Risking Human Security

Attachment and Public Life

Marci Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781855755970
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429918698
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Psychology

Most research in the field of attachment is on the experiences of attachment, separation and loss, and their developmental course and effects. This book widens our vision to the public domain, to consider the ways in which social institutions, culture and social policy may diminish our ability to make and maintain secure attachments. It argues that collective human security depends in part on the quality of attachments amongst individuals, a quality which, in turn, is conditioned by the structures of public life. The book invites its readers to reflect on those social processes that put our security at risk and to explore the prospects for enabling change.

Part I
The Basic Principles of Attachment Theory

Chapter One

The social construction of the human brain

Lou Cozolino and Michelle D. Walker

A fundamental characteristic of the biological sciences is to study individual organs and organisms rather than viewing them in the context of living systems and evolving communities. This bias has led us to think of the brain as an individual organ and to search for technical answers about human behaviour instead of those that arise within the lived experience of human interactions. While we have learned a great deal from the theories and methods of this type of scientific exploration, our gains have not been without costs.

A tragic example comes from the recent past in the treatment of children in orphanages. In response to high death rates assumed to be the result of infectious disease, physicians ordered that their handling be kept to a minimum and that they be isolated from one another. Despite these changes, institutionalized children continued to die at such alarming rates that death certificates were signed along with admission forms to save time (Blum, 2002). The work of Rene Spitz and John Bowlby about the importance of human contact and sustained bonding resulted in these children being assigned specific care-takers. Staff members were now encouraged to hold and play with the children and to allow them to play with one another. After these changes were instituted, mortality rates in orphanages began to decline. A lack of contact, attachment, and bonding proved more fatal than microbes.

All living systems—from neurons, to brains, to individual human beings—depend on interactions with others of their kind (Schore, 1994). From conception, each human brain is dependent on the scaffolding of care-takers and loved ones for its survival, growth, and well-being. During every moment of our lives, we affect and are affected by the biology and behaviours of those around us. Thus, to write the story of the social brain, we must begin with the thought there are no single brains.

We begin with what we know: the brain is a social organ, built at the interface between experience and genetics, where nature and nurture become one. Genes begin by serving as a template to organize the general structure of the brain and trigger sensitive periods of development. Later, through a process called transcription, genes orchestrate the ongoing translation of experience into neural material as the brain adapts to its particular environment. Through the biochemical alchemy of template and transcription genetics, experience becomes flesh, love takes material form, and culture is transmitted from one generation to the next (Cozolino, 2006).

Compared to other animals, humans are born extremely immature. Parents have to be very adept care-takers and babies need to come equipped with an array of reflexes designed to help them attach to their parents and communicate their needs to them. The shaping of the brain occurs within the interlocking system of children, care-takers, and the community at large. In building a brain, the ever-expanding concentric circles of parents, family, community, and culture interact and interpenetrate one another in shaping each child’s nervous system. The very prematurity of the brain allows it to be maximally influenced by its particular social and physical environment. The child has to learn and adapt to an ever-changing stream of social information and constellation of relationships. This process of experience-dependent learning via transcription genetics is the process by which each generation builds the brains of their children (Siegel, 1999).

We begin life with the task of getting to know our mothers and those around us. Attuning to the smells, sights, and sounds of familiar others, we gradually learn to feel safe in their presence. Our mothers, fathers, grandparents, and other caretakers shape our brains during the dance of interacting instincts. Certainly, babies are driven by internal forces to orientate towards, approach, touch, and interact with others. So, too, are their care-givers. For humans, other people are our primary environment.

As primates have evolved, our brains have grown increasingly larger. Larger brains have led to longer periods of childhood and juvenile dependency, as well as more complex social structures. Being a member of a complex society requires a brain that is born ready to learn a vast amount of social information that takes many years to master. The social brain systems involved in attaching and communicating with those around us are all built by, and dependent upon, experience. While we are born with many bonding reflexes, the ability to form healthy relationships must be learnt. Children have to be exposed to social interactions and taught how to be a healthy and functional member of the group. Through smell, touch, and eye contact and later via reciprocal interactions, play, and language, we become social animals by linking together across the social synapse.

The fact that the brain is such a highly specialized social organ of adaptation is both good news and bad news. The good news is that if unexpected challenges emerge, our brains have a greater chance to adapt and survive. When good-enough parental nurturing combines with good-enough genetic programming, our brains are shaped in ways that benefit us throughout life. However, the bad news is that we are just as capable of adapting to unhealthy environments and pathological care-takers. The resulting adaptations may help us survive traumatic childhoods, but may impede healthy development later in life (Cozolino, 2002). Our parents are the primary environment to which our young brains adapt and their unconscious minds are our first reality. The prejudices, strife, community violence, and deprivation that touch so many young lives also become woven into the neural fabric of each child’s brain.

In the face of inadequate parental and social resources, a child’s brain is often shaped in ways that do not support his long term survival, as the parent is communicating to the child that he is less fit. Non-loving behaviour signals the child’s brain to develop as if the world is a dangerous place: do not explore, do not discover, do not take chances. When children are traumatized, abused, or neglected, they are being given the message that they are not among the chosen. They grow to have thoughts, states of mind, emotions, and immunological functioning that are inconsistent with well-being, successful procreation, and long-term survival. Despite the old adage suggesting that stress and deprivation build character, the truth appears to be that what does not kill us makes us weaker.

It is vital that we are protected from overwhelming stress during childhood because early interactions are actually building the brain and impacting the way it will function for a lifetime. These experience-dependent neural circuits are sculpted and become organized by the child’s interaction with care-takers. While it is important to maximize the quality of early experience, there is considerable room for later healing and recovery. Social brain networks do retain varying degrees of plasticity throughout life. We rely on this plasticity in education and psychotherapy for new social, emotional, and cognitive learning. In addition, when we are nurturing our children, we not only build their brains, but build our own as well. Playing with a child triggers neural plasticity and neurogenesis in both brains, so in effect, we need children almost as much as they need us. I suspect that helping others, in all forms, has similar effects.

Survival of the nurtured

When I think of Darwin’s survival of the fittest, I picture body builders, Alpha male gorillas, or lions stalking their ultimately doomed prey—all of the usual misconceptions about the process of evolution. But what does it mean to be the “fittest” in our modern society? Certainly, it is not the romantic notion of the noble savage. The instincts to run fast, fight others, and catch our own food have been channelled into hobbies and sports. Remember, survival of the fittest is entirely dependent on the environment to which the organism needs to adapt.

In contemporary society, the freeway is our savannah, the information superhighway our Galapagos. The real challenges are multi-tasking, balancing the demands of work and family, information management, and coping with stress. We need to maintain perspective, pick our battles carefully, and remain mindful of ourselves in the midst of countless competing demands. What prepares us best for these abilities? In some ways, it is the same thing that prepared our ancient ancestors to survive in their world—early nurturance, which plays a vital role in the development and integration of the diverse systems within our brains. Optimal sculpting of the pre-frontal cortex through healthy early relationships allows us to think well of ourselves, trust others, regulate our emotions, maintain positive expectations, and utilize our intellectual and emotional intelligence in moment-to-moment problem solving.

Maternal and paternal instincts—in fact, all care-taking behaviours—are acts of nurturance that have evolved to become more important than one’s personal survival. It is my belief that the survival of our children’s genes is such a powerful evolutionary mandate that most of us appear very willing to sacrifice our well-being and our lives for our children. Achieving such an altruistic state depends upon the successful inhibition of selfish, competitive, and aggressive impulses. However, in most instances, we are able to balance our own needs with those of our children; this state maximizes the likely survival of both parents and children. (Acts of nurturance or nurturing behaviours would, to my understanding, be motivated by the biochemistry of bonding and attachment that is genetically programmed, which would make it instinctual vs. learnt behaviour.) We can now add a corollary from attachment theory to Darwin’s survival of the fittest: those who are nurtured best, survive best.

From neurons to neighbourhoods

Why do humans have such complex relationships, maternal instincts, friendships, family, and society? Why not be like a reptile that digs a hole, lays some eggs, and moves on? The newborns of some species even have to flee from their parents to avoid being eaten! Wouldn’t life be easier without gossip, grudges, and in-laws? Perhaps not. Mother Nature loves to combine simple structures into more complex forms (Bonner, 1988). Bacteria, ants, and gazelles seem drawn together into interdependent systems. These colonies, armies, and herds of individuals are presumably better able to improve their fitness, and, hence, the chances of survival. If we are to utilize evolution as an organizing principle, we may assume that the social brain has been shaped by natural selection because interpersonal experiences enhance our fitness. Our best guess is that larger and more complex brains allow for a greater variety of responses in and across diverse environments (Mesulam, 1998).

Thus, it appears that larger, more complex, and more experience-dependent brains allow for increasingly adaptive responses to environmental challenges. To accomplish this goal, evolution selected for bonding, attachment, and care-taking to provide the necessary scaffolding for the prolonged extra-uterine development required to build such complex social brains. This “socialization” of the brain also laid the foundation for increasingly sophisticated forms of communication, the emergence of spoken and written language, and the birth of culture (Dunbar, 1996). The idea of “culture” relates directly to the interconnectedness of humans in society. By thinking about culture, we begin to look at the idea of group instead of just the individual, and can focus in on shared elements between members of that group, such as their history, ways of living and being, and even stories passed on through generations. The evolution of culture, in turn, allows for higher levels of biological, behavioural, and technological complexity that emerges not simply within select individuals, but through the group as a whole.

Just as Mother Nature seems to bring individual organisms together in interrelated groups, it also appears that she likes to hold on to certain strategies for supporting their connection. If we zoom into the inner workings of the brain, we discover countless neurons that combine with other neurons to form nuclei or clusters of neurons that come together to perform some specific function. These nuclei are connected by fibre systems to each other, allowing them to form functional systems. Functional systems then become more sophisticated and complex and later can combine with one another. All of these neurons, nuclei, and neural networks stimulate and interact with one another, keeping each other vital and alive.

Individual neurons are separated by synapses, or small gaps. These synapses are by no means empty spaces; rather, they are inhabited by a variety of chemical substances engaging in complex interactions that result in synaptic transmission. It is this synaptic transmission that stimulates each neuron to survive, to grow, and to be sculpted by experience. In fact, the activity within synapses is just as important as what takes place within the neurons themselves. Over vast expanses of evolutionary time, neural or synaptic transmission has grown ever more intricate to meet the needs of an increasingly complex brain.

When it comes down to it, does not communication between people, as complex as it is, consist of the same basic building blocks? When we smile, wave, and say hello, these behaviours are sent through the space between us via sight and sound. These electrical and mechanical messages are first received by our senses and then converted into electrochemical signals within our nervous systems that are then delivered to our brains. These internal signals generate chemical changes, electrical activation, and new behaviours that, in turn, transmit messages back across the social synapse. The social synapse is the space between us. It is also the medium through which we are linked together into larger organisms such as families, tribes, societies, and the human species as a whole.

If you can accept the metaphor of a social synapse, let us take it one step further. Neurons have three sequential levels of information exchange that are called first, second, and third messenger systems. They are (1) the communication across the synapse, that (2) changes the internal biochemistry of the cell, that (3) activates the genetic codes and protein synthesis to change cellular structure. Through these three messenger systems, neurons are stimulated to fire, grow, and interconnect with each other in an experience-dependent manner. Put another way, it is the firing patterns of neurons, based on environmental stimulation, that actually shape the neural circuitry of the brain. Through these three systems, our brains are shaped by experience and become a living reflection of our learning histories.

Zooming out from the brain to the level of individuals in relationships, could these three levels of information exchange be at work? In other words, when we interact, could we also be impacting each other’s internal biological state and influencing the long-term construction of each other’s brains? I believe the answer is yes. In fact, the emerging parallels among neurons within neural networks and individuals embedded in the social world may help us to bridge the social and neurosciences and provide a means of integrating clinical and research endeavours in science, public policy, and mental health.

The three messenger systems in humans

So how exactly does this apply to people? In what way could this mechanism of growth, connection, and complexity be occurring amid social interaction? While neurons appear limited to chemical communication, humans have also developed senses that can detect and analyse mechanical vibrations and pressure through our ears and skin, as well as a complex visual system designed to receive and process patterns within waves of light. Our sense of smell is a direct descendent of chemical transmission between neurons. But our four other senses of sight, hearing, taste, and touch also receive and send constant messages across the social synapse. This multiplicity of sensory channels not only allows for the independent processing of these channels, but provides for increased complexity through every kind of combination.

Consider a typical interaction while putting a child to bed. We might talk about the day and read her a story while lying next to her rubbing her back. We share smells and sounds, perhaps listening to a favourite song, push her hair out of her eyes, kiss her cheek, and tell her to “sleep tight” after talking about plans for tomorrow. All of these experiences stimulate and organize networks of the social brain. As experts in the reception and analysis of social information, our brains and bodies are primed to monitor and react to those around us. The multiple means of social communication combined with these receiving systems are analogous to the first messenger system present at a neuronal level.

The second messenger system in humans commences with the activation of social brain networks via these multiple streams of social information. Social brain systems include those that regulate proximity, fear, attachment, and social motivation and are all linked to bodily homeostasis. There are also networks that process social information, such as eye contact and facial recognition, as well as trigger imitation, interpersonal resonance, and empathy. Akin to the second messenger system in neurons, these systems support energy supply and stimulate cell growth while regulating metabolism, stress, and immunological functioning.

The first two messenger systems we have just reviewed allow for social interactions to sculpt our brains. Positive social interactions result in increased metabolic activity, mRNA synthesis, and neural growth. In other words, relationships create an internal biological environment supportive of sustained neural plasticity, exploration, and secure attachment. Ultimately, we now know that our interactions with others, in particular those that occur in early intimate relationships, significantly impact brain structure and long-term functioning—the third messenger system.

However much we focus on and learn from these internal biological processes, it is helpful to always remember that neurons are embedded within our brains, our brains embedded within our bodies, and our bodies embedded within society. Stimulated by relationships within our social worlds, millions of changes within and between neurons combine to create our emotions,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ATTACHMENT THEORY
• PART II: THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PUBLIC LIFE AND PERSONAL ATTACHMENT
• PART III: STRATEGIES FOR ENABLING CHANGE
• INDEX