Although he never claimed to be a neuroscientist, some insights which have been attributed to Buddha resonate strongly with the findings of modern researchers. One of the most profound of these understandings is the idea that our deepest “self” is not a “thing”; rather, it is an ongoing natural process, one that continues to evolve throughout one’s life.
In fact, it seems that a baby doesn’t have a substantial self when it is born. As Louis Cozolino writes in his remarkable book, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: “The awareness of being a separate and autonomous self appears to emerge gradually over the first decade of life ... from how our brains construct our experience of others.”
He shows how the quality of our relationships with our parents and the other significant people in our lives affects us more than we usually know. A primary reason that we are unaware of these most basic feelings about ourselves and the world is that they are formed when we are so young that they usually become unconscious “givens.” Nevertheless, they influence and guide “our moment-to-moment experiences” throughout our lives.
Cozolino, who is a clinical psychologist as well as a professor at Pepperdine University, outlines how these early experiences guide the construction of our brain and central nervous system. Our thoughts and feelings don’t just float around somewhere in our consciousness; rather, they are biologically embedded in the very structures and functions of our brain as it adapts to its environment — healthy or otherwise.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of our early environment on the health of our growing brain. Indeed, that may be why we are born at a stage of development that is immature compared with other primates: in order to allow infants more flexibility when it comes to adapting to their specific family situations.
This openness to our social environment means that the kind of person that we eventually become is, to a very significant extent, the result of the quality of our relationships in the early years. “The most important aspect of early attachment relationships,” Cozolino notes, “is the establishment of a sense of safety.” A baby (or child) will obviously feel safer to the extent that more of its needs are met: to be held, to be fed when hungry, to experience warm interactions with its parents, and so on. Providing for these needs is a concrete demonstration of love, and a baby will thrive in such a nurturing social environment.
Findings such as these, which show how much we are shaped by our experiences, undermine the simplistic form of genetic determinism which claims that our fate is overwhelmingly decided by our DNA. The more complex reality is that, as Cozolino elegantly explains, “Our brains are built in the enigmatic interface between experience and genetics, where nature and nurture become one.”
The author also points out the vital but often overlooked corollary that: “there are no single human brains — brains only exist within networks of other brains.” More specifically, the self develops as reflection of the interactions of three factors: our brain, our body, and our relationships with other people — along with the rest of the natural world.
Cozolino employs the metaphor of our “social synapse” to explain our personal interrelations. Just as each individual brain cell communicates with others via the spaces between them and no neuron could survive by itself, people build families and communities across social spaces in order to survive and flourish.
Peter G. Prontzos teaches political science and political psychology at Langara College.
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