You made a very brief comment in this episode about romantic love. You said something along the lines that there is discussion around whether romantic love is a culturally learned emotion or not. Would you be able to point me to some reading (or listening) on this? My bias is toward seeing romantic love as something culturally learned, especially when it is funneled into a coupled experience, including marriage. It would be great if there’s some research that can either confirm or challenge my suspicion… Thanks!

I appreciate the detailed and thoughtful comment you left regarding the role of debriefing after traumatic events.

This would make a great contribution to the discussion forum at http://brainscienceforum.com. It would be interesting to know if any listeners have experience in this area.

My gut reaction to your comment is that this situation seems to be another example of the danger of trying to use a “one size fits all” approach to this sort of problem.

However, there are other studies which show otherwise for other people. For some people who go through a traumatic event, the only way to keep it from becoming PTSD is to debrief. It has been found that people who dissociate during the trauma have more problems. Also, it has been found that people who have had many traumatic events in their lives have more problems if they don’t debrief.

Previously traumatized people tend to peri-dissociation. Dissociation during trauma happens without volition. The brain makes an instant decision that it is too much for the person to handle. Haziness and forgetfulness of the experience may result. Sometimes, during the trauma, a person will view one’s self from outside of their body. Dissociation doesn’t allow the individual to process the meaning of the traumatic incident at the time it happens. But if that incident is not processed at some point, it causes all kinds of problems that can lead to PTSD.

The problem, of course, is to know who is who after a traumatic event. It may be useful to ask about peri-traumatic dissociation and other trauma in the individual’s life. If neither appear to be the case, let them go with some common sense advice about handling emotions and recovery after trauma. Otherwise, debrief thoroughly.

We need to remember, also, that how a person healthily handles emotion after a traumatic situation, such as a severe auto accident, is not the way a person would healthily handle emotions after, for eb., a fight with a partner.

Love your podcasts. Thanks for all the work and your enthusiasm too.

By default all beings possessing awareness or “sentience” attribute qualities of unity, permanence and existence to both interior mental phenomena and exterior empirical “its” which they do not actually possess. That is not to say that these phenomena are completely non-existent. The world vividly appear to beings, however upon careful analysis of any detail in our experience we can physically and/or conceptually decompose that item into constituent parts ad infinitum.

This is a very brief and inadequate explanation of the philosophical and some say “empirical” premise of Buddhist practice. The instruction then is to look closer at reality and investigate its qualities to see if you can find anything which exists independently and permanently; find anything which is not composed of other things and entirely dependent upon other things for its existence.

Specifically, when one engages in this injunction and investigates reality through careful study, inference and meditation the EMOTIONS are a primary subject of analysis. After all, the intention of Buddhism is to benefit beings, not just fill their heads with abstract recursive aphorisms (though personally I love abstract recursive aphorisms).

So, to tie this back to the podcast (finally) …Buddhist practice analyzes the contents of our experience along with the concepts and emotions we have about those contents. Steady practice accompanied by a clear understanding of the hypothesis stated earlier (that things are not what they seem) is said to result in a fundamentally altered experience of self and world.

After the recent podcast about brain plasticity along with this podcast’s explanation of the “short path” and the “long path” of emotional neuro-responses, I see possible neurological explanations for what is accomplished by Buddhist meditation. Could training the mind to see that all phenomena are merely coiled “ropes” or maybe “garden hoses” effectively re-route that pathway and result in a radically different experience?

I really appreciate Patrick’s enthusiasm. I am looking forward to getting the discussion forums up so we can have a better format for discussing everyone’s ideas.

The (excellent) podcast “The Best of Ideas” from Canadian CBC Radio had an interview with Jerome Kagan, as well. Very good. I couldn’t see the direct link at the show site, but you’ll be able to get it from iTunes. It’s dated Feb 12th, 2007.