This piece below is something I wrote yesterday for my book project but in retrospect doesn’t seem to fit neatly. So at least I can share it here.
In Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes Error, he provides compelling evidence from his work as a neurologist that the rational mind we celebrate actually depends upon emotional intelligence. That the absence of sophisticated feeling and emotion can break down rationality and make wise decision making almost impossible.
The evolution of the human brain begins with layering over previous ones. What is called the Triune Brain begins with what some called the Reptilian Brain (brain stem), that instinctive part in the brain that is wholly programmed for survival. When confronted with danger, it releases stress hormones, changes the heart rate and breathing to prepare the body to either attack (fight), run (flight) or hide (freeze). When the danger has passed, the hormones subside and the heart rate and breathing return to normal.
Because human beings have other layers of the brain, we have the capacity to imagine danger where none exists or to remember previous dangers and feel triggered by certain reminders of them. This is exceedingly wearing on the system as the perceived, rightly or wrongly, dangers that manifest as fear, stress and anxiety release some degree of hormones, change heart rate and breathing and keep us in a fight, flight or freeze mode over longer periods of time. The fight instinct manifests as chronic anger and abuse of others, the flight manifests as escaping into addiction, be it drugs, alcohol or video games, the freeze manifests as depression. None of this is healthy for our system and not only blocks all paths to our humanitarian possibilities but is dangerous in the political world where we are incapable of rational thought, of wise-decision making, of understanding the difference between fantasy and fact. In these reduced states of brain functioning, we are vulnerable to the manipulations of despots, dictators and media pundits, all of whom profit from our ignorance and inability to think.
The Mammalian Brain (limbic cortex) is layered over the Reptilian one and is what sets us apart from snakes and lizards. Reptiles lay eggs and don’t need to care for their young (indeed, there are stories of male alligators eating their children), but mammals who nurse their young instinctively learn how to nurture and protect. This feeling of connection and caring and tenderness with their babies moves mammals up higher on the evolutionary scale as we humans conceive of it. We feel kinship with these animals as we cuddle with our dogs, groom our horses, swim with the dolphins. Stories abound of mammals feeling emotions towards each other—chimpanzees grooming each other, otters playing together, elephants grieving over the loss of the deceased. Alongside jostling for the alpha male slot, jealousy, aloofness (cats!) and other nuanced feelings on the emotional scale.
As human mammals, this limbic cortex is where our feelings live and the neural connections can be developed through positive experiences of nurturing, affection, love, connection, happiness, joy, beauty or negative experiences of abandonment, abuse, disdain, betrayal, dislike, hatred, shame, sadness, anger and more. We are all of us combinations of different doses of these positive and negative experiences and all without exception are living records of what Faulkner calls “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
Just at the brain stem is programmed for survival and to steer us away from danger, so is the limbic cortex designed to steer us toward the positive emotions essential to the caring of the young and the flourishing of the species. It’s where we can find the idea of community, of caring for the common good, of compassion. To get there, in the words of the old jazz song, we’ve got to “accent-uate the positive (emotions), e- lim-inate the negative (emotions) and don’t mess with Mister in-between" (the shutting down of the heart, the incapacity to feel either pleasure or pain). Since music is designed to open the heart, to strum the strings of pleasure and beauty and love and belonging, it is wholly necessary to our higher evolution. Again, another point for our humanitarian promise.
The third, and most recent layer in the brain, is called the neo-cortex and that’s where logic and rational thought lie. This is where the great abstractions like Democracy, Existentialism, Spirituality and such reside. It is the home of all our various “isms” and "ologies" Our capacity to understand and put into practice whole systems of thought is what makes us unique in the hierarchy of species.
RenĂ© Descartes, that 17th century French scientist, mathematician and philosopher, became the self-appointed spokesperson for the neo-cortex when he declared, “I think, therefore I am.” He associated our capacity for abstract thought with the core of our identity as a species. His error, as noted by Damasio in his book, was to assume that the rational part of our brain was independent of our emotional part and our body. His Cartesian system of the disembodied mind paved the way for the separation of all that really belongs together and are essential to each other, creating our distinct subjects in schools and the divisions within the subjects (as in the way the wholistic Play, Sing and Dance in music was reduced to Play, Sing or Dance). Damasio’s critique comes from the findings of neuroscience (a field of study ironically made possible by Descartes' Cartesian ideas) as he shows how emotion is entirely present in the workings of the rational mind. Indeed, it will often take it over so that people make decisions that work against their best logical interest. (As in the way working class people in America with genuine grievances get fooled into thinking that billionaires care about them and will take care of them.)
In the world of education, Howard Gardner tried to repair some of the damage by suggesting that there are multiple intelligences and each are necessary to the others to fully develop our capacities. Daniel Goleman then wrote about emotional intelligences, suggesting that emotions are more than the random weather within us knocking us about, but can be cultivated more consciously as intelligences. He and others acknowledge emotion’s capricious and unpredictable nature but suggest that it is within our power to learn how to react to them when they appear and that’s where our social-emotional intelligence lies. In other words, we can’t wholly control what we feel, but we can gain some measure of control over how we re-act to those feelings and how we act from those feelings.
Now many schools have times in the day for SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) lessons. Such programs hope to help students in the area of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, enhanced social-emotional development, increase sense of well-being and community building. This feels like a positive development in our understanding of what constitutes a more wholistic and effective education.
And yet. America loves to make a noun of something, package it, market it, set it on the shelves for consumers to buy pre-cooked and ready-made, make a check-list for teachers to tick off the boxes and make a “Finished!” brushing their hands up and down gesture that means—“There you go! Took care of that!”
Meanwhile, music programs throughout the country are either in a constant threat of being cut or actually cut. And where they do exist, far too many are just making sure kids can play the notes for the football half-time show or win the competition or play everything correctly with no attention to how they actually feel about the music. Read that SEL list again and note how it describes everything that happens naturally and organically in my music class. Not only do the kids experience is all in a natural and fun-loving way, but we also name these qualities, discuss them and reflect on them so we can do it all yet more consciously. In so doing, it can help shape a lifelong commitment to humanitarian values.
And so I suggest that music, that faculty that indeed integrates every layer of the brain and chamber in the heart and part of the body and all of the above together is something we would to well to pay attention to. It’s power to fulfill the full measure of our capacity to feel beauty, to feel nuanced emotion, to feel empathy and compassion with fellow humans is no pie-in-the-sky “world peace” fantasy, but a necessary tool to help build our humanitarian house of belonging. It alone cannot do so but when properly considered it can contribute significantly. That’s a start.