May 4, 2003

The beginning of spring manifests new frontiers of life where the brain, the heart, emotions and the body take on a fresh meaning

GET the edge; unleash the power within, master your emotions, these twice-told mantras are more trite than doable. The gurus who mouth them promise us the moon, if we shell out a sizable sum and follow their ‘motivational’ techniques on how never ever to get overwhelmed with life.

They tell us tomorrow will be a better day. How so?

Not for the ordinary Americans — the working stiff — for whom bankruptcy is always two pay cheques away. Not for the two million plus kicked out of their jobs. Not for multitudes of naturalized citizens who happen to be “Moslems” and victims of discrimination. No one ever said life is fair? You’re in a world of hurt. Recently, the CEO of American Airlines — the world’s largest — apologized to his minions because he gulled them into taking huge pay cuts, warning the company was going belly up. A bit later, he and his top executives shamelessly rewarded themselves with whopping millions in bonus and pension funds! He’s been fired. But another prehensile will take his place to party on with the champagne life.

This is America — of unfettered greed. A CEO here makes 500 times more than his workers do, and when his company goes bust because of his stupid mistakes, he’s kicked out with a parting gift of millions of dollars while the shareholders are left holding the stocks worth the paper printed on.

Still, sparks of spring — from Nature to gurus, Nobel laureates to neuroscientists, psychologists to philosophers — manifest new frontiers of life where the brain, mind, emotions and the body take on a fresh meaning.

Spring fervour is everywhere. Renewal is in the air. The human organism is aware. A veritable panoply of blossoms: baby pink, snow white, soft apricot and shocking pink adorn New York and its suburbs. To live among them and lose oneself forever is akin to unrequited love that keeps the flame burning. The flower show at Macy’s famous department store in Manhattan literally takes the breath away...a million flowers in 30,000 different species from six continents that the eye beholds and the senses partake. My world is a topiary globe crafted with live flowers seven feet tall. It dazzles and delights.

In the sun-spattered outside are worshippers, come to pray on Easter Sunday and revel the avenues in Easter bunny outfits and bonhomie. Man and Nature are one, as is the body and mind on this joyous day.

“I feel, therefore I am,” said the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, spawning 326 years. Scientists today attest to emotions playing a critical role in ensuring a person’s survival and allowing him to think. “He’s done some of the most spectacular brain-imaging work that shows us what emotions are like in the brain.” Descartes, the thinker who trashed Spinoza with his famous dualist theory that body and mind are two separate entities, has since been discarded.

“Today, hard-nosed academics in America are throwing themselves into the study of emotion with the rapturous intensity of a love affair,” says a neurologist who tells us more importantly how emotions play a role in making decisions and choices in a normal way. He offers us an example of Elliot, a man in his 30s who suffered a frontal lobe damage due to a brain tumour. “While he performed normally on intelligence tests, he could no longer make choices, prioritize tasks, manage his time or hold down a job.”

Elliot was unable to feel. “He spoke of the tragic events of his life without emotion. Shown pictures of gruesome accidents and natural disasters, he registered no reaction.” Other patients with similar brain damage, too, showed “a striking combination of impaired reason and impaired affect.”

The mind thus “exists for the body, is engaged in telling the story of the body’s multifarious events, and uses that story to optimize the life of the organism.”

Anthony Robbins, the motivational guru who claims to have trained oodles of businesses, people and celebrities to reach their pinnacle of success, also combines the mind and the body in his latest work, Get the Edge. “Your nervous system,” he says, “is something you can train. You can train yourself to be fat, frustrated or depressed, or you train yourself to be fighting fit, certain, hopeful, committed, dedicated or loving. I’ve conditioned myself to find out how to utilize whatever life tends to bring me — that’s like an athlete. It’s my life — although it wasn’t my life until I chose to operate it that way.”

He speaks of times when he gets frustrated...these are normal human emotions and you certainly experience them, he assures us. “They used to be dominant force in my life, and now they’re pretty rare. And when they happen, I just don’t live in that place. That’s really my message for people. I think all human emotions are valuable — disappointment is a valuable emotion if it’s invested — but painful emotions are destined to call us out, to find something within us we’re not using. To try to ignore them, to sit and dwell with them can be disastrous. I try to find the message, use it and move on.”

But we live in a society that doesn’t “exactly encourage us to be in the fittest state — physically, mentally or emotionally.” Friends, relatives and colleagues covet your good fortune if you tell them that God has been kind to you. “Who does this guy think he is?” they respond with envy. But if you tell them a sob story of how your life stinks, they are sure to respond: “Hey, buddy, I know how you feel,” and hug you.

“We’re a culture that rewards people for pain and failure with attention; initially we reward people for success, but then our favourite thing is to jab them back down.” Despite this universal trait in humans, Tony wants us to take the leap and avoid the escape hatch that keeps us away from taking risks for fear of failure.

With his big physique and gigantic hands, he makes a powerful pitch for lasting changes, not just sparks that people in his seminars discover. A sea of change in our thinking and actions in just one week? Really?

And here’s where I part company with pep-talkers and quick-fixers such as Dr Phil, Tony Robbins and Dr Wayne Dyer. They have reaped fortunes by advising the fallen. Life is too complicated and will stay its course. For temporary relief, take an anti-depressant.

Wall Street is full of behavioural economists and wealth therapists such as Suze Orman (The Courage to be Rich) who pummel their depressed investors with psychotherapy while becoming their financial advisers for a hefty fees. Now that the bubble has burst, the once New York business moguls don’t want therapy on how to build up the courage to be poor, but how to regain their wealth! “I think the real illness of the age is the loss of perspective,” says a shrink while referring to investors whose self-esteem rises and falls with the Nasdaq or Dow.

“I worked with a man who was worth $800 million and ended up worth only $20 million...well, he at least found out who his real friends were!”

This year’s two American Nobel laureates in Economics shed light on how buyers make decisions. For example, people make a 20-minute trip to buy a calculator for $10 to save $5, but will not make the same trip to buy a jacket for $120, saving the same $5 in discount: “It took me several years to realize that the textbooks were wrong, and the people in my class were correct,” says one of them, a psychologist who rebuts the ideal world theory where people act rationally.

What makes us who we are is a complex interplay of early experiences, parenting, environment, friends, genes, conclude neuroscientists. While activities shape the brain throughout our life, our brain is the director of our daily life and how we live it.

Does this click?

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