The Myth of Normal 104

being “formed.” The individual and collective stakes are far higher than we tend to imagine. “We discover who we are from the inside,” Raffi says. “What’s forming is no less than how it feels to be human. And I’m using my words carefully here: how it feels to be human.” Our culture too often subordinates felt knowledge to the intellect. This inverted ranking system upends how we raise our children—which, in turn, serves to reinforce the error culturewide. Above all, the singer asserts, “we are feeling creatures.” He has science on his side. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explores the primacy of feeling in his authoritative volume Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. “Nature seems to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it,” he wrote (italics his).[2] Biological regulation means the workings of the homeostatic[*] and emotional structures of our brains and bodies, which, before and after birth, are many months ahead of the thinking cortex in the developmental queue—as, in the bigger picture, they long preceded it over the course of our species’ evolution. These areas of the nervous system form the unconscious scaffolding for our thoughts and conscious feelings and, therefore, for our actions. “The earliest established components of an infant’s psychobiological makeup are those most formative of his lifelong outlook,” notes Jean Liedloff. “What he feels before he can think is a powerful determinant of what kind of things he thinks when thought becomes possible.”[3] In fact, the impacts go well beyond the content of thoughts: research has shown beyond any doubt that early experience molds behaviors, emotional patterns, unconscious beliefs, learning styles, relational dynamics, and the ability to handle stress and regulate ourselves. The new knowledge is summed up nicely in two brief paragraphs from an article published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics; the authors are affiliated with perhaps the world’s leading institute on childhood, Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child: