The emotional system is an anticipatory and genetically programmed system for survival, which takes over because it is much faster and more organised; not in vain, it started hundreds of millions of years ago in brains under a protective structure, the skull. There was an evolutionary priority, it went from an accumulation of powerful neurons, for chemical perception in very primitive beings, to grow to form a brain for new channels; sight, hearing, organs of locomotion... and, the brain was founded, a set of multimodal structures. The fruit fly brain, the size of a dot, already has a hundred thousand neurons. That's why emotions anticipate or direct us - they are an early warning system.
We will gain some command over these deep structures of what, very simplistically, we call the emotional system, and we will gain ground on something so primitive through training. This system is incredibly ancient and is involved in the preservation of our life, indistinguishable from our glandular system, our immune system, the system that encompasses our metabolic fluids, our vital signs, all the organs of the body, including the intestinal flora.
In this sense, it is naïve to believe that a system such as the emotional system can be changed with a course or exercises that are not necessarily based on anatomical, epigenetic or neuro-biological knowledge. There are no tricks to modify the way the human body functions.
To change something in our habits, in our lifestyle, in the way we experience things, is to speak of new connections between neurons, of alterations in established circuits and their interconnections, of genetic modifications to produce new proteins within neurons to learn or erase what we know, and with resistance to inserting the feared complexity into our minds.
You can't expect a weekend of exercise or a hotel retreat to profoundly change a company's staff. It will generate an impact, an emotional shock, but if it were capable of having a profound change on the human being, it would mean that our brain would be very fragile; every day would be a shock and we would be unbalanced.
All cells in our body die and are replaced by others, including those of the skeletal system. But neurons do not. We have the same ones for a lifetime, because they have to be conservative, they preserve immutable metabolic principles, they preserve who we are. We all understand and consider it necessary to change the body to be competent in sports, or the mind to be an expert in medicine; yes, but with years of training. The same is true of neuroscience for modifying, developing, or fine-tuning the emotional system; in this case from before birth and especially the first six years, at home.
There is little interest in delving into the origins, developments, complex anatomical structures involved in mental, human and physical development. The proof is that no programmes have ever been devoted to explaining in some detail the years, methods, procedures by which one becomes an expert in any sport, which is to say, how their brains have been modified to command so much bodily, mental, will and persistence in goals.
This ties in with the forthcoming education law, according to which primary school teachers are to be tutors of their pupils' emotional development and therefore experts. It is vain to believe that teaching sex games and other practices for children's emotional development in schools is sufficient to prepare them for a future of challenges, such as the loss of plants, animals, farmland, droughts and scientific, technical and better productivity than ours, from a globalised world. This would require training teachers in neuroscience to have a medium capacity in their revolutionary performance, and awakening early sexual awareness in children can have lifelong impact and consequences.
"Humanity has lost its reason," says philosopher Julian Baggini: "too much reliance on gut feelings" (The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World. Julian Baggini. Yale University Press. 2016)
*The texts reflect the views of the author and are independent of the opinions of PROA.