«Others shape our brain»
I am 59 years old. I am married, two children and two grandchildren. I was born in Bordeaux (Bordeaux) and live in Toulon, at whose university he directs a clinical ethology research group. I have worked with the politician Ségolène Royal and I feel very close to her. I believe in man more than in God. I have just published De cuerpo y alma (Ed. Gedisa), about affects and neurons.
What is the soul?
– I use the word soul in the same sense as Freud. We are matter and non-material representations, we are flesh and soul.
What do you know about the soul?
– According to theories of affect, each of us builds a film of ourselves with images and words, a selection of things experienced, impressions.
A movie that is only made with my memories?
– And with the image that the other has of you.
Can you change the movie of yourself throughout life?
– That film, which we call narrative identity, constantly changes. During adolescence our emotional world and therefore our narrative identity changes, or when we go through a life challenge. If we do psychotherapy it changes again.
When we go to sleep, our memory reviews what is stored. Couldn't we intervene to change our personality?
– That is the theory of resilience: we can intervene and modify the idea we have of ourselves. There are tools to not be a slave to the past.
Are you telling me that happiness or misery is built day by day?
– Yes, and word by word. It is a network, we weave the feeling of happiness.
And that gene that facilitates serotonin transit?
– True, some get more serotonin (a substance that fights depressive emotions) than others. But neurology also suggests that often our way of perceiving the world is what gives us the taste of happiness or unhappiness.
What do you suggest to modify the trend?
– When we feel unhappy we have to regain control and review the wounds: write, or meet people who are experiencing the same situation and talk, or help others selflessly.
Does the brain become the consequence of a state of mind? - Absolutely.
Does the chemistry change?
– Even if I am genetically and neurologically healthy, if I am alone, all my biological development will stop. A baby needs another person to develop biologically, so as not to become pseudo-autistic.
What if the other one is not healthy?
– If the mother, friends or culture are cruel to me; If there is war and inconsolable misery in my environment, even if my wife or husband mistreats me..., I will fall ill.
¿?
– The other, you, modifies the secretion of my dopamine. If I am alone, dopamine is scarce. If you talk to me kindly, if you make me laugh, if you make me feel safe, large doses of dopamine circulate. This shows that the mind and body are intertwined.
Does it happen at all ages?
– Yes, but during the first five or six years of life in our brain there are 200.000 synapses per hour, and all the events that occur around me – the kindness, the cruelty, the sadness of my parents – create channels through which it goes. to circulate dopamine. If you mistreat me, the channels will reach an area of the brain. If you make me feel safe, they will reach a different path that generates a feeling of well-being in me.
What a responsibility...
– It is your way of being, my mother, my family, my school, my culture, everything that surrounds me, which will channel the circulation of neurons towards an area of the brain that generates a feeling of well-being or discomfort.
Can the brain be reprogrammed?
– Yes, since it is plastic, although plasticity decreases with age. One in three children has an emotionally suffering mother. If my mother is bad, I am bad; I'm afraid to love, I don't know how to love.
Do those who start life well have it easier?
– Wait and see: when we monitor this other group, more communicative and sociable, it turns out that 25% sink after the ravages of first love. And 40% of those who started badly improve after that experience, they learn. We develop based on overcoming fears and sufferings. Happiness is not escaping them, but facing them and overcoming them.
Why so many hyperactive, anxious children?
– Our modern and technological world has improved material conditions but not relational ones. Before, the family was the nucleus of well-being and the hard things were outside. Now it is not the place of well-being, but of boredom; life is out. Our children develop intellectually and physically better, but emotionally worse than before.
Is suffering healthier than indifference?
– Yes, indifference is psychic death and suffering is life. While we suffer we can continue dreaming of something better.
Whoever waits for pain suffers it more and whoever waits for happiness enjoys it more?
- That's how it is. A simple relationship, depending on the emotions it provokes, can modify opiate secretions. The hope of appeasing me appeases me. The simple fact of believing that something or someone gives me peace gives me that power.
"You can only live covered in a cloak of words," you say.
– You have to give meaning to misfortune. If I don't understand it, I can't react and I am subject to discomfort. If my world is coherent again, if I give it meaning, I have a strategy to live again.
BORIS CYRULNIK SENSITIVITY: His entire family died in the Nazi death camps. At six years old, he was a runaway. He lived in foster homes and promised to understand. This led him to investigate different fields of science until developing the theory of resilience: how an unhappy childhood does not determine life. Now, in “Of Body and Soul”, he demonstrates how our mind modifies our body, how neurons create a biological link in the void between two people, how the faith of believers rescues them from illness much more frequently than who do not believe, how meditation makes the biological indicators of stress disappear, how the words of another modify our brain, how to become intelligent we must be loved...
Published in “La Contra” of the newspaper LA VANGUARDIA – 05/04/2007 – IMA SANCHÍS
