Revisiting the Delusion of Separation in the Brain

Earlier this week I posted a blog entry called "The Delusion of Separation," and in that post I shared a moment in time when I felt a profound feeling of separation: early motherhood soon after I stopped breast feeding.

Ironically, later in the same week, I attended a lecture by a Harvard Psychiatrist from the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine who spoke about the neuroscience--the brain science-- that exacerbates and colors the human perception of separation not only in humans, but in all mammals.

It was a fascinating talk to say the least, but especially in consideration of what I personally have been reflecting on in my own private life: the power of the delusion of separation.

In many ways, a scientific explanation that involves a residual legacy of millions of years of brain evolution that sets off an alarm in the limbic system--an evolutionarily old and deep area of the brain-- around any perceived threat of separation is quite validating of my struggle to live in a deeper truth of interconnectedness.

It is paradoxical as well.

This is because, although according to this scientist our human brain evolved from an amphibian brain to a mammalian brain through attachment as a survival strategy in the limbic system, I have internalized the myth of  detachment as a survival strategy.

Another point of interest for me, and maybe you as well, was this Harvard professor highlighted the role of the stress response (the sympathetic nervous system) in the human experience of separation.

Specifically, he said the amygdala (the emotion center of the brain which is part of the limbic system) sends out alarms (in the form of glutamate) to the brain when the experience of separation is being triggered by something in the environment because this ancient area of the brain still views attachment as a primary survival strategy.

Yet, it seems, it is also possible that the amygdala could misperceive a threat of separation and/or not factor in the many other areas of safety and protection that could be equally present, but blinded from view due to the brain's hard-wired hyper-focus on separation.

Furthermore, other normative types of separations like ending breast-feeding in motherhood, or traumatic separations like a family member dying in a car accident, could prompt an even greater reaction from the amygdala that requires other areas of the brain like the prefrontal cortex (the most evolutionarily modern part of the brain) to help the individual turn the separation alarm off.

So what does all this neuroscience mean on the ground level where we are practicing the dharma and living out our own spiritual lives?

The truth is, I don't entirely know.

Maybe though, it gives more power to the practice.

Because if neuroplasticity--the theory that our brains can change and evolve throughout our entire lifetime--is true (and by all of Dr. Richard Davidson's scientific evidence at The Center for Investigating Health Minds it is), then the very human experience of being overwhelmed or even physiologically alarmed by the delusion separation is not only scientifically valid, it is also completely workable.

As in, "Yes, I can work with this."

So it would seem, just like the storm cloud in the sky, that the delusion of separation is in fact not a problem at all, it is just a part of the practice.

Fascinating!