The hating brain

It is all up to you, of course, but by giving you stretches of time such as the Holy Week, the calendar gives you a chance and space to be quiet and to think. In most cases, when humans are given time to reflect, we experience an overwhelming tendency to give in to feelings that consume us. Two of those top feelings are love and hate.

Love and hate are the inner life’s versions of peace and war. Other emotions such as fear, anger, and disgust seem to circle around these two. But what do love and hate really look like as they come alive in our brains? Do they occur in places that are opposing equivalents? In other words, if there’s a person who claims to hate someone with volcanic rage, would his or her brain look distinctly different from the brain of a person who loves someone with the fury of a thousand suns?

Love was the first emotion that scientists tooled with brain-scanning devices sought out. One anthropologist named Helen Fisher dominated this kind of work. She has been leading her team in many studies since the early ’90s to know what happens to the brain when in love. Their work focused on romantic love, usually in its early stages, while other studies like this one mapped brain activity in those who have been in love for a long time. There are also studies such as this one that focused on “maternal love,” exploring how love motivates humans to not just go on with life but to also do extraordinary things because of it. Taken together, all these became surrogates for what love looks like in our brains.

According to brain activation studies of love, the brain seems to perk up certain areas such as the medial insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, the caudate nucleus, and the putamen – parts that are associated with that “rush,” the rewarding feeling of beholding someone. But what is equally important is that when we love, we also “dim” certain parts of the brain such as the amygdala, the prefrontal, parietal, and middle temporal cortices. This “dimming” action in these parts associated with reason explains why we can come up with excuses for our beloved’s bad behavior. To love is indeed to be blind to reason.

Now for hate, this recent study looked at the brains of people who volunteered to think about people they hate. Most of them chose their ex-lovers, and only one showed that the parts of the brain that are aglow when hating someone include certain neighborhoods in the frontal cortex – critical in predicting the action of the despised person – and in the premotor cortex – understandable, as we are always on guard and ready to take action when confronted by a person we hate.

The scientists have distinctly noted, though, that the right putamen and insula – two areas that are also activated when in love – are also recruited to form the brain map of hate. According to the scientists, these two areas are associated with amassing the rewarding hormone of dopamine in aggressive acts, as well as cueing our motor systems to respond to our hateful plan. The scientists were quite surprised to know that the networks involved in love and hate are not completely opposed, and that they, in fact, shared some areas. The Jesuits could have told them that they are not opposites; during philosophy classes in college, we were repeatedly reminded that the opposite of love is not hate – it is indifference.

To me, what was chilling in the research on plotting hate in the brain was that when we hate, we think clearly. It does not mean that when we think clearly, we are hateful; it means that unlike when we’re looking at someone we love, when we hate, we are very surgical in the way we perceive the hated. We have an overwhelming tendency to offer no excuses, considerations, and forgiveness to the hated.

Thus, when we hate someone, we reduce the hated to an object that could be treated with pure reason and logic, which shortchanges the social, emotional, and moral complexities that define our humanity. But these parts also explain why humans seem to have a strong tendency to cave in to hate as much as to fall in love. This makes me wonder whether our justice system – which prides itself with clear, logical arguments – is really the best path to making our societies better. When two sides are pitted against each other, hate is a logical stance for either side in order to maximize the compensation or the justice they think they should have. Judges, armed with the law, are only mandated to weigh the evidence with reasoning.

Now that we have a general map and itinerary of where our sparks go when we love and hate, I want to see the human neural itinerary when we are able to cross the divide between love and hate. I already know the highlights of the love and hate network, but I want to know how we cross these intersecting neural highways that we carry around in our heads. This is what seems to matter, and what creates an impact in individual and collective lives.

We already know that humans are capable of forgiveness. More importantly, we know that forgiveness changes everything. Forgiveness caused a Palestinian who once tried to bomb an Israeli depot to understand the Holocaust, forgive the Israeli soldier who shot his 12-year-old daughter, and work for peace. It caused a bereaved father, whose son was shot by a teenager who was just dared to shoot a random delivery boy, to nurture the teenage killer through prison, and work with him later on to combat hate in schools. It caused this woman to realize that being forgiven is not about being told she is forgiven – it’s about acting against the things she needed to be forgiven for.

“How do I hate thee” easily comes from “how do I love thee.” Other times, it just comes from ignorance and fear of what (or whom) we do not know or understand. How do we break the link through forgiveness, or by being open so we can swear, mourn, slap ourselves out of it, and then promptly move on? Now that is a brain scan I want to see. – Rappler.com