On Hearing Others

Louis Cozolino's beautifully written book on neuroscience has an explanation near the end about our necessary interconnectedness. 

Communication from one body part to anther happens when messages throughout our body are transmitted by neurons, but the transmission doesn't happen inside the neurons but between them, in the synaptic gap that separates the dendrites of one neuron from the axon terminal of the other. 

Then there's this bit that I love from Cozolino's book: It doesn't stop at our epidermis. The communication continues outside of our individual bag of bones into others nearby. The space between us, you and I, is a synaptic gap. The transmission of messages is continuous, not just inside our bodies but between them. So, maybe it's silly to think of ourselves as separate beings. We're one giant blob of a being, but some of the transmission circuits are damaged. Inside the body, damaged circuits manifest in a variety of ways, like Alzheimers' and Parkinson's. Between bodies, it feels to me like our systems are struggling to function from the lack of dendrites able to receive our signals. 

Cozolino says,

"Our brains are organs of adaptation and survival, designed to do things as fast as possible with the smallest amount of information. So once they come upon a solution to a problem, like never expressing negative emotions during childhood, they become shaped to never express negative emotions again. . . . Brains are inherently conservative and want to keep doing what's worked in the past. . . . Having a witness [therapist, friend, coach...] activates mirror neurons and theory-of-mind circuitry, making us more aware of others and ourselves while reinforcing our identity. The importance of our brains linking across the social synapse for therapeutic success is probably why the quality of the client-therapist relationship (as perceived by the client) has the strongest positive correlation with treatment success of any variable to have been studied. . . . 

It is obvious that we can model the outward behaviors of others and imitate their physical actions. What is less obvious is that the mechanisms of our social brains allow us to attune to the mental activities of those around us. . . . Unfortunately, the social isolation created by many psychological defences can separate us from the positive emotional connectedness that drives healing. . . . All aspects of this cocreation of our experience support the idea that both reality and memory are social constructs. . . . While the brain evolved to help us deal with potential danger, the speed, intensity, and negative bias of all the thoughts it generates has gone too far. In many ways, the cortex has grown too smart for our own well-being. The good news is that while brains evolve over eons, we can change our mind in an instant. It may take decades for that instant to happen, but when it happens, our mind is capable of discovering new ways of being."

In the body, we're constantly working towards homeostasis by responding to internal stimuli (more on that here). Feeling fear tells us to hide or run or prepare to fight. Feeling lonely provokes us to seek out other people. Feeling horny provokes us to seek a mate. Even shame can be useful to encourage useful social norms (but can be a problem when it attempts to enforce harmful norms - more on that here). When we don't get a reciprocal response from our efforts outside the body, it affects us internally. Fear can become panic, loneliness becomes despair, and libidinal energy can turn angry. Any blocked instinct can become rage. That's all to say this very simple thing that we all already know: We need connections with others who can hear us out and are willing to try to understand us. 

And we can be pretty bad at doing that - or, at least, I can. 

I was in a group training session that used an exercise I found really profound: One trainee described a problem they're having, and the rest of us were asked to each reflect back what we heard and suggest what direction we'd take the issue in a row without any discussion of each conceptualization. Almost everyone went in a totally different direction! Judging from my own response, I believe people each focused on the part of the story that resonated with them and wanted to ask more about that specific part. The response we each had to a single story said so much more about each of us than it did the speaker. It was startling how much I had missed and how much I tuned in to the things that were familiar to me. One thread went down a specific road, and I thought to myself, That's got nothing to do with all this, but it had. That ended up being the path the original speaker wanted to explore when asked about our comments. 

The exercise made it crystal clear how much we need to ask more about one another's experiences in order to really understand where they're coming from. We tend to listen, connect with that little piece, then relate that back instead of getting the bigger picture. How many of us are walking around largely misunderstood by the people closest to us?

The other thing that happened to me is that once I started resonating with part of the story, I got so excited to know the crux of the problem and share it with others that my heart started racing and my mind got so singularly focused (as it will when we're in an excited physiological state - that's the sympathetic nervous system kicking in) that I stopped listening to the rest of the story! I didn't choose to stop; I was unable to hear the rest of the story. I think that's very common. I've seen it happen in classes where someone says X, someone else throws up a hand and excitedly waves it around while I take other hands who answer Y and Z and maybe A and B, and then that excited hand is called on to blast out answer Y, which we had just talked about! They couldn't hear it in their excitement to say it. It happened once at an old boyfriends Christmas dinner. His dad had a joke to tell, but his sister was first. We smiled and nodded politely; it was a cute joke. Then his dad took a turn and told the exact same joke, and we all laughed our asses off, and he thought he must be hilarious!

I don't think it's a problem that we connect with others through shared experiences and don't always have the full picture no matter how carefully we listen. But I do think it's something to be aware of, to remind ourselves that we don't understand as much as we might think we do and to ask more about them, being careful to notice any assumptions based on our own experiences. Understanding people is like understanding works of art: We'll never fully grasp the authorial intent. Even when the artist leaves a statement of their thought process, it's never complete. Our interpretation of their representation always brings more to the conversation that what's there. But we have to acknowledge that we can never know what the artist wants to convey, even in an essay, because it's always going to be mixed in with our own experiences to create something new that each of us sees in slightly different ways. That is the miraculous part of the connections we create in the space between us because sometimes our interpretation connects more with the artist than their original intention. And sometimes when we tell others what we hear them saying - as trite and psychobabbly as it sounds - it can be an enlightening experience, helping the speaker to understand their own thoughts in a completely new way. 

It's not a problem to never really know, but we do need to know we don't know and to widen our understanding, put out more dendrites to receive more pieces of the puzzle in order to better understand.