Our Amazing Brains and the Danger of Disordered Affections

Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed astonishing facts about the human brain.  A single brain contains more molecular-scale switches than all the computers, routers, and internet connections ON THE ENTIRE PLANET!   According to Professor Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, the brain’s complexity is staggering beyond anything he and his team of cellular and molecular physiologists could have imagined.  In the cerebral cortex alone, every single neuron contains between 1000 and 10,000 synapses, which amount to approximately 125 trillion synapses, the equivalent of how many stars it would take to fill 1500 Milky Way galaxies !  What’s more, glial cells, which account for the speed of our brain, outnumber neurons by about 10 to one.  The cortex alone contains over 100,000 miles of nerve fibers.  When you consider the fact that the human brain evolves from a single microscopic cell, it is impossible to believe that all this could have happened by chance.

The question each of us must ask ourselves is: What do we do with this miraculous gift of a brain?  As it turns out there are neural pathways designed for specific use: memory, motor function, fear/flight response, sexuality, etc.  These pathways they are shaped in subtle ways by our experience.  When neurons from separate pathways fire together, they fuse together.  This has been well-documented and is referred to as Hebb’s principle.  For example, when the pathways associated with sex fire at the same time as the pathway for violence, they fuse and affect our future perceptions and reactions.  According to Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist at the University of California Irvine Medical Center, “When we bring sex, aggression, and anxiety together in one act, we must prepare for the mind as well as the body to accommodate that new reality.  When this fusion happens, the brain gets confused.  And this is exactly what happens when people experiment with sadomasochism.  These distinct neural networks and brain maps become fused according to Hebb’s principle.”   This leads to clinical psychiatric problems related to normal human sexual relations.  In light of this, it is easy to understand why sexual abuse and pornography that glorifies aberrant sexual practices would affect people for the rest of their lives.  Dr. Kheriaty cites two studies that link women who read Fifty Shades of Gray with an increase in behaviors associated with abusive relationships.

All this points to the fact that our behaviors matter because we influence our brain and our body by our actions.  Do we want to be linking sex and love, sex and fidelity, sex and trust, sex and commitment?  Or do we want to be linking sex and selfishness (e.g. pornography), sex and aggression, sex and fear?  We shape our brain by our choices more than we realize. 

The gospel for the first Sunday in Lent recounts the temptation of Jesus by the Devil.  The first temptation invited Jesus to put sensual pleasure at the center of his life, measuring good and evil by what sensually satisfies him.  The second temptation was to put his ego at the center of his life, puffing up His pride and self-worth.  The third temptation offered worldly power, making the expansion of authority the central goal of life.  Of course, Jesus overcomes all three temptations, causing the Devil to depart empty handed.  All of us face temptation frequently.  The attraction of pleasure or hedonism is a powerful temptation, and it is made to seem harmless with terms like ‘we’re only human’ or describing pornography as ‘victimless.’  This is meant to deceive us, but when we give in to temptation, our experience alters the way we think and how we react to the world and to the people we interact with.  Gradually we come to believe we deserve happiness as defined by pleasure, but in the process we begin to see others not for their inherent dignity, but how they can be a source of satisfaction to us.  Egoism is equally powerful and ultimately self-destructive, but it is attractive to think we deserve things we may not have earned, such as respect, or perhaps ‘income-equality.’  The desire and quest for power is easily rationalized, even at the expense of integrity and the neglect of personal relationships.  

All of these temptations are conveyed by means of lies and deceit.  If we knew the truth about the consequences of our choices, we would think twice before taking such risks with our body, mind, and soul.  When we succumb to these lies and temptations we injure ourselves and others.  When our affections become disordered, the people we are most likely to hurt are those closest to us.  Instead of putting God and our loved ones first, we measure happiness and goodness by how it satisfies our selfish motives.

Whichever temptation is greatest, our lives will not expand to greater depth and meaning as long as we are deceived into thinking we will derive happiness from pleasure, ego-inflation, or power.  God created us for much more.  He created us in His image, capable of love and loyalty, and to live in loving relationships.  All the temptations cited above interfere with this true calling.

Lent is the time of year we are called to examine our values and our lifestyle.  The practice of disciplining our bodies and minds with fasting, abstinence, and almsgiving, is meant to strengthen our self-control.  It is also the time to prepare ourselves to accept the saving grace of our salvation.  Despite our weakness in the face of temptation, Jesus Christ died for our sins despite our unworthiness, and in doing so He reconciled us with God our Father. 

Fifty Shades of Gray- A World In Need of Healing

This past week was proclaimed “Fifty Shades of Gray Week” on NBC’s Today Show.  Someone had turned it on in the gym where I work out in the morning, and every day last week NBC celebrated the premier of this event, deemed so wonderful by the happy-go-lucky morning show team.  On Friday, thousands of people gathered outside and cheered boisterously every time the movie was mentioned.   As they awaited the much anticipated premier, the Today Show hosts interviewed the actress who played the lead, but who hoped that her mother would never see the movie.  Although I’ve not read the book (books?), I am led to understand that it was wildly popular, especially with women who were apparently thrilled at the wanton sexual abandon of the main character.  I gather this is much more than a so-called ‘romance novel,’ but rather a graphic pornographic affair that celebrates all manner of sexual perversities.  In the not too distant past, such genre was only available in adult bookstores where X-rated materials were sold, if unobstructed by anti-obscenity laws.

This brings to mind an incident that occurred some twenty years ago in Cincinnati, where we lived at the time.  Cincinnati had anti-obscenity laws that kept adult entertainment and printed materials outside the city limits, mostly across the river in Covington, KY.  Despite this, the Cincinnati Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibit of homo-erotic art, knowing full well they would be shut down by authorities and forced to relocate.  When that happened, the exhibit got national press for more than a week, catapulting the exhibit from a ho-hum affair into a national frenzy that subsequently sold out in every other venue for the next several years.  Ironically, at exactly the same time, a well-known Catholic artist hosted an exhibit of religious art, but was censored by the media who not only refused to review and report it, but rejected it as inappropriate for secular media coverage.  In retrospect, this also coincided with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair that seemed to downplay the importance of sexual dalliances.

Also last week, our president attended the National Prayer Breakfast and took the opportunity to chastise Christians for “killing in the name of Jesus.”  Have you noticed that on the few occasions he comments on terrorist’s acts, he points out that only a very small minority of Muslims partake in terrorism, but in this instance he was quick to ascribe the killing to followers of Jesus.  He never mentions that Muslims kill in the name of Mohammed or Ala, but warns us all that Christians kill in the name of Jesus.  Rather than express indignation at the very recent killing of thousands of Christians in Syria, Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan and elsewhere, he chose to castigate all of us for “killing in the name of Jesus.” Where is the outrage over so many recent deaths?  Why is he commenting on something that happened 500 years ago among a small portion of the European Crusaders who went too far when they recovered Constantinople from marauding Muslim invaders?  He also cited the Inquisition, but any historian worth his/her salt knows that the Inquisition was the only law in an otherwise lawless feudal Europe.  The Inquisition set up judges who held land owners and self-appointed kings of small domains, responsible for the fair treatment of the people serving their estates.  It also formed the basis for what would become European Common Law.  When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain co-opted the Inquisition for the purposes of rooting out their enemies, the pope made every effort to stop them.  President Obama’s comments demonstrate either complete ignorance of the historical facts, or a malicious intent to discredit Christians.  The president’s  example took place 500 years ago, and radical Islamic terrorists are running amuck right now.  Can you imagine Winston Churchill or FDR responding to the Nazi holocaust with a vague historical reference to something that took place centuries earlier?

These two episodes point out that our world is badly in need of leadership and direction.  I am not referring to political leadership, but rather moral courage and leadership by words and example.  Over the past six years, our president has presided over the dismantling of our social mores with regard to marriage and family.  The “fundamental transformation of America” that he promised in his early campaign is well underway.  We are rapidly moving away from being a Republic founded on the self-evident truths revealed “by nature and nature’s God,” into a socialist state where our leaders are attempting to force people to forego their religious convictions about marriage and the sanctity of unborn human life.   This transformation has been wrought by use of deception and outright lies, cleverly disguised by terms like “reproductive health,” rather than “killing unborn children,” and by portraying gay marriage as a “civil right,” equivalent to the civil rights of blacks, when the two are completely different issues.  In fact, the icon of the civil rights movement, none other than Martin Luther King, was avidly pro-life and pro-marriage.

The ubiquitous rise of the internet has brought with it access to all manner of pornography, like an epidemic of a morality-destroying plague.  Movies and television have become more and more salacious in their portrayal of American life.  Promiscuity is represented as the norm not the exception, while chastity and modesty are mocked and caricaturized.   Despite all of this new found sexual license, the world seems no happier nor content.  Contraception implies that there are no consequences from sexual intercourse outside of marriage, one of the biggest lies of all.  When God gave us the gift of sex, it was to establish a loving bond between a man and woman, a degree of intimacy that brought with it a commitment to one another and to the product of their union: children.  Ignoring this natural fact may account for the amount of angst and depression that people cannot seem to shake.  It is as if we are a nation suffering private miseries, seeking relief in the fantasy of sexual libertinism.  When in fact what we really need is a healing of our spirit, and forgiveness of our sins. 

If Atheism stands literally for nothing: no God, no after-life, no absolute moral authority, what we really need is something to believe in.  That something is the God who reveals Himself to be the architect of all life and all love.  In Sunday’s gospel, Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, then everyone else who comes to him.  Our world is in dire need of healing our broken spirits, worn thin by failure to form a conscience, and worn out by our desperate attempts to assuage our brokenness with momentary pleasure, only to be left wanting something more.  When Pope Francis comes to America this Summer, he will offer Americans an alternative to the secular culture and lies we have come to believe in; he will offer us moral truth as understood and taught by the Church in a direct apostolic line back to Jesus Himself.