Modern neuroscience is slowly validating what Chinese astrologers have observed for thousands of years. But when will the scientists acknowledge it?
Dr Wager of Columbia University in New York has been engaged on what statisticians call 'meta-analysis'. He has been analysing data from around 150 studies of human emotions – all attempts to identify links between basic human emotions and the different areas of the brain that house or might regulate them. In particular he has followed up an idea first proposed by Dr LeDoux at New York University over 20 years ago that the emotion of fear is one shared by many other species, and thus studies on animal brains ought to mirror what goes on in human brains.
From his experiments on rats Dr LeDoux identified a part of the brain called amygdalas that is critical to the response of fear. And later studies have identified other emotions - anger, sadness and disgust - that appear to be regulated from within the same area. Another basic human emotion - joy - is said to reside nearby, in another part of the brain called the hypothalamus.
Ancient Chinese Astrology also identified 5 basic human emotions: Anger, Joy, Fear, Sorrow and Worry, and gave each one a name that early human beings could understand by relating them to everyday things: Wood, Fire, Water, Earth and Metal. Astrologers may not have identified an area of the brain where such emotions reside, but from years of observation they knew that the existence and strength of any of these emotions depended upon the time and date of birth.
Some neuroscientists attribute anger to the absence of an enzyme called 'monoamine oxidase A'. But astrologers had a more complex explanation that they could not explain in neuroscientific terms - that the gravitational and other forces exerted by planets and moons in our universe were strong enough to affect the personality and make up of a child at its most vulnerable - at birth - when the human brain is in the final stages of development. They did not know that this might one day be identified as a part of the brain - only that it could be related to the date of birth as the child emerges from the womb to the full atmospheric forces exerted at that moment.
The strength of emotions is measured by Chinese astrology with the use of an element chart that assesses each person according to 5 tests
Compatibility analysis is then the easy part. Two people whose dominant emotion is anger are not likely to get along with each other - their domestic disagreements will probably become violent. Nor will two people each dominated by fear because each needs a rock-like partner to soothe their concerns. Chinese astrolgers observed human relationships in minute detail, and established astrological rules to ease potential conflicts between couples - rules that we use today in compatibility analysis.
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