The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live -- and How You Can Change Them. by Richard J. Davidson PhD with Sharon Begley.
He speaks of six distinct emotional dimensions -- resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context and attention. Each person's unique combination of these dimensions make up what Dr. Davidson calls their own "emotional style" or the essence of our personality and the reflection of how we live and respond to our experiences.
Dr. Davidson remains on the cutting edge of brain research that investigates understanding our emotions and co-authored this book with Sharon Begley, the former science writer for Newsweek. She herself has written a book called Change of Mind, Change of Body.
From the following link you can access this book and read its Table of Contents, Introduction and I think even the first chapter.
http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Life-Your-Brain-Live/dp/1594630895
Here are Gary's notes on this book:
Notes on,” The Emotional Life of Your Brain…” by Richard
Davidson PhD and Sharon Begley
He writes this book as a story of his personal and
scientific transformation, citing his experiences in acquaintances from college
on, including his friendship with the Dalai Lama. He describes the growth of
his spiritual and professional life, how they impacted on each other and went
to his interest in and elucidation of the emotional life of our brains.
According to Davidson,” Emotional style is a consistent way
of responding to the experiences of our lives. It is governed by specific,
identifiable brain circuits and can be measured using objective laboratory
methods. Emotional style influences the likelihood of feeling particular
emotional states, traits, and moods. Because emotional styles are much closer
to underlying brain systems than emotional states or traits they can be
considered the atoms of our emotional lives–the fundamental building blocks.”
For Davidson, anything that has to do with such concepts is based on the brain.
He goes on to relate that emotional style comprises six dimensions, reflecting
the discoveries of modern scientific research. These dimensions include:
1) Resilience: how slowly or quickly you recover from
adversity.
2) Outlook: how long you are able to sustain positive
emotion.
3) Social Intuition: how adept you are at picking up social
signals from the people around you
4) Self–Awareness: how well you perceive bodily feelings
that reflect emotions.
5) Sensitivity to Context: how good you are at regulating
your emotional responses to take into account the context you find yourself in.
6) Attention: how sharp and clear your focus is.
These six dimensions arose serendipitously from his research
in affective neuroscience, complemented by the discoveries of others. They
reflect properties of and patterns in the brain, arising from his systematic
studies of the neural basis of emotion. Each of the six dimensions has a
specific neural signature. Each dimension describes a continuum. There is no single
ideal style and no single combination of ideal styles.
When Davidson went to college in the 60’s at Harvard, the
study of the brain was dominated by behaviorists, and the study of emotions was
almost heresy. Davidson was convinced that emotion was central to understanding
important qualities of being human. Emotions were thought to exist in the
limbic system and hypothalamus alone. Davidson's interest in alternative
viewpoints was piqued by studies of brain damage that revealed that damage to the
left prefrontal cortex led to pathological crying, while damage to the right
prefrontal cortex led to pathological laughter. He speculated there might be
different brain regions and networks that could generate specific emotions.
It was already known that the eyes would gaze right if the
left prefrontal cortex was working on an answer to a problem (emphasizing
verbal ability), while the eyes would gaze left if the right prefrontal cortex
was working on an answer (involving spatial reasoning). He pursued an
experiment asking questions meant to trigger emotions and recorded which way
the eyes moved. He found that people look left when responding to emotionally
negative questions and right when responding to emotionally positive questions.
He wanted to refine this idea further and used EEGs (scanners weren't present
in the 1970s). He found that the right prefrontal cortex was activated when
people were shown film clips that would induce negative emotions, and the left
prefrontal cortex would be activated when shown clips inducing positive
emotions.
People watching the film clips were themselves filmed.
People from different cultures form the same facial expressions when they felt
any of six basic emotions including happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and
surprise. They developed a detailed system for coding muscle movements
constituting facial signs of emotion. They learned, for example, that it is the
eyes, not the mouth, that convey true joy.
It was becoming clear that brain correlates of positive and
negative emotions are seen in areas of the brain associated with cognition,
i.e. the prefrontal cortex, as opposed to the brainstem and limbic system, as
previously thought. He went on to study ten-month-old babies, fitting them with
EEG skullcaps. They were shown video clips of people laughing, which caused the
babies to smile, resulting in an increased activity in the left prefrontal
cortex. When shown people crying, babies became sullen, and there was an
increased activity in the right prefrontal cortex. He subsequently studied
infants. They obviously could not use videos and decided to use taste.
Introduction of sugar water led to an increase in activity in the left
prefrontal cortex, while introduction of lemon juice led to increase activity
in the right prefrontal cortex. A subsequent paradigm involves asking the
mothers of the infants to leave the room. Some of the infants cried and an
increase in right prefrontal activity was noted. Some of the infants took the
departure in stride with no such increase in activity.
Studies of depressed people revealed decreased levels of
activity in the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting that the left prefrontal
cortex contributes to positive emotions and the ability to hold a desired goal
and form a plan of action to achieve it. This is consistent with the notion
that absence of joy is worse than a feeling of sadness. He started to wonder if
what he was looking at might be the neural correlates of approach (positive
emotions) and avoidance (negative emotions), segregated to different
hemispheres. The idea of emotional style was born. He started to look at the
differences between the dots on his graphs of individual people as opposed to
the differences between the dots that he had been using to note the differences
between right and left activation. The activation dots varied between
individuals.
Resilience is the first emotional style discussed. The
continuum ranges from quick to recover to slow to recover. The neural correlate
involves inhibition of the amygdala by the left prefrontal cortex resulting in
people who are more quickly able to recover from trauma. People are presented a
negative picture or administered a painful stimulus and the recovery is
measured using an eyeblink reflex. Recall that activity in the left prefrontal
cortex is increased with positive emotions. The right prefrontal cortex does
not inhibit the amygdala and more negative emotions persist; these people are
slow to recover. It has also been learned that more resilient people have more
myelinated fibers between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
The second style is Social Intuition. The continuum measures
degrees of being puzzled. Autistics are not intuitive. The neural correlate is
the existence of low levels of activity in the fusiform area of the visual
cortex with heightened activation in the amygdala (the social cognition
circuit) when looking at human faces. The heightened activation in the amygdala
is lessened by averting the gaze away from the faces. This results in the
decreased activity in the fusiform area. More attuned people are better able to
study the eyes of other faces, without any activation of the amygdala. It
should be noted that oxytocin quiets the amygdala, inducing feelings of
commitment and attachment.
The Sensitivity to Context dimension involves being tuned in
or tuned out. An example of this is how toddlers freeze when in an unfamiliar
situation. This is called behavioral inhibition. Sensitivity to context is the
ability to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar. It is a function of the anterior
hippocampus, which attunes one's behavior in particular contexts. People who
struggle with posttraumatic stress disorder can't distinguish familiar from
unfamiliar. They have been found to experience a loss of volume in the
hippocampus. They are unable to form memories of the context and are,
therefore, overwhelmed by anxiety in situations that have some similarities to
other situations that involved significant trauma. The circuitry involves the
connections between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.
The Self-Aware brain is the ability to appreciate internal
states. The continuum runs from self-opaque to self-aware. Self-awareness plays
a role in empathy. If one can appreciate one's own internal states, then one is
able to appreciate the internal states of others. This involves the insula,
which receives signals from the visceral organs, represented by a viscerotopic
map. Increases in insular activity are consistent with increases in internal
awareness. Too much activity is associated with panic attacks and
hypochondriasis, while too little activity is associated with a lack of
empathy.
The Outlook brain involves the ability to sustain a positive
emotion. It is the capacity to be upbeat. People are shown positive pictures
that activate what is called the ventral striatum, specifically the nucleus
accumbens, which is the reward center. This is rich in dopamine and endogenous
opiates. People who struggle with depression have an initial positive response
when shown positive pix, but are unable to maintain this positive outlook. The
prefrontal cortex and ventral stratum share a feedback loop. Low activity is
associated with less prefrontal cortex input. Prefrontal cortex transmits the
instruction to maintain the positive feeling. You can actually will yourself,
or choose, to be rewarded. Dopamine is associated with the motivation part of
the reward while opiates are associated with the pleasure part of the reward.
This area is rich in both.
The final dimension is known as the Attentive brain. This is
the ability to screen out emotional distractions, which is correlated with the
ability to screen out sensory distractions. People are focused to unfocused, on
a continuum. Attention and emotion are partners. Emotional stimuli command a
lot of attention. Maintaining a stable internal compass allows us to focus and
resist distractions. This provides a building block for other aspects, like
self-awareness. You can enhance incoming signals and/or inhibit surrounding
stimuli. The prefrontal cortex can become synchronized by external stimuli. The
neural correlates include the orbital frontal cortex and the dorsal lateral
prefrontal cortex. This can be measured using the attentional blink test.
Based on earlier studies, including a classic by Kagan at
Harvard, emotional style was thought to be fixed and largely a result of
genetic predisposition. Certainly genes do play a role. However, we have since
learned that a genetic trait can be expressed or not depending on the
environment and that a gene can be turned on or off depending on experiences,
in what has come to be termed epi-genetics. Studies had shown that neurotic
rats gave birth to neurotic rats. It was thought that anxiety and neuroticism
were genetic. Laid-back rats gave birth to laid-back pups. However, it was
learned that you could take neurotic pups and have them raised by laid-back
rats, who groomed and licked the pups frequently. You could also do the
reverse. The pups would be changed by the upbringing. Neurotic rats, when
exposed to laid-back mothers, would become more laid-back. Laid-back rats, when
exposed to neurotic mothers, would become more neurotic. They essentially “inherited”
a behavior from mothers whose genes they did not share.
Davidson did a study involving 3,7 and 9-year-olds. A small
robot was sent into a room full of children and their mothers. The response of
the children was gauged. The children fell into three groups: shy, middle or
bold. When they checked the children's responses at an older age, they were
surprised that their findings did not agree with Kagan. Many of the shy
children were now in the middle or bold group. Many of the middle children had
gone to either of the extremes. Some of the bold children had gone to the
middle or shy group. They learned that some of these movements depended on the
life stressors these children had dealt with in the intervening time. For
example, one bold boy, at age three, had lost his father to cancer and was
subsequently found to be shy at age seven.
We have also learned that emotions can influence the mind
and the body. Anxiety leads to an increase in blood pressure and heart rate.
Contentment strengthens the immune system, while negative emotions weaken it.
Davidson believes that, of everything, the most powerful influence on our
health is our emotional life. One of his hopes is that, if we can understand
the neural circuits of these emotional styles, we can perhaps control our
feelings and thoughts in a way that will be good for our health. He notes that
positive emotions seem to be helpful for patients with diseases that have
effective treatments, but the findings are more equivocal when this is not the
case. Cortisol levels are higher by 48% in unhappy people. Higher cortisol
inhibits inflammation and also kills neurons and inhibits neurogenesis. It also
leads to higher fibrinogen levels, which is implicated in coronary artery
disease. He feels that if we have a more positive outlook, there is a decrease
in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system i.e. a decrease in the fight
or flight response, which leads to a decrease in heart rate and a decrease in
blood pressure. Positive emotions lead to increased growth hormone, increase
prolactin and oxytocin. Oxytocin leads to a decrease in blood pressure and a
decrease in cortisol. Growth hormone and prolactin are associated with binding
white blood cells that then become better killers of pathogens.
Davidson has done a number of studies with a number of
different collaborators. He is quite imaginative and ingenious. He did one
study with the knowledge that Botox injections inhibit the corrugator muscles
that squeeze the eyebrows together in a frown. He found that women injected
with Botox took longer to read angry and sad sentences while there was no effect
on the time involved to read happy sentences. This was because the Botox had no
effect on the muscles of the smile. This exemplifies the interplay between the
body and emotions.
Emotional style also shapes how vulnerable we are to mental
illness, usually at the extremes of the emotional style continuum. Autism
consists of a triad of symptoms including poor social interaction marked by
poor eye contact, communication problems, and stereotyped behavior. People with
autism have poor social intuition. They do not like to look at faces and will
avert their gaze. If they are unable to avert their gaze, their amygdala
becomes very active. Faces are threatening. This is the strongest heritable
illness of any of the neuropsychiatric disorders. He found that the siblings of
autistics also have high amygdala levels when exposed to facial pictures, but
not as much.
People with depression have higher right-sided than
left-sided prefrontal activation. There are different kinds of depression.
There is the slow to recover group. When something bad happens they can't turn
off the negative emotions. There is the tuned out end of the sensitivity to
context group. These people have a hard time being comfortable with friends,
tend to take things to heart and have a smaller hippocampus. Then, there is the
“can’t sustain positive emotion” group. These people have initially the same
response when shown positive pictures as healthy controls, with increased
activation of the nucleus accumbens. However, they were unable to sustain the
response because of a malfunction between the nucleus accumbens and the
prefrontal cortex.
Davidson's major goal is to pursue neurally inspired
behavior therapy. One idea is called behavior activation therapy. This involves
building enjoyable activities into one's routine so that people who can't
sustain a positive outlook can build it into their daily routine.
Of further interest is the idea of neuroplasticity. Starting
with the Silver Spring monkeys, it was learned that areas of the brain
dedicated to where peripheral nerves had been cut were now dedicated to other
duties. Looking at people who were deaf from birth, it was realized that these
people perceive things in the visual and auditory cortex, as if the auditory
cortex sees. Indeed, deaf people are better at detecting movement of objects.
This is comparable to people blind from birth, whereby the visual cortex is
recruited for braille reading. This is called compensatory reorganization. It
is also exemplified by virtual piano playing where thinking about playing an
instrument expands the region of the cortex devoted to the fingers. If people
are blindfolded for as short as five days, it has been found that the visual
cortex will be stimulated by touch. These findings have led to new treatments
for stroke victims, including constraint induced movement therapy. The good arm
is placed in a sling while the paralyzed arm is forced to move.
This holds for internal causes of neuroplasticity as well as
external. As discussed previously, in OCD there is increased activity in the
orbitofrontal cortex and striatum. Jeff Schwartz used mindfulness meditation,
observing thoughts and feelings from the perspective of a nonjudgmental
third-party. This allowed for the concept, “It’s my OCD, not me.” This has been
generalized to treatments for depression and Tourette's syndrome. It can also
be used for chronic pain, i.e.”That’s my foot tingling,” as an alternative
perception to the foot hurting.
He then went on to discuss the differences in neural
patterns when different kinds of meditation were pursued. MRI study showed
clear differences between open presence, compassion, devotion and focused
attention forms of meditation. Compassion meditation leads to increased
activity in the insula and motor cortex. Attention meditation leads to
increased activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortices. Open presence
meditation leads to widespread activation. Devotion meditation leads to
increased activity in the visual cortex, presumably because the teacher is
being visualized. Please note that the increase in activity corresponds with
what has already been discussed, ie. compassion-insula, attention-prefrontal
and parietal cortices, devotion-visual cortex and open presence-widespread
activation. The field of contemplative neuroscience was born.
He then went on to discuss the work we talked about last
week in the seminar. This included the changes in the newly trained MBSR
(mindfulness based stress reduction) group versus a control group. Anxiety
symptoms fell 12%. There was triple the activation of the prefrontal cortex.
There was a 5% increase in available antibodies. There was a shift to the fast
to recover end of resilience. He also talked about the effects of meditation on
attention, noting how meditators do better on the attentional blink test. He
also discussed how people trained in compassion meditation experienced an increased
activity in their insula.
Compassion meditation leads to a decrease in personal distress
as a result of decreased activation of the amygdala. There is an increased
activation in regions of the brain associated with goal directed behavior, i.e.
increased activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There is increased
connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, insula and nucleus accumbens so
that one is not depressed by suffering but develops a strong disposition to
relieve suffering. The goal is to relieve suffering.
The final chapter focuses on exercises to change emotional
style. In general, mindfulness meditation is beneficial to most of the styles.
A positive outlook is associated with increased activity in
the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex. The main goal of the prefrontal
cortex is to plan. If you wish to strengthen the connections between the
prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens, you might consider seeking out a
situation in which immediate reward beckons but then resist its lure. Start
easy. As you do this, you will increase the connectivity between the prefrontal
cortex and the nucleus accumbens. You are strengthening your ability to sustain
a positive emotion by waiting to gratify yourself.
You can also improve your outlook by writing down a positive
characteristic of yourself and someone you routinely interact with. Hopefully,
a different trait can be identified each time. You could also express gratitude
and complement others regularly. After a week of doing those things, you would
find that positive emotions lasted longer, consistent with a more positive
outlook. You can also fill your environment with positive reminders of happy
times.
It is also possible to be too pollyannish, i.e. have too
positive of an outlook. You can weaken the connections between the prefrontal
cortex and the nucleus accumbens by imagining negative potential outcomes. You
can also fill your environment with negative reminders.
On the self-awareness scale, it is possible to be too self-aware
and become hypochondriacal or have panic attacks. Increased self-awareness is
associated with increased activation of the insula. The best validated
treatment for panic attacks is CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). This
involves learning to reframe the significance of internal bodily cues. You
normalize something if you are too aware, which leads to a decrease in insula
activity.
Another exercise is to decrease the activity in the amygdala
and the orbital frontal cortex, leading to a decrease in the emotional value of
thoughts and sensations. This can be done through mindfulness meditation or the
body scan. Paradoxically, increased self-awareness is also achieved by
mindfulness meditation, but here you amplify awareness of bodily cues by
increasing gain in the insula.
On the attention scale, it is possible to be overfocused. An
exercise to address this would be open presence meditation, whereby you pursue
meditation and lightly attend to whatever object rises to the top of your
awareness, being aware of it and then letting go. You merely observe the
thought, without focusing on it. You can also arrange your environment to have
multiple things to focus on.
If you tend to be unfocused, the best exercise is
mindfulness meditation. This will increase the activity in the prefrontal
cortex. You can also arrange your environment to have fewer things to focus on.
Recall that people who are too fast to recover, too
resilient, have strong activation of the left prefrontal cortex and weaker
activation of the amygdala. If you are too fast, one way to quiet the
prefrontal cortex is to pursue tonglen meditation. If you are slow to recover,
the best way to intensify the activity of the prefrontal cortex, as in
depression, is to use mindfulness meditation.
If you tend to be puzzled, from a social intuition
standpoint, there is decreased activity in the fusiform gyrus of the visual
cortex and increased activity in the amygdala. To increase social intuition,
the first step is to increase attention. You can do this by attending to social
interactions in your environment. You can close your eyes and listen to others
talking. You can also do mindfulness meditation, making the observation of
social signals the object of your mindfulness.
If you are too overwhelmed by signals that people transmit
and want to move closer to the puzzled end where you are less aware of signals,
you can avoid looking at people's eyes as you attend to social interactions.
You can also limit your social interactions to specific times of the day.
And finally, we have sensitivity to context. People with
PTSD tend to be tuned out, i.e. unaware of the context. The treatment for PTSD
is exposure therapy. The initial stages of exposure therapy involve the
imagination of being exposed to some element of the stressor while attending to
your breath. One is asked to imagine situations that put one closer and closer
to the perceived threat, while pursuing relaxation breaths.
Thus, there is evidence for emotional styles that have
neural correlates. These can be observed and measured. Our emotional style
plays a significant part in our physical and psychological well-being. We are
able to change our emotional style for the better and improve our physical and
emotional well-being. Various forms of meditation can have a positive influence
on our emotional style and are then useful in leading to healthy changes."
End of Gary's notes.
Our discussion of a summary of this book entailed some of the following comments.
Both Todd and Tom agree that by breathing through the nostrils it is possible to end a panic attach. Tom advises to also smile while breathing through the nostrils and concentrating on the breath. This can also be used to treat chronic pain. Actors use it to get past stage fright. It is used in the La Maze method of childbirth.
One can carry this treatment or investigation still further by just asking in a noncommittal way: "Isn't that interesting? It helps!. Then most people ask themselves "How is this occurring?" Why does the panicky feeling or the pain improve? That adds even more improvement.
Notably although the panic goes away, the anger does not. And that is OK, because it is important to address and allow the anger to occur, to accept it, even embrace it. This is the correct healthy way to deal with the anger.
Intrinsic to Buddhism is the idea that "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." One can choose whether to suffer or not, and of course the Buddhist eightfold path offers ways to choose not to suffer.
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