We're all no doubt familiar with the sensation of fear undercutting rational thinking and response. Some stimulus triggers the willies, and suddenly your reactions become exaggerated well beyond what you'd consider normal for somebody else.
Psychologist Martha Stout, who helped make sense of a particular kind of senselessness with her alarming book "The Sociopath Next Door," gives a fascinating biological account of how fear short-circuits reason in her more recent "The Paranoia Switch."
Under normal circumstances, the hippocampus part of the brain acts as an efficient and wise traffic cop, integrating sensation with emotional input and assigning ordered reactions accordingly. The result is that after a normal-to-pleasant event, you can mentally reconstruct not just the event but the emotions associated with it. You can build a story, allowing the event to inform and enrich future interactions with the world.
If an event sets off your fear response, however, your hippocampus quickly gets overwhelmed with the urgent emotional messages being broadcast by your limbic system. Memories of the event come together haphazardly and in fragments. "They remain in the brain as incoherent memory traces and sensations, constituting a cruel little hair trigger, a paranoia switch."
When something happens that reminds of you of that traumatic event, you have no coherent story to guide your emotional reactions. Instead, you're stuck in that greatest of fear factories, the unknown, re-experiencing that original limbic tornado.
Fortunately, our brains don't stop at the hippocampus. We have that big ol' cortex, which allows us -- with a lot of practice, attention and effort -- to build reasonable, useful stories even around the nasty stuff.
For many years, my computer monitor has been adorned with one of my favorite quotes relating to emotional life, mental well-being, etc:
"Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions."
All along, that line has been attributed to Hafiz, the mystic poet of 14th century Iran who wrote movingly about love, God and wine.
Recently, however, it has come to my attention that the phrase actually has little, if anything, to do with Hafiz. It is from Daniel Ladinsky, by most reckoning a minor British poet who had the marketing sense to hitch his fortunes to Hafiz and a growing interest in Sufi mysticism.
The cover of "The Gift
," in which the line I so like appears, labels the work as "Poems by Hafiz, the great Sufi master. Translations by Daniel Ladinsky."
The writer is coyer in the introduction, saying his poems are "renderings" of Hafiz works meant to capture the spirit of the originals for modern readers. Further inquiry reveals Ladinsky neither speaks nor reads Persian, making his qualifications dubious for any normal conception of "translator."
Further reading of more scholarly interpretations of Hafiz's work reveal a tight formal structure that bears no resemblance to the free verse of "The Gift."
Which leaves me in a quandary. I still love that quote. But it's one thing to pass along the wisdom of Hafiz and quite another to quote "this British guy who kind of..."
Should that matter to me? Or should one accept wisdom wherever one finds it?
T
here's a lot about engineering in Tom Vanderbilt's fascinating explanation of why driving sucks, but the most intriguing ideas are of a psychological/sociological nature.
Condensed version: Driving a car is a hugely complex task we're forced to accomplish with a vital piece equipment (your brain) designed for far more basic functions.
Vanderbilt covers topics such as distraction, the inherent narcissism in being a motorist (you're always the best driver on the road) and the phenomenon of risk compensation: Make a system safer, and people with use it in a riskier way that eventually cancels out any advantage.
For my money, the most captivating idea comes as Vanderbilt tries to explain our exaggerated emotional reactions to whatever happens on the highway. If someone cuts you off or makes an inopportune U-turn (quickly emerging as the top new thrill sport in San Francisco), you're likely to get mad and defensive all out of proportion to the actual risk posed by the behavior. Likewise, if another driver does you a courtesy, you'll feel good out of proportion to the significance of what in reality will be a very minor event in your day.
Vanderbilt's explanation is that our brains are wired to handle maybe 100 or so human relationships in a lifetime, reflecting the conditions when our ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. Back then, any encounter with another person had potential life-changing significance. "Thag scowl at me. Thag no like me. Thag burn down hut!"
Evolution being what it is, that's the basic brain we're still working with. Yes, your higher cortical functions can suss out the relative significance of events if you give it time. But in the moment, your reactions are dictated by a part of the brain that does not recognize the concept of a casual, meaningless social encounter.
