Getting to the bottom of this emotional blindness could shed light on many serious illnesses, from anorexia and schizophrenia to chronic pain and irritable bowel syndrome. More personally, stories from the “alex community” lead you to re-examine experiences that you might think you know so well. How can you fall in love, for example, when you lack all the basic tender feelings of affection that normally spark a romance?

Shells of feeling

To understand that emotional numbness, it helps to imagine emotions as a kind of Russian doll, formed of different shells, each one becoming more intricate. At the heart is a bodily sensation – the skip in your heart when you see the person you love, or the churning stomach that comes with anger. The brain may then attach a value to those feelings – you know if it is good or bad, and if that feeling is strong, or weak; the amorphous sensations begin to take a shape and form a conscious representation of an emotion. The feelings can be nuanced, perhaps blending different types of emotions, such as bitter-sweet sorrow, and eventually we attach words to them – you can describe your despair, or your joy, and you can explain how you came to feel that way.

When alexithymia was first described in 1972, the problem was thought to centre on this last, linguistic stage: deep down people with alexithymia felt the same as everyone else, but they just couldn’t put the emotions into words. The scientists hypothesised that this may result from a breakdown in communication between the two hemispheres, preventing signals from the emotional regions, predominantly in the right, from reaching the language areas, predominantly in the left. “You need that emotional transfer in order to verbalise what you’re feeling,” says Katharina Goerlich-Dobre at RWTH Aachen University. This could be seen, most dramatically, when surgeons tried to cure epilepsy by cutting the fibres that connect the two hemispheres; although it reduced the seizures, the patients also appeared emotionally mute as a result. Less sensationally, Goerlich-Dobre’s brain scans have found that other people with alexithymia seem to have abnormally dense connections in that neural bridge. This might create a noisy signal (a bit like a badly tuned radio) that prevents emotional cross-talk, she thinks.