The Well-Tuned Brain: Neuroscience and the Life Well Lived

"This is the last part of a trilogy: the first one was called A Mood Apart , the second one was called American Mania , and this is the one that suggests solutions. The first one is about the emotions and how it is that they change in moods and how we can treat them. It was a very interesting book about emotions from a psychiatric point of view. The second book was about what he saw as the American condition — why it is that Americans are running around frantically, and the kind of mania you find, not full-blown mania, but things that go awry. Before the financial crisis, he was already saying this cannot be sustainable, this belief in technology is not something that can go on. Sadly, he was right. In this book, he’s trying to think about how we can come up with solutions, how we can look at the kind of people we are, that our emotions have turned us into, and then tune ourselves. He takes the metaphor of the ‘wohltemperierte klavier’ or ‘well-tempered clavier.’ The idea, from the history of music, is this. Initially, with the harpsichord, you had to tune it to the key you were in. Then the wohltemperierte klavier came along and you could tune it in such a way as to be able to play all different keys. What he is suggesting is that, by understanding the human condition, there are ways in which we could really tune ourselves to function more optimally. We can deal with problems that we have, that are inherent in human nature, such as, for instance, that as young children we always find it difficult to defer our goals. We find it much, much easier to jump directly to the small reward instead of waiting a bit for a larger one. We find it difficult not to want things that we know are pleasurable and we tend to do things to excess. In my research, with Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, we have shown that when you think about pleasure, there’s a wanting phase when you want something. Right now, I’m getting quite hungry so I’m thinking about where food might be coming from. Then I engage, and find the food that I like. Then, at some point, I can’t have any more. There’s a lot of learning going on throughout that cycle. If you come into contact with something that is hugely pleasurable — like sugar — it’s difficult not to search for sugar everywhere. Then, when you do it to excess, it’s not particularly sustainable. So, what Whybrow is talking about here, is all of the different ways we can learn from what we know about the brain to come up with sustainable solutions. For instance, it’s variation that’s important — as opposed to just doing one thing to exclusion and becoming addicted to it. One of the things he talks about was what I was stressing earlier: the role of love and of early life experiences in creating a balanced life. If you want to create a happier society, you need to intervene at a much earlier stage and help people with post-natal depression, help them to engage with their children, to build on their strengths and create ways for them to feel connected, to weave that social connectedness. That’s a very humane and important message. Technology is a great tool but it’s also a word for something that doesn’t quite work yet. It will never solve our problems. What will solve our problems is having meaningful engagement with other people. To do that, we have to empathise with them, we have to have an understanding of our own shortcomings and ways in which we can overcome them. Whybrow talks a lot about some of the early philosophers and political scientists, like Adam Smith . He is seen as this selfish economist but, of course, if you really read him, what he’s concerned with is being part of a social web. It’s about making the right choices based on a social contract. What’s important is easily lost: if you’re just interested in money for money’s own sake that’s neither here nor there, because one of the key things about money is that it’s not a natural reward. It’s impossible to have too much money. But money stands in for something else, and that something else is social relationships. Once you understand that, and are able to make sustainable solutions, you may be able to provide hope and wisdom for the way in which we build our societies, and how we are going to carry on living on this planet. This is a book that engages with some really large and important questions — from human nature and what we understand about the brain and early experience — to how we should govern and how we should manage and live in, maybe not harmony, but at least some kind of balance with the nature that sustains us and which gives us the most pleasure possible. There is certainly that perspective. At the same time, it’s important to remember that probably the most important brain is that which exists between people. We can peer into our own brains but really I think the exciting bit is when we look at how brains interact and finding out what is natural to the human species. One should not forget the curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ It’s ironic that we are getting closer and closer to being able to ‘know thyself’ — as was written on the portico at the temple in Delphi — and yet we are doing it at a time when we are changing the natural environment in which we live almost irrevocably. There is an urgent need both to peer into ourselves, to understand our emotions but also to take the consequence of what it is that we learn about our maladaptive emotions and short-termism, about all the limitations that are built into the human condition, and see if we can’t actually transcend those."