Louis Cozolino is a psychologist and professor of psychology at the Pepperdine University. Combing knowledge of medicine with a degree in theology and clinical practice with teaching have perhaps been some of the reasons for the new ideas that Prof. Cozolino has come up with. In his book, “The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain”, he gives us the idea that there is a lot of give and take between brains!
Says Cozolino, “We have had so much trouble studying the brain or understanding it because it is not an individual organ but a social organ. The Western medical model of science in which researchers take individual brains, analyse, dissect and scan them, does not get us anywhere. The brains are social organs and can really be understood when they are connected to other brains. It harkens back to neuro psychology, harkens back to the role of relationships and health and family therapy etc….”
Cozolino opines that the brain has to be studied in relation to the relationships that surround that individual and their effect on the brain under study. He says, “For primates, attachment equals survival and abandonment equals death. This is true for most mammals as well. At the eighth month of gestation, even before birth, a part of the brain, the core part of the brain called the amygdala is well formed. It is the executive centre for fear activation. So by the time we are born we are capable of being completely terrified. If you notice in children when there is a fear response it is a whole body response, it is a kind of panic attack when they are frightened. The circuits that actually regulate fear are located in a primitive part called the prefrontal cortex but those take years to develop. These centres have inhibitory functions that modulate and control fear. So, for many early years we use our parents’ frontal lobes, in a sense, as an external prosthetic brain. We depend on our parents to be sensitive to us, to mirror us, to see when we are heading for danger, when we are upset. So we have this experience when we get upset, our parents step in and help us re-regulate and assess whether we are hungry or afraid or whatever it is and then we go back to the base point to be calm again. And it is these thousands and thousands of interactions that we have over the first few years with our parents that provide a scaffolding for us to go from a regulated state to disregulated state and back again. And in the process of all these interactions when we are connecting and tuning and being with our parents, our sensitivity to them and theirs to us…what is happening is our network between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is being shaped and modelled on the basis of these interactions. So this is one of the ways in which parenting affects brain development.”
But even before we think we have understood it all, Cozolino cautions, “I think that the brain is so complicated and its functioning in many ways is so mysterious that we are still at the very beginning…the brain is a social organ and that is an incredible discovery…it connects to other brains…this gives us an understanding of why we are all connected…when we feel something when we see somebody, the brain is creating a model of the feeling within us…”
Cozolino has an interesting suggestion, “Education is life…the brain is designed to keep learning and we need to be stimulated. Exploratory behaviour is a measure of the absence of anxiety and fear. So if you are out there exploring you are growing your brain, you are activating the chemistry of neuro plasticity and also positive mood connects with other people….education is life.”
To keep the brain healthy and positive makes a difference not just to the person whose brain it is but also to all others who interact with him or her.
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Web link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gprqHsvj-U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbiNQaFZMhA
