Column
You are who you know. That's the message from Daniel Goleman, science writer and the author of "Social Intelligence."
We all know that our relationships affect us. Married men live longer, scientists say. Lonely people are more depressed. When our boss is angry, everyone else in the office is anxious and alert, taking the emotional temperature of the room. Our days are lightened when we share a laugh with a friend.
Daniel Goleman, though, goes further. It's not just our moods that are changed by the shifting tides of the emotions of others. It's our very biology. It's our brains.
"Mirror neurons make emotions contagious, letting the feelings we witness flow through us, helping us get in synch and follow what's going on," Goleman writes. "We 'feel' the other in the broadest sense of the word: sensing their sentiments, their movements, their sensations, their emotions as they act inside us."
What he means is that what other people feel, we literally feel. What other people think, we can literally think. Other people's thoughts and emotions resonate in our bodies as if they were our own.
We've all had moments with certain people when we can finish each others' sentences, or when hilarity seems to build until everyone at a table is voiceless with laughter. We've held a friend's hand and cried because she cried.
Goleman is saying that these moments reach beyond empathy. Our brainwaves literally mirror the brainwaves of the people we are interacting with. Inside us, we feel what they are feeling. And these feelings loop inside our own neural pathways, changing them.
These changes, in turn, affect our immune systems, the flood of our hormones, the aging of our cells.
In the gay community, we talk a lot about our chosen families, the people we turn to who give us support and love and affection when our families of origin cannot, or will not.
Goleman's book makes our chosen families both a point of worry and a point of hope.
Worry, because we are not always careful when choosing our compatriots.
Sometimes we are friends with people just because they're gay and we're gay, too.
Or because we see them every Saturday in the bar, or because we are always outside together taking a smoking break. This makes sense, right? I think that all of us have experienced what it's like to find ourselves in a tight, dysfunctional circle, where everyone seems crazy, and we feel crazy, too.
When one of our friends is powerful in our friendship circle, and he or she is highly emotional, with widely swinging moods, we can catch it and pass it on---and lesbian drama (or gay drama) is born. In fact, the more drama that's around us, the more our brains change, until we ourselves are drama queens, with our emotions and hormones and neurons marching steadily down a well-worn path, creating a deeper and deeper rut within our own bodies.
Goleman says that when people are truly in synch, their brainwaves match—and, as we learned in high school physics, matching waves amplify, becoming much bigger than their parts. Drama amplifies, increases, until everyone nearby is drowned in it.
But, of course, there is also hope. Because if we do choose our friends—if we cultivate friends and lovers who are stable and secure, with a balanced picture of the world, and we are open to their point of view, then our brains will change, slowly but surely. We will create new neural pathways, and new hormonal triggers.
This is why, Goleman says, that couples who have been together a long time start to look like each other. It's not just because they shop at the same places and borrow each other's clothes—it's because their feelings echo each other, and eventually their faces are reshaped with the same furrows of worry across the brow, the same wrinkles of joy mapping the eyes.
Our relationships affect how we feel; they also affect our health, our longevity, our mental sharpness, the very structure of our brains.
We are not just bundles of genes; we are not just who our parents raised us to be. Those things are important, of course. But just as important are those people we surround ourselves with. Our bodies, our brains, echo the bodies and brains of our closest associates.
We become, literally, who we know.
Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com and read her occasional blog at jennifervanasco.com.
i know you, therefore, i am
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
