'Nerve Zero' and Speculation on Human Happiness

R. Douglas Fields. the neuro- and cognitive scientist, wrote a curious and very cautious account of a cranial nerve in the sperm whale in Scientific American some four or five years ago which, true or not, gave rise to some thoughts on our perception of reality.  He has postulated that this Nerve Zero is an additional 'sense' and that it might be operative as such in the human being, given common mammalian structures.

Whether his thesis will be confirmed or not, Fields is dealing with a mystery - whether a tiny nerve, hitherto ignored, at the base of the brain, is at the heart of subliminal sexual attraction. Do pheromones hit this nerve and relay deep subsconscious signals to the brain? Does this explain 'instant attraction' and what does it mean for sexual free will?

Most nerves enter the brain through the spinal chord but cranial nerves go direct to the brain and so to the 'mind'. They are linked to our sensory inputs and to the way we express ourselves, so a 'sixth' sense linked to a cranial nerve looks to be intimately connected to the way we construct our reality and the way that we behave.

Such a nerve is a part not of the autonomic process or of our willed movement (though we can will much of our expression) so much as of the system by which sensory inputs compete for attention and so create our model of the world - if the nerve exists quite as Fields suggests. It may also have (see below) an expressive component of its own.

The nerve itself provenly exists in all vertebrates (discovered in humans as long ago as 1913) but what exactly it is for is what remains disputed. What we do know is that it sends its endings to the nose which has led some sceptics to believe that it is merely a frayed strand of the olfactory nerve. Field's whale autopsy threw that thesis in doubt.

The role of the olfactory nerve with its complex of 347 types of receptor cell in determining sex, social rank, territories, reproductive status and even the identity of individuals such as mates and offspring is well accepted and there are certainly indications that humans, like other animals, exchange secret pheromone messages.

Pheromones are, according to Fields and others, very different from odor-producing molecules. Pheromones are large molecules that need intimate contact to pass between persons (such as kissing or 'snuggling'), whereas smells are small and volatile molecules that can travel large distances. Pheromones also do not need to 'smell' - if a pheromone goes straight to our brain, it could by-pass our consciousness entirely so the issue is only whether there is a mechanism for doing this. So-called 'nerve zero' allows the possibility of that by-pass.

There is a pheronome detector in the animal brain as it is - a specialised area within the vomeronasal organ which connects to the olfactory bulb in the brain that sorts and makes sense of olfactory inputs but which then routes these to the amygdala (sexual arousal through release of hormones) rather than the olfactory cortex (conscious perception). Pheromones (it is believed) can influence the oestrus cycle, stimulate sexual behaviour and ovulation and even, when it goes wrong, cause abortion. Pheromones from familiar and unfamilar mates can have different effects in this respect.

In 2006, Buck and Liberles (one of whom is a Nobel Laureate) found a new family of receptor proteins [TAARS] on the mouse nose, on the surface of the sense cells that detect pheromones. This, we are told, increases the possibility that mammals, at least, have a separate pheromone pathway. Certainly the mouse pheromones are intimately linked to sexual behaviours. Buck found that humans have the genes to make at least six of the 15 pheromone receptors found in the mice. However, the human vomeronasal organ appears to be vestigial, like gill slits, in humans so if pheromones are travelling to the human brain it is not by that route.

This is where 'nerve zero' may be relevant - its endings are in the nasal cavity (the 'pick up' point) and its nerve fibers reach into those ''hot-button' [Fields again] sex regions of the brain that are concerned with basic reproduction, that release sex hormones and control thirst and hunger, completely by-passing the conssciousness-creating olfactory bulb. The sort of cruel experimentation done by scientists to extend our knowledge - the 'original sin' behind all knowing in this area - has shown that severing 'nerve zero' in hamsters results in a failure to mate. Electrically stimulating the nerve in fish and other animals seems to be related to the triggering of sexual responses. The evidence mounts.

Other research by Fields suggests that nerve zero fibres were stuffed with peptide hormones that led him to conclude that the nerve could even be a neurosecretory organ in its own right, regulating reproduction by releasing hormones. But nerve zero remains a mystery. It is doing something different from analysing smell and it connects to the part of the brain controlling reproduction whilst also releasing a powerful sex hormone into the blood. If its early embryonic pathway is disturbed, the result is a syndrome that leaves the animal unable to mature sexually beyond puberty.

Nor need nerve zero have a solely sexual function since electrical impulses are travelling out from the brain through the nerve with no current understanding of their function, leaving room for some interesting and wholly unscientific speculation about our ability to communicate intimacy beyond immediate consciousness ... could this be love? Fields raises the old free will problem since, if he is right, external stimuli are by-passing consciousness in order to control brain and behaviour.

Psychological experiments seem to indicate that cognitive abilities improve when people smell the sweat of fearful rather than happy people so that the psychological state of one person seems to be able to trigger the cognitive state of another if they are within 'smell' distance. Socially, this suggests that groups can operate at some level like flocks or herds, certainly in states of excitation or danger. Chemical warning signals may be being transferred from person to person at a level well below the consciousness of each.

Women with more pheromone release around their nipples tend to get their children to latch on and gain weight faster than women without such glands - another intriguing example of an instinctive biological operation beyond consciousness. But there is another aspect to the case. It is pretty well established that the mind is selective in choosing inputs from the five senses so that the picture of the world on which we operate is a representation of it but it is not the only possible representation and it is a representation that deliberately excludes large tracts of objective reality in order to allow us to function.

As we have noted in earlier essays, our social reality is a compromise between millions of individual realities where the socialised mind of each individual helps in choosing between sensory inputs, prioritising the inputs into a mental map that starts on the basis of 'prejudice'. To de-socialise the mental map is to re-see the territory. Now we have a sixth instinctual sense to cope with, one that adds intimacy and sexuality to the socialised mind either to subvert it perhaps or to direct it to its own instinctual nature regardless of social norms. This instinct is animal and personal, based on intimate communications with very significant others and on a guardedness about the world beyond.

Universalists and rationalists will hate this. Perhaps they would want this nerve removed. But it is an essential part of who we are and socialisation and failed attempts at 'perfectability' flounder, to our great individual benefit, on the subversion offered by our instinctive desires and our need to flock with those we feel comfortable with. The pheromonal nerve zero may not only mean that love is blind and 'against reason' (which we knew) but that pheromonality represents some higher reason where the mind-body that is more than ego-consciousness is seeking out what is best for it in a world where 'all things are equal'.

Of course, social norms and culture do not permit 'all things to be equal' (this is classic 'alienation' territory) so perhaps this is the dilemma - to have a culture where 'nerve zero' constantly fights for happiness against the acculturation process or one that is adapted to 'nerve zero' and is, thus, happy. Such an integrated culture could be a revolutionary one.

Minds, Placebos & Orgasms ...

Now here's a funny story. There was this woman, see ... and she hadn't had an orgasm in three years, wasn't making love to her husband, got no pleasure from touching herself and had no sexual fantasy life at all.

And, then, suddenly everything changed - orgasm, love-making, pleasure, fantasy. So what miracle drug delivered all this? No drug at all! She was in a blind test for a testosterone patch and she believed that she was getting the drug when, in fact, she wasn't.

The belief was sufficient to shift her from a state of cold sterility to rampant sexuality and pleasure. This is the power of the placebo effect, the simple belief that something is happening when it may not be.

We make what we are from our beliefs but if the mechanical, technological or physical input is not there, then we may still need some input, something that triggers the re-organisation of our mental state in order to make us something different, in order, indeed, to make us happy.

This is perhaps the tragedy of thousands of years of sterile communitarianism. It has removed joy and pleasure for reasons both good and bad in their time but nothing has yet emerged to strip away this nonsense and give us back our bodies, place them under the command of our own free minds.

The mystery is not that the environment, including our culture, can drive hormones but that we continue to believe that hormones cannot be under the command of minds, that we are not the commanders of minds that can command, to a much greater degree than we believed, our hormones.

We can, within reason, will ourselves to happiness and pleasure - and be willed to misery and happiness by powerful cultural forces which we allow to control us at our own peril. Perhaps we can will our destinies and perhaps we can defy the attempt by others to will our destinies for us.

The dessicated cultures of Middle America and the Greater Syrian desert alike both fear sexual imagery because such imagery can trigger our own wilfulness.

To get sexual pleasure requires that we allow ourselves to close down the centres of our brain that make us watchful (if we are males) or thinking and feeling creatures (if we are female).

To be anxious if you are male or to be thinking or feeling too much (as a female) is to create a huge block in our ability to experience sexual pleasure. Anxiety and thought, in particular, dampen desire - worry, defensiveness and inability to communicate compound the problem.

Is this why intellectuals so often have sexual hang-ups?

Nor does desire have to lead to orgasm - sexologists see the erotic and the satisfaction of the erotic as a matter of achieving pleasure at any stage of the sexual cycle. Orgasm does not become iinvariably central to the process. There is an obsession here in our culture with epiphenomena.

As with so much in the post-ideological age, the game is not one of some 'normal' progressive fulfilment of some pre-arranged cycle regulated by the average person's response times but is, instead, a matter of a variation of responses within an almost infinitely variable sexual community.

The evils of Iron Age religiosity and State involvement in sexuality become clearer when one sees how prescribed models for sexual expression result in proscription of anything out of the allegedly normal range, a normal range experienced by no living person precisely because it is an abstract.

So what is desire? As so often we have been lied to in the rational man's determination to simplify and regulate matters. The standard line is that beastly men are triggered by external tactile and visual stimulation and gentle women by 'a richer cognitive and emotional context'. This results in the dangerous courtly myth of the moral superiority of the female.

This becomes a story of women requiring safety and bonding without ever really teasing out what it is that can make anyone, let alone a woman, feel safe and bonded. If a society prescribes particular forms of bonding and norms of safety, then a woman will bend to that social will instead of her own - and so will a man.

Yet scientists seem to have demonstrated (one is always cautious about scientists) that women can just as much be aroused by sexual imagery devoid of emotional connection as can men (according to the 2007 study of Meredith Chivers at the Toronto Center for Addiction and Mental Health). A whole range of visual sexual activity (including that of bonobos)  was shown to men and women and it was the men who differentiated between the type of actor in the sexual drama.

Heterosexual women, it seems, saw their levels of sexual excitement increase with the intensity of the imagery regardless of the type of performer. Hetero women will get excited by men, women and bonobos alike, whereas men are focused wholly on their preferred sexual style (hetero or homo with no interest in bonobo bonking) and only gay women do not 'get' male sexuality.

Women, it seems, are far more flexible than men in their sexual responses - but are they more enslaved to the social? A 'normal' (ouch!) woman may think in terms of security but this may be misdirection ... it may be that social acceptance is of more consequence.

The key point is that orgasm itself is not purely physical - sense inputs construct an orgasm out of a variety of cognitive and emotional responses but where the orgasm ultimately leads in men and women is instructive.

There seem to be neuroscientific observable differences (leaving open whether they have evolved within the species or within the individual through acculturation) between the way sense and emotion are balanced between men and women.

If there is a species-specific element it may be this. Male orgasm reproduces. Female orgasm may have reproductive benefits but seems to have much more to do with the bonding process referred to above. So much, so cliched.

But we need to tease out this bonding because it may be the context for the possibility of orgasm yet not necessarily relate to the experience itself except tangentially. The bonding impulse may be prior to the pleasure principle. And bonding may be disconnected from pleasure.

Female orgasm is possibly more contextually 'social' than male, more contingent on social reality (the conditions for bonding) and far more prone to have its terms of engagement defined by male proprietorial demands or the jealous communitarianism of matriarchal society.

A woman's ability to exercise wilfulness in choosing her own orgasm faces far more pressure from society, patriarchal or matriarchal, gerontocratic or priestly, than does a male's wilfulness. She is far more likely to be an easy victim of the social norm than a male whose discipline is more likely to be externally imposed than internally accepted.

Research has looked at actual brain behaviour in men and women. Neuroscientists at the University of Groningen scanned brains in a state of orgasm. The results were fascinating. The intensity of male response in the ventral tegmental area was so intense as to be likened to the effect of heroin - suggesting to this author (me) that the global drugs problem is little more than a mass cultural response to sexual deprivation. Ejaculation is a just a high that is designed to create babies.

More to be expected, the ejaculating male shifts energy from the watchful centres of the brain where vigilance and anxiety are to be found into those areas where memory, the visual and emotional are located. In short, the male is deeply engaged in his act at the time of the act, almost certainly fantasising to a degree his reality. We have written on the tantric-spiritual impulse elsewhere and there may be some evidence for this in the language of that curious sub-culture.

However, the opposite happens with a woman. At the point of orgasm, it is as if she temporarily ceases to be - most of the brain goes silent in a way that is still clearly not perfectly understood. The signs are that a woman, at that moment, is liberated from tension and inhibition but also from all moral reasoning and social judgement - blanked out as a person, as a socialised thing.  The woman ceases to think, in effect.

The orgasm may be regarded (and this is me, not the scientists) as a dramatic point of liberation from what social reality demands of a woman, from communitarianism, from priests, from mothers, from patriarchs, from the old and the dessicated. How very dangerous for society!

Paradoxically, the bonding (unless in the oxytocin context noted below) is really a complete non-bonding - as if the female's unconscious is saying, "the bond lies in a total loss of fear of you (the sexual partner) and the world". The silence in the brain is almost deafening.

Perhaps this helps to explain the age old mystery of why authority seeks to control sexuality - perhaps the dangerous liberation of that orgasmic moment (from which, as every man knows, a woman may awake as unbonded as bonded) might liberate women from an allotted role in the past designed to hold things together in societies of scarcity.

The constant allusion in (male) literature to the 'fickleness' of women might also well relate to this orgasmic nature because the loss of being in the act does mean that a woman is not addicted to the partner but can look at the partner afresh if the oxytocin has not kicked in. Above all, the essence of the female orgasm is that the removal of fear and anxiety in a woman's mind is very much more central to her than for a man. And that it is not necessarily replaced romantically by 'love' or its cognates.

Instead the woman may have all emotion stripped out from her at the moment of orgasm - a level of almost Buddhist detachment being evidenced by the neuroscience although there is other important evidence that some types of orgasm are connected to a very specific heightened emotional response, linked to oxytocin, that does imply bonding. Again, there are tantric analogies.

Perhaps (the science is as yet unclear) there are 'detached orgasms' and 'bonding orgasms' for women that exist according to circumstance but that the male simply has a 'high orgasm' that leaves him begging for more and his oxytocin comes from the 'cuddle' and the touch and not the fuck.

Much would be explained by this model. Which type of orgasm a woman has or even whether she has one may have surprisingly little to do with the flow of chemicals into the body but a great deal to do with the intimate, community and social conditions in which it takes place. These are ideally ones of trust but also one where there is no fear or anxiety and the woman herself makes all the choices. But one other thought arises - the fear of addiction.

Sex therapists appear to fall into two camps which tell us more about the libertarian and puritan cultural tensions of America than they do about what it is to be human: those who see the erotic and the orgasmic as essential to long term bonding and those who see it as dangerously addictive.

This is a nonsensical dichotomy. The issue should be one of either will to pleasure or a firm decision, based on full facts, that pleasure is not appropriate in such-and-such a situation for rational reasons. For centuries, pleasure has been denigrated but it may be that there are conditions where survival suggests that this negativity has been appropriate.

Yet, all things being equal, there seems to be no rational reason why any person should actively avoid pleasure, with all its other associated bonding and health benefits, out of an irrational acceptance without question of the values of an earlier age or those of the local dominant culture. Above all, the type of 'liberatory' feminism that sees the male as oppressor rather than as a useful tool for that beautiful state of non-being (alongside the more practical matter of providing for a family) is particularly odd.

A society where males get their regular 'hits' and females get to lose anxiety and their duty of care to the world in an explosion of pleasure periodically is actually more likely to end up in long term stable relationships and well balanced children than one where the males are permanently frustrated and the females see only a world of anxious drudgery as the norm.

Neuroscience can make few claims to understand the sociology of sex but the evidence is heading in one direction - the acceptance of pleasure and the elimination of our fear of addiction in favour of a world of life-enhancing natural highs for men and of brief tastes of nirvana for women.

[This essay owes a great deal to neurologist Martin Portner's article in Scientific American on 'The Orgasmic Mind', 2009/2010. The opinions are, however, wholly mine.]

'Here I Stand" - The Problem of Universalism

How does one win hearts and minds to counter an imperialistic universalism when universalism is the faith of the intellectual class that dominates the modern West? Where is our Luther?

I suppose the claim that universalism is a problem will bring some readers up short almost immediately. The idea that there is a universal quality to a humanity of fixed and equal natures is the over-riding assumption of Western culture, especially in its dominant American form.

The starting point must be to show how the 'universal' is a fraud and that, once this fraud is exposed, not only universalist politics but identity politics, the politics of gender and ethnicity, of class and nation, are equally fraudulent.

Toleration shifts from that toleration that arises because we are all allegedly the same (when we are clearly not) to a toleration of each precisely because they are different.

Commonality will no longer be imposed to meet a pre-set theoretical and intellectual standard of universality but can arise from below through the co-operation of free individuals as their similarities and shared desires become clear.

Back in the early nineteenth century, Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Coleridge understood that universalism operates against the instinctive aesthetic of humanity, against the inner spirit of the individual and the weight of history.

This mentality fuelled the romantic European Right but it need not necessarily be that the instinctive aesthetic is not progressive - quite the contrary.

Universalists socialise humanity into normal behaviours, chopping off the far sides of the Bell curve, in a way that represents no single person alive. They make the universe into something that exists so far from really existing humanity that no space is left for the inherent complexity of the individual.

And this critique (although the nineteenth century anti-universalists would disagree with their penchant for obscurantist philosophies) extends to the universalism of religion as much to the universalism of the philosophes and the aufklarer.

Above all, to be anti-universalist is not to be anti-rational - on the contrary, it is universalism that works against human reason by depending on an abstract, manufactured, Kantian Reason.  Human reasoning is fitted to the human condition. It is a tool, not an end.

'Objective' abstract Reason is a poor thing, a simulacrum of the real. Human level reason still has room for intuition and for instinctive judgements that may not be pure but are, nevertheless, human and oftentimes right. Our human reason lies in openness to our dreams as much as to our calculation.

It is something of a cliche that Reason is totalitarian in concept (as opposed to reasoning which is just one, generally essential, tool amongst others). Reason fakes reality much as scholasticism once faked spirituality. Scholasticism proved to be dysfunctional and so, now, is Reason.

Which brings us back to our Luther. Luther asserted a different spirituality against a degenerate scholastic culture. A new Luther might assert a different social reality against a degenerate universalism. Here may someone stand.