‘Cerebral climaxes’ are those moments when we experience a high, a life-changing realisation, a joyous epiphany. I have studied these brain peaks for many years, and they are associated with crises and extreme emotions. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow called them ‘peak experiences’, but the truth is that we know surprisingly little about how these climaxes come to pass – and, indeed, about how the brain itself works.
If other complex systems can do this magic trick, the brain must surely be able to do it too
Our ignorance was highlighted recently when Harvard and Google AI experts announced that they had successfully mapped one cubic millimetre of brain tissue (about one millionth of an adult human brain). The imaging and mapping exercise produced 1.4 million petabytes of data. One neuron was found to have over 5,000 connection points to other neurons, of which we have an estimated 86 billion. A member of the Harvard team, Professor Jeff Lichtman, said: ‘We don’t understand these things, but I can tell you they suggest there’s a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.’
These days, many people mistrust the brain’s ability to cope with crises, as though the most awesome object known to science were an obsolete computer unfit for purpose. Some swallow brain-modifying drugs, afraid to face the pace or pressures of work or even day-to-day problems. There’s no doubt that fear, anxiety and depression cause enormous suffering, and that some biological brain abnormalities do require medical intervention. But when poor mental health accounts for so many work-related illnesses (around 51 per cent of long-term sick leave is due to ‘stress’, depression or anxiety, according to Mental Health First Aid England), something has gone seriously wrong. This whole epidemic has been presided over by a ‘stress management’ industry. Managing what, exactly?
When my book, The Truth About Stress, was published in 2006, the New Statesman said of me: ‘Angela Patmore is widely regarded as a heartless bitch’. The reason was that I had presented 440 pages of evidence that the ‘stress’ concept was bogus. The book did not say that emotional anguish was bogus, or that anxiety, fear, grief and depression were not real and eviscerating. It made the case that ‘stressology’ was gaslighting people and undermining their ability to face threats and challenges. In the years since, this conclusion has become increasingly hard to ignore. All too often, worried people with problems who desperately need practical help or coping skills are being offered calming medication. Is this really the answer?
The theory that we need calming down is based on the work of endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930s. Funded by the ‘calming’ tobacco industry, Selye borrowed the stress concept from engineering and applied it to living things. In science, this flaw is known as ‘false extrapolation’, and this is why there are thousands of different and opposite definitions of ‘stress’. Selye observed that tortured rats got sick and blamed this on the corticosteroids (now known as ‘stress’ hormones) produced by the adrenal glands as the animals struggled to survive. But the real cause should have been obvious. When the rats realised there was no escape from his experiments, they simply gave up. Resignation shuts off the immune system.
The disastrous effect of the stress ideology has been to pathologise the physiology of arousal, especially the fight-or-flight response, now sometimes referred to as a ‘syndrome’ – a survival mechanism apparently designed to harm us.
One neuron was found to have over 5,000 connection points to other neurons, of which we have an estimated 86 billion
I wrote two of the earliest sports psychology books in the UK on ‘pressure’ in sport, interviewing scores of competitors including world champions. What happens inside people’s heads in the clutch of high-level competition? I analysed the interviews and found a metaphorical patois of hundreds of expressions to do with blood, heat and pressure, tension and stretching: ‘I had a rush of blood’, ‘He got hot under the collar’, ‘his blood was up’, ‘I was pumped up’, ‘I nearly burst a blood vessel’ and so on. The words ‘stress’/ ‘distress’, ‘distraught’ and ‘strain’ all refer to stretching or pulling asunder, as do a lot of our ‘nervousness’ metaphors like ‘tight’, ‘strung out’, ‘on tenterhooks’, ‘wired’, ‘keyed up’ and ‘nerve-racking’.
My sportsmen’s metaphors evidently described a process. It culminated for these individuals, if they had the guts to go through with it and not ‘choke’, in a marvellously clear and focused state called ‘being in the zone’, where you played ‘like God’s professional’ with calm visionary certainty. But you didn’t get to be in the zone without the more unpleasant feelings of pressure and tension first.
I puzzled over this peculiar patois. Then one morning walking over a field with my dog I stopped dead. It’s blood ‘pressure’! They’re talking about the physiology of threat situations. I referenced those potted endochrinology lessons beloved of the stress industry that I studied as a research fellow at UEA, about what happens during fight-or-flight. Blood circulation reverts to an arterial tree. It withdraws from our extremities, orchestrated by vasodilation and vasoconstriction, and it goes to the large muscles we may need for fighting or running away. But it also goes to the brain.
A minutely controlled ‘rush of blood’ enables the brain to up its game, using an enriched supply of oxygen and glucose, micromanaged by vasodilation within its circuitry. This expands the neural networks, so nerve fibres or axons undergo literal nervous tension. The feelings of being stretched or about to burst a blood vessel may simply describe the brain’s internal processing, doing its job of making connections, delivering fusion and focus. None of this is abnormal, but when the brain makes a particularly big connection, this may well stop us in our tracks and give us a ‘high’, or a eureka moment.
There are two ways in which we can experience an epiphany. The first is involuntarily; in a life crisis. Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was lying in bed in a New York dosshouse having lost everything and thinking he was about to lose his sanity as well. Terrified, he sat up and experienced ‘the hot flash’ that vouchsafed his vision of the Twelve Steps to get off alcohol that have helped millions to overcome their addiction. Countless others have described epiphanies that suddenly rescued them from hell. Mine cured me of panic attacks.
We may never fully understand how our brains work
The other method of achieving a brain peak is voluntarily. We get them in our leisure pursuits, which artificially create crises and climaxes, perhaps because the brain likes to rehearse the whole thing. Sport has nip-and-tuck competition rising to unbearable tension and finally a result. Childhood dares and adventure activities offer high-tension and relief. Theatre builds tension as the characters sweat it out and finally reach an outcome. Fiction and movies follow the same pattern. Classical music communicates its tension and crescendos direct to the brain. And then there’s human sexuality. Other animals, so far as we know, use the biological drive for making little animals, but we have turned it into an art form so we can experience lots of cerebral climaxes.
While we may never fully understand how our brains work, Francis Crick, one of the hardest of hard scientists, wrote in 1994 that: ‘Much of the behaviour of the brain is emergent.’
Complex systems, at the very zenith of their complexity and on the verge of apparent chaos, suddenly produce order, as though at the throwing of a switch. Shoals of fish, computer automata, a big pile of sand, the money markets, the Earth’s weather systems – all can undergo this phase transition known as emergence. Take for an obvious example a pan of water heating up. All the water molecules behave more and more randomly and chaotically, until suddenly they all form a hexagonal convection pattern and start to simmer.
If other complex systems can do this magic trick, the brain must surely be able to do it. And if we interrupt the process – as ‘stress management’ urges us to do – we risk interfering with one of the wonders of science in the midst of its work. So when you walk through the storm, hold your head up high. It has your miraculous brain in it.
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