Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Rewires the Brain – The Marginalian

“Lights and shadows keep flying in my inner sky, and I know not whence they come or whither they go; and I do not much question it,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in his diary one spring day in 1840. “It is dangerous to look too lightly in such situations. In earthly language, but expect the soul to make itself understood.”

A century after him, the French philosopher Simone Weil—another rare insight into the depths of the soul—thought about the paradox of friendship, noting that “it is a mistake to wish to be understood before we have clarified ourselves.”

For one to be able to understand another – to understand what it is love to be another – it can be a great challenge to communicate and live together, because each of us goes through a life that is not clear to us. We aim at the analytical mind – that thousand years of a wonderful tool in the making of evolution – in the light, but closing the lens of self-understanding is a very important thing: Emotion interferes with the eye piece of life, often without our awareness, changing what we see and making us react to what we are but to what we are. Anyone with moderate self-awareness can face the feeling of having a feeling of anger or resentment or anger descend on him that seems to be out of the sky, when in fact it comes from an invisible and omnipresent place of unprocessed feeling: Who among us has never, in human time, intended to be angry at someone who is wrong by filling another wrong thing in his mind. of injustice.

Why emotions so easily obscure the lens of experience is what three psychologists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore in detail. A General Theory of Love (public library) – a book of total revelation that remains, in my reading life, the single most enlightening inquiry into the nature of emotions and the psychological upbringing of why we feel what we feel and how this shapes us to be who we are.

Drawing on the analogy of music – which may be the basis of our sense of life precisely because it shares a basic neuropsychological approach with emotion – Lewis, Amini, and Lannon explore the structure of feeling without neural notation, illuminating the interdependence and difference between emotion and spirit:

Emotions can escape a musical note. When a pianist strikes a key, the hammer collides with the same string inside his instrument and sets it to vibrate at its characteristic frequency. As the pitch of the vibration decreases, the sound falls off and dies. Emotions work in the same way: an event touches a responsive key, an inner auditory tone is heard, and it immediately becomes silent. (The idioms “heartbreaking” and “hitting me hard” have found a home in our language for this reason.) Increased activity in emotional circuits produces not only sound, but (among other things) facial expressions. When neural excitation exceeds the shadowed threshold of awareness, what appears to be a feeling – a conscious sense of emotional openness. As neural activity decreases, the intensity of hearing decreases, but some residual activity continues in those circuits after the sensation is no longer felt. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, emotions appear suddenly in the play of our lives to move the players in the right direction, and then dissipate into nothingness, leaving a vague impression of their former existence.

Against this emotional background, the atmospheric dance plays, shaking us into chaos with its persuasive beats:

Emotions they exist because of the musical aspect of the work of the nerves, the lower part is not audible to our conscious ears… The mood is a state of being more ready to feel a certain emotion. When the emotion is a single note, clearly struck, hanging for a moment in the still air, the shape is an extended, almost inaudible echo that follows. Consciousness registers a fading level of activation in sensory circuits little or no. And so the upsetting events of the day may leave us with an emotional reaction waiting under our notice… As the emotional activity that creates a certain feeling decreases gradually, it is easier to get upset within the emotional window.

Through these invisible pulsations and resonances, our present experience changes with the echoes of the past:

The sound of music causes physical objects to vibrate with its frequency, which is an act of sympathetic trance. The soprano breaks a wine glass with the right note as she shakes the curved glass and her voice. Emotional tones in the brain establish a harmony between the living and the past in the same way. The brain is not made up of cords, and there are no oscillating fibers inside the cranium. But in the nervous system, information echoes down the fibers that make up the synergistic nerve networks. When an emotion strikes, it stirs up past memories of the same feeling.

[…]

A certain emotion revives all the memories of its previous actions. Every emotion (after the first) is a multi-layered experience, only a part of which reflects the present, sensory world.

Over time, our lived experiences thus stimulate the brain, creating a powerful impulse for emotional habit. What we have heard comes down to shaping what we hear more easily and simply, unraveling the harp of truth. We did not help to see the world as it is but as we are. At the heart of this disagreement are Lewis, Amini, and Lannon Limbic marketers – pre-set patterns of interpretation of incoming sensory data, densely networked and embedded in the limbic brain, are activated so reflexively and powerfully that they can mask and override the raw signal of reality.

Limbic Attractors are a source of blindness that makes us invisible to ourselves, but they are also a portal to transcend our limitations by connecting with other minds, sympathetic and sonorous with different emotional tones. Using the same harmonics – nowhere more powerful than in the limbic connection we call love – we can re-name our song with an emotional pattern:

Because people remember through neurons, we tend to see more of what we've seen, re-hear what we've heard over and over, think what we've always thought. Our minds are burdened by the slow state of information… No one can think his way around his Attractors, as they are embedded in the structure of thought… Because the senses of the legs and control connect the minds of people in a continuous exchange of influential signals, the whole brain is part of a local network that shares information – including the Attractors.

[…]

Through the transmission of the Limbic influence of the Attractor's influence, one person can attract others to his emotional appearance. All of us, when we engage in a relationship, fall under the gravitational influence of the other's emotional world, at the same time as we bend their emotional mind to our own. Each relationship is a binary constellation, a hot flux of altered energy fields, deep and ancient influences arising and felt, felt and emanated.

In any such binary star system, this limbic resonance allows two people to harmonize their Attractors, fine-tuning the different musical tones that flow easily from each consciousness – Pythagoras' music of the spheres and Kepler's celestial harmony, right here on Earth, in the infinite space of the human heart:

In a relationship, one mind updates the other; another heart changes its partner. This amazing legacy of our collective nature as mammals and emotional beings is limbic updating: the ability to reprogram the emotional parts of our loved ones, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's immobilized pathway reinforces itself. Who we are and who we are depends, in part, on whom we love.

Complete this lighting piece completely A General Theory of Love with poet Ronald Johnson on story, music, and mind, then revisit José Ortega y Gasset on how our love shapes our character and George Saunders on breaking our patterns to break our hearts.