Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (11 page)

Why did people develop the ability to map each other’s minds? Two zoologists independently came to the same conclusion: Coping with the “hostile forces of nature” (i.e., Darwinian natural selection) wasn’t enough to necessitate mind-mapping. The necessary stimulus and reward was increased contact with other human beings.
⁶⁷
Your higher consciousness is largely occupied with mapping the thoughts and feelings underlying other people’s actions.
⁶⁸

Before this theory, scientists approached communication like naïve marital therapists: They thought the purpose of communication was transferring information. They pictured the sender and the receiver both benefiting from clear, accurate, and honest messages. However, scientists finally realized many animals use communication to manipulate each other rather than to transmit information. All the great apes have the ability to imagine alternative worlds, as is evident in their deceptions. Calculated intelligent deception occurs occasionally in chimpanzees, rarely but existent in baboons, but commonly among humans. Mind-mapping greatly facilitates building alliances, and alliance building (“salesmanship”) is a key to success among human beings. But deceiving others and detecting deception may also be a primary reason humans developed mind-mapping.
⁶⁹
Deception plays such an important role in human communication that your brain is hot-wired to detect it.
⁷⁰

The rudiments of mind-mapping show up as soon as you’re born. During your first year of life, you’re already tracking other people’s attention and intention.
⁷¹
You orient toward what other people focus on and point out objects of their interest. You seek “moments of meeting” in which you share “joint attention” with someone else.
⁷²
By twelve months old, you also draw your parents’ attention to objects or events that interest you by pointing. You look toward their faces when you are uncertain, trying to read their expression.

By eighteen months you can track someone else’s gaze into space hidden
from your view, and recognize that he or she sees an object you cannot see.
⁷³
You understand that when someone looks or points at an object, or focuses attention on an event, he or she becomes mentally connected to it. You know from personal experience that two people become connected when they focus attention on the same thing or event.
⁷⁴
These joint-attention behaviors are your very first experience of intimacy.

When you are eighteen to twenty-four months old, your ability to make distinctions between yourself and others marks the passing from infancy to early childhood. You recognize yourself in the mirror and engage in fantasy play in your mind. You play cooperatively with other children and do simple acts of altruism. You imitate and complete an action you’ve seen someone else attempt but fail to finish.
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You smile when you succeed at a task, cry when you fail, and loudly signal your desires.
⁷⁶
Most importantly, you understand
pretence
, which requires understanding other people’s intentions.
⁷⁷
(Yes, this means your children have mapped your mind, too.)

By the time you are two, you’re preoccupied with your emotions and desires, babbling incessantly about your wishes, wants, and hopes. You know pain comes with wanting something but not having it. When you’re three, you’ve learned that if you figure out what someone wants, you can accurately predict what that person will do.
⁷⁸

In other words, mind-mapping greatly focuses around
desire
.

It’s much easier for children to understand other people’s desires than their own. Figuring out what someone wants (or doesn’t want) uses the primitive parts of your brain. Mapping out your own motivations—and other people’s knowledge and beliefs—comes later as your brain and social intelligence mature.
⁷⁹

By age five you arrive at a critical turning point: You understand someone’s mind can have a false belief.
⁸⁰
As a child you first encounter alternative mental worlds and the possibility of deception by mapping out inaccuracies and self-deceptions in your parents’ minds. For instance, the first time you do something wrong, tell a lie, and get away with it, you realize your parents don’t have an all-knowing, perfect picture of the truth. When they give you ice cream instead of punishing you, you discover they can make inaccurate presumptions.

At that point you start engaging in deliberate acts of deception. Lying (deliberately implanting false beliefs) is positive proof of mind-mapping ability.
⁸¹
To be a good liar you have to read other people’s minds, because that’s the only way you know when you’ve been successful. Like sharpening a knife, lying hones your ability to map out other people’s minds.
⁸²
Your mind-mapping ability becomes more sophisticated around age eleven, and during adolescence it goes through another revolution.
⁸³

I’m telling you this because you and your partner are mapping each other’s minds all the time—even when it doesn’t look like it. Lots of people
pretend
they’re not. Some of the shrewdest mind-mappers I’ve ever met look as though they are not doing anything and have no idea what’s going on.

So, are you a mind-mapper? I know you are. The question is: How accurate are you? Do you let yourself know what you see, or do you blind yourself? Do you let your partner (and other people) map your mind?

Mind-mapping plays many critical roles in sexual desire. Once couples have sexual desire problems, mind-mapping runs amok. No doubt you use mapping to figure out whether or not your partner desires you.

The politics of mind-mapping shift as relationships evolve: Early on, you usually
want
your partner to know whether or not you want him—because you probably do. (If you don’t desire him, you mask this if you want the relationship to continue.) Later on, when you’re sexually bored, you probably mask your mind from being mapped about your level of desire.

If you don’t want your partner, you usually don’t want him mapping your mind. It may destabilize your relationship, or shift it into an undesirable balance. At the same time, when desire fades in one partner (or both), both partners begin mind-mapping sorties, gathering information about the other’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations. This squirrel cage of contradictory agendas underlies what most couples refer to as “growing apart.” (But from this perspective you can see it’s a kind of emotional fusion. Each partner’s emotional equilibrium rests on what he or she thinks is going on in the other’s mind.)

The politics of mind-mapping also play out differently depending on who’s involved. For instance, you might
want
to hurt your partner’s feelings, or tamper with her reflected sense of self, or shift the balance of power in the relationship. In that case, you’ll go out of your way to make it easy for her to read that you don’t desire her.

If we can read each other’s minds, why don’t we use this to be more considerate of each other? How can people with highly developed ability to intuit another being’s mind use it in such self-preoccupied and insensitive ways? This is easier to understand when you know how your brain got organized into a mind-mapping machine.

According to some experts, mind-mapping involves developing and applying general principles about human behavior and human nature. We deduce other people’s inner reality by cross-referencing what they say, what they do, and what their behavior suggests they want, analyzing this through prior social learning. (This is the “theory” aspect of mind-mapping).
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Children show remarkable ability to approach situations with powerful deductive logic that quickly zeros in on their parents.

Other scientists say we map someone’s mind by mentally simulating his thoughts and feelings, using our own mental state as a model of what’s happening inside him.
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(This is the “simulation” aspect of mind-mapping.) We do this by role-taking and dramatic impersonation, imaginatively putting ourselves in the other’s place, and assessing our own emotions and physical sensations. We can either assume he or she will respond as we do, or we adopt alternative character traits and do a mental recalibration. Our goal is to figure out what they find attractive or unattractive, what they wish to pursue or avoid.

Research suggests that “simulation” occurs directly from seeing other people’s faces and bodies. Neuroscientists discovered we have automatic and unconscious neural responses when we observe someone else doing something. We feel visceral responses and “gut feelings” when we see another person’s face express an emotion.
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When you see someone grasp an object, it triggers “mirror” neurons in your premotor cortex as if you
were grasping it. When you see someone eating an apple, or being hit with a stick, motor neurons fire as if you were doing the movements yourself or it was happening to you. This gives you the same motor, visceral, and psychological pain responses as the person you’re observing. Your brain uses this to infer what’s happening in another person’s mind and body.
⁸⁷

Highly accurate mind-mapping probably uses all these sources. If someone’s behavior is predictable you use mental simulation. When he doesn’t act the way you expect, you shift to “collect and analyze data.” Your visceral reactions from watching his face and body cue you to his state of mind.
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A large part of mind-mapping has nothing to do with empathizing or identifying with other people.
⁸⁹
That’s why sociopaths and con artists, lacking any empathy and compassion, can be stunningly good mind-mappers. They are trackers. They deduce your beliefs, desires, and intentions from their understanding of human nature and watching what you do. They put themselves in your place, figure out what you think and feel, and use this to manipulate you with lies. Mind-mapping is the human refinement of prehistoric social intelligence that keeps animals alive.
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Mind-mapping doesn’t primarily derive from your neocortex. Making meaning of what you’ve mapped out primarily goes on in your limbic system—the less rational, highly emotionally reactive, “non-thinking” part of your brain. The raw data comes from an even more primitive part called your
reptilian brain
, which you have in common with reptiles.

I believe you
can
get your neocortex in charge of your mind-mapping. When you do, your mind-mapping improves. Your perceptions and judgment will be less shaded by emotional distortions. You
can
direct your mind-mapping efforts toward your partner’s happiness, but doing so involves more than improved accuracy. If you lack a solid self, you’re not likely to do this, because it means potentially giving up something else you want. It’s easier to act as though you’re clueless while tracking your partner’s every move.

Mind-mapping accuracy and benevolence improve when you’re willing and able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, including confronting yourself and mapping your own mind. When you’re not willing to look
at yourself or be truly known, or the most important thing to you is having things your way, you’ll map your partner constantly, but it won’t involve empathy.

It’s hard to get the best in you orchestrating your mind-mapping. It takes a fair amount of solid self for true empathy and caring to be your motive. If you’re like most people, you need help becoming a more solid person. So to improve your mind-mapping—and
many
other things in your life—in the next chapter I’ll introduce you to my Four Points of Balance™ program. The Four Points of Balance will help you develop a solid self. If you want the best in you doing your mapping so you can resolve your sexual desire problems, then embrace the Four Points of Balance. This will ripple throughout your life.

We’ll talk about mind-mapping throughout the remaining chapters of this book. Mind-mapping shapes human nature, love relationships, and your sexual desire. If you and your partner depend on a reflected sense of self, you are constantly mind-mapping each other, manipulating each other’s minds through your interactions, and trying to get the positive reflected sense of self you want.
When you rely on someone for a positive reflected sense of self, you invariably try to control him or her
. You don’t want your emotional “drug supply” going away.

People who can’t maintain their own sense of self squeeze the life out of the people around them—whether they know it, or like it, or not. Earlier we saw how Robert tried to control Sally when he couldn’t control himself. He badgered her with the idea she was sexually defective. He tried harder to turn her on to rescue his sinking reflected sense of self.

The same holds true if you can’t calm your own anxieties. If you can’t regulate your own emotional temperature, you’ll regulate everyone
around you to keep yourself comfortable. Think of a parent who can’t control her temper or anxieties. Everyone else in the family has to act accordingly to keep her calm and stable.

Your inability to hold on to yourself upsets your partner’s emotional balance. The more your reflected sense of self drives you, and the more you look to others, the more your partner will feel oppressed and controlled. The more you try to regulate yourself through your partner, the more you trigger her refusal to submit to tyranny, which is part of human nature. This is why
normal
people have sexual desire problems.