Why Rats Laugh (and what it shows us about ourselves)

Part of my morning routine during the early weeks of lockdown was spent ploughing through ‘The Archaeology of the Mind’  an absolute door stopper of a book  by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven.

An important book but not an easy one, at least not for me.

I am glad I ploughed on with it though, as what I learnt from it feels worth sharing.It increased my understanding of how my mind, and consequently, my relationships and my life works. In the light of this book, the complexities of my personality seem a lot simpler and the way other people are also seems to make more sense, too.

The neuroscientific research of Jaak Panksepp reveals the oldest, deepest emotional circuity of the mind. A foundational mind, located deep within the brain. He refers to this as our ancestral mind, a structure we share with other animals and it is the source of many of our most powerful feelings.

An aspect of his research that I especially loved – being a fan of rats anyway (I think a rat would be my spirit animal if I had to choose one), is that when he was investigating the PLAY circuit in rats, he discovered that rats actually laugh when being tickled (their laugh is an ultra-sonic sort of chirp). Interestingly, playful tussles with one another teaches rats to be socialised and to understand what it is to be fair to other rats; if the stronger rat didn’t let the weaker rat win the play-fight at least 30% of the time, the weaker rats stopped wanting to play with the stronger rat, leaving the stronger rat socially isolated and presumably lonely. This is exactly the sort of thing you witness when watching a bunch of four year olds in the playground. (If any of you didn’t catch Secret Life of Four Year Olds the Channel 4 series, and are interested in social psychology, I recommend it).

Anyhow, Panksepp’s research has identified at least seven basic emotional systems or ‘circuits’, including PLAY:

·      SEEKING characterised by expectancy

·      FEAR characterised by anxiety

·      RAGE characterised by anger

·      LUST characterised by sexual excitement

·      CARE characterised by nurturance

·      PANIC-GRIEF characterised by sadness

·      PLAY characterised by social joy

These systems are primary-process systems i.e. they form the foundation of our conscious experience and are generally situated closer to the base of the brain. They can be viewed as tools for living. They steer us towards and away from things that we need to approach or avoid in order to survive and to flourish.

Our capacity for emotional learning, (i.e. our ability to remember the sorts of things we want to approach and avoid),  is situated above these foundations and our capacity for emotional thoughts and deliberations sits on top of it all. This is the narrative and explanations we attach to the things we take to be approach or avoidance worthy. The higher up we go through the brain’s structures, the more complex things become. As we move up through learning and deliberation, these seven simple, primal emotions multiply and cross pollinate with each other to produce an array of more refined emotions such as pride, shame, confidence, guilt, trust, disgust, dominance, jealousy and so on.

The lower brain seems to be arranged in a way that allows for only one of these basic emotional states to prevail at any one time. You could view them as 7 sub-personalities inhabiting the deepest recesses of our mind, each with their own distinct motivation (i.e. thing they was to ‘get us’ to do), and they are jostling with each other for dominance. This explains the battle we sometimes fight with ourselves. We may not want to not call an ex who treated us poorly, and are indignant and angry about the poor treatment we received (RAGE motivating us to stay away from them) and at the same time we may very much want to contact them, as we are missing the intimacy of someone who gives us hugs and whom we feel a strong attachment (CARE motivating us to call them). Who will win? Which sub-personality will ultimately steer our behaviour? It’s often a close call!

When any of these systems are highly activated they encourage our emotional thoughts and deliberations to follow suit, to ruminate on the events past or present and projected futures associated with the emotional state. In the above example, RAGE says: ‘Remember all the times they were cruel to you?’ and CARE says: ‘Remember how happy you were together at times?’ The value of having the awareness and skill to free our thinking from these sticky traps that the basic emotional systems ensnare us in has been recognised for a long time – Aristotle called it phronesis, using your thinking mind to master of your emotions by understanding how they operate at their most basic level.

Also important to know is that these circuits can be sensitised and become hyper-responsive. If you know a very angry person it’s probable that an over-sensitised RAGE circuit is the culprit. Basic emotional systems can also be under-aroused, for example a very serious child may have an under-active PLAY system.

As well as characterological differences in how our circuits are ‘set’ – inherited personality traits – they also get sensitised and desensitised by experience. They get shaped by the things that happen to us, particularly in early life, to the extent where certain genes get activated. This can lead to enduring patterns of emotional strengths and weaknesses that we carry through our lives and which of course shape our lives. (Environmentally induced changes to genes happen through a process of epigenesis – a fascinating subject in its own right. The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey is a good read if you’d like to learn more about it).

So back to these enduring patterns that emotional over-sensitisation or de-sensitisation that epigenesis can produce, to use a real life example: the arbitrary violence I was subjected to at a young age at the hands of an alcoholic parent (a regrettably common experience),  meant that I experienced disproportionate levels of FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF over the extended period of my childhood. As a consequence, my capacity for negative feelings became enlarged, something that has thankfully been, for the large part, remedied through a few years of psychotherapy and a pretty conscientiously developed set of habits that support my mental health.

Grasping how these basic emotional tools for living that evolution has endowed our brains with work, how they express themselves and influence our own lives, can sharpen up our view of the ‘task at hand’ when it comes to how we get the best out of ourselves and our relationships with others.