Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (43 page)

49
. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,
Biographia Literaria
, Chapter XIV, 1817.

50
. Directors come up with countless ways to either induce or suspend disbelief. I once watched an unforgettable show by the Théâtre du Soleil, led by the French director Ariane Mnouchkine. To reach my seat I had to walk through a corridor where on one side, separated by a see-through curtain, actors were putting on their make-up. Through this unusual tactic – which I interpreted as a way to bring spectators close to, and familiarize them with, the actors – the cast were whispering to us: we are going to fake a story. Of course, I knew that whatever I was about to watch was fiction. I spent a few minutes looking at the cast. I recognized some of them when they showed up in character on stage. Yet, as the show unfolded, this awareness did not interfere with the power of the story and the actors’ skill in making me forget that the characters were actors in disguise.

51
. Brecht, B. (ed. and trans. John Willett),
Brecht on Theatre
, 2nd edn, Methuen, 2001; Freshwater, H.,
Theatre and the Audience
, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

52
. Interview by Robert Ayers: http://www.askyfilledwithshootingstars.com/wordpress/?p=1197

53
. For a review of the relationship between direct eye contact and the social brain network, see Senju, A., and Johnson, M. H., ‘The eye contact effect: Mechanisms and development’,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
, 13 (2009), 127–34. One area in particular that is involved when we follow the direction of someone else’s eyes is the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). A person in whom this area is damaged or missing finds it hard to assess accurately where someone else is gazing or interpret what they are feeling about the object they are gazing at. See Campbell, R., Heywood, C., Cowey, A., Regard, M., and Landis, T., ‘Sensitivity to eye gaze in prosopagnosic patients and monkeys with superior temporal sulcus ablation’,
Neuropsychologia
, 28 (1990), 1123–42. As I explain later, the pSTS is also activated when we watch a play. See Metz-Lutz, M. N., Bressan, Y., Heider, N., and Otzenberger, H., ‘What physiological and cerebral traces tell us about adhesion to fiction during theater-watching’,
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
, 4 (2010), Article 59, 1–10.

54
. Kampe, K., Frith, C. D., Dolan, R. J., and Frith, U., ‘Reward value of attractiveness and gaze’,
Nature
, 413 (2001), 589.

55
. The original title is
Onysos le furieux
, a play written by the French playwright Laurent Gaude.

56
. Metz-Lutz, Bressan, Heider, and Otzenberger, ‘What physiological and cerebral traces tell us about adhesion to fiction during theater-watching’. I have previously commented on this work in Frazzetto, G., ‘Powerful Acts’,
Nature
, 482 (2012), 466–7. I am grateful to Dr Yannick Bressan for discussing his work with me in an email exchange.

57
. Jabbi, M., and Keysers, C., ‘Inferior frontal gyrus activity triggers anterior insula response to emotional facial expressions’,
Emotion
, 8 (2008), 775–80.

58
. Campbell, Heywood, Cowey, Regard, and Landis, ‘Sensitivity to eye gaze in prosopagnosic patients and monkeys with superior temporal sulcus ablation’.

59
. Rapp, A., Leube, D. T., Erb, M., Grodd, W., and Kircher, T. T., ‘Neural correlates of metaphor processing’,
Cognitive Brain Research
, 20 (2004), 395–402.

60
. Zysset, S., Huber, O., Ferstl, E., and von Cramon, D. Y., ‘The anterior frontomedian cortex and evaluative judgment: An fMRI study’,
Neuroimage
15 (2002), 983–91.

61
. Brook,
The Empty Space
.

Chapter 6

1
. Freud, S.,
Civilization and Its Discontents
(originally published 1930), Penguin, 2002.

2
. Ekman, P.,
Emotions Revealed
, Henry Holt and Company, 2003, p. 205; Darwin, C.,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(originally published 1872), in Wilson, E. O. (ed.),
From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin
, Norton, 2006.

3
. Provine, R., ‘Laughter’,
American Scientist
, 84 (1996), 38–45; Provine, R. R.,
Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping and Beyond
, Belknap Press (Harvard University Press), 2012.

4
. Burgdorf, J., Panksepp, J., Brudzynski, S. M., Kroes, R., and Moskal, J. R., ‘Breeding for 50-kHz positive affective vocalization in rats’,
Behavior Genetics
, 35 (2005), 67–72.

5
. Sauter, D. A., Eisner, F., Ekman, P., and Scott, S. K., ‘Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through emotional vocalizations’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, 107 (2010), 2408–12.

6
. Warren, J. E., Sauter, D. A., Eisner, F.,
et al.
, ‘Positive emotions preferentially engage an auditory-motor “mirror” system’,
Journal of Neuroscience
, 26 (2006), 13,067–75.

7
. Provine, R., and Fischer, K. R., ‘Laughing, smiling and talking: Relation to sleeping and social context in humans’,
Ethology
, 83 (1989), 295–305.

8
. Hammer, M., ‘An identified neuron mediates the unconditioned stimulus in associative olfactory learning in honeybees’,
Nature
, 366 (1993), 59–63.

9
. Olds, J., and Milner, P., ‘Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain’,
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology
, 47 (1954), 419–28.

10
. Schultz, W., Apicella, P., and Ljungberg, T., ‘Responses of monkey dopamine neurons to reward and conditioned stimuli during successive steps of learning a delayed response task’,
Journal of Neuroscience
, 13 (1993), 900–13; Schultz, W., Apicella, P., Scarnati, E., and Ljungberg, T., ‘Neuronal activity in monkey ventral striatum related to the expectation of reward’,
Journal of Neuroscience
, 12 (1992), 4595–610. For a review of predictive rewards, see Schultz, W., ‘Multiple reward signals in the brain’,
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
, 1 (2000), 199–207.

11
. Fiorino, F., Coury, A., and Phillips, A. G., ‘Dynamic changes in nucleus accumbens dopamine efflux during the Coolidge effect in male rats’,
Journal of Neuroscience
, 17 (1997), 4849–55.

12
. Hammer, M., and Menzel, R., ‘Learning and memory in the honeybee’,
Journal of Neuroscience
, 15 (1995), 1617–30.

13
. The article exploring predictive learning in bees via computer simulation is: Montague, P. R., Dayan, P., Person, C., and Sejnowski, T. J., ‘Bee foraging in uncertain environments using predictive Hebbian learning’,
Nature
, 377 (1995), 725–8.

14
. For a detailed review of how a loop of information is established between pleasure centres and the prefrontal cortex, and how abstract thoughts can be built from simpler ones, see Miller, E. K., and Buschman, T. J., ‘Rules through recursion: How interactions between the frontal cortex and basal ganglia may build abstract, complex rules from concrete, simple ones’, in Bunge, S., and Wallis, J. (eds),
Neuroscience of Rule-Guided Behavior
, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 419–40.

15
. For a very informative review of the effect of positive feelings on working memory and for a description of the neurobiology of problem solving, see Ashby, F. G., Valentin, V. V., and Turken, U., ‘The effects of positive affect and arousal on working memory and executive attention’, in Moore, S., and Oaksford, M. (eds),
Emotional Cognition: From Brain to Behavior
, John Benjamin Publishing, 2002, pp. 245–87.

16
. Isen, A., Daubman, K. A., and Nowicki, G. P., ‘Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 52 (1987), 1122–31.

17
. Isen, A. M., Johnson, M. M. S., Mertz, E., and Robinson, G. F., ‘The influence of positive affect on the unusualness of word associations’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 48 (1985), 1413–26.

18
. Ginsberg, A.,
Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems
, Penguin Classics, 2009.

19
. Sahakian, B., and Morein-Zamir, S., ‘Professor’s little helper’,
Nature
, 450 (2007), 1157–9.

20
. Maher, B., ‘Poll results: Look who’s doping’,
Nature
, 452 (2008), 674–5.

21
. Sample, Ian, ‘Female orgasm captured in series of brain scans’,
Guardian
, 14 November 2011.

22
. Holstege, G., Georgiadis, J. R., Paans, A. M. J.,
et al.
, ‘Brain activation during human male ejaculation’,
Journal of Neuroscience
, 23 (2003), 9185–93.

23
. Komisaruk, B. R., and Whipple, B., ‘Functional MRI of the brain during orgasm in women’,
Annual Review of Sex Research
, 16 (2005), 62–86; Komisaruk, B. R., Whipple, B., Crawford, A.,
et al.
, ‘Brain activation during vaginocervical self-stimulation and orgasm in women with complete spinal cord injury: fMRI evidence of mediation by the Vagus nerves’,
Brain Research
, 1024 (2004), 77–88.

24
. Darwin, C.,
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(originally published 1871), in Wilson, E. O. (ed.),
From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin
, Norton, 2006. In footnote n. 944.

25
. Goldstein, R., ‘Thrills in response to music and other stimuli’,
Physiological Psychology
, 8 (1980), 126–9.

26
. Sloboda, J. A., ‘Music structure and emotional response: Some empirical findings’,
Psychology of Music
, 19 (1991), 110–20.

27
. Blood, A. J., and Zatorre, R. J., ‘Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, 98 (2001), 11,818–23.

28
. Goldstein, ‘Thrills in response to music and other stimuli’.

29
. For an excellent review of the distinction between wanting and liking in food reward, see Berridge, K. C., ‘ “Liking” and “wanting” food rewards: Brain substrates and roles in eating disorders’,
Physiology and Behavior
, 97 (2009), 537–50.

30
. Woolley, J. D., and Fields, H. L., ‘Nucleus accumbens opioids regulate flavor-based preferences in food consumption’,
Neuroscience
, 17 (2006), 309–17.

31
. Gainotti, G., ‘Emotional behavior and hemispheric side of the lesion’,
Cortex
, 8 (1972), 41–55; Sackeim, H. A., Greenberg, M. S., Weiman, A. L.,
et al.
, ‘Hemispheric asymmetry in the expression of positive and negative emotions’,
Archives of Neurology
, 39 (1982), 210–18.