Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness forum: topic
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innate love
Eric Grimmet
Friday, 13 June 2008 01:49 UTC
Is there such thing as innate love? Like in the mother child relationship, the mother and child are suppose to have an innate, unbreakable love for each other, that no matter what they love each other. Some peers of mine say that it does exist. I argue that innate love is taught to us, therefore not being innate and therefore not existing.
My defense is that if you look at an autistic child (since they are autistic they could not have been taught or grasped the idea of innate love), many of them seem to feel no special attachment for those who take care of them, the one who bore them, their mother. For some autistic people it seems that if you were to take them away from their home and mom right now and have a different person raise them, they would feel the same towards the new person as they did the old one after they got use to the new person in a couple of months. Even when their mom had been with them their whole life, years and years, they wouldn’t even care, maybe not even notice, that she was gone.
My peers do point out that I don’t really know that the autistic person would notice as we are no experts on them, and just speculating. Also though, what if the child was switched at the hospital by accident, and years later the mom bumps into her real child and they do not know it is each other, the mother would not have the innate love for her real child and treat him with indifference thinking he is just a stranger. So the mother and child do not have this love that is suppose to transcend all borders and really only love each other since they think that person is there mom/child.
I guess what I’m asking is does innate love exist, and give examples of it existing/not existing.
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Dear Eric and All:
This Forum is not well formulated in the context of the group profile. We are interested in the relation of cognition and consciousness with brain physiology.
I propose to change the main theme to Autism, a very interesting topic that has been mentioned in other discussions in this group. Of course those who are interested in discussing Innate Love also can post here, but preferentially relating it with Autism (as Eric began to do).
Another interesting issue is if (maternal) love has a biological basis. What are the (neuro)biological mechanisms that support maternal love?Best Regards
Alfredo Pereira Jr.
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Dear All:
I will begin a discussion on Autism reproducing part of the text from the site of Inger Lorelei, which refers to the extremely interesting work of my friend Hilke Osika.
"Some of the nonverbal autistics who never gain speech may have verbal apraxia due to lacking enough muscle control to use their vocal chords. These individuals may really want to communicate but are unable to. Many cannot even focus their muscles enough to type or write either.
But with sustained and correctly executed Facilitated Communication, these autistics may be helped to communicate. FC has gotten much criticism – some of which may or may not be justified – but I have personally seen it work with mrs Hilke Osika, music therapist, autism expert and mother of 3 severely autistic sons. She is successfully using it with her children here in Sweden, as well as teaching it to others. However, it must be done with someone the child knows and trusts and the Facilitator needs to have the proper training to be able do it the right way (which is supporting and holding against the Communicator’s wrist so as to provide a stable base, not guiding their hand to individual letters on the letter board). That it really is the autistic’s own thoughts and not the facilitators, has been shown by those autistics who started out with FC and later learned to type on their own and continued writing in the same personal style; some proving to have very deep and profound thoughts and interests! Hilke Osika also reports an instance when she repeatedly spelled a word one way and her son kept spelling it another way when pointing on the FC letter-board. When later consulting a dictionary, it turned out that her son’s spelling was the correct one… Ergo: difficulties speaking does not necessarily mean that the person cannot think. Many nonverbal autistics have baffled everyone when gaining access to a computer. “My sister’s husband has an adopted sister who was diagnosed as severely retarded when she was young, but after she was adopted her new mother decided that wasn’t accurate and fought to have her appropriately tested and when the ‘powers that be’ finally listened they found that she had problems with speech due to congenital problems with her mouth, muscles in the mouth, and vocal cords but that she was not retarded. After that, she was able to get her driving permit, then license and now she is an adult, married and has a child.”- Kathy J, adult Aspie from USA
Or read this story about Free Freya, once considered the most dangerous woman in Sweden and a hopeless case. After a female Swedish scientist took a personal interest in her, it turned out that all she needed was some mental stimulation, a computer and being treated like a human being! Even Albert Einstein was thought to be somewhat retarded because he started speaking so late. Another of the most brilliant minds on the planet has at times been treated like a mentally disabled person when ALS affected his ability to speak properly, although it was only his muscles malfunctioning, not his mind" -
Sorry about the autism thing. I do not have a lot of background on them and was just basing judgment on speculation and general assumption. “many of them seem to feel no special attachment”
I hoped somebody with knowledge on that subject would contribute. -
Dear Eric, Dear Alfredo,
This is a very interesting topic and moreover someone at network.nature.com seems to have fallen in love with it because it is listed as one of the most frequented threads, which is not true ;-)
Maybe there is some fortune telling involved and this thread will be very much frequented soon.
I would like to know from Eric a bit more about his peers’ statements: are they referring to publications that are available online etc.?
Innate love does not seem to be much of a topic for science yet. Maternal love seems to be a topic.
Depending on what is understood by love, it is a biological necessity otherwise mothers would not care for their children. To simply reverse it and postulate a kind of unbreakable bond in both directions, is questionable. Of course there is an old and lasting controversy what children are born with and what is a product of socialisation. I should advocate the socialisation view, but I fear Alfredo won’t like it ;-)
In any case I think this is a very complicated topic, much worth investigating.Yours friendly
Hans -
We can trace the roots of what we call ‘love’ to the dealing of life forms with context – either to replace the context with one of one’s own or else coexist with the context through fitting-in by developing instincts/habits.
Emotionally, sexual love shares space with anger and BOTH stem from the generic focus on context REPLACEMENT – either by eradication (anger) or replication (sex – drown out the opposition with copies of self).
At the other end of the emotion spectrum is a focus on coexisting with context by working THROUGH it rather than taking it over – this gets into issues of fear being resolved by numbers (we form social groups, sameness bias, to protect the individual) as it does issues of lost/impossible loves (suffering), out of which comes quality control – discernment.
The grief/love dichotomy reflects a ‘universe of discourse’, or a coin, named PASSION.
The self-referencing of the fight/flight dichotomy will elicit the spectrum of primitive, primary, emotions we share with our ape cousins and other mammals/reptiles etc.
With some apes and with all humans we get secondary emotions where they are dependent on a developed sense of SELF.
All of this self-referencing will, if done deep enough, elicit the encoding of all emotions in each and as such allow for high precision in emotional expression (e.g. love in anger or anger in love; love in fear or love in rejection etc etc)
The MATERNAL element covers love expressed THROUGH a context, where such is in the form of one’s family/clan/church/football-club etc etc
Chris
Emotions from self-referencing – part IV of categories -
Chris Lofting wrote: “The grief/love dichotomy reflects a ‘universe of discourse’, or a coin, named PASSION.”
Where is the scientific evidence for a grief/love dichotomy? Most would not consider grief and love to be anywhere near dichotomous concepts… in fact, they are all too frequently synonymous!
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Keith – you obviously dont understand the meaning of the word “passion” – it covers SUFFERING and as such fits perfectly with your notion of grief/love being syonymous!
The derivation of the dichotomy is from the self-referencing of fight/flight – covered, with lots of reference for you to read – in part IV of my categories of mediation material , OR, if you prefer single topic then see the older the emotions page
Grief covers a LOSS of love as it does an ‘impossible’ love etc From it can come a developing quality control we label as discernment.
From self-referencing fight/flight comes the dichotomies of:
anger/fear
love/grief(sadness)
acceptance/rejection
surprise/anticipation (of wrong doing)The REFINEMENT of these reactive states develop into proactive states such as devotion to self from anger, devotion to others from fear, discernment from grief, cultivation from anticipation etc etc etc
Overall Keith, you need to think a little deeper than you have where what you wrote appears more as a knee-jerk reaction – I think the references in the above links may help.
Chris
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Dear Keith,
nice to see you here again! It is good to emphazise the scientific approach in this forum. Alfredo requested to narrow the topic down to autism and maternal love, which is very much understandable.
The topic of love is very difficult to discuss in a neurophysiological context, that Alfredo aims to focus on here. Even if by bringing up an evolutionary view through ‘innate’
Love is natural and part of survival as well as belonging to the realm of poetry, where hearts are breaking. What a range!
Eric brought up the idea that maternal love could be unbreakable, which appears to be almost poetic, because we know mothers can neglect, harm and even kill their children.
Yours friendly
Hans -
Although there is very little scientific available on the topic of love there are a couple of references I have come across that are very interesting: They are posted in Cogprints (http;//cogprints.org)::
The Ribbon of Love: Fuzzy-Ruled Agents in Artificial Societies:http
the author of this article also has other related papers in this archive.
also related is my own unpublished manuscript:
in which a force of avoidance/affinity is discussed with respect to set theory and the functioning of nature
Uniqueness and Self belonging in Naturethe ribbon of love is pictorally presented resembling a chromosome and discusses social groups in terms of neighborhoods. akin to nearest neighbors on a strand of DNA.
Marvin
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Thanks for the kind welcome, Hans!
I am concerned with any proposed connection between autism and maternal love (or lack thereof). If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Bruno Bettelheim was under discussion here… and though I am sympathetic to the man in general, this particular idea of his was shot down long ago. If Eric wants to resurrect that canard, he should be more straightforward about it. Unless, of course, he just happened to come up with Bettelheim’s theory all by himself, which is, I admit, within the realm of possibility…
As regards Chris’ comments: I am, needless to say, quite familiar with passion, but that’s irrelevant to my question. To restate the original passage which concerned me: “The grief/love dichotomy reflects a ‘universe of discourse’, or a coin, named PASSION.”
However, Chris now says this “PASSION” “covers SUFFERING and as such fits perfectly with your notion of grief/love being syonymous!” Perhaps Chris does not realize that when one discusses “dichotomies” and “coins,” one has set up an EXPLICITLY dualistic framework: heads or tails, on or off, 1 or 0. And indeed, Chris had rather explicitly cast grief and love as the two dichotomous sides of the “PASSION” “coin.”
Now, strangely, he denies this, claiming that “PASSION” “covers” “SUFFERING” even though he already claimed the set “PASSION” is defined by “love” and “grief.” Perhaps he would like us to think that “SUFFERING” is simply the interplay of “love” and “grief”—but for this to be the case, there could be no instances of “SUFFERING” in which both “love” and “grief” were not present. It shouldn’t take a second’s thought to come up with many compelling examples of “SUFFERING” occuring in the absence of either “love” or “grief.”
So what is it, I wonder, that Chris is trying to say here? He wants “love” and “grief” to be the “dichotomy” of the “coin” called “PASSION,” while insisting that “PASSION” “covers” “SUFFERING,” even though “SUFFERING” as commonly understood has no necessary connection to “love,” “grief,” or for that matter (unless you are Mel Gibson) “PASSION.”
Despite Chris’ unseemly ad hominem rhetoric (“Keith – you obviously dont understand the meaning of the word ‘passion’”; “Overall Keith, you need to think a little deeper”), I must stand by my initial question: Where is the scientific evidence for a grief/love dichotomy? Furthermore, what relevance does said data have to autism?
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