By contrast, corresponding areas that judge objects have to rev up in order to operate. This may explain why we make judgments about people around a tenth of a second more quickly than we do about things—these parts of the brain have a continual head start. In any social encounter this same circuitry springs into action, making judgments of like or dislike that predict the course of their relationship, or whether there will be one at all.
The progression of brain activity begins with a quick decision involving the cingulate that spreads via spindle cells to heavily linked areas, especially the OFC. These low-road networks extend widely to reverberating circuits throughout the emotional areas. This network stirs a general sense that, with help from the high road, can develop into a more conscious reaction—whether it is an outright action or simply a silent understanding, as it was with Maggie Verver.
The OFC-cingulate circuitry springs into action whenever we choose the best response from many possibilities. This circuitry appraises all we experience, assigning value—liking or disliking—and so it shapes our very sense of meaning, of what matters. This emotional calculus, some now argue, represents the fundamental value system that the brain uses to organize our functioning, if only by deciding our priorities in any given moment. That makes this neural node crucial in our social decision-making—the guesses we continually make that determine our success or failure in relationships.19
Consider the staggering brain speed of such realizations in social life. In the first moment of an encounter with someone, these neural areas make their initial judgment pro or con in just one-twentieth of a second.20
Then there’s the question of how we will react to the person concerned. Once the like-dislike decision registers firmly in the OFC, it guides neural activity there for another fifth of a second. Nearby prefrontal areas, operating in parallel, offer up information about social context, using a more refined sensibility such as what reactions are appropriate to the moment.
The OFC, drawing on data such as context, strikes a balance between a primal impulse (get out of here) and what works best (make an acceptable excuse for leaving). We experience what the OFC decides not as a conscious understanding of the rules guiding the decision but as a feeling of “rightness.”
In short, the OFC helps guide what we do once we know how we feel about someone. By inhibiting raw impulse, the OFC orchestrates actions that serve us well—at the very least, by keeping us from doing or saying something we would regret.
This sequence happens not just once but continually, during any social interaction. Our primary social guiding mechanisms, then, rely on a stream of rough emotional inclinations: if we like her, one repertoire springs into action; if we loathe him, quite another. And should our feelings shift as the interaction goes on, the social brain quietly adjusts what we say and do accordingly.
What goes on during these eyeblinks is crucial for a satisfying social life.
HIGH-ROAD CHOICES
A woman I know tells me how troubling she finds her sister, who because of a mental disorder has become prone to attacks of anger. While at times the two are warm and close, without warning the sister will become sharply adversarial, paranoid in her accusations.
As my friend put it, “Every time I get close to her, she hurts me.”
And so my friend has begun to insulate herself against what she experiences as an “emotional assault,” by not returning every phone call right away and by not scheduling as much time together with her sister as they used to. And if she hears her sister’s voice in an angry tone on her answering machine, she’ll wait a day or two before returning her call, to give her time to cool down.
Still, she cares about her sister and wants to stay close. So when they do talk and her sister lashes out, she reminds herself of the mental disorder, which helps her not take the anger so personally. Her inner mental judo shields her from a toxic contagion.
While the automatic nature of emotional contagion makes us vulnerable to coming down with distressing emotions, that is just the beginning of the story. We also have the capacity for making strategic moves to counter contagion as needed. If a relationship itself has become destructive, these mental tactics can create a protective emotional distance.
The low road operates at hyperspeed, in the snap of a finger. But we are not at the mercy of all that comes at us so fast. When the low road’s instant linkage pains us, the high road can protect us.
The high road gives us choices largely via wiring in the circuits linked to the OFC. One stream of messages shuttles back and forth to low-road centers that spawn our initial emotional reactions, including simple contagions. Meanwhile the OFC shunts a parallel flow upward to trigger our thoughts about that reaction. That upward branch allows us to make a more nuanced response, one that takes into account a refined understanding of what’s going on. These parallel roads manage every encounter, and the OFC is the switching station between them.
The low road, with its ultrarapid mirror neuron links, operates as a sort of sixth sense, prompting us to feel with another person even though we may be only vaguely aware of our attunement. The low road triggers a sympathetic emotional state without an intervening thought: instant primal empathy.
The high road, by contrast, opens up as we monitor such a mood shift and intentionally attend to the person we’re talking with, to understand better what has happened. This brings our thinking brain, especially the prefrontal centers, into play. The high road adds enormous flexibility to the far more fixed and limited repertoire of the low road. As the milliseconds tick away and the high road activates its vast array of neural branches, the possibilities for response increase exponentially.
So while the lower route gives us instantaneous emotional affinity, the higher route generates a more sophisticated social sense, which in turn guides an appropriate response. That flexibility draws on the resources of the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center.
Prefrontal lobotomies, a psychiatric fad in the 1940s and 1950s, surgically disconnected the OFC from other areas of the brain. (The “surgery” was often primitive, the medical equivalent of inserting a screwdriver alongside the eyeball, slicing into the buttery brain.) At the time neurologists had little idea of the specific functions of the zones of the brain, let alone the OFC. But they found that previously agitated mental patients became placid after a lobotomy, a major plus from the viewpoint of those running the bedlam of vast mental asylums that warehoused psychiatric patients of the day.
While a lobotomized patient’s cognitive abilities remained intact, two then-mysterious “side effects” were observed: the patients’ emotions were flattened or absent altogether, and they became disoriented in social situations new to them. Today neuroscience knows that that was because the OFC orchestrates the interplay between the social world and how we feel, telling us how to act. Lacking that interpersonal math, the lobotomized patients were utterly confused in any novel social situation.
ECONOMIC ROAD RAGE
Say you and a stranger are given ten dollars to split any way you can agree. The stranger offers you two dollars, take it or leave it. The decision to take it seems perfectly reasonable, as any economist can tell you.
But if you take the two dollars, the person making you the offer gets to keep eight. So reasonable or no, most people become indignant—and, if offered just one dollar, outraged.
That occurs over and over when people play what behavioral economists call the Ultimatum Game, where one partner makes proposals that the other can only accept or reject. If all offers are rejected, both end up with nothing.
A very low offer here can trigger the economic equivalent of road rage.21 Long used in simulations of economic decision-making, the Ultimatum Game has been merged with social neuroscience through the work of Jonathan Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior at Princeton University. His group studies partners who are playing the Ultimatum Game while their brains are scanned.
Cohen ha
s pioneered in “neuro-economics,” the analysis of the hidden neural forces that drive both rational and irrational decision-making in our economic lives—an arena where the high and low roads both play powerful roles. Much of this research centers on the brain areas that are active during interpersonal situations that have ready implications for understanding the irrational forces that move economic markets.
“If the first guy offers just one dollar,” says Cohen, “the other’s response might well be ‘Go to hell.’ But according to standard economic theory, that’s irrational, because a dollar is better than nothing. This result drives economists crazy, because their theories assume people will always try to maximize their rewards. In fact, people will sometimes be willing to sacrifice up to a month’s salary just to punish an unfair offer.”
When the Ultimatum Game is played with only one round, lowball offers often result in anger. But if the players are allowed multiple rounds, then the two are more likely to reach a satisfactory bargain.
The Ultimatum Game does not just pit one person against another; within each of them it creates a tug-of-war at the junction of the high and low roads in their cognitive and emotional systems. The high road relies heavily on the prefrontal cortex, critical for rational thought. The orbitofrontal area, as we have seen, lies at the bottom of the prefrontal area, policing its border with the low road’s emotionally impulsive centers like the amygdala, down in the midbrain.
By observing which neural circuits are at work during this microeconomic transaction when high and low roads are at odds, Cohen has been able to separate the influence of the rational prefrontal cortex from the “go to hell” rashness of the low road—in this case, the insula, which can react during certain emotions as strongly as the amygdala. The more powerful the low road’s reactivity, Cohen’s brain scans show, the less rational will be the players’ reactions from the economic perspective. But the more active the prefrontal area, the more balanced will be the outcome.22
In an essay called “The Vulcanization of the Brain” (a reference to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, the hyperrational character from planet Vulcan), Cohen focuses on the interaction between high-road abstract neural processing, where information that is valenced pro or con is considered in a careful and deliberative way, and low-road operations, where emotions and predispositions to act rashly run strong. Which prevails, he argues, depends on the forcefulness of the prefrontal area, that mediator of rationality.
Over the course of human brain development, the size of the prefrontal cortex has largely been what set us apart from other primates, which have much smaller prefrontal areas. Unlike other parts of the brain that are specialized for a particular job, this executive center takes a bit more time to do its jobs. But like some all-purpose brain-booster, the prefrontal area is spectacularly flexible, able to engage in a greater range of tasks than any other neural structure.
“The prefrontal cortex,” Cohen told me, “has changed the human world so that nothing is the same anymore physically, economically, or socially.”
Even as human genius spews a dizzying array of ever-evolving realities—gas guzzlers and oil wars, industrialized farming and overly abundant calories, e-mail and identity theft—our inventive prefrontal circuitry aids us in navigating through the very dangers it has helped create. Many of those perils and temptations stem from the more primal cravings of the low road as it confronts the explosion of opportunities for indulgence and abuse created by the high road. Surviving them depends equally heavily on the high road.
As Cohen put it, “We have more easy access to whatever we desire, like sugar and fat. But we have to balance our short- and long-term interests.”
That balance comes via the prefrontal cortex, which wields the power to say no to impulse—squelching that reach for a second round of molten chocolate mousse—or that violent retaliation to a slight.23 In such moments the high road masters the low.
NO TO IMPULSE
A man in Liverpool, England, diligently played the same numbers in the National Lottery week after week: 14, 17, 22, 24, 42, and 47.
One day while watching television he saw that very sequence of numbers come up as the winner for the two-million-pound prize.
But this week, for once, he had forgotten to renew his ticket on time. It had expired just days before.
Overwhelmed by disappointment, he killed himself.
A news item on that tragedy was cited in a scientific article on the experience of regret over making a poor decision.24 Such feelings stir in the OFC, driving pangs of remorse and, most likely, the self-recrimination that so unhinged that poor lottery player. But patients with lesions in key circuits of the OFC lack all such feelings of regret; no matter how bad their choice, they are utterly unfazed by missed opportunities.
The OFC exerts a “top-down” modulation of the amygdala, the source of unruly emotional surges and impulses.25 Like small children, patients who have lesions in these inhibitory circuits typically lose the ability to suppress emotional impulses, unable for example to keep themselves from mimicking someone’s scowling face. Lacking this emotional safety device, their rambunctious amygdala has free rein.
These patients are also unfazed by what other people would find mortifying social gaffes. They may greet a total stranger with a hug and a kiss, or make the kind of tasteless bathroom jokes that a three-year-old might find delightful. They blithely reveal the most embarrassing details about themselves to anyone within earshot, unaware of having done anything the least untoward.26 Even though they can explain rationally the proper social norms for propriety, they are oblivious to those norms as they break them. With the OFC handicapped, the high road seems powerless to guide the low.27
The OFC also goes awry this way in those war veterans who, on seeing a battle scene on the evening news or hearing a truck backfire, are flooded with traumatic memories from their own wartime nightmares. The culprit is an overactive amygdala, one that sends surges of panic in mistaken reaction to cues vaguely reminiscent of the original trauma. Ordinarily the OFC would evaluate such primal feelings of fear and clarify that it’s just a television show or a truck we’re hearing rather than enemy guns.
While it is kept in line by high-road systems, the amygdala cannot play the brain’s bad boy. The OFC contains one of the array of neurons that can inhibit those amygdala-driven surges, that can just say no to limbic impulses. As low-road circuitry sends up primitive emotional impulses ( I feel like yelling, or She’s making me so nervous I want to get out of here), the OFC evaluates them in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of the moment (This is a library, or It’s only our first date) and modulates them accordingly, acting as an emotional brake.
When those brakes falter, we act inappropriately. Consider the results from a study where college students who did not know each other came to a lab and were “virtually” put together in pairs in an online chat room to get acquainted.28 About one in five of these Internet conversations quickly became startlingly sexual, with explicit terms, graphic discussions of sex acts, and outright solicitation of sex.
But when the experimenter who conducted these sessions later read the transcripts, he was astounded. As far as he had seen while escorting the students in and out of the cubicles, they all had been low key, unassuming, and invariably polite—completely out of keeping with their uninhibited licentiousness online.
Presumably none would have dared plunge into such blatantly sexual talk had they instead been having a live, face-to-face conversation with someone they had met only minutes before. That is just the point: during in-person interactions we loop, getting an ongoing flow of feedback, mainly from the person’s facial expressions and tone of voice, which instantly tell us when we are on track and off.
Something like the out-of-place sex talk in the lab has been documented ever since the earliest years of the Internet: “flaming,” in which adults make childishly offensive comments online.29 Ordinarily the high road keeps us within bounds. But the Internet lacks t
he sort of feedback the OFC needs to help us stay on track socially.
ON SECOND THOUGHT
How sad. That poor woman standing there all alone, in front of that church, sobbing. The funeral must be going on inside. She must miss horribly whomever she’s lost….
On second thought, that’s not a funeral. There’s a white limo decorated with pretty flowers in front of the church—it’s a wedding! How sweet…
Such were the thoughts of a woman as she studied the photo of a woman weeping by a church. Her first glimpse suggested to her the scene of a funeral, and she felt herself fill with sadness, her eyes welling up with tears in sympathy.
But her second thought changed the photo’s impact entirely. Seeing the woman as attending a wedding and imagining that happy scene morphed her own sadness into delight. As we alter our perceptions, we can change our emotions.
That small fact of everyday life has been deconstructed into brain mechanics via a brain imaging study done by Kevin Ochsner.30 Just thirty-something, Ochsner has already become a leading figure in this fledgling discipline. When I visited him in his neatly arranged office, an oasis of order in Schermerhorn Hall, the musty rabbit warren that houses Columbia’s psychology department, he explained his methods.
In Ochsner’s research a volunteer at Columbia’s fMRI Research Center lies perfectly still on a gurney in the long, dark tube of an MRI machine. That willing soul wears what looks like a birdcage placed over his head; it detects radio waves emitted by atoms in the brain. A semblance of human contact comes via a mirror artfully placed at a forty-five-degree angle over the cage that reflects an image projected from the far end of the gurney, where the subject’s feet stick out of the massive device.31
It’s hardly a natural setting, but the setup renders meticulous maps of how the brain reacts to specific stimulus, be it a photo of someone in abject terror or, via earphones, a baby’s laugh. Imaging studies using these methods have allowed neuroscientists to chart with unprecedented precision the zones of the brain that intertwine in orchestrated action during the vast variety of person-to-person encounters.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 9
