THE BIOLOGY OF LOVE

Humans teeter on a knife’s edge. The same deep

chemistry that fosters bonding can, in a
heartbeat, pivot to fear and hate
Ruth Feldman
13 February, 2020

An infant is born. The radiant mother holds the baby in her

arms and immediately begins to scan the infant’s face, softly
caressing the little fingers while uttering repetitive sing-song
vocalisations, her face lighting up in an affectionate smile. She
has never had a baby before but intuitively knows what to do.
Proud and oblivious, she feels no one has ever cared for such a
gorgeous child; yet she stands along a great line of mammalian
mothers who lick, groom, sniff, smell, touch, poke, nurse and
handle. Rats do it, sheep do it, even educated chimps do it …
let’s fall in love.
Behind our loving mother, evolution works with its quick-
and-dirty tools to ensure the bond is cemented, the infant finds
the nipple, the mother engages; brain meets the world. The
synchronous dance of mother and child begins and, upon its
unique rhythms, a relationship is formed. This relationship will
incorporate, like expanding ripples, the child’s emerging abilities
across development and into dialogue: babbling, creating
imaginary scenarios, the capacity to collaborate, feel the pain of
others, comprehend emotions, discuss conflicting positions,
argue convictions, until the child grows and can meet the mother
in a full adult-to-adult relationship of empathy, intimacy and
perspective-taking. Like the 12-bar-blues, synchrony gains in
range, repertoire, complexity and timbre, but its basic rhythms
stay safe and secure.
The synchronous mother-infant dance will set the stage for
the child’s affiliative bonds throughout life: with father and
siblings at home, with close friends in school, through
adolescence and first love and, finally, as parents to children of
their own. Those affiliations, and the terms of endearment they
set, will guide the child’s conduct within society-at-large, shaping
the empathy, responsibility, collaboration and self-restraint by
which he or she will meet fellow-humans: co-workers,
neighbours and strangers.
Evolution is thrifty, and once a trick works, it will be
repurposed endlessly. A new mother and infant enter the world
tapping the social patterns, habits, beliefs, customs, fears,
hopes, joys and rituals of the old ones. The family, the group,
the tribe lives on from one generation to the next. Resilience,
endurance and the durability of the group can be achieved only
by coordinating action among kin, first genetically and then
symbolically. Infants acquire the capacity for coordinated action
in the context of the mother’s body and its unique provisions: a
mother’s smell, touch, heart rhythms, eye-gaze, smile. Then it
expands across time, place and person. But such massive
expansion does not come without its risks.
What tricks of the trade does evolution utilise to ensure that
bonding, so critical for survival and continuity of life on Earth,
happens as planned and all pieces of the puzzle fall safely into
their place? After decades following thousands of mother-infant
dyads, hundreds from birth to young adulthood, my lab
has mapped the ‘neurobiology of affiliation’ –
the emerging scientific field that describes the neural, endocrine
and behavioural systems sustaining our capacity to love. The foci
of our research – the oxytocin system (based on the
neurohormone of bonding); the affiliative, or social, brain; and
biological synchrony between mother and child – are all marked
by great plasticity, and sculpted throughout animal evolution to
reach their exquisite complexity in humans. And they all lean on
automatic and ancient machinery that runs the risk of turning
love on its head into fear.
Oxytocin, the first element in the neurobiology of bonding,
is an important driver of both care and prejudice. A large
molecule produced mainly by neurons in a small region of the
brain called the hypothalamus, oxytocin is known for
coordinating bonding, sociality, and group living. From the
hypothalamus, oxytocin targets receptors in the body and the
brain, primarily the amygdala, a centre for fear and vigilance;
the hippocampus, where memory resides; and the striatum, a
locus of motivation and reward. Through these pathways, the
bonding hormone, oxytocin, functions with the precision of a
neurotransmitter and the longevity of a hormone, reaching
faraway locations and broadly influencing behaviour.
Importantly, oxytocin is released not only through the central
part of the neuron, but also its extensions, called dendrites. The
dendrites are primed to increase oxytocin release whenever
attachment memories are invoked. This way, early attachments
prime us for a lifetime, and we keep seeking echoes of early
experiences in later relationships, whether being carried on
mother’s back throughout the day or exploring nature with
father.
Memory of these early attachments helps us re-enact the
unique state that Sue Carter, a neurobiologist at the University
of Indiana, calls ‘immobility without fear’. These same memories
enable what the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in
1958 described as ‘the capacity to be alone’ in the presence of
someone in a state of peace, serenity and transcendence, where
aloneness is not loneliness. In our studies, we found that,
throughout life, during periods of bond-formation – for instance,
when we fall in love or form a close friendship – oxytocin
production increases to cement the new bond, as it does at birth.
During birth, a surge of oxytocin triggers uterine contractions,
and oxytocin release initiates milk letdown. Maternal oxytocin is
then transferred to the infant through the mother’s milk, touch
and caregiving behaviour. It bonds mother and child forever but
it also reorganises the infant’s brain to what it means to be in
love and what it takes to feel safe. This is how cultures ‘stamp’
the infant’s brain with the distinct social patterns that reflect their
philosophies on human relationships, particularly those across
the generational divide – for instance, are adults and children
allowed to be in direct eye contact and dialogue as equals?

The same oxytocin that supports love and

kindness also underlies prejudice and
parochialism

Still, oxytocin is an ancient system that functions in a quick-

and-dirty way; no time for complexities when the lion is at your
door. The oxytocin molecule presumably evolved approximately
600 million years ago, and is found in all vertebrate and some
invertebrate species. Its role across animal evolution was to help
organisms manage life in harsh ecologies. Hence the system
supports regulation of basic life-sustaining functions: water
conservation, thermoregulation or energy balance in species
such as nematodes, frogs or reptiles.
With the evolution of mammals, oxytocin became integrally
involved in controlling birth and lactation; as a result, the young
acquired life sustaining functions and skills not in the context of
the group but within the intimacy of the mother-infant bond. This
created the main schism I wish to underline, the core conflict of
the human condition: mammals learn to manage hardship
through relationships, and bonding is their key mechanism for
stress reduction. Being born a mammal, then, implies that
oxytocin, the very system that sustains parental care, pair-
bonds, group sharing, and consoling behaviour, also became
intensely sensitive to danger. Oxytocin protects against danger
by immediately differentiating “friend” from “foe” based on
nuances of social behaviour.
When mammals perceive slight alterations in social
behaviour, they identify the approach of ‘others’, activating the
alarm systems of the fight-or-flight response and their bodies
prepare to attack. Those ‘others’ may indeed intend to eat us up
for supper, or they could just as readily be going about their daily
social life in ways that seem to us odd, unfamiliar, or even
disrespectful. They could be like the ‘enemies’ Dr Seuss describes
in The Butter Battle Book, a parable about the Cold War: ‘those
who eat their bread with the butter side down’. But when the
stakes are so high, why take a chance?
Through it all, the oxytocin system is integrally involved.
Oxytocin neurons stand in close proximity to corticotropin-
releasing factor (CRF)-producing stress-sensitive neurons in the
hypothalamus. Human studies, both ours and others, have
repeatedly shown that the same oxytocin that supports love and
kindness, also underlies prejudice, parochialism, and outgroup
derogation, even when the ‘outgroup’ comprises those who wear
a blue shirt while the ‘ingroup’ wears red.

The second element in the neurobiology of bonding is the

affiliative brain.Research into its role in maternal care began
in the 1950s with the work of Jay Rosenblatt at Rutgers
University-Newark in New Jersey and colleagues, who wished to
chart the brain structures that enable rodent mothers to care for
their offspring. Following decades of careful work by several
research groups, the scientists were able to describe the
‘mammalian maternal brain’ both in terms of its neural networks
and, more recently, their molecular composition. Primed by
oxytocin’s increase during pregnancy, the hypothalamus
(specifically, the medial preoptic area of the
hypothalamus) sends projections to the amygdala, and this
sensitises an oxytocin-amygdala ‘line’ that makes mothers
extremely attuned to signs of infant safety and danger. This line
of constant vigilance and worry is implanted into the maternal
brain as soon as an infant is born and, without it, our fragile
offspring might not survive.
In human mothers, the amygdala activates four times more
than in fathers: from the moment of birth and, I believe, forever
thereafter, mothers sleep with their amygdala open. Imagine
this: a 15-year-old goes to a party. You trust her, have arranged
for your best friend to pick her up, and know who she’s with. You
go to sleep, but your amygdala is open. It is 3am and you hear
the door open and her footsteps tiptoeing in. You turn to the
other side and finally sleep in earnest. The ‘care’ and the ‘scare’
become inseparable the minute you love someone for real. It is
precisely this entanglement that defines, in my mind, the ancient
curse: ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’ – not the birth
itself, which we soon forget due to the analgesic properties of
oxytocin.
Yet, at the same time that the tracks for the oxytocin-
amygdala line are set, the oxytocin-primed hypothalamus sends
another projection, this time to the ventral tegmental area
(VTA), the brain’s dopamine factory, and the striatum, where
dopamine receptors abound, to make the infant the most
rewarding stimulus for its mother. The infant’s smell, soft skin
and cute round face become addictive, and mothers can spend
hours looking at, sniffing and licking their baby. Even infant
reminders become imbued with reward: the pacifier, the crib, the
nursing chair all trigger the brain’s reward system and initiate a
state of bliss. Our lab found that it is enough to put a picture of
an unfamiliar infant on a side screen when parents discuss a
conflict to quiet their sympathetic arousal, decrease their hostile
tone, and increase their empathic concern for each other.
The evolutionary role of the oxytocin-dopamine line is to
‘glue’ the mother to her baby so she can tolerate the sleepless
nights, physical pain and endless mess. This oxytocin-dopamine
line is even engraved into the neurons. The nucleus accumbens,
a node in the striatum, contains neurons that encode both
oxytocin and dopamine, enabling the brain to combine the
motivation and vigour of dopamine with the social focus of
oxytocin in order to set the parent’s – and, via the cross-
generational cycle, the infant’s – reward system for a lifetime of
longterm attachments. When the connection between oxytocin
and dopamine breaks, results are devastating. When dopamine
is directed to neural targets unrelated to sociality, a risk
is addiction; when dopamine and oxytocin are produced out of
synch, depression can result.
A neurological triangle, including the oxytocin-producing
hypothalamus at the top for sociality and the two arms of ‘scare’
and ‘bliss’, underpins mammalian mothering. In species where
mother and father parent together, this same system also
supports paternal care, and recent molecular studies show that
mothering and fathering are underpinned by the same brain
structures, though with different populations of neurons
involved. This network enables mammalian mothers, from rats
to elephants, to recognise, invest, attend, feed, bond, teach and
provide a secure habitat for their young.

Humans can fight for their god with the intensity

and cruelty with which a gorilla will protect her
baby

Still, for humans, the ‘apex of evolution’, this neural network,

is insufficient to transmit the immense knowledge, linguistic
competencies, social cognition, executive functions and mental
abstractions we acquired over our lengthy history. Human
parenting incorporates several additional higher-order networks
controlled from the seat of cognition, the cortex, that enable
planning, resonance, and the ability to communicate and share
affect; all of this is superimposed on the subcortical brain
structures giving immediacy and motivation to caregiving. These
include the empathy network (located in the brain’s anterior
cingulate cortex and anterior insula), enabling parents to feel the
infant’s pain and affect in real time; the embodied simulation
network (within the brain, traversing the supplementary motor
area, inferior parietal lobule, and inferior frontal gyrus), through
which parents represent the infant’s motions and emotions in
their own brain; the mentalising network (superior temporal
sulcus/gyrus, temporo-parietal junction, temporal pole),
allowing parents to reflect and give meaning to the infant’s
nonverbal signals; and the emotion-regulation network
(frontopolar cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex) that helps
parents multitask, set longterm goals, and plan their parenting
according to the culture at hand.
Such an integrated human caregiving system supports the
complex, extensive and multidimensional task of raising human
children and preparing them for a life of commitment, industry
and social involvement. Because the period after childbirth marks
the time of greatest plasticity in the adult brain, human parenting
can take on multiple forms, depending on culture and habitat,
and still raise a loving, healthy child. Furthermore, thanks to the
parsimony principle of evolution, this same flexible system of
caregiving also evolved to support other human attachments,
such as romantic love and close friendship, in aggregate
comprising the human ‘affiliative brain’. Other mammalian
species follow the same path; the neuroscientist Larry Young at
Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues, studying the
monogamous prairie vole, showed that mating and parenting
utilise the same neural, cellular and molecular processes,
including a molecular ‘fingerprint’ of the attachment target.
The human brain, with its ancient and advanced, automatic
and controlled, bottom-up and top-down components, affords a
massive expansion of love. It enables humans to extend love well
beyond their immediate attachments to pets, to the Earth’s flora
and fauna, and – stretching these systems to the limit – to
abstract ideas, such as homeland, God or workers of the world.
All these abstract forms of love can elicit intense commitment,
even sacrifice of one’s life; yet they are all triggered by a 500-
million-year-old, nine-amino-acid molecule that surges in the
pregnant dam’s hypothalamus.
With such complex neurobiology underlying human love, we
fall right back into the human condition. Here is the schism: the
extensive brain structures that enable the abstraction of love
beyond the here and now – giving meaning to human suffering,
inspiring resilience in the face of trauma, and enabling humans
to transcend death by acts of kindness – are still connected via
multiple ascending and descending projections to the ancient
oxytocin-amygdala-dopamine triangle. The ancient and the
more-recently evolved parts of the love network cohere into a
single, unified system. On the one hand, this lights up an
energetic and motivational hearth underneath our love (shall we
call it ‘libido’?) that can invigorate, energise and compel our
abstract commitments; without it, our life’s road would feel
rough and barren.
Yet, on the other hand, the blind, automatic force of the
ancient, subcortical triangle does not allow our love to remain
abstract, that is, touched by the light of reason, tempered by the
perception of multiple perspectives, and seasoned by equanimity
and (evolutionary) age. Humans can fight for their god (or their
workers-of-the-world god) with the intensity, cruelty and short-
sightedness with which a gorilla will protect her baby from
predators, whether or not it would cost her life. When it comes
to love for one’s tribe, country, religion, code of dress, political
system, historical narrative or holy scriptures, a breeze in the
leaves becomes a panther, aeons of carefully sculpted mental
functions melt and, even within the automatic love triangle, the
‘scare’ overrides the ‘care’. Almost always, the winner is the
amygdala, the ever-alert sentinel of encroaching danger, the
fount of emotion and fear, all the way to destruction of human
spirit and lives.

The third major factor in the neurobiology of bonding is

synchrony. Unlike oxytocin and the affiliative brain, synchrony
is not a system but a process. Yet it tells much the same story;
it is ancient, it evolved to exquisite complexity in Homo sapiens,
and its evolutionary roots lurk constantly in the background. Like
the Flaming Sword by the Garden of Eden guarding the Tree of
Knowledge (the first symbol of multiple perspectives), it can
swiftly switch between good and evil.
Synchrony describes the coordinated action among
organisms in the service of the group’s survival and resilience.
The first scientist to describe the biological underpinnings of
synchrony was probably the American entomologist William
Morton Wheeler, author of the influential work The Social
Insects (1928). Like many children fascinated by a trail of
marching ants, Wheeler came to empirically describe the social
mechanism that enables these small industrious creatures to
carry a grain of wheat much greater than their size. (Indeed,
another famed American entomologist, Edward O
Wilson, argues that social cohesion made ants the most resilient
species among invertebrates, paralleling human conquest of the
vertebrate world.) Wheeler suggested that the coordination of
leg movements among ants synchronises with the ants’ other
neurobiological processes, from neural firing to hormone release,
all in sequence and lockstep. In short, he proposed, one ant’s leg
movements triggered neural firing in the brain of the next,
causing leg movements and then neural firing in a third ant, and
so on. Hence, by coordinating across biology and behaviour, the
strength of the group is far greater than its individual members
would suggest. The same type of synchronous mechanism
enables a group of tiny swirling fish to ward off a shark, or a flock
of small birds to undertake an amazingly complex, thousand-mile
trip toward warmer climates, painting our evening skies with
their exquisite dance, autumn after autumn. The wisdom,
strength and fortitude that enable small creatures to survive
harsh conditions lie within the group, and require total
subordination to its rhythms. An injured bird departing from the
pack will die in winter.
Humans, by belonging to the class Mammalia and by virtue of
their moral reasoning, departed from this coordinated rhythmic
submission, but not quite. Throughout human history, this
evolutionary heritage has served us well, instilling energy and
purpose during work, dance and cultural rituals. For millennia,
farmers have harvested via coordinated hand movements,
sailors have left shore via a unified lifting of oars, believers have
chorused at houses of prayers, and such synchronous activity
matched none in its capacity to uplift, instil a sense of purpose,
and generate moral elevation. A group in unison creates a far
grander and loftier experience than any achieved in solitude or
even in a one-on-one encounter. Recent evidence,
including studies that film crowds from helicopters and use
machine-learning algorithms, shows that humans have ‘herding’
tendencies; they synchronise their walking in large streets,
match movements while waiting in long lines, and coordinate
running in big marathons. Such synchrony of large crowds,
underpinned by the molecule that glues us together, is
comforting; it cements our sense of belonging to humankind, a
race whose legs are stuck in dirt but with heads that can reach
the stars, as so beautifully described by John Steinbeck
in The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

We are unique in our ability to synchronise via

coordination of facial signals without physical
touch

Yet coordinated action through the synchrony of the crowd

not only unites us but also propels us to derogate, fight and,
eventually, kill. It vitalises soldiers in battle and lulls skepticism
in hateful political rallies. The ‘together we stand’ in joint union
sends a not-so-subtle, ominous message to those who pose real
or imaginary danger to our loved ones. We are easily triggered
by ‘scare’ to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’, and to go after ‘them’ with
zest and zeal. Soldiers receive extensive training for this very
goal so that, on any given doomsday, they’ll execute with
precision while sublimating thought. It is the group that marches
on, not its members. The 20th century has seen countless
images of soldiers marching in perfect unison, treading to a
variety of gods, goals and goods. Guns on their shoulders and
faces undistinguishable, humans have adapted the coordinated
leg movements of their ancestor ants while neglecting the ants’
humility, industry, and foresight.
 What, then, can differentiate the ‘care’ and the ‘scare’, both
evolved from the same ancient mechanisms that helped fish,
ants and birds to bond for survival? Here we can be helped by
the fact that humans are mammals and, as such, bond within the
intimacy of the ‘nursing dyad’.
Also in our favour: the long history of primate evolution that
expanded our social brain, lengthened the period of infant
dependence, perfected our empathy and, most important,
created the uniquely human way of communicating through the
face. Indeed, primates, particularly chimpanzees, bonobos and
gorillas, can show admirable social abilities beyond parental care.
For instance, chimpanzees resolve aggressive conflict with group
members by consoling behaviour, stimulating oxytocin. Gorillas
form coalitions among large groups of unrelated kin in ways that
resemble a small human village. But humans are the only species
that orients to, and attaches through, the face. Human neonates
selectively attend to the human face, humans communicate
affectionately in a face-to-face position, and humans are unique
in their ability to synchronise via coordination of facial signals
without physical touch.
My research group has studied this face-to-face synchrony
for years; when partners synchronise their gaze, smile or
emotional expression, that spurs coordination of physiological
response. For instance, mothers and infants coordinate their
heart rhythms during moments of social synchrony, but not
during non-synchronous moments; both mother-child pairs and
romantic partners show brain-to-brain synchrony of gamma
waves during episodes of behavioural coordination but not
otherwise. And synchrony of alpha waves in the frontoparietal
regions of the brain and gamma waves in temporal regions
emerges during ‘support giving’ moments between affiliated
partners (romantic couples, close friends) but also among
strangers, particularly when the dialogue is empathic. Face-to-
face synchrony requires intimacy and intent, invokes reflection
and awareness, and obligates significant effort. When parents
can validate their infant in a face-to-face exchange during
the sensitive period between birth and nine months of age, they
orient their child’s brain to the social world and its wonders.
When synchrony fails – for instance, when mothers are
depressed or when stress is heightened by poverty, war or abuse
– the consequences to the social brain can be devastating, and
children can develop psychopathology, loneliness, dysregulated
conduct or affective disorders that can limit their capacity to
engage.

Is there a solution to the human condition? Given that

human love is layered over blind forces that react automatically
to the slightest sign of danger, is there any chance for
redemption, or are we bound to endless cycles of aggression and
destruction?
While any random look at human history tells a grim story
and gives ample evidence for a hopeless view, I see three types
of solutions based on the work of three great thinkers. I call them
‘face’ (the Levinas solution), ‘light’ (the Freud solution), and
‘humour’ (the Kundera solution). Each witnessed fear and cruelty
under pressure, and the immense destruction brought by war.
Each in his own way tries to free us from the natural way that
our brain interprets the world.
The first of these, the ‘Levinas solution’, is based on the work
of the 20th-century French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas and his recognition of ‘the face’. How can one create an
account of the world that describes what ‘is’ (ontology) without
resorting to unchanged, abstract, or metaphysical ideas (the
work of Parmenides, Plato, and Descartes come to mind)? How
can one ground existence in the daily experience of the self-
within-the world (as Martin Heidegger does) without placing the
self as the cornerstone of all that is knowable? Levinas suggests
that the ‘Other’, as presented through the Other’s face, defines
unknown territory that cannot be immediately incorporated into
the self. That Other, that face, argues Levinas, substantiates the
self and, upon seeing the Other’s face, the only possible response
is: ‘Here I am,’ fully committed to that person’s wellbeing and
safety or, in Levinas’s words: ‘To see a face is already to hear:
“thou shalt not kill”.’ Only then can true knowledge – that is,
knowledge that can reach the stars, as Levinas says in Totality
and Infinity (1961) – be acquired.
I spent countless hours microcoding videos of parent-infant
face-to-face interactions, gradually coming to understand that
only upon the parent’s attuned face, careful echo and radiant
smile can the infant build a bridge to a reality that is often harsh,
painful and oblivious. ‘At first was the gaze,’ says the Greek
filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos; humans need a loving gaze to
start on their life’s road. Looking at your enemy’s face, we
hypothesised, makes it impossible to wish him harm.

For the first 500 milliseconds, the adolescents

responded equally to others’ pain, whether their
ingroup’s or outgroup’s

Several years ago, we put this hypothesis to the test.

We developed a dialogue-based intervention for Israelis and
Palestinians aged between 16 and 18 years, when group
subordination is at its peak. For eight weeks, the adolescents
became familiar first with the cultural rituals, then with the
immediate habitat, and finally with the family habits and
personal preferences, hopes and struggles of each member,
creating a common ground where the ‘other’ became familiar and
similar. While each session covered a distinct topic (affiliation,
conflict resolution, empathy, prejudice), sessions began with
coordinated group activities that involved reciting famous poems
and holy texts in both languages, face-to-face encounters for a
‘conflict dialogue’ (on a conflict topic of their choice), empathic
giving, joint planning or group games involving joint movement
and dance. The adolescents were randomly assigned to
intervention or control groups. Before and after each intervention
they were tested extensively for social behaviour, opinions and
attitudes, and hormonal profiles; we also monitored the social
brain using magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Our findings on the empathic response were eye-opening. To
conduct our study, we exposed our participants to a well-
validated set of pictures showing hands and feet in physical pain
– examples included a hand burnt by an iron or a foot stuck in a
door – which reliably elicit the brain’s empathic response. Before
each stimulus, a screen announced the protagonist: ‘This is
Danny from Tel Aviv.’ Or ‘This is Ahmed from Kafr Qara.’
Adolescents observed an equal number of stimuli where pain was
inflicted on members of their ingroup or outgroup. We found
that, for the first 500 milliseconds (representing the brain’s
automatic response), the adolescents responded equally to
others’ pain, whether their ingroup’s or outgroup’s.
However, after this half-second of grace, the outcomes were
different depending on whether our dialogue-based intervention
was in play or not. Without the intervention, the brain’s top-down
mechanisms began shutting down the neural empathic response
to the outgroup, keeping activations only for the ingroup. This
later, more cognitive-empathic neural response is critical in order
to understand the feelings of others, generate compassion, and
form a plan of action. Aborting neural empathy midway doesn’t
allow the brain to sustain a fully human response that can
activate emotional resonance and practical help.
But adolescents who underwent the dialogue intervention
learned to include the Other in their ingroup and display a fully
human empathic response to members of the outgroup. The
face, as Levinas maintains, indeed compels us, even neurally, to
save the Other from pain.
The second solution, from Sigmund Freud, looks to
light. From Freud’s immense contribution to human self-
understanding, I wish to stress his relentless effort to shed light
on our deepest (and ugliest) drives, and his conviction that
shining the light of consciousness on those hidden, blind and
automatic motivations can rescue us from our cruel and
pleasure-seeking nature. What a radical position to suggest that
sheer awareness can combat the push-and-pull of the
subconscious! While Freud emphasised that the road to light is
long and arduous, involves walking in the thickets of defences
and contradictions, and requires stubbornness and severity, he
was the first to suggest that the ‘way out’ of the human condition
is through dialogue. Although I have a hard time accepting his
neglect of the face for the couch in this important human
dialogue, Freud’s model was the first to offer a carefully crafted
route to healing through knowledge, toiled by two.
Freud’s quest for light echoes the ancient Greek ‘know
thyself’. But I am also reminded of an old Talmudic verse,
probably dated from the same era as Socrates: ‘If you meet the
devil, shine on it the light of knowledge. If it is stone, it
evaporates; if it is metal, annihilates.’ What a triumph to the
human spirit is the belief that the hardiness, nastiness and
‘stone-ness’ of our nature can be overcome by the ‘light of
knowledge’.
My third solution, humour, is inspired by the novelist Milan
Kundera, a victim of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia,
exiled to France. Kundera summons the insights on the human
condition through the history of the novel, laid out in The Art of
the Novel (1986) and Testaments Betrayed (1993). The 400-
year journey of the novel, he suggests, is to break the
overarching single narrative we form of reality, the one inherited
from parents, corroborated by neighbours, tended by culture,
cemented by religion, and imposed by totalitarian regimes,
which, without a radical shake, would stand to testify for truth.
Our brain typically creates a single percept that discards all
information not befitting our ‘story’, but the novel upsets this
singularity.

Look at someone’s face with compassion; climb

the Tree of Knowledge; and practise a good laugh
 And it does so via humour. While truth is dead serious,
humour is suggestive, nonsensical, unnerving, contradictory,
and functions at multiple nonadjacent levels simultaneously.
Humour weaves together a kaleidoscope of images that not only
are not neighbours, but have never even resided in the same
continent.
Humour is a fine panacea to the pompous ‘together we
stand’. Practised to perfection, it knocks precisely those
marching soldiers off their feet (letting our ants keep their
industrious sisterhood). How easy can it be to march to a
humorous idea, fight for an ‘either-or’ programme, or conquer
cities in the name of a smiling god? (Kundera began his
acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for Literature in 1985
with the old idiom: ‘Man thinks, God laughs.’)
Here’s to three solutions: look at someone’s face with
compassion and care; climb the Tree of Knowledge and cherish
its multiple branches; and practise a good laugh. These could
help tune the environment-dependent, behaviour-based systems
comprising the neurobiology of affiliation to a life of lasting love.
While the neuroscientific programme of the human brain is
couched in an evolutionary framework, the grand theory of the
biological sciences has its limits as a singular window into the
human condition. The psychiatrist and neurobiologist Myron
Hofer at Columbia University in New York spent his career
describing the biological provisions embedded in the mother’s
body. He reminds us that, when it comes to human development,
an evolutionary viewpoint must be complemented by insights
from other fields of knowledge: the humanities, the arts, and
clinical wisdom. Hofer maintains that, while evolution is impartial
to the individual child, the individual is precisely what matters
for human life. The goal of a human programme set to
understand how early environments meet or fail the needs of
their infants is to enable the individual to benefit from the
fullness of the human experience afforded by modern science –
long time to maturity, planned parenthood, freedom from
infectious disease, literacy and a manageable stress response.
Human research, therefore, must translate into brief and widely
deliverable interventions that maintain the deepest respect for
the individual’s cultural heritage, personal meaning, and life
journey.
‘It is time the stone made an effort to flower,’ writes Paul
Celan in his poem ‘Corona’: ‘Shine on it the light of knowledge –
if it is stone, it evaporates.’