#44. Sunshine in Covey's Gap [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Who has not felt frustration at the difficulty and seeming impossibility of making a disagreeable emotion go away before we weaken and act it out, to our detriment? Techniques of true emotional control, i.e., making the bad feelings disappear rather than white-knuckle, open-ended resistance to acting them out, are not impossible, just non obvious. You just have to persuade yourself that this bad is good and believe it.

For the modern person, that second part, the believing, is difficult to achieve robustly if one is using religious solutions to the problem, the domain of soteriology (being "saved"), easier with psychoanalytical solutions, and, I am here to say, easiest of all with scientific solutions. "Believing," for me, means being prepared to bet your life on the truth of a proposition.

Steven Covey writes in "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" that between stimulus and [emotional] response, humans have, somewhat metaphorically, a "gap" in the causal chain and animals do not. In the gap, you find such things as imagination, self-awareness, conscience, and self will. He correctly lays tremendous emphasis on this point. George Santayana seems to have grasped this truth when he wrote: "Our dignity is not in what we do but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things." [source, Wiki quotes, accessed 11-06-2018]

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has even elucidated what could be the neural pathways that make Covey's gap possible. A direct pathway from the thalamus to the amygdala mediates the basic fear response but an indirect pathway that leads from thalamus to cerebral cortex to amygdala provides a more nuanced, intelligent amendment to the first response. Full cancellation of the direct pathway by the indirect would account for Covey's gap, and in principle, this could be done by a cortical relay through the inhibitory interstitial neurons of the amygdala that terminate on the amygdalar projection cells.

The doctrines of classical religion probably lead to such cancellation of emotions such as hate and fear by activating the same circuits that are used by a parent to reassure a needlessly fearful infant.

Apparently, classical religion is all about getting people to do the right things for the wrong reasons. When the discipline of evolutionary psychology is sufficiently developed, we can look forward to the age when people do the right things for the right reasons.