The Biochemicals of Emotions appears at www.debadler.com, Whole Health and Healing. It is reprinted here by permission of the author, Deborah Adler.

PART 2
Elmer Green of the Mayo Clinic, pioneer in biofeedback to treat disease, said: “every change in the physiological state is accompanied by an appropriate change in the mental emotional state, conscious or unconscious, and conversely, every change in the mental emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state.” 

According to Dr. Pert, it’s a simultaneous two-way street. She advances a new theory of information exchange “focused on a purely chemical, nonsynaptic communication between cells.”

 

Let us consider the key players in the biochemistry of emotions; receptors, ligands, and peptides, and their definitions. The receptor is a single molecule “made up of proteins, tiny amino acids strung together in crumpled chains.”  In the early 20th century, it was believed that in order for drugs to be able to act in the body there had to be something present to which they could attach themselves. At that time “receptor” was a hypothetical body component.

Today we recognize that receptor molecules respond to chemical and energy cues by vibrating. “They wiggle, shimmy, and even hum as they bend and change from one shape to another.”  They will dance back and forth between two or three different configurations or favored shapes. They are always found attached to a cell in the organism, either floating on the cell’s membrane or the oily outer membrane of the cell’s surface. 

Dr. Pert offers the analogy of lily pads floating on a pond’s surface. Receptors, like the lilies, have their roots “enmeshed in the fluid membrane snaking back and forth across it several times and reaching deep into the interior of the cell.”  There may be millions of receptors on a typical neuron (nerve cell). They function as sensors, or scanners – hovering in the cell’s membranes, dancing and vibrating, waiting to pick up messages from other vibrating amino acids diffusing through the fluids surrounding each cell.  They cluster in the cellular membrane waiting for the right chemical keys to swim up into their keyholes – a process known as binding. 

Ligands (“that which binds” in Latin) are the chemical keys that bind to the receptor, docking into their “keyholes,” then dancing and swaying they create a disturbance to “tickle” the molecule into changing its shape and rearranging itself until there is the proverbial “click” and information enters the cell. 

Ligands can be a “natural or manmade substance which binds selectively to its own specific receptor on the surface of the cell.” The dance between the ligand and receptor, in which the ligand bumps on and off, is the actual process of binding. It is through this process – which produces a vibration – that allows the ligand to transfer its message to the receptor by way of its molecular properties.  Once the receptor has received the message, it transmits it from the cell’s surface, deep into the cell’s interior. Here the state of the cell can change dramatically through a chain reaction of biochemical events. 

“The life of the cell, what it is up to at any moment, is determined by which receptors are on its surface, and whether those receptors are occupied by ligands or not….The process of binding is very selective…Binding occurs as a result of receptor specificity, meaning the receptor ignores all but the particular ligand that’s made to fit it…These minute physiological phenomena at the cellular level can translate to large changes in behavior, physical activity, even mood.” 

There are three kinds of ligands: neurotransmitters, which carry information across the gap, or synapse, between neurons; steroids, which are transformed into hormones through a series of biochemical steps, and peptides, which comprise 95% of all ligands.  Made up of strings of amino acids, they play a wide role in regulating practically all life processes. 

“If we accept that peptides and other informational substances are the biochemicals of emotion,” states Dr. Pert, “their distribution in the body’s nerves has all kinds of significance…The body is the unconscious mind! Repressed traumas caused by overwhelming emotion can be stored in a body part…there are almost infinite pathways for the conscious mind to access – and modify – the unconscious mind and body.”

“Emotions and bodily sensations are thus intricately intertwined, in a bi-directional network in which each can alter the other” – usually at an “unconscious” level, but under certain circumstances, the process can surface into consciousness or “be brought into consciousness by intention.” 

All sensory information goes through a filtering process as it travels across one or more synapses. This filtering process determines what stimuli we pay attention to at any given moment by determining which sensory input reaches the areas of higher processes, like the fontal lobes. Which sensory input enters our conscious awareness is determined by the quantity and quality of the receptors, which can be influenced by a variety of things, including our experiences as a child, an event yesterday, even what we ate at our last meal.

“Using neuropeptides as the cue, our bodymind retrieves or represses emotions and behaviors. Dr. Eric Kandell and his associates at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons have proved that biochemical change wrought at the receptor level is the molecular basis of memory. When a receptor is flooded with a ligand, it changes the cell membrane in such a way that the probability of an electrical impulse traveling across the membrane where the receptor resides is facilitated or inhibited, thereafter affecting the choice of neuronal circuitry that will be used.

These recent discoveries are important for appreciating how memories are stored not only in the brain, but in a psychosomatic network extending into the body, particularly in the ubiquitous receptors between nerves and bundles of cell bodies called ganglia, which are distributed not just in and near the spinal cord, but all the way out along pathways to internal organs and the very surface of our skin. The decision about what becomes a thought rising to consciousness and what remains an undigested thought pattern buried at a deeper level in the body is mediated by the receptors.” -Deborah Adler

 To be continued…

©2008 Deborah Adler. All rights reserved.