TEMP:
An Interview with Candace Pert, Ph.D.
--by Lynn Grodzki, LCSW
I have been trying hard to understand the concept of emotion for the past ten years. In my work as a psychotherapist, I run groups where deep, cathartic emotional expression is encouraged. I listen as people talk and reveal their feelings. I read and research about neurology. But trying to explain emotion is still challenging. As the academics would say, it lacks a theory base, meaning that it is difficult to define and write about emotion using specific language. But the work of Dr. Candace Pert is changing all that. I began to correspond with Candace a few years ago. This May, I interviewed her about a subject that interests both of us: the need for a unified theory of emotion. She offered some new, startling insights into how our bodies interact with our minds through the chemical pathway of emotion.
Candace Pert, Ph.D., pharmacologist and professor at Georgetown University, was Chief of Brain Biochemistry at the NIH for 13 years. In 1993 she appeared on Bill Moyer's landmark TV program, Healing and the Mind, where she attracted attention for being that rare scientist who can explain her work with a sense of humor and passion. Pert has spent over twenty years researching peptides and receptors, chains of amino acids, that she considers the "biochemical correlates of emotion." Pert believes she has found the material manifestation of emotion in the body. In this interview, she explains why she believes these chains of molecules are the biological basis of emotion and what that means for those who practice alternative methods of medicine.
The Chemistry of Emotion
Grodzki: Candace, could you review what led to your understanding that peptides and receptors are the biochemical correlate of emotion?
Pert: In the late seventies and eighties, I performed numerous mapping studies in the brain of both the peptides and their receptors. The receptors tended to map out in areas like the amygdala and the hippocampus [areas of the limbic system] that had been previously implicated as being part of the emotional circuitry. We could also map the peptides in other areas of the body, such as the immune system and the glands. At first, nobody could make any sense out of this. To most people who are in the Western scientific tradition of separating brain and body, this seemed counter-intuitive.
But my team realized that this system of molecules formed a communication network throughout the brain and body. It seemed consistent with my almost intuitive feelings about the biological basis of emotions. I was familiar with some of the concepts coming out of California, from Esalen to Stanford, of how health and disease, mind and body are intertwined. What we were seeing made sense to me.
Grodzki: So you combined your intuitive understanding of mind and body, along with what you were seeing in the lab.
Pert: Yes. There was one more thing. Darwin had hypothesized that the biochemical basis of emotions, the physiological correlate, would be highly conserved in evolution. We in fact had found these neuropeptides in one-celled animals.
Blanche O'Neil did a series of elegant studies on the opiate receptors of one-celled organisms to show that, biochemically, theirs were just like ours.
Grodzki: Up until now there hasn't been a unified theory of emotion, one that explains the concrete workings of emotion and its existence in the body and the mind.
Pert: My research not only contributes towards a unified theory of emotion, but it also explains how a lot of alternative medicine works.
Grodzki: How do you understand the connection between memory and emotion?
Pert: Experiments show that the hippocampus area of the brain [part of the limbic system] is the access or gateway into the whole emotional experience. Almost every variety of peptide receptor is found in the hippocampus. Through the peptide network, which is anything that has peptide receptors on it, you can access different memories, mood states or developmental stages. Strong emotions are the key variable that make us bother to remember things.
There is a lot of evidence that memory occurs at the point of synapse in the neurons. One cell communicates with another. And we know that at the synapse, there are changes that take place in the receptors. The sensitivity of the receptors are part of memory and pattern storage. But the peptide network extends beyond the hippocampus, to organs, tissue, skin, muscle and endocrine glands. They all have peptides receptors on them and can access and store emotional information.
This means the emotional memory is stored in many places in the body, not just the brain. The autonomic nervous system is pivotal to this entire understanding. Its importance is much more subtle than has been thought. Every peptide that I have ever mapped and more can be found in the autonomic nervous system. There is an emotional coding to the way our autonomic patterns are elaborated.
Grodzki: The autonomic nervous system includes the spinal cord and the ganglia that are down either side. Is it possible that emotion could be stored in places like this indefinitely?
Pert: Absolutely. Emotional memories are our earliest memories. One of my earliest memories is that I struck a match when my mother was making dinner. I just started a tiny fire, and she came over and put it out with her dishrag. I can still see the terror in her face. I think I must have been one year old. Emotional memories are long term memories, stored where we need them, for survival.
Grodzki: Let's say you had forgotten this memory and you are in a situation where something similar happens. Perhaps your own daughter plays with matches and you find your reaction has an intensity that suggests an earlier incident was attached to it. How is early emotional memory retrieved in the body?
Pert: You can access emotional memory anywhere in the peptide/receptor network, in any number of ways. For example, if you have a memory that has to do with food and eating, you might access it by the nerves hooked up to the pancreas. You can access through any nodal point in the neural loop. Nodal points are places where there is a lot of convergent information with many different peptide receptors. In these nodal points there is potential for emotional regulation and conditioning.
Grodzki: Massage therapists often talk about "muscle memory"--the phenomena that massage can elicit intense emotional response in a person, often of childhood upset.
Pert: As soon as you hit the muscle, you are sending a stimulus into the spinal cord. You are accessing the spinal cord. That's another nodal point, by the way, in the loop. When I talk about emotional conditioning, I mean we are repeating some old patterns, which is the way we are constructed. We have some autonomic aspects of ourselves.
Grodzki: So we are programmed to be able to repeat emotional experience and we can access it through the body, in many ways. What happens to emotions that are not able to be fully expressed?
Pert: I have a whole theory about this. I believe that emotion is not fully expressed until it reaches consciousness. When I speak of consciousness, I include the entire body. I believe that unexpressed emotion is in process of traveling up the neural access. By traveling, I mean coming from the periphery, up the spinal cord, up into the brain. When emotion moves up, it can be expressed. It takes a certain amount of energy from our bodies to keep the emotion unexpressed.
There are inhibitory chemicals and impulses that function to keep the emotion and information down. I think unexpressed emotions are literally lodged lower in the body.
Grodzki: This is a fascinating idea, that emotion is moving up the body. Do you make a distinction between emotion that is felt, versus emotion that is felt and understood?
Pert: Yes. That is a good way of putting it. In my mind, there are levels of integration. You are integrating lower brain areas when you move the emotion up and get it into consciousness. That's where you begin comprehension.
I often tell a story in my lectures. I show a picture of a woman with hot coffee, who has dropped the cup and burned herself. She reacts to the scalding coffee by being startled and feeling pain. The emotional reflex moves up and up and up the body. When it finally gets to the level of the thalamus she says, "Oh, it's hotter than it usually is." But then I make a joke. I say, "Its only when it gets all the way up to the cortex that she can actually blame her husband." That's where we put the whole spin on it. Unexpressed emotions are buried in the body -- way, deep down in the circuitry of the organs, or the GI tract, or a loop in a ganglium.
Grodzki: This gives more credence to the concept of a "gut feeling." Its amazing to think of our organs as storage places for emotion and emotional memory.
Pert: We even know what the memory storage looks like. It's protein molecules coupled up to receptors. Some thought it only gets stored in the brain. But it looks like that in the body, too. Your memories can get stored that way in the pancreas, for example.
Grodzki: There is a belief that unexpressed emotion is harmful to the mind and body. If you haven't fully grieved a loss, for example, your weakened immune system might make you a candidate for an illness, like cancer. How do you understand it, as a scientist?
Pert: I think there is overwhelming evidence that unexpressed emotion causes illness. I'm a molecular Reichian!
Grodzki: Reich had a model of working with emotion that is sometimes called the "conflict model" of catharsis. He thought there were two psychic forces at work in every individual. One is the force that wants to express emotion. The other is the force that seeks to prevent its expression, which he termed resistance. He thought the pressure of the two forces caused stasis, so his therapy techniques were designed to exhaust and weaken the resistance, to allow emotional expression to occur.
Pert: I see it this way. The raw emotion is working to be expressed in the body. It's always moving up the neural access. Up the chakras, if you will, but really up the spinal cord. The need to resist it is coming from the cortex. All the brain rationalizations are pushing the energy down.
The cortex resistance is an attempt to prevent overload. It's stingy about what information is allowed up into the cortex. It's always a struggle in the body. The real, true emotions that need to be expressed are in the body, trying to move up and be expressed and thereby integrated. That's why I believe psychoanalysis in a vacuum doesn't work. You are spending all your time in your cortex, rather than in your body. You are adding to the resistance.
Grodzki: You suggest a vertical model of catharsis, letting the emotion move up the body, perhaps finding ways to relax the cortex to allow the unexpressed emotion to be first experienced and then cogni- tively integrated.
Pert: Let the emotion all bubble up. Let the chips fall where they may. My personal experience using catharsis was with the New Identity Process.* I think the NIP bonding might serve to relax the cortex and let the emotion come through. I believe that the process of catharsis is not complete without saying things, because we must involve speech and the cortex, to know that the emotion has come all the way up and is being processed at the highest level. To feel and understand means you have worked it all the way through. It's bubbled all the way to the surface. You're integrating at higher and higher levels in the body, bringing emotion into consciousness.
[*The New Identity Process is a method of group psychotherapy that works directly with emotional energy to help people change self defeating behaviors. The process includes expressing deep emotions within a group setting. Once limiting belief systems begin to shift, a new, healthier sense of self can emerge. The NIP uses a healing technique called bonding that combines deep emotional expression with the safety of therapeutic touch.]
Candace Pert, Ph.D. will be the keynote speaker at the 1995 Conference for the International Society of the New Identity Process (ISNIP), held in Columbia, Md., Sept. 21-24, 1995. She will be speaking on the "biochemistry of emotion."
Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, is a psychotherapist who runs New Identity Process
groups and workshops in Silver Spring, Md. For more information or to register
for the ISNIP Conference call (301) 871-2678. For more information on NIP
therapy, call Lynn Grodzki at (301) 434-0766.
Love (and hormones)
Could it be that chemistry is at the heart of all of our warm and fuzzy feelings?
By SCOTT LaFEE
Feb. 14, 1996
When it comes to affairs of the heart, the usual experts tend to be philosophers, romance novelists, best friends and
therapists with midday radio talk shows.
Scientists seem an unlikely source. Love defies scientific method. Adoration cannot be hypothesized. Devotion lacks a
database.
But all that may be changing.
From the pensive journal Behavioral Neuroscience to the august Annals of the New York Academy of Science, disparate
researchers are beginning to publish and explain -- if only indirectly and with many caveats -- the biology of feeling warm
and fuzzy.
"Who you fall in love with is largely cultural," said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University. "People grow up
learning to like and expect certain things. That's why Hottentots usually marry Hottentots and Americans marry Americans.
"But once you do fall in love, physiology takes over and determines how you feel about falling in love. It's a lot like fear.
You don't feel fear until you're actually afraid. It's the consequence of chemical interactions in the brain and body. Feeling
love is the same sort of thing."
Much of what researchers have learned about the chemical nature of love -- or to be more precise, about specific behaviors
associated with physical attraction, affection and long-term mating -- has been extrapolated from studying the prairie vole.
Prairie voles are rodents and, as rodents go, they're not particularly unusual. They belong to the same family as gerbils,
hamsters, lemmings and New World rats. They look like oversize mice.
But prairie voles do possess one notable trait: They're monogamous.
Among mammals, that's a relatively rare characteristic, shared by only 3 percent. (In fact, the prairie voles' close cousin, the
montane vole, is quite the opposite, preferring to play the field.) In their youth, prairie voles tend to be indifferent to other
members of their species. But older males and females, once sexually bonded, become inseparable, devoted for life.
In other words, they find a sort of prairie-vole love.
Researchers now believe that the impetus for this behavior is strongly influenced by a pair of hormones called oxytocin and
vasopressin. Both hormones are present in all voles (and most mammals, including humans), but oxytocin appears to be
more strongly felt in females while vasopressin plays a more influential role in male voles.
Ordinarily, oxytocin and vasopressin exist in voles only in small amounts. "They're made all of the time but usually
released by the brain only in very low levels. That's made it hard to determine exactly what they do day to day," said Sue
Carter-Porges, a zoologist at the University of Maryland.
On the other hand, researchers have known for a while that certain stimuli -- sexual arousal, intercourse, birthing and, in
the case of females, nursing -- boost the presence of these hormones.
When that happens, the results are dramatic.
In a series of experiments, researchers injected unmated male and female voles with added hormones. Males injected with
vasopressin quickly found mates, indulged in marathon rounds of sex and became aggressive but nurturing spouses and
parents.
Similarly, females exposed to higher levels of oxytocin became hopelessly enamored with males they had never seen before.
They mated, becoming loving partners and doting mothers.
But when some of these same voles were given drugs that interfered with the added hormones, the rodents reversed course.
Both males and females became indifferent to the opposite sex, and neither seemed much interested in offspring.
In fact, in research reported in the journal Hormones and Behavior in 1994, female rats whose oxytocin systems had been
chemically blocked began avoiding all physical contact with male rats or actually began fighting with them.
Interestingly, while individual oxytocin levels in humans seem to vary with their response to different people, levels appear
to remain constant among parents and their children, said Bi-Cheng Wang, a researcher at the University of Georgia who
described the molecular composition of oxytocin in last month's issue of Nature Structural Biology.
"And in older people, oxytocin can even be at higher levels," Wang said, which may help explain why the elderly are often
perceived as being warmer, calmer and more family-oriented than younger generations.
At the molecular level, oxytocin and vasopressin are almost identical, composed of nine amino acids, seven of which are
shared. Yet the effects of each hormone are distinctly different.
Vasopressin is a powerful adrenal-based stimulant. During times of stress, levels of the vasopressin increase, constricting
vessels, raising blood pressure, preparing the animal to fight, flee or, perhaps, make love.
Oxytocin, on the other hand, is an anti-stress hormone that seems to lower blood pressure, ease pain and act as a sort of
general relaxant.
Ordinarily, said Carter-Porges, oxytocin's role is to stimulate uterine contractions and lactation in pregnant women. It's also
believed to be involved in neural control of the digestive system. Females, including humans, in late pregnancy produce
additional amounts of oxytocin that help them extract more energy more efficiently from smaller amounts of food.
"That's how a mother-to-be can eat for two," said Carter-Porges.
Of course, oxytocin and vasopressin aren't the sole chemical components of this thing called love. There remains a lot of
uncertainty about how these hormones work in humans.
"They're obviously not the only hormones involved," said Carter-Porges, "but they do seem to be core to the system. They
come from deep in the hypothalamus, in an area of the brain involved in the management of stress and emotions."
The human brain harbors other such substances. Certain neurochemicals promote or provoke specific "love-related"
activities in the brain, said Rutgers anthropologist Fisher in her 1992 book, "Anatomy of Love." One is a small molecule
called phenylethylamine (PEA), which is produced in larger quantities when humans experience the emotions of
excitement, apprehension, giddiness, euphoria and attraction.
"All the things we associate with infatuation."
PEA is a natural amphetamine. The more PEA present in the brain, said Fisher, the faster the brain revs. "No wonder lovers
can stay awake all night talking and caressing," said Fisher. "No wonder they become so absent-minded, so giddy, so
optimistic, so gregarious, so full of life. Naturally occurring amphetamines have pooled in the emotional centers of their
brains; they are high on natural `speed.' "
(PEA has powerful effects on nonhuman creatures as well. Mice injected with PEA jump and squeal, says Fisher, in a display
of mouse exhilaration called "popcorn behavior." Rhesus monkeys make pleasure calls and smack their lips -- a courting
gesture. And baboons press levers in their cages more than 160 times in a three-hour period to obtain diet supplements
containing PEA.)
Such high-octane emotions, however, can't be sustained indefinitely. The body would burn out. That's where hormones
such as oxytocin come in, says Fisher. "They're cuddle chemicals. They provide a sense of peace and calmness. This is the
second stage of love -- that feeling of attachment and satisfaction."
Carter-Porges agreed:
"I think we're starting to see some major implications for these hormones. We have, within our brains, these chemicals that
manage stress and are transmitted by nerves throughout the body. Oxytocin is important to social behavior because it tells
the body how to behave in the presence of somebody you like. It says this is a safe place, that the body can go to a more
relaxed physiological state. That's essential to good health. Nobody, not voles or humans, can stay in high gear forever."
From voles, researchers have extended their work to other mammals. Thomas R. Insel, director of the Yerkes Regional
Primate Research Center in Atlanta, is investigating whether oxytocin and vasopressin play similar roles in chimpanzees
and apes.
"The data is still preliminary," said Carter-Porges, a colleague of Insel's, "but I'd be surprised if it showed anything different."
The same, presumably, could be said of humans.
Looking for love, of course, isn't really the goal of such research. There may be practical, future medical applications. Insel
and others, for example, hope that by understanding how these hormones work, they can better figure out what's happening
in the brains of individuals who have trouble forming emotional attachments, people with autism, Alzheimer's or certain
learning disorders.
Carter-Porges takes a larger view. Hormonal research, she says, helps explain how humans and other mammals determine
the appropriate behavior for a particular social situation.
Love, it seems, means never having to say you've got bad chemistry.
Further resources
"Anatomy of Love" by Helen Fisher (Fawcett Columbine, 1992)
"Hormone of Monogamy" by Kathy A. Fackelmann. Science News Nov. 27, 1993
http://hri.ucsf.edu -- On-line connection to the Hormone Research Institute at the University of California San Francisco
Copyright 1997 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.