A (19:49)
Been talking about social bonding through the lens of neural circuits that are already established. However, these very neural circuits that are responsible for social bonding in adult forms of attachment, be it romantic or friendship or otherwise, are actually established during development. One of the more important and I think exciting areas of early attachment as it relates to adult attachment comes to us from the work of Alan Shore. Alan Shore, spelled A L L A N Shore S C H O R E is a psychoanalyst who also has deep understanding of neurobiology of attachment, both in childhood and in adulthood. And he's focused a lot on differences between right brain and left brain forms of attachment. Now, in a early episode of the Huberman Lab podcast, I touched into the fact that most of what's discussed in the general public in sort of pop psychology and even in some neurobiology courses about right brain versus left brain and one side of the brain being more emotional and the other side being more rational, is completely wrong. However, the work of Alan Shor points to some very concrete neural circuits that do have a lateralization bias, meaning they are more right brain than left brain or more left brain than right brain, that underlie certain forms of attachment between child and parent, in particular, child and parent, mother. And that these right brain isms, if you will, and left brain isms for attachment get played out again and again in our forms of attachment as adults. So within the field of psychoanalysis, there's a long standing discussion, of course, about the so called unconscious or subconscious, the things that we are not aware of. And I think there's growing evidence pointing to the fact that at least one major component of the subconscious or the unconscious is the so called autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is the portion of our nervous system that controls our reflexive breathing, our heart rate, our skin conductance, meaning our sweating pupil size. It's the aspect of our nervous system that makes us more alert or more calm. It's the so called sympathetic meaning for alertness or parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. Parasympathetic for more calming responses. Now, what, what Dr. Shore's work and the work of others is now showing is that early infant parent, in particular infant mother, attachment involves a coordination or synchronization of these right brain circuits and these left brain circuits as they relate, excuse me, to the autonomic nervous system. How does this play out? Well, it plays out where early on, as an infant, when you're born, you're truly helpless. You can't feed yourself, you can't warm yourself, you can't change yourself, and you certainly can't ambulate, walk anywhere to get the things that you need. All of those functions, all of those needs rather, are met by your primary caretaker. Typically, that's the mother. I realize there are Exceptions, but that's the general rule. There are now brain imaging studies examining the brains of infants and the brains of mothers as they interact and showing that the physical contact between the two, the breathing of the mother and child, the heart rate of the mother and child, and indeed the pupil size of the mother and child are actually actively getting coordinated. In other words, the mother is regulating the infant's autonomic nervous system primarily, and the infant is also regulating the mother's autonomic nervous system. A small coo from a baby or a cry, which is a stress cry from a baby, will definitely regulate the autonomic nervous system of the mother. Now, as we get older, there's another system that starts to come into play in parent child interactions, and this also comes into play in sibling interactions and so forth. And that's the left brain system as described by Alan Shor. Now, again, this isn't about emotion versus rationality. This is about autonomic versus more conscious forms of emotional bonding. So on the left brain side of things, there is a processing more of narratives that are very concrete, logical narratives. Okay, and again, I have to zoom out and just really tamp down the idea that it's not that one side of the brain is emotional and the other side is rational, but rather, there's a bit of a dominance for the left brain circuitry to be involved in the kinds of bonding that are associated with prediction and reward. The idea is that there are two parallel circuits that are important for establishing bonds, and that this is set up very early on in childhood, and that it's neither emotional nor rational, but both. What's becoming clear from the neurobiological imaging studies is that as people start to advance into adolescence and adulthood and well into their elderly years, the same circuits that were active and established in childhood are repurposed for other forms of attachment, and that to have truly complete bonds with other individuals, but in particular with romantic partners, it's important that there be both synchronization of physiology and synchronization of these more, I guess we could call them more rational or predictive type circuits. So we can leverage this information in the clinical psychology and in the neurobiological literature. Now it's understood that there is both emotional empathy, like actually feeling what somebody is feeling, and what is now called cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is this idea that we both see and experience something the same way at a mental level. Emotional empathy is this idea that, yes, I can feel what you feel at a visceral, somatic, or autonomic level. And it's absolutely clear that strong social bonds between children and Caretaker involve both emotional empathy, this autonomic function, and cognitive empathy. That there's a mutual understanding of how the other person feels and how the other person thinks in order to be able to make predictions about what they're going to do. Now, it's also very clear, based on the emerging literature, that romantic relationships and to some extent friendships, although friendships have been explored a bit less in the literature, that emotional empathy and cognitive empathy are both required in order to establish what we call a trusting social bond. So for those of you that are seeking to establish deeper bonds or bonds of any kind, it's important that you think about synchronization of bodily states. We talked about that earlier. And synchronization of cognitive states. Now, that doesn't mean you have to agree on everything. In fact, oftentimes people who feel very close to one another cognitively and emotionally argue about all sorts of things and disagree about a lot of things. But the point isn't that there be total convergence of opinion or stance, but rather that we understand how the other feels and we believe that they understand how we feel, that we understand how the other person thinks, and that they think that we understand how they think. So it's a reciprocal loop between two people that involves this cognition and involves emotion. And it's grounded, as Dr. Shore has pointed out, in our earliest forms of attachment. And that makes perfect sense because the same sorts of circuits that are responsible for social homeostasis, the kind of right brain and left brain circuits that are responsible for infant mother attachment and then later for more intellectual or predictive type attachments between child and caregiver, are the exact same circuits that we superimpose into all all other types of relationships throughout the rest of our life. And I should just mention that for those of you that might be thinking that you had a less than satisfactory infant caretaker interaction or form of attachment, you are not alone. And in fact, much of the work that Dr. Shore focuses on is about how those early circumstances can be understood and rewired toward the development of healthy adult attachment. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and 0 grams of sugar. 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