by Zeev Nitsan
Synchronization also exists in the sense of a subconscious merger with the rhythms of the other. The lower pathway is in possession of most of the neural oscillators that determine the shooting rhythm and the frequency of activity; thus, the lion’s share of their activity derives from the nonconscious kingdom.
The synchronization is partially based on nonvocal language—the body language.
Thus, in a wireless neural network, emotional infection sometimes leads to energetic synchronization between the brains, related to cognitive and physiological functions, which crosses the skull barrier between the two brains.
A successful merger between two brains leads to a situation in which one brain’s output becomes the other brain’s input, and vice versa, in the sense of the reference point according to which they mutually “calibrate themselves” and metaphorically dance according to matching choreography.
The expiration of such synchronization usually leads to the expiration of the dialogue. When two people are having a conversation and one of them (or both) feels that the conversation has exhausted itself, they step out of synchronization (which is reflected, when it still exists, in nonverbal physical gestures that match the topic of conversation, timely looks, and facial expressions that fit the situation) and, by that, a silent signal that indicates that the conversation should come to an end is given.
Different levels of mental and physical energy among the participants of the interaction might constitute a significant obstacle to its success.
Many parents of young children are familiar with situations in which there is a lack of compatibility (desynchronization) of energy levels: when they return from work, exhausted, their little child has just woken up from his afternoon’s nap and he is vital and full of energy—the energies of parent and child are desynchronized. Thus, the famous claim that all mothers are glad when their children, as cute and precious as they are, finally fall asleep. In situations of energetic synchronization, the duet of interaction between parent’s brain and child’s brain is much more melodic.
The sounds of silence: Music is based on single sounds, and the rhythmic organization (the intervals between sounds) determined by the internal metronome of the musician has a significant effect on the quality of the music. The famous violinist Isaac Stern once said that all the people who were certified in a school of music knew how to read notes, as he did. Stern added that real art resides in the silence between the notes, and that this is where emotions and talents are hidden.
Listening to music together creates a sort of “common metronome” that synchronizes the brains of the listeners, and, usually, emotional synchronization that crosses skulls’ boundaries and matches the nature of the musical piece is created, as well.
Some find similarities between social behaviors that are composed of single activities of numerous individuals grouped together (i.e., social processes conducted by multiple participants) and the principles that derive from thermodynamics rules and the Brownian motion of molecules in a solution. And, similar to the different levels of solidarity in different human societies, it is possible to refer to the human texture of a society as existing in between a homogeneous solution and heterogeneous mix.
The Modality of Socialization
A famous study estimates the “people distance” that links any person to any other person on Earth as six or seven. In other words, a course of six to seven people, each one of whom knows a reference group that is closer and closer to the desirable person, leads from a housewife in the suburbs of Bogota, Colombia, to Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace in Britain. This seemingly proximity, however, conceals the fact that sometimes the skip from one acquaintance to the other is like a skip from one cultural galaxy to another.
The rules of this social chess game, which are based on inter-personal psychology, are much more complex than the rules of an ordinary game of chess.
The mask of mannerism we wear is partially transparent with respect to other people who are familiar with the secrets of the algorithm of socialization, which is considered a norm in the society in which we function. Deeper interaction usually requires the creation of unique contents in our brain that do not derive from general, non-unique behavioral codes.
Each period changes the pattern of socialization among people’s brains. Thus, for example, the communes that were popular across the western world in the 1960s were formed as a microcosmos in which the psychological climate was often characterized by sweeping juvenile joy, which served as a protective wall against the winds that were blowing outside. Socialization, then, was often based on holding a common ideological set of beliefs and served as a greenhouse in which additional insights grew, often in the image of the ones that preceded them. The period we live in is characterized by winds of change as, some people claim, are well described in the words of Lev Tolstoy in his book War and Peace: “…multitude of people in which no one is close, no one is far.” In the era of the Internet, many people have replaced participating in “flesh and blood” community activities with alternative participation in activities of a virtual community. The possibilities of Internet socialization rewrite the experience of human socialization (for better or for worse).
The critics of online socialization claim that once we became “friends of everyone” on the social media, we forgot how to be a “friend of someone.” We became “wholesalers,” in the sense of proposing friendship that minimizes the individual value of each of our friends. We prefer “instant friendships” that are formed by a keyboard’s clicking to building a friendship attachment as we did in the past, through face-to-face meetings and heart-to-heart talks that are not mediated by technology.
The range of socialization possibilities allows a higher degree of selectivity with respect to choosing our friends, in the spirit of the saying “Friends are the selected family” (as opposed to the biological reality, in which we were born to a family that was not chosen by us). This is, perhaps, the advantage of “socialization technology.” Many of us, however, have a virtual mega-family, whose members have temporary, superficial relationships as a routine—but real friendship, which is based on long-term relationship, is rare. Some might say that, in this era, the more friends we have, the lonelier we are. The tribal fire was put out; the circle of people who used to sit around it, shoulder-to-shoulder, has evaporated, and now many of us are isolated within the walls of our electronic cave, trying to reinvent a “tribe” whose members are represented by pixels on the computer screen.
As technology progresses, the virtual world simulates reality in a way that becomes more and more reliable and blurs the borderline between truth and fiction even further, to a point at which it is hard to see through the screen that distinguishes between reality and virtual reality.
Culture, which is mediated by technology, shapes our brain more and more intensely as years go by. At the same time, the skills of inter-personal, direct relations are dying out. As the poet T.S. Eliot commented in 1963, when television started its campaign of conquering the hearts (and brains) of people as preferred mode of recreation, “Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.” The impersonal nature of mass entertainment has contributed, and still contributes, to a decrease in the value of inter-personal, direct interaction and changes the activity patterns of our social brain.
The Journeys of the Brain in Terra Sexica (the Land of Sex)
Brain areas that mediate our sexual behavior are approximately two times bigger in the brain of an average man compared to those in an average brain of a woman.
The sexual desire (libido) is like a generator that generates tension, in a changing pattern, and is tuned to sexual behavior that results in relief and decrease of tension, and so on, in a repetitive pattern.
The libido is intensified by testosterone in both men and women, and among women by estrogen as well.
The potion in which our brain is immersed dur
ing an orgasm is composed mostly of a spurt of the neural transmitters dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins. Immediately after an orgasm, the level of oxytocin rises among both men and women.
Stress as an Aphrodisiac or its Opposite
It seems that cortisol, the stress hormone, has an inverted effect on the brain of women and men in terms of the tendency to fall in love. Women in stress do not tend to establish a romantic relationship, whereas among men, stress and accompanying cortisol act as an aphrodisiac that increases their craving for female company.
Among men, reward-driven brain areas become alert at times of stress, whereas the same brain areas become subdued among women.
The Day Before the Cigarette After
The complexity of the female orgasmic process has led many researchers in the field to think that, often, a woman’s ability to experience an orgasm depends on the collection of experiences she has undergone during the previous twenty-four hours. This is the average period of time of the female’s pregame. The average pregame time required for men is about three minutes.
On a Journey to the Supernova
Studies have shown that a necessary (though not sufficient) state for female’s orgasm is a sense of relaxation, whose main expression is a decrease in the activity of the amygdala and… warm feet.
An average woman requires three to ten times longer than the average man in order to reach orgasm.
A possible explanation for that lies in the fact that studies have shown that the chances of becoming pregnant increase when the woman reaches orgasm after the ejaculation of the man. Thus, if a woman wishes to get pregnant, the man should not act like a gentleman and finish last.
A Brain in Love—Under the Spell of Romantic Love
Love and attachment are basic layers originating in our evolutionary and cultural heritage.
Thus, for example, the first time the expression “not good” appears in the Bible, is in the verse “It is not good that the human being should be alone.”
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, love moves the sun and the stars. Love in its version of “romantic love” for the masses, in which people select the object of their love, is a young phenomenon in terms of historical review. In the absence of reliable historiography, some place the creation of romantic love in the Renaissance period, from where it embarked on a journey to conquer the heart of the world.
In brain-imaging studies, it was found that, during the formation of the process of falling in love, the most active areas in women’s brain are those that process memory, attention, and intuition processes. On the other hand, among men, excessive activity was found in the areas in charge of processing visual input. Thus, we might claim that the pattern of “love at first sight” is mainly a male pattern.
Many evolutionary psychologists believe that, in the “casino of match-making,” our brain directs us to gamble on the one it feels has the chance of yielding maximal “genetic yield.”
About four hundred mature eggs are produced in a female body throughout the years of fertility. The male body ejaculates, during orgasm, about 250 million sperms. These great gaps, with regard to the availability of reproductive cells, have contributed to the development of different courting and reproduction strategies among men and women.
On the other hand, nowadays a big part of our repertoire of behaviors above the covers and under them does not obey the evolutionary dictate that is directed at conception and procreation.
The Secret Cocktail in Which Cupid’s Arrows Are Immersed
The hormone cocktail in our brain is like a chief choreographer of the communication gestures between men and women.
The romantic dance takes part considerably according to the directions of hormonal choreography. The hormones are the “application assistants” of desire—the invisible threads that move the marionette of urges in our brain.
The intoxicating cocktail smeared over the arrows of Cupid is created from a mix of oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine, phenylethylamine, testosterone, estrogen, etc., whose level within our brain increases at the time of falling in love.
The oxytocin and opioids come together and lead to the sense of pleasant relaxation we feel when we are close to our lovers and they are also attached to the orgasmic experience.
As for the level of testosterone at the time of falling in love, opposite changes take place in the female brain and the male brain: among men in love, the level of testosterone in the brain decreases, while the level of testosterone among women increases. In this sense, we might say that, at the time of falling in love, the female brain becomes a little “masculine” and the male brain becomes a little “feminine.”
The level of serotonin in a brain in love is greatly decreased (thus, some think that antidepressants that are based on increasing the level of serotonin at the communication junctions between neurons decrease depression and the tendency to fall in love and, in this sense, serve as the opposite version of love potions).
It seems that there is not a single soul on Earth who does not oppose the replacing of the bill of intimate love with coins of neurotransmitters’ mixture, though this intuitive opposition is not sufficient to blunt the sword of heartbreaking facts that cause us to act, at least partially, as marionettes that move according to the instructions of the threads of biochemistry. On the other hand, the claim that a complex phenomenon like love can be fully explained by the biochemistry discipline is haughtiness whose pretension is not supported by sufficient evidence.
The Nectar in the Absence of . . .
The period that comes right after separation from a significant person in our life is described as the time in which that person is present in our life more than ever. When a person who is important to us vanishes from our world, his mental representation often appears frequently on the screen of our consciousness close to the time of disappearance.
The absence of the loved one induces in the spouse’s brain a “withdrawal syndrome” that also has a biochemical expression, although it is usually referred to only as a “mental phenomenon.”
The Minus is Missing from Love Arithmetic
When we are in love, our brain is prone to avoid critical thinking about the weaknesses of our loved one. The minus sign (-) is missing from the arithmetic of romantic love. The areas that are in charge of anxiety—mostly the amygdala and the cingulate gyrus, which is thought to have a major role in the doubtful brain—are active, as if they are on a go-slow strike, and their output reduces significantly. Hidden from the burning sun of reality, in the dim shadow of romantic love, our uncompromising willingness to compromise thrives.
“The terror of the ideal” is a frequent companion of romantic love, and it dictates an outline that does not match the plane of reality.
Romantic love—a kingdom whose capital is a dream palace, whose anthem is “paradise now”—is a place desired by everybody, although its rules are illogical.
Some see it as a journey, during which people are looking for their own happiness—within the happiness of the loved one or, alternately, their self, within the self of others. When physical intimacy is accompanied by emotional intimacy, the separate being of one person is melted and merged into the being of the other person.
The duration of romantic love is limited. There are not any safety nets for the acrobats of the show of romantic love, and sooner or later the lack of a safety net becomes apparent.
The ingredients of the intoxicating cocktail, in which Cupid’s arrow are immersed and that floods our brain during falling in love, change as time goes by, and their intoxicating effect vanishes. Numerous researchers indicate a period of three to four years, similar to the life expectancy of romantic love, before the burning thread of romance perishes. There is a teleological explanation to this phenomenon, according to which this is the estimated period of time during which the craving is realized by an act of lovemaking whose result—the fruit of love—the offspring—reaches partial independence.
And what comes after romantic lo
ve? On the “day after,” the possible scenarios range from relationship characterized by deep affection and respect (a sort of quiet love—as is common among married couples who live in relative harmony for a long period of time) to losing interest and returning to the hunting fields for the next prey.
The Brain in an Intimate Relationship
Love and marriage—or was Frank Sinatra right in his song?
“Arranged marriages” are popular in traditional societies. The families of the designated bride and groom arrange the treaty of marriage, and the ones who are married accept the verdict.
Through a psychological questionnaire called “Rubin’s questionnaire,” which quantifies the illusive intensity of love, researchers have attempted to assess the height of the love flames in various marriage scenarios in different societies. The averaging of results revealed that the flames of love among Indian couples who married by choice are not stable, which is similar to the unstable pattern that is common among western couples who married by choice and out of love: at first, the flames are very high, and then they become shorter, as a reflection of the decrease in the intensity of love. On the other hand, in arranged marriages, the situation is inverted: the height of the love flames at the beginning is low, but the flames become higher and higher as time goes by. Within five years, the height of the flames in both types of marriages becomes even, but it follows two contradicting trends: in cases of marriage by choice, love loses power, and, on the other hand, in cases of arranged marriages, it becomes greater. Ten years after getting married, the “love dial” among those whose marriage was arranged points to a value two times higher than the value pointed to by the dial of those who married out of love and by choice. A possible explanation for that is that couples in arranged marriages, in which one of the spouses is not particularly underprivileged, “learn to love” their spouses differently, and they are less affected by the whims and limited time of romantic love.
