Frazzetto - Joy, guilt, anger, love: what neuroscience can--and cant--tell us about how we feel

W hen I worked in a neuroscience laboratory, the rhythm of experiments paced the hours. The lab was an island, a hideaway that felt distant from reality. It was a world of its own, one I had desired to set foot in ever since I turned sixteen. Inside, there was always quite a lot to do: exact solutions to prepare, delicate dissections to perform, precious molecules to purify and animals to take care of. Tightly parcelled one after the other as in a chain, these were some of the tasks that punctuated the flow of my daydreaming and at the same time pointed to big research questions. In between, I filled my lab journal with notes, diagrams and calculations. Trying to understand something as ineffable and intimate as emotions and the mind, I amassed minute fragments and discrete units of technical information.

Venturing into the secrets of the human brain became an opportunity for deep reflection. It was like interrogating an unfamiliar aspect of myself. It was like deciphering a tale written in code about the mind that I myself, with my experiments, was contributing to writing. Brain tissues, neurons and stretches of DNA were the protagonists of a story that, fact after fact, revealed new truths.

Every evening, with my lab coat dirty, my lab journal stained with chemicals, and standing in front of empty glassware piled up in the sink, I would assess the progress I had made. Usually my thoughts were also in need of a rinse. No matter how much I had laboured at the bench, there always seemed to be something left undone. One question demanded another, every experiment begged for confirmation, the results could use a second round of analysis. But the next chapter of the story was always scheduled for the following day.

When I made my way home, the characters from the lab would stay behind and I would latch on to another story still in progress, that of my own emotional life, of which I was the only protagonist, with my own script, the lines and movements of which were also still to be discovered. At home, I was face to face with my emotions.

Emotions, even the most fleeting, pervade every portion of our lives. One minute we are sad, the next we are beaming with hope. Some emotions chase us, others elude us. Every so often, emotions may leave us wounded, or they may consume us. On other occasions they lift us or transport us afar. This is why, sometimes, we think it would be useful to know how to rid ourselves of some of our emotions, or at least learn how to tame them. Occasionally, as in the case of joyful emotions, we wish we could make them recur on demand.

While I was writing this book, whenever I revealed to new acquaintances that I work as a neuroscientist, they, no matter their field, would want to know more. If I then mentioned emotions, there was no risk of failing to strike up a conversation. I found that people would ask me for advice on how to control their temper, how to forget unpleasant memories, how to overcome fears and cultivate joy, and even how to fix or save their love relationships. And they were unfailingly surprised when, even though I studied the brain , I didnt always have answers for them.

We have it from the ancient wisdom of Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, that discovering the exact causes of a phenomenon does not concurrently reveal its meaning for us and our lives. It seems that in the last days before his death, around 399 BC , Socrates read a book by Anaxagoras, a leading contemporary scientist. He had heard the news that Anaxagoras had discovered an element called nous (mind) that explained the nature of all things. Socrates hoped to learn the riddles of existence with the help of that book. However, when he realized that nous was only a force that ordered natures elements air, for instance, or water and could not tell him much about the meaning of life, let alone how it should be lived, he was filled with disappointment. Science was no road to self-knowledge.

This question how to harvest scientific knowledge so as to learn how to live, or to know oneself, for that matter grew no less urgent in the millennia to come. At the end of graduate school I came across a revealing essay: the transcript of a lecture delivered in 1918 by the German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber (18641920) and entitled Science as a Vocation . Going by its title, I was hoping to find there an echo of my passion for research. In the essay Weber addresses an audience of young students on the meaning and value of science for both personal and broader questions in life. Its take-home message was not encouraging. For Weber, science was responsible for a process of profound intellectual rationalization, which he termed a disenchantment in German, Entzauberung . Science meant human progress, yes, but it was not necessarily synonymous with a life full of existential meaning, because science teaches us only how to master life by means of calculation. I had a strong reaction to that essay. How could science ever be meaningless, or of no value?

My wonder at science remained unscathed, but Webers question about how it could help me understand life, or myself, resonated loudly.

In fact, almost a century later, that question grows ever more pressing for us. At the dawn of the second millennium, we live in a world that is profoundly pervaded by science and technology. The incredible amount of information about the brain at our disposal delivers the resounding message that what counts most in us is a web of neurons and that, if we learn how those neurons work, we will come closer to understanding who we really are. An enthusiastic belief reverberates: deciphering the mysterious code of the brain would let us adhere to the ancient dictum Know Thyself, proving Socrates wrong by successfully using science to throw light on our existence even in that most private and shadowy territory, our emotions.