Thoughts on the Lyrics of Limerance

"I think love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America" 

- Frank Zappa

It will soon be February 14th. For a long time I used to refer to this as Singles Awareness Day, and I even wrote a song about the way that single people can feel overlooked or portrayed negatively, as though only one lifestyle is valued by Western society. You only have to turn on the TV to see adverts, programmes and films that all tap into the 'one size fits all' philosophy. The reason for this is perhaps obvious in evolutionary terms. A lifestyle that generally results in the propagation of human population is going to be seen as 'desirable,' although with the number of humans increasing exponentially out of pace with resources on a finite planet, it may be time for society to enter a new paradigm.

Then I had a period where February 14th didn't really bother me at all. My girlfriend (who later became my wife) and I exchanged cards but we weren't always together on this particular day. We had plenty of chances to catch up all year round after all. That said, it was always nice to go out for a meal, although we didn't actually need an excuse to do this.

Now, things have changed again and my thoughts on the 45th day of each year are perhaps different once more. I now think of this as the Festival of Limerence, because if you think about it, it's not really for couples who are already together and secure, but more about declaring interest in the early days of uncertainty - cards signed with a question mark and all that mystery and intrigue. I feel that I should apologise at this point for one incident around thirty years ago when I was at school where I was embarrassed to receive a card from a girl I wasn't attracted to, tearing the card up, which in hindsight was horrible, but as a young teenager who had yet to experience such emotions I guess I had yet to fully develop skills of empathy. It was poetic justice that I didn't receive a card from anybody for many years after this!

It recently struck me that much of what society thinks of as romance is really 'limerence,' a term coined by Dorothy Tennov in 1979 who postulated the kind of intense romantic infatuation that is often considered 'romantic' is a very different beast to familial love and other uses of the other L-word.

Let's look at some love songs that might just be limerence songs.

The first ditty that springs to mind is Robert Palmer's 1986 hit, 'Addicted to Love,' which pretty much compares the romantic experience to that of drug use; 'Your mind is not your own.' One of my favourite songwriters is Bob Dylan and albums such as 'Time out of Mind' (1997) are littered with expressions of unconsummated frustration. He sings about being 'sick of love' and 'in the thick of it,' and exclaims 'You have no idea what you do to me' and [it feels] 'like the universe has swallowed me whole.' If you rewind to the 1976 track 'Isis,' he sings 'What drives me to you is what drives me insane.'

Leonard Cohen was another master of seemingly limerent lyrics, in songs like 'There Ain't No Cure For Love' (1988), once again equating the experience with that of being ill, and in the 1971 song 'Avalanche' he sings 'I stepped into an avalanche, it covered up my soul.'

Often lyrics simply glory in the sheer misery of it, as though there is some apparent virtue in feeling like a sack of effluent! However, one song that really doesn't glorify the feeling is Barry Ryan's 1968 classic 'Eloise,' with lyrics like 'And only time will tell, and take away this lonely hell.' Then there's the Temptations' 1971 hit 'Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me),' which leads the listener to believe that the vocalist is blissfully happy before declaring that it's all just fantasy. Another song that smacks of limerence is John Lennon's 'Abbey Road' composition for the Beatles, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' where he repeats the line 'I want you so bad, it's driving me mad' throughout the song and the band attempts to represent the heaviness of the feeling musically with the endlessly circling coda.

Taking all of this to its logical conclusion, could we infer that a greater percentage of creative and artistic people experience limerence, rather than the ordinary more controlled form of romantic feelings? Or to turn it around, is it this profoundly unpleasant and obsessive experience that prompts the person to release some of the tension creatively?

Food for thought. So what actually is it?

The fascinating book 'Living with Limerence' by the mysteriously named 'Doctor L,' postulates that three factors must be present for limerence to occur. These are an initial sign of hope followed by sufficient ongoing fuel for this hope to survive and a level of uncertainty. I am of the opinion that much of our romantic fiction is entirely based around this concept. It's not a love story if a couple merely meet, start dating, mutually agree upon a relationship and end up getting married (or whatever substitutes as the ultimate fulfilment in modern societies). There has to be a certain level of impossibility. For example, one or both partners could be in another relationship, or there could be geographical or socio-economic barriers ('Romeo and Juliet,' anyone?). If the limerence is expressed and the result is positive it could be passed off as romantic comedy, with all the frustrations seeming comedic in the light of the happy ending. If the limerence does not produce the desired effect the story will be more tragic, as well as being the source for a million love songs (Barry Manilow / Take That pun intended).

The point about uncertainty is particularly interesting. Professor Robert Sapolsky in one of his many fascinating YouTube lectures demonstrates how a perceived 50% chance of an action resulting in success produces the maximum amount of dopamine in anticipation of the desired result. Both a 25% chance and a 75% chance result in less dopamine. I would postulate that with relationships the brain views the 'yes / no' nature of a potential partner as a 50/50 chance even if it is not. Thus, the dopamine goes through the roof and one can be stuck in a state of limerence.

It is also postulated that the experience is a kind of sticking plaster over deeper issues, such as lack of fulfilment, being the brain's way of creating its own excitement when things are not quite right at a more profound level. For example, it is commonly assumed that John Lennon's extreme emotions for Yoko Ono were a result of losing his mother at a young age.

Returning to art and literature, it does seem that a huge proportion of such creativity stems from this experience that the majority will fortunately never have, in spite of idealising its themes. I guess it is some consolation to turn such unpleasantness into something that is, on the whole, appreciated. Take the novel 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for example, where a man simply pines away his whole life for a woman who he eventually pairs up with in old age. In truth, that's not romantic, that's just disturbing, and thankfully our brains agree. Generally periods of limerence have a shelf-life that can be measured in months and at most a few years. And the more generally experienced non-limerent form of passion is not so different either in its lack of longevity. And this is down to our old friend, evolution.

If a couple could be completely obsessed with one another for life, you can see how any potential children might be neglected. The parents would be too wrapped up in one another to fully concentrate on the needs of the child. However, literature and films rarely depict the period after the wedding when passions die down, but die down they must, because that's how it was for our ancestors. In other words, the children that survived had the parents that cooled off after the usual time it takes to produce offspring, and thus these traits were passed on.

Returning to limerence, it is perhaps a perfect example of something called ambiguous grief. When a person dies, the death is final and once grief has been experienced those left behind can recover, but a limerent has to deal with an ambiguity where they can both imagine a life alone and a life where the potential partner becomes an actual partner. And one thing human brains can't stand is duality. And with all that dopamine sloshing around (among other hormonal changes), it is a chemical addiction just like heroin or cigarettes! It seems that Robert Palmer wasn't so far off the mark after all.

[Adam Colton is the author of numerous psychological fiction books as well as '2021: A Musical Odyssey,' which reviews classic rock albums.]

Thoughts on Narcissism and Psychopathy

I know that politics is a huge turn-off for many readers as it's coming at us every time we turn on the news, but I wanted to take a more psychological perspective here, regarding our expectations and what may drive those who seek our votes. As always I stress that my blog is an opinion and more of an exercise in juggling around a few thoughts than anything!

In my book of short stories 'Seven Dreams of Reality' I included a tale of somebody from elsewhere visiting earth to observe the behaviour of humans concluding that there are two types of human and that some exist in an altered state where the feelings of others don't really register. Ten years later it seems to me that what was just an idea in a story is actually not far off the mark.

For most of us listening to the news is just a catalogue of horrors – murder, torture, rape, abuse, violence, etc. and there is a sense of incredulity that human beings can do such things to one another. Do extreme circumstances where survival is threatened push human beings into primal behaviour? Or is it trauma / lack of love in childhood that pushes many relatively comfortable humans into a life of selfishness and disregard for others? Perhaps both.

With a general election on the horizon in the UK I often hear (and indeed experience) a sense of despair at politicians who promise the earth and seem to deliver very little. Once again, is this deception deliberate and what kind of person could live with themselves having got into a position of power by lying? Obviously I generalise and not all politicians are the same, but it does seem that those who are enticed by power and wealth the most are those who are more likely to compromise morality in order to achieve it. It is commonly known that there is a much higher proportion of psychopathy among bosses of corporations than among the general population for example. But of course in politics, showing this ruthless desire for power and influence would not achieve the necessary votes. Thus, a certain amount of deception is essential for those at the more narcissistic end of the spectrum to succeed.

I have heard that there are two sliding scales within personality; 'directive v friendly' and 'analytical v expressive.' Potential politicians have to appear to be friendly to get the votes but are more likely to be directive in order to be attracted to the role in the first place. I wonder if this may even come right down to the level where we might expect a pub landlord or landlady to sit chatting to us because he / she has to appear friendly to customers, but he / she may in fact be just thinking about the business and not really interested in what we have to say at all - directive thinking i.e. working towards a specific aim.

Moving up to the pathological level, it is often quoted that around 1% of the population are psychopaths and around 4% are narcissists. These are two significantly different things but a lack of empathy is consistent in both. Thus, 5% of people are not going to play by the accepted norms of society if they can get away with it.

Have you ever encountered somebody you just cannot reason with? No matter how hard you try to tailor your arguments to suit their outlook they simply will not give an inch or concede any common ground in a debate. For them a debate is not about thrashing things out and finding some kind of solution; it is merely about prolonging the debate and staying rock solid. Of course this doesn't achieve much, but once again we are assuming that they want to achieve something – a solution to the argument and peace. Perhaps prolonging the argument for entertainment value or attention could be the aim? I am not saying that every time this happens you are dealing with a narcissist, but as I said, not everybody sings from the same hymn sheet.

There is a huge resource of information on narcissism online so I won't explore the subject in depth here. I guess to most of the 95% it is important to what degree the person can control this awkward or ruthless behaviour or whether it is deliberate. As hinted above, it is believed that narcissism is caused by a lack of unconditional love in childhood resulting in a lack of object constancy, which means that people and things are viewed as 'all good' or 'all bad,' and they can alternate between the two within seconds, kind of like that optical illusion where you either see a candlestick or two faces but never both at once. So with this 'black or white' view of the world, I guess a minor comment can feel like a full blown verbal attack and the wounded narcissist reacts as they feel is appropriate. But at the same time does this excuse the disproportionate reaction? Well, this is a deep ethical rabbit hole to go down – to what extent can anybody control who they are?

With most psychopaths I think it could be different, insofar as they may actually enjoy seeing others suffer so there seems to be an element of choice here, but as always there are gradations within both conditions – how the 95% love those shades of grey!

Back to politics (ugh!), it seems that perhaps naively we expect our politicians to be the same as us. We expect their consciences to burn because they couldn't deliver a promise or because they decided to sacrifice the needs of the 'insignificant poor' to do a deal with the rich and influential (legal tax avoidance, anyone?). We expect the rich to realise that they are privileged and pay their taxes without complaint, getting a warm feeling because they are funding the NHS for us mere mortals. We expect leaders to find a compromise solution to the endless spiral of murder that goes on in the Middle East, or any other of the world's hot spots over contested territory. We even expect a solution to the Brexit deadlock!

I guess my conclusion here is a word of warning to us all. Are our fears being exploited in order to get us to vote a certain way that will benefit only the upper echelons of society? Are statistics being quoted correctly? (Please check any statements in my own blogs too – they are only a collection of thoughts based on what I've previously read after all.) Are politicians exploiting the fact that when many people hear terms like 'million' and 'billion' they just think 'large numbers' when the difference between the two is the difference between one day and nearly three years? And Brexit wasn't solved in a day after all. Until next time, happy voting!

UPDATE: My novel "Codename: Narcissus," a psychological tale about narcissism is now available physically on Amazon and digitally on other online stores. Alternatively email hamcopublishing@aol.com for details.

Thoughts on Dream Phenomena

Apologies to those who enjoy the cycling narratives, etc. They will return as soon as the weather picks up. For now, I'm continuing with the 'psychology' theme of my last blog.

I've been interested in dream phenomena since a very young age. One of the first dreams I remember involved thinking I'd woken up in my bedroom aged about 7, only to find various animals appearing in my room, at first as a faint outline and then vividly. In the end, I got out of bed and went to open the door to the landing, only to hear my mother's voice say, “Don't come out. There's snakes out here.” Then I woke up.

How many childhood stories end with that twist? - Alice in Wonderland for a start! In fact, I recall being told at school that this was a kind of 'cop out' cliché ending to give a story when you don't know how to finish it. Well, it worked for Lewis Carroll.

I guess the opposite of the phenomenon of thinking you have woken up when you are still dreaming is what is known as 'lucid dreaming' - when one becomes aware of being in a dream. The natural reaction is to try to wake yourself up, but this invariably seems to fail. After a while, you realise that the best thing to do is to go with the flow and try to manipulate the dream itself for your own entertainment.

My grandfather used to state emphatically that he never dreamed at all, in spite of the impossibility of this, and indeed, for those who don't even remember their dreams such phenomena will sound almost like having a fight with your own mind. I remember as a child having lucid dreams and thinking I was forcing my eyelids open with my fingers, when of course I was laying motionless all along.

In later years, I used to have a similar experience on a regular basis, thinking I'd got out of bed to put the light on, only to find that I was still in total darkness. This was normally the give-away that it was a dream, so rather than panic, I used to open the patio doors and go for a wander around the village where I lived, until my brain was ready to wake me up. Of course, I had not left the safety of the bed in reality.

Winding the clock back to childhood, I remember staying at my grandparents' house and seeing a pneumatic drill being used in a dream while I was there, only to wake up and realise that the sound was in fact my alarm clock going off. My grandparents used to have a 'teasmade' (basically an alarm clock that wakes you up with a cup of tea) and perhaps I heard the kettle boiling while in a dream-state when I dreamed that I could see the tea infusing within the teapot! In both cases, it amazed me how quickly the brain can incorporate an external sound into a dream. In fact, what can seem like hours in a dream is really just a matter of seconds.

This may be because the dream contains the important moments of a sequence of events but not all the boring stuff in between. A dream tends to flick between one event and another more like a film does, rather than playing out an actual 'minute for minute' timeline. The Christopher Nolan film 'Inception' makes good use of this time distortion factor by creating months of time by means of a dream within a dream within a dream within... you get the idea!

Lucid dreams can be particularly fun when you're trying to prove to yourself that you're in a dream by catching your brain out. For example, trying to find the answer to a question that you know nothing about. This could mean picking up a book on an unfamiliar subject and trying to read it, or having a conversation with somebody who is supposed to be an expert on a topic that you know little or nothing about.

A lot of these ideas ended up in some of the stories in my Conundrum anthology, from somebody being stuck in a dream and unable to wake up to another character who invents a machine that can record dreams and ends up unable to distinguish them from reality. It's free to download from most online retailers if you fancy some unusual stories with a (usually dreamlike) twist.

One particularly disturbing experience is sleep paralysis. This occurs when a person is partially asleep and partially awake. Thus, the paralysis that stops a person from acting out their dreams is in full effect but the brain is active.

Far more scary sounding than it actually is is something called 'exploding head syndrome.' This seems to occur in a half-asleep, half-awake state, and involves hearing all kinds of explosions or loud sounds that seem to be coming from within the brain. It's a real thing (see Wikipedia) – I personally experience it sometimes when I first drop off to sleep and the sound normally resembles rushing waves over a high pitched ringing. Sounds bizarre? It is - not my idea of fun at all!

A more common parasomnia (occurrence within sleep) is somnambulism or sleep-walking. I had a brief dalliance with this in my teenage years. I used to wake up during the experience at the opposite end of the room to the bed, disorientated. When I got my first job of cleaning windows, I even woke up finding myself attempting to clean a non-existent window in my wooden bedroom door.

As you can see, I've had a lot of these experiences and I'm not sure if it's simply a case that if you suffer from fairly poor sleep you're more inclined to 'get the lot.'

But why dream at all?

The most sensible theory I've encountered is that dreams merely occur while the brain is filing away information from the preceding day. This would make sense to me – when we sleep badly, we cope pretty poorly with things – perhaps the brain is just in a state of confusion, like a teenager's bedroom. And you're expecting it to find solutions in that kind of chaos?!

What we experience as dreams mostly occur during periods of rapid eye movement (REM), where the eyes move around beneath the eyelids as if the dreamer was awake. This is one of five stages of sleep which vary from shallow to deep, with REM sleep as a kind of fifth 'bonus' stage.

All in all, I think remembering dreams adds a dimension to life that many are not even aware of. How much creativity has been inspired by dreams for example, from music to literature, and from films to art? The bible is filled with dream stories, so it would seem that the ancient people were far more interested in these night-time adventures than most folk are today. It's true that people believed that dreams contained premonitions, a view that few would share today, but this isn't to say that dreams have nothing to offer the dreamer at all.

The brain can often find solutions to problems while it's doing its filing, and the dreamer merely has to ask what the specific things within the dream mean to them personally and join up the dots. Sometimes the idea is helpful; other times just 'bleeding obvious.' I used to often dream of travelling on a train, only to find that there were no rails beneath it and then later there was no train at all – I was just walking along a disused track-bed. It seems fairly obvious to me that this implies a lack of a clear direction or a sense of not reaching any particular destination fast. Thankfully I don't have that dream now, so either I've found a direction or resigned myself to not having one!

Peculiarly, I have noticed that many dreams seem to exist in a time-warp. I hardly ever dream of being at my current home, or even the one before that. Time and time again, my dreams seem to take place in my parents' house (pre-2000) or my grandparents' house (pre-1997). My old jobs also seem to feature quite heavily too. I wonder if the experiences of early life merely have a greater impact on the mind and therefore the brain interprets everything through these memories.

Another thing with dreams is that the brain never seems to accurately replicate a real-life location. Normally the dreamer just accepts what the brain is presenting as reality, but upon waking realises that the scene was pretty far off the mark. I guess these dreamscapes are like the vaguely familiar pictures that the mind conjures up when imagining a location in a book - generally our personal idea of what is being described roughly takes on features of familiar places. I also find that people rarely look the same in dreams and that often a person can morph into somebody else completely half way through the dream without me even realising. Yet conversely, I find that music sounds astonishingly real in dreams, as do recognisable voices.

Whilst dreams are often dismissed as having little value these days, it does seem to me as though they give us a glimpse of how the brain actually works in interpreting the real world. On that thought, I'll let John Lennon have the final word on the matter, with a line from what is perhaps his most popular song (Imagine); - “People say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.”

Indeed, there are over seven billion others.

STOP PRESS: Adam Colton's short novel 'The Dream Machine (Labyrinth of Dreams' was released in 2020. It is a psychological sci-fi tale concerning a machine that can record dreams.

Thoughts on Spatial Synaesthesia

It's been a while since I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard if you're pedantic about your metaphors) - in Britain in winter there aren't a great deal of biking adventures to document (too cold and damp), so I'm going to talk about something completely different – a phenomenon known as synaesthesia (sometimes spelled 'synesthesia').

Ever since being a child I have always viewed numbers as positions on curving lines, and it was only about 12 years ago that I realised that most people don't actually do this. To me, the numbers one to twelve are represented by positions on a clock face (logically) and then the numbers 13 to 20 run vertically from the 12. Then each set of ten is a circle, loosely based on the clock face with the 6 at the bottom, but with the zero at the top. Each set of ten (21-30, 31-40, etc.) moves progressively to the left and then curving upwards from 60 to 100. The hundreds, thousands, hundred thousands, millions, billions, etc. and powers of ten follow the same pattern, except that the 1-6 on the clock face are upside down, so 600, 6000, 6 million, etc. occupy the central point of an S shape. I fear I could be losing my readership now, so I'll move on...

The practical implication of this is that I view every event in my life as a position, either located at the number which was my age at the time, or the number of the year at the time. If I think about my time at primary school in terms of my age, it occupies the clock face from 5 to 11; if I think of primary school in terms of the years (81-86), it occupies the right hand side of the '80s' circle, from zero to six. It may seem a bind to view things in this way, but it does make it very easy to remember such things as the years songs were released, as naturally they all have their positions too. Thus, I always relish the music round in a pub quiz!

It isn't just numbers that work this way. Days of the week, months of the year and the alphabet are the same. Saturday is always at the bottom of the circle for me and Tuesday at the top - the days run anti-clockwise. With the months (also anti-clockwise), the circle is a bit distorted - January is at the top right, then there is a long curve left and then down to August at the bottom left. Then the autumn months stack up vertically on the right hand side – well, it always feels uphill to Christmas, doesn't it?

Even the alphabet brings to mind a curve like an oxbow in a river. A-D occupy the first curve on the left hand side, E-R occupy the bulging middle curve and S-Z  take up the final curve on the right. As you can see, the letters aren't evenly spaced - there is both logic and no logic to this way of thinking!

Thanks to the Internet, I discovered that this mode of thought is called 'spatial synaesthesia.' It is thought that as babies, our senses are a mishmash of inputs, where sounds can be perceived as colours, words as smells, etc. Most people lose these cross-associations entirely, but it is thought that those who don't lose all of them are 'synaesthetes' (yes, that's a real word!). Thus some people associate certain numbers with colours. If you put a triangle of twos in a grid of fives, most people will struggle to see the pattern, but somebody with 'grapheme-colour synaesthesia' will see the triangle straight away, as it will appear a different colour to them. Some people even associate personalities with different numbers. As a child, I can remember thinking of the number 5 as very mischievous (along with the colour yellow) and the number 7 as very respectable, but for me, these associations no longer exist.

I have never had the 'seeing sounds as colours' experience myself (although I believe some folk try to induce such phenomena illegally), but some of my favourite music albums do always bring to mind a shade. Sorry, my references are very old, but Pink Floyd's Ummagumma album and The Beatles' Abbey Road (both from 1969) both bring to mind a dark green shade to me. But if you think about it, do we not all associate certain colours with certain moods, and therefore the music that invokes such moods? There is a whole genre called 'the blues' after all.

Some synaesthetes see all kinds of patterns when they hear music, which isn't anything vastly different from the kind of graphics you can get your computer to generate to accompany music. Indeed, certain songs do bring to mind a kind of illustration to me, such as the guitar noises in the creepy middle section of Pink Floyd's Echoes invoking thoughts of strange spiky lines springing up from the ground (another 'Stone Age' music reference for you). The musician Richard D James (aka Aphex Twin) is known to have been inspired by his synaesthesia (as well as lucid dreams) to have created soundscapes such as those in his 1994 album 'Selected Ambient Works Volume II.' The Russian author Vladimir Nabokov was also a known synaesthete by the way.

Back to the curving lines again, the songs on albums I've had a long time always seem to be arranged down one side and back up the other, like a loop, or alternatively as two parallel sides joined across the middle like the letter N. I guess younger synaesthetes would not have these perceptions as modern music formats don't have 'sides' in the way that vinyl records or cassettes did.

This may all seem very odd to somebody without such neural connections, but to a certain extent, I think everybody experiences a kind of synaesthesia when they dream. The brain is filing away information during dreams, but in a way where everything is jumbled up. People from different eras of your life can intermingle for example, and places never seem quite the same as in reality. An experience I sometimes get is one of waking up laughing at some words that were said in a dream, but when I recall the words, there is nothing remotely funny about them. It's as though they have different associations to the subconscious, and therefore their own code of humour.

Well, I could write an entire article about dream phenomena too, but we'll leave it for now. I could be back with something along those lines soon, or indeed another biking write-up when we've moved a little downward and to the left along the circle of months!