously immediate and ludicrous, is central to his comedic gift. Fuzzy people exist, he tells us in this scene, people whose selves, not their bodies, are painfully indeterminate. Such a person enters psychotherapy because he does not know who he is. To people who do know, the predicament sounds improbable. But a person cannot know himself until another knows him. Omit skilled limbic resonance from the life of a child, and he will emerge with a psyche as indistinct as the blurry habitus of Allen’s character. If a parent actively hates a child, if she affirmatively knows him in the punishing clarity of her fury—that child will fare better than one who languishes in the dim ether of emotional ignorance.

LEARNING TO BE

A baby begins life as an open loop. His mother’s milk provides nourishment, and her limbic communication provides synchronization for his delicate neural rhythms. As a child matures, his neurophysiology internalizes some regulatory functions. Balanced from the outside in, his brain learns stability.

Lengthy parental absence deprives a child of limbic regulation. If he is very young, losing his parents upends his physiology. Prolonged separations even can be fatal to an immature nervous system, as vital rhythms of heart rate and respiration devolve into chaos. Sudden infant death is increased fourfold in the babies of mothers who are depressed—because without emotional shelter, infants die. The heart rhythms of securely attached babies are steadier than those with insecure relationships, just as the breathing teddy bear regularizes the respiration of premature infants. Synchronicity with parents (or, in a pinch, with another reliable rhythmic source) becomes the baby’s developing physiologic strength.

Being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek ceaselessly in romance, religions, and cults; in husbands and wives, pets, softball teams, bowling leagues, and a thousand other features of human life driven by the thirst for sustaining affiliations. In early life, limbic regulation is not simply pleasure; it is also crucial training. As a baby’s precarious neurophysiology falls under the steadying spell of his mother, he first borrows her equipoise and then makes it his own. A child balances his physiology in the same way he masters a two-wheeler. A good parent rights him when he strays from the vertical; through repetition, a child absorbs the ability to correct his stance. Without words, concepts, ideas, or understanding, the vestibular and motor systems of his brain learn to do what the parent standing beside him once did.

Before a child can say “bicycle” (much less ride one), he is modulating his emotions via an external source. A distraught baby reaches for his mother because an attuned parent can soothe him; he cannot soothe himself. As a consequence of thousands of these interactions, a child learns to self-quiet. His knowledge, like knowing how to keep a bike upright, is implicit—invisible, inarticulate, undeniable.

The child of emotionally balanced parents will be resilient to life’s minor shocks. Those who miss out on the practice find that in adulthood, their emotional footing pitches beneath them like the deck of a boat in rough waters. They are incomparably reactive to the loss of their anchoring attachments—without assistance, they are thrown back on threadbare resources. The end of a relationship is then not merely poignant but incapacitating.

An event as common as a cross-country move can uncover this sensitivity. In less time than it takes to read a good book, the average person can transport himself several thousand miles away from everyone and everything he has ever cared for. The limbic brain registers the disorienting loss of attachments as the all-purpose ache of homesickness. Letters and phone calls are a salve on the wound, but they are insubstantial substitutes for the full-bandwidth sensory experience of nearness to the ones you love. To sustain a living relationship, limbic regulation demands sensory inputs that are rich, vivid, and frequent.

Most therapists have in their practices at least one casualty of a calamitous move—the college student leaving home for the first time, the recipient of a distancing promotion or transfer—whose seeming psychological health collapses under the geographic strain. Often no one is more surprised than the sufferer, who had no idea of his emotional frailty and the support networks of his native environs.

Our society overlooks the drain on emotional balance that results from severing attachments. From the dawn of the species until a few hundred years ago, most human beings lived out their lives in one community. The signature lesson of the twentieth century is that unforeseen complications are ever the faithful companions of technological progress. The convenient devices that enable extensive mobility are problematic because limbic regulation operates weakly at a distance. We have the means to establish a peripatetic lifestyle, but we will never have the brains for it.

LEARNING TO LOVE

Suppose for a moment that a friend whisks you to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The dusty basement of a château undergoing renovation has yielded up a new painting, he tells you, and it is on display. The painter was either Manet or Monet, or perhaps Matisse—your friend cannot recall, his mind awhirl in French artistes and their alliterative surnomic M’s. The painting hangs unlabeled. If you are familiar with the works of the three artists, you may be confident that you could tell them apart.

How? By the reflected gleam of implicit memory. If you have seen, say, Matisse’s work, then you hold title to an accessible prototype that imparts what his paintings generally look like. A critic or connoisseur might be able to articulate the identifying characteristics: composition, lighting, tints, texture, perspective, subject, color. But book-learning is superfluous here. Armed only with the neural results of serial viewing, absorbing, pondering—some paintings look and feel like Matisse. Others do not. Without a degree in art history, you can know a Matisse when you see one. As you see more of them your intuition sharpens.

So it is with emotional knowledge. In the first years of life, as his brain passes from the generous scaffold to the narrow template, a child extracts patterns from his relationships. Before any glimmerings of event memory appear, he stores an impression of what love feels like. Neural memory compresses these qualities into a few powerful Attractors—any single instance a featherweight, but accumulated experience leaves a dense imprint. That concentrated knowledge whispers to a child from beneath the veil of consciousness, telling him what relationships are, how they function, what to anticipate, how to conduct them. If a parent loves him in the healthiest way, wherein his needs are paramount, mistakes are forgiven, patience is plentiful, and hurts are soothed as best they can be, then that is how he will relate to himself and others. Anomalous love—one where his needs don’t matter, or where love is suffocating or autonomy intolerable—makes its ineradicable limbic stamp. Healthy loving then becomes incomprehensible.

Zeroing in on how to love goes hand in hand with whom. A baby strives to tune in to his parents, but he cannot judge their goodness. He attaches to whoever is there, with the unconditional fixity we profess to require of later attachments: for better or worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health. Attachment is not a critic: a child adores his mother’s face, and he runs to her whether she is pretty or plain. And he prefers the emotional patterns of the family he knows, regardless of its objective merits. As an adult his heart will lean toward these outlines. The closer a potential mate matches his prototypes, the more enticed and entranced he will be—the more he will feel that here, at last, with this person, he belongs.

It is attachment that makes familiarity trump worth. A golden retriever thrills only to his owner. He is amiably and helplessly indifferent to passersby who may be kinder, fonder of walks, quicker with treats—he does not, he cannot value them. Everyone is in the same limbic boat as those patient, expectant dogs.

Most people accept without difficulty the neural miracles of exactitude contained in 20/20 vision or perfect pitch. But some balk at believing that a person can scan a crowd and pick out the intimate elements in a stranger’s heart. Can somebody survey a group and intuit who has a bad temper, an alcoholic mother, who dreams at night of revenge on the father who left him? Look at the relationships around you and judge for yourself. People target the mates who mesh with their own minds, and they do so with speed and precision that our smartest smart bombs are not sufficiently intelligent to envy.

A relationship that strays from one’s prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation. Loneliness outweighs most pain. These two facts collude to produce one of love’s common and initially baffling quirks: most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a “nice” relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect. Consider the young man described in the last chapter wrestling with the present-day reenactment of the long-ago love with his fiery, critical mother. As an adult, he faces a binary universe. If he connects with a woman, she turns out to be his mother’s younger clone. But a supportive woman leaves him exasperatingly empty of feeling—no spark, no chemistry, no fireworks.

Many people can relate the love story they think they have in mind: boy meets girl (and every permutation thereof), they fall in love, and live happily ever after. But this story dwells in the airy regions of the cortex, which drafts its scripts using imagination, logic, and will. In the older, deeper, and occasionally darker structures of the limbic brain, a different trio cooperates: attachment, implicit memory, and strong Attractors. There one can read love stories like this: boy meets girl, who (reminiscent of his mother) is needy and stifles his independence; they struggle bitterly over the years and resent each other a little more every day. Some people carry that tale in their hearts, and whether they find a player for the part or not, the piece can only come to grief.

The limbic Attractors that form in childhood can be multiple. A single relationship or household can spawn as many Attractors as it embodies predictable lessons. Thus a child can form influential Attractors from relationships not just with mother and father, but also with siblings, nannies, even the family as a whole. In a home with ten children, for instance, each may extract a version of the local truth that there isn’t enough love to go around in the world, that you must fight fiercely and ceaselessly and still your heart will go hungry. A newspaper column with advice for parents recently advocated letting older and younger children settle disputes without parental interference, so that they might learn what people do in the real world. The children in the unfortunate households where parents apply this pearl will unerringly distill the timeless lesson of the unsupervised boarding school or playground: justice is weak; might and intimidation triumph.

The consequences that flow from early limbic lessons entail a final complexity: emotional reality (or its illusion) is collaborative. Back at the MOMA, you inspect the painting that looks like a Matisse. Your formerly forgetful friend snaps his fingers and says he remembers that he heard the artist is Manet. As he stands next to you, radiating Manet certainty, the painting itself starts to change before your eyes. Pigments fade and oxidize, lines blur and reform, and the painting, if not a textbook Manet, is now indisputably more Manet than before.

Visual virtuality is mildly susceptible to interference from others, and limbic virtuality is a good deal more so. As every child knows, if one passes a magnet over a handful of sand, thousands of tiny magnetically sensitive particles—iron filings—leap to the magnet, while the silicate crystals of stone remain unmoved. The limbic brain is an emotional magnet. Attractors activate compatible aspects of relatedness and emotionality in others, leaving dormant the incompatible pebbles. We all embody an emotional force field that acts on the people we love, evoking the relationship attributes we know best. Our minds are in turn pulled by the emotional magnets of those close to us, transforming any landscape we happen to contemplate and painting it with the colors and textures they see.

The young man with a fondness for faultfinding lovers is in even more trouble than he thinks. First, he must contend with the mental mechanism that leads him with uncanny precision to a woman who is herself critical. Second, his presence will magnify whatever minatory tendencies his current paramour may possess. Ditto for her: she has chosen her man because he matches an Attractor of hers, and she will enhance the matching virtues and vices.

EVER AFTER...

After the formative years that instill templates and Attractors, emotional learning doesn’t stop, but it slows. Childhood chisels its patterns into pliable neural networks, while later experience wields a weaker influence on the evolving person. Why should this be? In theory, the same learning so influential in casting the emotional core of the self could take place later in life. But often the only emotional learning one sees after childhood is the reinforcement of existing fundamentals.

Unfortunately, the brain’s biology and its mathematics both oppose adult emotional learning. The plasticity of the brain—the readiness of neurons to sprout fresh connections and encode new knowledge—declines after adolescence. And later learning is energetically unfavorable within a neural network. New lessons must fight an uphill battle against the patterns already ingrained, because existing Attractors can easily overwhelm and absorb moderately novel configurations. The nature of neurovirtuality ensures that it trims the ambiguity from reality, and portrays largely what has already been seen. And so, left to his own devices, a child who knew and loved a deceitful, selfish, or jealous parent does not often learn to love differently at age twenty, forty, or sixty.

Every child stores his Attractors and lives out his adult life on a neurally generated soundstage. If his Attractors mislead him, is there any way out? Can he manage to escape the trap of seeing what he’s always seen and doing what he’s always done? Once emotional learning has gone awry, can it be set right?

Despite the longevity of Attractors and the waning of neural flexibility, the emotional mind can change in adulthood. The old patterns can undergo revision, although the task is not easy. You may think that we have given late emotional learning short shrift in this brief section, but the topic is so near to our hearts that it merits a chapter to itself.