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Making Healthy Choices: Evolve Your Emotions, with Rudolph Tanzi, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard University
The Choice
Emotion is so interesting. If you think about the evolution of emotions, you know, first there was, 400 million years ago, the brain was – the reptilian brain as we call it. And these are memories that were instinctively programmed by our genetics. You don’t need to learn how to run away when you’re attacked or how to fight – fight or flight. You don’t need to learn how to find food or to go find sex to reproduce, right. It’s instinctively programmed. And then it was only about 100 million years ago that if I use what’s called the handy brain that Dan Siegel uses. This is brainstem down here, you tuck your thumb in, that’s the mid brain so that’s the 400 million. And then that’s the frontal cortex, that’s only four million years old. That’s meaning, creativity, purpose, self-awareness. Well tucked in here that’s where we live. That’s short-term memory. And the first short-term memories we had were based on the roots of our emotions – fear and desire.
And what was fear? Then the first memory of pain and the anticipation of pain in the future. Pain or punishment. And what is desire but the first memory of pleasure and reward and then the desire, the anticipation of that in the future. So the first messages of acquired memories that involved us living our lives and saying, you know, I remember that was – remembering something was bad and fearing in the future, having anxiety. Or remembering something’s good and say I want it again. We still live in that part of the brain. Now our emotions become more complicated as jealousy, as greed, as resentment. But they’re all based in basically reward and punishment. Remembering reward, seeking it again, punishment, remembering that and avoiding it again, right.
So the way to think about this is when you live in that short-term memory the reason why we live there is that sensations are coming in all the time. We’re seeing, all your five senses are bringing information to you. It’s all packaged in one big bundle, like a cable, called the perforant pathway because it perforates the short-term memory – or the short-term memory area is called the hippocampus and it’s Greek for seahorse because it looks like this. Picture a big sphere going through it. And everything you’re hearing right now and seeing is going into that area.
So now you’re living in the short-term area of the brain trying to keep track of what’s going on five minutes ago, a minute ago, right now. And there are two ways you can connect. You can either connect back to the brainstem which is constantly saying fight or flight – go find food, go find somebody to have sex with, right. And some people live there. The brainstem constantly guiding their short-term area, that’s back to middle. Or you have people who live in the frontal cortex saying meaning, purpose, identity, self-awareness. I want to serve. I want to make this a better place. How can I creatively do that? And there’s a huge evolutionary vector right now away from selfishness to self-awareness.
So the old brain was selfishness. The new brain is self-awareness. Emotion is where you live. You live in the middle. And it’s always a choice you have to make. Am I going to be self-aware and know what my brain is doing right now and by my actions have my gene activity serve me and my brain serve me? Or am I just going to be a servant to my brainstem that instinctively whips me around and makes me do whatever I want while I just live with fear and desire, phobias and addictions every day. And that’s a choice in your brain you have to have every day to know where you live because we do live in emotions.
“Playing the Rookie” to Regulate Your Genes and Emotions
So epigenetics, unlike just genetics alone, doesn’t pertain to the genes or the DNA sequence or content of the genes, but how the gene activity is regulated. What’s most interesting about epigenetics is that everything you do all day changes your gene activity. Every experience you have, every choice you make – what you eat, how much you exercise, your stress level. If there’s repetition, if there’s habit, if you’re doing similar things every day then eventually those genes that are getting turned on or off the same way get chemically modified and say okay, we’re just going to make this easy for you. The genes get trained and the activity becomes consistently the same. So your habits train your genes and their activity. Then the question is is that activity going to serve you well or not.
Happiness is a very complex thing because on one hand happiness can be attaining that which we find pleasurable and rewarding, but is that truly happiness or is that just serving a need? There can be anxiety in wanting something that’s pleasurable. And when you get there you may feel happiness but is it true joy? You can also argue that happiness or true joy is knowing that although you have a fear of something that you’ve overcome it, that you’re not living in anxiety, you’re not living in fear. You’re not thinking about the future of being painful or punishing because your past was.
I think it’s important in terms of happiness to always know where you are on the fear and desire scale, because those are the roots of your emotions. And there’s a constant battle between the older parts of the brain, the veterans in the locker room, 400 million years of experience and the rookie, the frontal cortex trying to say hey, wait a minute, you have meaning, purpose, identity, creativity, you know, social bonding. Well, think about what happens in the locker room, right. The veterans basically kick around the rookies. If you want the rookie to have a spot on the field, you have to be the coach. You have to put him in, right. And this is where epigenetics and how your gene activity changes in response to how you’re living of life and how you’re dealing with stress is so important because happiness has a lot to do with your lifestyle and your gene activity, more than what you inherited from mom and dad.