I wish I could do full-body fMRIs of people’s nervous systems in settings through which HHDL moves. If I could, I would find that his touch produces the colorful activation of goodwill in the brain and body. HHDL’s vocabulary of touch is as precise and imaginative as a chess master’s representation of the possibilities on the 64 squares of the chessboard. As we concluded our panel in Vancouver, HHDL tickled Paul Ekman in the ribs. In the midst of a discussion about neural plasticity, HHDL squeezed neuroscientist Richie Davidson’s earlobe. In his deep, bowed greetings with other Tibetan monks, HHDL rubs the corner of his head against that of the other monk, triggering laughter. HHDL is known to fall to the floor and wrestle with Desmond Tutu, as though the two were preteen brothers. HHDL’s genius at touch is a window into an ancient communicative system by which we can alter others’ jen ratios, spreading health and happiness to others.
VIRAL JEN
In John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart, tired of bumming smokes and meals off expatriate Americans in Tampico, Mexico, encamps with two other down-on-their-luck prospectors in the arid mountains of the Sierra Madre. They are in search of gold. As their bags of gold dust mount in weight and number, the three men confront an ancient evolutionary problem—how to build and maintain trust between nonkin. In their high chaparral camp, the opportunities for exploitation are infinite—a quick escape with the gold during the heavy sleep following a day of moving dirt, a silent murder in a desert ravine, an alliance of two ganging up on the third. In the face of the pull of exploitative self-interest, the band of desperate prospectors hold tight. They are bound together in cooperative spirit by enthusiasm, camaraderie, the reverie of the meals and clothes and farms and white picket fences they envision enjoying with their newfound fortunes, and the laughter, banter, backslapping, and firm handshakes of men cooperating.
When a mine shaft collapses on Bogart, he suffers a blow to his head. Like Muybridge, his mind shifts to the orientation of dog-eat-dog survival, and he leads the group into a nightmarish battle of distrust and exploitation. Ambiguous actions out in the desert—a partner claims to be searching under a rock for a Gila monster—appear to cynical eyes to be attempts at searching for the other’s hidden bags of gold. The language of friendship—“buddy,” “friend,” nicknames—shifts to the sharp, impersonal tones of last names. Suspicions about the imagined interests of others escalate into gun-pointing confrontations.
This high mountain drama parallels a central dynamic in the evolution of cooperation. How might cooperation, kindness and jen emerge in social groups composed of individuals who are better off pursuing self-interest? As we learned from the lessons of the tit-for-tat, an answer is found in the contagious goodness hypothesis. Simply put, cooperation and kindness will take hold in groups when jen becomes viral, when individuals can readily signal their kind intentions to others and evoke similar inclinations. In this fashion, people are less likely to experience the costs of being generous to competitive individuals, and more likely to enjoy the fruits of mutual cooperation—reciprocal trades of resources, sharing in parental care, and so on.
Jen becomes viral through behaviors that spread goodness from one individual to the next, thus setting in motion reinforcing, reciprocal cooperation. These behaviors would need to be powerful and fast, to counteract the mind’s automatic tendency to perceive threat, danger, and competition in nearby, fast-moving bundles of self-interest—namely other humans. These behaviors would need to operate on the bodies of others, to shift the nervous system away from its potent, trigger-happy fight/flight tendencies toward a physiological profile more conducive to cooperation and kindness. These contagious behaviors would need to be easy to use and readily adaptable to the close proximity of the daily interactions of our hominid predecessors. These contagious behaviors, as signals of cooperation and trust, would need to be easy to perceive and hard to feign.
The scientific study of touch reveals the tactile modality to be an ideal medium in which individuals spread goodness to others. We can readily put touch to use in the close encounters of group living—when negotiating close spaces, working together, flirting amid rivals, playing around, or allocating scarce resources. Touch triggers biochemical reactions in the recipient—activation of the orbitofrontal cortex and deactivation of the amygdala, reduced stress-related cardiovascular response, and increased neurochemicals like oxytocin—all of which promote trust and goodwill between individuals. Touch, my studies show, is the primary language of compassion, love, and gratitude—emotions at the heart of trust and cooperation. To understand why touch can make jen viral, we must first look to evolution of the largest organ of the body—the epidermis—and that five-digit wonder, our hand.
SKIN AND HAND
In humans, shifts in the morphology of our organs of communication have emerged with developments in our ultrasociality. So it is with touch: Evolutionary shifts in our skin and hands have led to a central role of touch in our ultrasocial relationships. A first big shift was the loss of most of our body hair—we became, in Desmond Morris’s famous phrasing, naked apes. Why? You may be tempted by the aquatic ape hypothesis—that for a period of our evolution we actually lived largely in the water, thus losing our hair, as other water-bound mammals such as dolphins and whales did. As readily as this hypothesis appeals to our love of lolling about in the water on hot summer days and our sense of communion with whales and dolphins, it makes little evolutionary sense. As Nina Jablonski has argued in her book Skin, water holes on the African savannah were highly dangerous places, brimming with quick-striking predators, all the more so to a species not terribly adroit in the water, as in the case of our hominid predecessors. Had we been aquatic apes, we wouldn’t have done very well in the game of survival.
The actual explanation for our hair loss is less flamboyant but eminently more sensible—we lost our hair in hominid evolution for purposes of thermoregulation. A thick carpet of body hair would have been dangerously hot on the savannah—the locale of our early evolution. In this hot, arid environment, we increasingly relied on the rich network of sweat glands distributed throughout the skin to keep ourselves cool. These glands function more effectively in the absence of hair.
One by-product of this shift toward hairlessness is that our skin evolved into a most remarkable interface between our inner and outer worlds. Human skin is the largest of our organs, weighing six pounds and covering eighteen square feet. Its distinct layers house a veritable industrial zone of biological factories accomplishing several functions essential to human survival. A rich network of blood vessels, sweat glands, and hair follicles and surrounding muscles lie under the skin. There are cells producing proteins called keratins, which account for the strength and resilience of the skin. Cells known as immigrant cells move into the skin during development from other parts of the body and accomplish three tasks. Melanocytes produce the skin’s pigment, melanin, which protects our bodies from the dangers of ultraviolet rays. Langerhans cells are part of our immune system, and represent our body’s first response to viruses and bacteria. Finally, Merkel cells reside at the ends of sensory nerves in the skin and respond to touch. Some of these cells, in particular in the arm, face, and leg, appear to respond to slow, light touch, and may be involved in the release of opioids trigged by contact from others. The skin is our protection against harmful physical agents—sharp branches, ultraviolet rays, bacteria and viruses—in the external world. As important as the skin is to keeping the bad stuff out, it is vital to bringing the good stuff in.
Just as critically, evolutionary changes in the morphology of the human hand likewise facilitated the development of the tactile language of emotion. As humans began to walk upright, the hand changed dramatically. We acquired the opposable thumb—the morphological darling of many evolutionists. We also developed more dexterous fingers. Chimp thumbs are much shorter, in relation to the rest of their hand, than the human thumb. Humans, unlike chimps or bonobos, became able to make precision grips b
etween thumb and forefinger, and power grips using the entire hand. These shifts in the morphology of the hand, most obviously, allowed our hominid predecessors to emerge as the first complex toolmakers in primate evolution, fashioning sophisticated arrowheads, clothes, baskets, and so forth. In the process, we developed profoundly expressive hands. Our hands allowed us to point with precision, a critical part of the child’s emergent understanding of the referential quality of language: Words refer to things. With the refined acrobatics of our hands and fingers, we learned to signal different objects and states with what are known as emblems—gestures that translate to words. With our hands we learned to convey internal states with specific patterns of touch.
The skin and hand evolved to enable adaptive response to heat and for tool use. Alongside these pragmatic gains, our hominid predecessors evolved a communicative system that became central to how humans form and maintain bonds. Most obviously, the skin is the platform for intimacy and sexual relations. It is a medium in which individuals in conflict channel aggression, through pinches, pokes, prods, and punches. We soothe and reassure with hands on skin. The skin and touch are a central medium in which the goodness of one individual can spread to another, resulting in high jen ratios as the primary orientation in groups.
CONTACT HIGH
Faith healers have been in human society since at least the time of the classical Greeks and Romans. Central to their repertoire of healing skills is touch. Recent neuroscience suggests that, at least in the use of touch, faith healers may have been on to something. Scientists have learned that touch is a basic reward, as potent as the sweetest of summer peaches or the scent of blooming jasmine. The progenitor of this view is Edmund Rolls, of Cambridge University, who has studied the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which, as we will recall, was damaged in Eadward Muybridge during his fateful stagecoach accident in east Texas. Rolls’s thesis is that this region of the brain processes information about basic rewards, which help individuals navigate their physical and social environments, acting in ways, presumably, that bring about more rewarding social encounters, more nutrition-rich searches for foods, and so on. He has found that sweet tastes and pleasing smells stimulate activity in the OFC, in particular in hungry animals. But there is more. He has also documented that the simple touch of the arm with a soft velvety cloth activates the OFC, so important to our understanding of how to obtain rewards. This is a remarkable finding: Touch (the right kind, of course) is as powerful and immediate a reward as chocolate or the scent of Mother to an infant. Touch is a primary color in the color scheme of pleasure, wired deep into our nervous systems.
Further scientific studies found that touch—again, the right kind—sets in motion a cascade of rewarding biochemical reactions. For example, in one study participants received a fifteen-minute Swedish massage, the type that is stock in trade at spas and now a much-appreciated service at more forward-looking airports. While participants’ Merkel cells were being pleasingly pressed, their blood was drawn. A quick neck rub to the shoulders by a stranger triggered the release of oxytocin, a neuropeptide that promotes oceanic feelings of devotion and trust. Other studies have found that massage (like Prozac) increases levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and that it reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Touch also appears to release endorphins in the recipient—a natural source of pleasure and pain relief.
Touch, then, triggers activation of the orbitofrontal cortex and the release of oxytocin and endorphins—biological platforms of social connection. Just as importantly, recent studies of maternal behavior in rats suggest that the act of touching is physiologically rewarding for the toucher. Rat mothers devote a great deal of time to licking their rat pups and coming into nose-to-nose physical contact with their offspring. Recent studies have found that rat mothers who lick their pups a lot, who touch their offspring a great deal, get surges of dopamine upon physical contact. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is involved in the pursuit of rewards; it underlies our experience of sensory pleasure. When we touch, the implication is, we get a burst of pleasure as well.
Thankfully, the benefits of touching are not limited to rat pups. Scientists have found, for example, that depressed mothers who are encouraged to touch their infants regularly and to massage them experience reduced symptoms of depression and begin to play more with their children. Elderly individuals who volunteer to give massages to infants report reductions in anxiety and depression and enhanced well-being.
Humans, then, are blessed with an inexhaustible resource of rewards—touch. Through millisecond touches in our daily living, we can provide pleasure, reward, and encouragement to others. Experimental studies have found that when teachers are randomly assigned to touch some of their students and not others with friendly pats on the back, those students who receive the rewarding touch are nearly twice as likely to volunteer comments in class. When medical doctors are experimentally assigned to touch some patients but not others, those patients who are touched in a warm fashion estimate the visit with their doctor to be two times longer than those patients who go untouched. Students touched by librarians while checking out books indicated a much more favorable attitude toward that bastion of good undergraduate fun—the library—than students who were not casually touched by the librarian. Touch is the original contact high.
TOUCH TO THRIVE
In her excellent book Touch, Tiffany Field, the world’s leading investigator of touch, recounts a moving story about an incident in a nursing home for the elderly. Two elderly residents, a man and a woman, were found missing during the dinner hour. They were soon discovered in a small utility closet, embracing one another like old friends. The staff quickly deemed them “sex offenders” and prevented them from further contact. Isolated, they withdrew from friends and families. Within weeks they were dead.
It is not a stretch beyond rigorous empirical evidence to claim that touch is essential to our physical and mental vitality. Some of the earliest systematic observations on this theme came from studies of orphanages, where only seventy-five years ago mortality rates for infants hovered between 50 and 75 percent. In one, run by a warm, friendly, affectionate German woman, the infants thrived. In another, where the children received no touch, the orphans were undernourished, sickly, and more likely to die. In a more systematic comparison, Renée Spitz assessed how well infants were doing at two orphanages, one in which female convicts served as mother surrogates, the other a foundling home. In both the infants were given food and clothing and kept clean. The foundlings had better access to medical services and were kept in a cleaner environment, but they were deprived of touch. They fared worse in terms of life expectancy and cognitive development.
More controlled studies have yielded comparably striking results showing how critical touch is to thriving. Tiffany Field has found that massages given to premature babies lead, on average, to a 47 percent increase in weight gain. In another study, thirty human infants were observed in the course of a painful heel lance procedure, in which the infants’ heels were cut by medical doctors. Some of the infants were held by their mothers in whole-body, skin-to-skin contact. Others underwent the procedure while swaddled in a crib. The infants who were touched during the procedure cried 82 percent less than the comparison infants, they grimaced 65 percent less, and they had lower heart rate during the procedure.
Touch alters not only our stress-related physiology but the development of the underlying physiological systems that render the human stress response more labile and strong. Responses to stress are governed by two populations of neurons in the central nervous system. One population in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus projects to the anterior pituitary, which produces the adrenocorticotropin hormone (ACTH) that causes the release from the adrenal gland of the stress hormone glucocorticoid. The second population of neurons resides in the amygdala and projects to a region known as the locus ceruleus, which, when stimulated, leads to the release of noradrenaline. These respective neural populations
ultimately stimulate the liver, the heart and circulatory system, and different organs. These organs then kick into action (for example, the liver increases glucose output to maintain stable blood sugar levels) to support stress-related behavior.
In stunning research, Darlene Francis and Michael Meaney have examined how a pattern of licking and grooming directed by rat mothers, or dams, to their pups alters the development of the HPA axis, which is the body’s stress system. The researchers first identified those rat mothers who provided a high level of licking and grooming to their pups. This was accomplished by observing patterns of licking, grooming, blanket postures where the mother lies over the pups, and various nursing postures. Francis and Meaney assessed this family of tactile behaviors five times a day for six to eight days postpartum. The licking and grooming are relatively infrequent, constituting about 10 percent of the interactions between mother and pup (the most common postpartum observation is no contact or arched-back nursing). There is tremendous variation in how much each mother licks and grooms her pups. The amount of touch provided has profound consequences.
Francis and Meaney have found that mothers who lick and groom a lot alter the HPA axes of their offspring. They produce young rats who are more resilient to stress. As adults, offspring of mothers who lick and groom a lot show reduced levels of ACTH and the stress hormone corticosterone in response to being stressfully restrained. They show reduced startle responses and a greater tendency to explore novel environments and foods. Perhaps most dramatically, they show reduced receptor levels of stress-related neurons in the brain (decreased corticotropin releasing factor receptors in the locus ceruleus; decreased central benzodiazepine receptors in the amygdala). Touch altered these animals’ nervous systems. Early touch in a rat pup’s life leads to a more resilient and calm rat later in life, endowed with a more robust immune system.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 19
