This link below goes to Sam Vaknin trying to recover two terms that have been captured and corrupted by the social media. One is "empathy" and the other is "gas-lighting." In addition, he adds terms like "dissociation" and "confabulation." At the end he makes a "Germanic" joke about Trump you may need a moment to recognize. Remember, this guy is a self-declared narcissist, though a benign one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ3Piz0TNXk
I enjoy following Sam Vaknin (http://samvak.tripod.com) and his colleague Richard Grannon (http://spartanlifecoach.com) They could not be more different in style. Grannon is an "Aussie" who started out in martial arts, Here's a sample post so you can see what I mean. The vid is a quick list of 15 problematic traits of people. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14pHZ8X0du8)
As much fun and as helpful as these guys are, neither of them is talking about what Stephen Porges calls empathy, which is a physically and mentally participatory aspect of communication. It seems to be derived from "mirror cells" that cause one's body to echo what one is seeing in the body of someone else. You watch tennis and your own muscles can be detected to be faintly making the same moves.
For me, Porges' thought is a vital example of the organic, concrete, actual cell interactions of the body and how they are linked to what has always seemed like a near-supernatural understanding of thought and emotion. It is a chance to simplify and weed out centuries of concepts that just aren't true. Recovered in the process is the massive subconscious and the importance of body-wide perception, even "thought"in muscles and guts. Overemphasis on the brain and its comparison to computers -- which I call "the brain in a bucket" -- is finally countered.
Porges discovered a third autonomic nerve (numbered 8th from the brain) that is myelinated (insulated), unlike the other two branches, and that connects to what I call "the frame of expression." That is, the face, throat, heartbeat, and gut. These parts of the body send the information of what a person is saying and feeling. They are "tells" for the person addressed. I think of the two confronting frames of expression as a dyad, a dialogue, the most basic communing of people.
I link this to the "teddy bear books" and Victor Turner, in their quite different but also similar accounts of virtual space created by the infant and mother interacting or by ceremonial "going over the threshold" into virtual space. This is the first way I've seen to describe the felt difference between ordinary life and what might be called sacred or holy. It is a clue to something that seems ineffable but that we might be able to "kindle" somehow.
Most of us think of senses in terms of eyesight but Porges is interested in the fact that this third vagus nerve controls the anatomy of speech: throat, pharynx, larynx, hard and soft palates, tongue, teeth, lips. He is not one to analyze vocabulary, like Vaknin, nor the dynamics of relationship like Grannon. Rather, his special interest is in "prosody,"which is the tune and tone of the voice when anything is said.
Definitions are important in this thinking and Porges is careful to supply one which he takes from linguistics. Culturally standardized, prosody is learned with language, often from the mother in the virtual space, seeming to be play. He is particularly interested in how prosody carries the emotional content of safety and intimacy. Though he might not be able to dissect or describe an "organ", some small entity is needed to decode the stream of speech sounds into sensible words. There are examples of people losing this ability, maybe due to damage.
Every distinct language has its own lilt and emphasis, so that when a person can hear what is spoken without distinguishing words they can still recognize Spanish or Irish by the up and down of sound, partly what Bob used to joke about as the "emPHAsis of syLAbles". He was a musician who applied the equivalent of "prosody" to music. There must be some kind of relationship to bird song, maybe as a precursor to speech, but most mammals have a vocabulary of some kind in the sounds they make. Domestic animals are certainly expressive in this way. One learns them as word-like. Calling kittens, asking for food, craving sex.
Certainly there is a relationship to the poetic terms of iambic pentameter, which is said to be the natural cadence of American English speakers. It's easy to write in iambic pentameter -- maybe not the pentameter part as much as the "iambs" -- de-dah, de-dah -- or maybe anapest, de-de-dah, de-de-dah. Poetry is heavily involved with this, but even prose carries rhythm and emphasis. Stage technique finds it crucial in the voices of the actors: the prosody should be heard even between speakers throughout the play.
Porges is interested in the ability of prosody to convey safety and to help with self-regulation, the "self-talk" that people learn to reassure themselves, but also the noisiness of our environments which can cancel meaning and provoke fear or confusion. He remarks on the noisiness of hospitals where the clatter and predatory hum of doing things with machines interfere with the whole purpose of being there.
Agreeing with the Paul Newman character who says ironically in the face of violence, "what we have here is a communication problem", the appeal of the third vagal nerve revealing the value of voice prosody is strong. We have a continuing fantasy of being able to "read each other's minds" in some magical way, but in truth we already do it through our "frames of expression." It even works on television.
I once read a sci-fi story about a planet where the individuals shared one mind among everyone: that is, what was felt by one was shared by everyone else. Privacy was not a concern. The subject was actually suffering. What would it do if the agony of a person dying in the Australian conflagration were felt by every person on Earth at the moment it happened? It was not considered that suffering persons who can share directly with another present person who is truly empathic will have their pain lessened. Chaplains and therapists know this. But most of us work hard to avoid the despair of other people. We want only happy empathies.
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