How Relationships Shape Your Brain | Dr. Allan Schore

Andrew Huberman frames the conversation around a claim he attributes to Dr. Allan Schore: that during the first 24 months of life, the brain develops in a particular way depending on how an infant interacts with a primary caretaker, usually the mother but also the father or others. He previews Schore's argument that circuitry on the right side of the brain builds a specific resonance with the caretaker, moving between shared states of calm and quiescence and "upstates" of excitement and enthusiasm. In this framing, moving back and forth between those states is critical to emotional development and to how attachments form later. Huberman also says the episode will explain why avoidant, anxious and secure attachment styles develop, how they carry into adolescence and adulthood, and how they can be modified. He introduces Schore as a clinician psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of "Right-Brain Psychotherapy" and "Development of the Unconscious Mind."

Huberman opens by asking what share of thinking and behavior comes from the conscious versus the unconscious mind. Schore answers from his background as a psychoanalyst, psychodynamic psychotherapist and neuroscientist, and maps the question onto brain anatomy. In his view the right brain is always processing information, especially emotional information, below conscious awareness, and this is most pronounced during emotional interactions.

I'm suggesting that the right brain is the unconscious mind.

Schore puts a number on it: for the basic motivations behind what we do, he says "95% to 90%" is unconscious. He says there has been data showing this but names no specific study. He contrasts his view with the older idea that the unconscious surfaces only in dreams. As he describes it, the right brain is constantly reading unconscious signals between people, such as "Is it safe to be with you?" and "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Huberman asks how much right-left specialization exists at birth. Schore points to findings from the 1980s and 1990s on the human brain growth spurt, which he says runs from the last trimester of pregnancy into the second and third year of life. He describes this whole period as one of right-hemisphere dominance, citing six major studies from neuroscience labs around the world. He also mentions a recent study in Mexico that measured infants at two to three months, six to eight months and 9 to 12 months and found the right hemisphere accelerating its growth while the left did not. He adds that there is evidence of right lateralization even in utero.

Schore stresses that lateralization reaches below the cortex. His example is the amygdala: the right and left amygdala differ. According to him, the left hemisphere does not begin its growth spurt until the end of the second year and into the third. That timing is the basis of his central claim that "everything about attachment is about right brain dynamics."

Huberman asks whether this means attachment is formed entirely in the first 24 months, and Schore says yes. He describes the mother shaping the infant's right brain through her regulation of it, "for better or for worse," which covers the early development of both secure and insecure attachments. He adds that dominance alternates over the lifespan, moving from right to left and back again. Adolescence is another growth spurt that, he says, starts on the right and then shifts left, driven by puberty and the onset of testosterone, androgens and estrogens.

Schore's core definition is that attachment is the communication and regulation of emotion, right brain to right brain, during the first two years. He says mother and infant communicate through face, voice and gesture. The mother reads the baby's facial expressions, the prosody of its voice and its tactile signals, resonates with them, and then regulates them. In his account, the strategies a person uses to regulate affect for the rest of their life depend on this early relationship.

He places this view in the history of the field. He notes that Bowlby studied attachment in the 1960s, but early research looked at behavior and cognition rather than emotion. Schore says he began his emotion-centered approach in 1994 with his first book, "Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development," around the same time Antonio Damasio published his book. He credits mid-1990s neuroimaging, during the decade of the brain, with making emotion a subject science studied for the first time.

Huberman briefly explains the "strange situation" paradigm Schore refers to. A parent, usually the mother, brings a child into a clinic and leaves the child with a caretaker. Researchers watch how the child reacts to the separation, whether the child can play, and how the child responds when the mother returns. From these observations children were classified as securely or insecurely attached, with a mixed group of "D babies." Huberman says this research is where today's talk of secure, anxious and avoidant adult relationship styles comes from.

Huberman asks whether the alternation between right- and left-brain dominance has been mapped carefully into adulthood by chronological age, for example the early 30s. Schore answers that it follows developmental milestones. He refers to Erik Erikson's stages of life and describes attachment as a hierarchy that starts subcortical and then becomes cortical. He does not give an age-by-age map or cite adult data for this. Instead he argues that the attachment relationship keeps guiding relationships with other people and strategies for dealing with stress and novel situations, and that those strategies depend on how the mother regulated the baby's stress during a critical period.

attachment is not psychological, it's psychobiological

Schore argues that emotions are physiological events as well as psychological ones. He names the stress response, the energy-expending sympathetic nervous system and the energy-conserving parasympathetic nervous system. In his description, the mother tracks the baby's arousal and emotions moment to moment, synchronizes with them, and so becomes able to regulate them. A securely attached mother regulates the baby's negative states, which Schore calls adaptive by definition, and also amplifies positive ones. Huberman's example is a baby crying and the mother nursing.

Schore says this regulation is intuitive and implicit, operating below awareness rather than through left-brain problem solving.

She's doing it intuitively, and intuition is a right brain function.

His examples are concrete. If the baby is under-aroused, the mother uses her tone of voice to lift the baby into a more excited state. If the baby is in sympathetic hyperarousal, she softens her face and voice to bring arousal down. Schore describes attachment as regulating limbic-autonomic circuits, which he places in the right brain. Because there is no speech in the first two years, he says, all of this happens nonverbally. He contrasts the right hemisphere's subjective self with the left hemisphere's verbal, conscious, objective self and its processing of explicit, rational stimuli.

Schore's regulation theory says that "attachment is interactive regulation," and that by the end of the second year a child can also regulate its emotional states alone. He distinguishes auto-regulation, which is managing one's own state, for example by going to a quiet place, from interactive regulation, which is turning to another person during stress or to share joy. He locates auto-regulation in the right orbitofrontal cortex regulating the amygdala, and he emphasizes that the right orbitofrontal cortex, not the left dorsolateral cortex, is the key structure. He calls the right frontal cortex the most sophisticated and latest-evolving part of the brain. In his account, a secure attachment gives a person both capacities.

Schore then adds a second element to secure attachment: repair. Mothers sometimes misread the baby's state. In good-enough caregiving, the mother then re-attunes, re-synchronizes and reconnects right brain to right brain.

So the key to a secure attachment is not only psychobiological attunement, but it's also the repair of the misattunement.