Valerie Day Sings

Of all the books I have read while doing research for the Brain Chemistry For Lovers show, my absolute hands down favorite is “A General Theory of Love” by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., and Richard Lannon, M.D. I don’t know how these three M.D.’s managed it, but somehow they were able to collaborate and come up with a book that turns scientific prose into poetry.

Here’s a paragraph from the forward:

“From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains. The body’s physiology ensures that relationships determine and fix our identities. Love makes us who we are, and who we can become. In these pages we explain how and why this is so.”

And of course they totally had me when I read this:

“During the long centuries when science slumbered, humanity relied on the arts to chronicle the hearts mysterious ways. That accumulated wisdom is not to be disdained. This book, while traveling deep into the realm of science, keeps close at hand the humanism that renders such a journey meaningful. The thoughts of researchers join those of poets, philosophers and kings.”

The authors have an immense appreciation for the arts and use quotes from many great artistic and philosophical minds to underline their scientific perspective. The result is a very readable and compassionate take on our most complex and important emotion – love.

Their explanation of our “triune” brain – the reptilian brain, limbic brain and neocortex – is the best I’ve read. The authors describe the evolution of these brains, how they function, and how they work together to create the unique brain that we humans possess.

Here’s a short primer on these three brain structures courtesy of Lewis, Amini and Lannon (these are edited for brevity – for the full text – please check out the book!):

The Reptilian Brain: “The oldest or reptilian brain is a bulbous elaboration of the spinal cord. This brain houses the vital control centers – neurons that prompt breathing, swallowing and heartbeat. The startle center is here too, because a swift reaction to abrupt movement or noise is the principal reason animals have brains at all. As long as the reptilian brain survives, it will keep the heart beating, the lungs expanding and relaxing, salt and water balanced in the blood. The qualities that set us apart from other animals, or that distinguish one person from another, do not belong to this archaic conglomeration of cells.”

The Limbic Brain: “The limbic brain collects sensory information, filters it for emotional relevance, and sends outputs to the other brain areas thousands of times a day…Humans beings are immersed in a sea of social interchange, surrounded by a subtle communications network that most do not notice. The limbic brain is our internal cryptographic device, allowing us to decipher a flood of complex messages in an instant.”

The Neocortex: “ The neocortex (from the Greek for “new” and the Latin for “rind” or “bark”) is the last and, in humans, the largest of the three brains….Speaking, writing, planning , and reasoning all originate in the neocortex. So do the experience of our senses, what we know as awareness, and our conscious motor control, what we know as will….Another gift that the neocortex bestows is the skill of abstraction: every task that calls for symbolic representation, strategy, planning, or problem solving has it’s headquarters in the neocortical brain.”

So what do these different brains have to do with love? Well, the triune brain presents us with some challenges when it comes to why we love, who we fall in love with, and the path our love takes. Simply put, our newest brain - the neocortex, can help us think about love, but much of what we feel when it comes to love is not under our cognitive control.

“The scientist and the artist both speak to the turmoil that comes from a triune brain. A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times, People lack this capacity not through a deficiency of discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within it’s purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded. Our society’s love affair with mechanical devices that respond at a button-touch ill prepares us to deal with the unruly organic mind that dwells within. Anything that dies not comply must be broken or poorly designed, people now suppose, including their hearts.”

OK - so we cannot control many aspects of romantic love – like who we fall in love with and why. Does this mean that we have no free will when it comes to love? Is romantic love just nature’s way of making sure our species survives?

In Brain Chemistry For Lovers we’ve tried to take a look at these questions from the perspective of both the neocortex (the science of love) and the limbic brain (the songs of love). We discuss the brain chemicals occurring in the different stages of love (activating the speaking, writing and reasoning part of the neocortex), and then bring it on home emotionally with music. Even though lyrics activate some of the verbal areas of the brain, most music “goes limbic” – that is it goes beyond the verbal centers and straight to the heart where it is felt and understood on a more intuitive level.

In “A General Theory of Love”, the authors have this to say about the limbic brain: “The emotional brain, although inarticulate and unreasoning, can be expressive and intuitive. Like the art it is responsible for inspiring, the limbic brain can move us in ways that have only the most inexact translations in a language the neocortex can comprehend.”

It’s a challenging yet wonderful experience to go from thinking to feeling and back again in the context of this show. I’m grateful to the authors of this book for inspiring me to delve even deeper into these two different ways of perceiving that so often seem in conflict with each other yet must somehow learn to coexist. It also gives me a greater appreciation for those who have used words to somehow give voice to the incredible array of feelings we have when it comes to love – so that we might be able to share our experiences, and know we’re not alone in having them.