I recently stumbled onto an interesting New York Times article describing the onset of a seemingly contagious disease that spread Tourett’s-like symptoms among teenage girls in a small town. The catch to the story is that many neurologists and doctors observing the case think the “disease” is psychogenic – essentially mass hysteria with no environmental or biological cause.
This is, of course, startling. After all, how can a psychological condition cause such bizarre symptoms? And how can it be contagious? Apparently, it’s not that uncommon.
Half of mass psychogenic illnesses occur in schools, and they are far more common in young women than any other category. Simon Wessely, an epidemiologist at King’s College in London and chairman of the department of psychological medicine, estimates that hundreds of outbreaks occur every year in the United States — just this past November, 22 students fell ill with stomach complaints at a football game in Houston, and no one so much as noticed outside the local news. Motor mass hysterias — twitching, fainting, stuttering — are more rare and draw more attention. In the past 10 years there have been three such outbreaks in the United States, which Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist specializing in the subject at Botany Downs Secondary College in Auckland, New Zealand, says is a surprising number for so short a period of time.
How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.
Any two people, as they try to delicately disagree or flirt or compare notes on the best route to Boston, might unwittingly match vocal tones or even frequency of eye blinks. In one study, researchers found that subjects trying to form an alliance with someone else subconsciously tap their feet to match the tapping of that person’s foot, or touch their faces with the same frequency. “It’s happening unconsciously, but it is serving the goals you need it to serve,” says Jessica Lakin, the chairwoman of the psychology department at Drew University in New Jersey, who studies what’s known as the chameleon effect. … Mass psychogenic illness, whatever its mysterious mechanism, seems deeply connected to empathy and to a longing for what social psychologists call affiliation: belonging.
Weird and interesting. It seems clear we do not really control our bodies. We dance through life as twisted puppets under the control of the puppet master’s iron grip. We think we have autonomy but we are merely slaves to the black humors that fill the caverns of our subconscious. We are doomed as fools an idiots.
In various sections in Damasio’s book he discusses people with a particular ailment – they feel limited or no emotion. Often these people start off as conscientious, upstanding members of society – people who can be counted on to provide emotional support to their fellows – but after brain damage they become withdrawn and disinterested in the agonies of their fellow man. I can’t help read these anecdotes and feel that it describes changes that have occurred to me in recent years. I used to be intrigued with the activities of my fellows and at least somewhat responsive to their emotional needs; now I often find myself stifling laughter when I hear someone describe the tragedies that have befallen them.
One might presume I have become cold and callous in my years; I offer another theory. I am actually the first in a new kind of advanced human – a human who has stripped away human weaknesses such as emotion. Within time, the most attractive of the less evolved human females, led by Scarlett Johansson, will recognize my superiority and mate with me. Our progeny will be a new race of meta-cyborg-humans who will declare war on the old weak human race. Emotional humans will fall, mewing and screaming, one by one, under the metal fists of their new masters – my children.
I continue my reading of the Damasio book; currently I’m on a chapter discussing the need for the evolution of emotions. It’s an explanation I’ve read in the past (in Damsio’s other books, in Jonah Leher’s “How We Decide”) but it’s still interesting to ruminate on.
Before I get into it, let’s be clear what the term “emotion” is describing. By Damasio’s argument, an emotion is a series of measurable body changes – fear is an increased heart rate and sweating, sadness is the dull ache of muscles and viscera, joy is perhaps a light warmth, a sense that the body is moving smoothly. These are not the complete list of body changes for each emotion and it can also be argued that many of the changes we experience in an emotional state are barely on the tip of our consciousness (e.g. Freud’s classic subconscious emotions.)
Damasio’s argument is that emotions evolved as a kind of short cut to reason. We employ emotions to make quick decisions that would take longer if we employed only logic. Let’s say a friend says to you, Hey [your name here], I’ll give you ten bucks if you dangle you penis into this swimming pool filled with flesh eating sharks.” Do you contemplate this offer by musing, “Well, if I do that there’s a likelihood that the sharks will sense my penis and bite it off in a mad feeding frenzy. Since this would deprive me of the many pleasures of owning a penis as well as the possibility of creating children I should decline this offer.”? No, you do not. Instead you instantly recoil at the thought of your proud phallus becoming shark chum. Emotions do all the logic processing for you and deliver a sharp sensations (physically felt) indicating that the idea is bad.
I described a similar example of this kind of emotional processing, complete with physical sensations, in my groundbreaking article, “What is Emotion?”
I recently hiked up a mountain near my house. As I stood atop a boulder overlooking the view, I observed some power lines that ran down the mountain and crossed just below me. As a kind of mental joke, I considered the possibility of leaping off the boulder and wrapping my sweater over the powerline so that I could literally slide down it as a kind of human ski lift. I had no serious intention of doing this, but even so, I could feel my body revolt. My viscera churned slightly and my chest got tight. What surprised me was the sensation in my knees. They tingled and weakened, almost as if my body was saying, “if you are considering this insane action, then I’m going to take away your ability to jump!”
So the idea here, again, is that emotion is a shortcut for logic. Problems that a computer, or Mr. Spock, might solve by “pure reason” (a questionable concept) are instead solved by emotion. In many ways one can see advantages to this – emotions are faster than logical processing and speed can be important in many situations. But there’s a downside – emotions can get “confused” and find joy or fear where there is really none to be had. The classic horror film, “Silent Night, Deadly Night” explores this. As a boy, the lead character sees his parents murdered by a man dressed as Santa Claus. As a result, he grows up associating every Santa with fear (and eventually, ironically, himself becomes a killer wearing a Santa uniform.) This is unfortunate since most Santas are harmless. But the movie’s lead is not processing the sight of Santas logically; he is processing them emotionally.
Thus you get to the cruxt of all problems in society. Take an issue – gay marriage, national defense, taxation, animal rights, etc. People argue and debate these issues, but they “feel” their viewpoints more than they “think” them. They process these issues emotionally more than logically. Frankly, I’m not sure there is a “logical” resolution to many of these issues. But you can no more convince someone to “feel” they way you do about something than you can convince them to like a food they do not like. They have their emotional sensations, you have yours, and never the twain shall meet.
In the past, I’ve mentioned my idea — drawn from various texts — that you can break the experience of pain into multiple components. I define these components as 1) the actual feeling of the pain, the firing of nerve endings etc. 2) your attention to the pain (in the same sense that you can be looking at someone and not be consciously aware of the color of their eyes, I believe you can feel pain but not attend to it*) and 3) your emotional response to the pain (“Oh shit — this really hurts! Is this going to destroy my life? I’m fucked.”)
* I’m not saying this is easy.
As I’m reading through Antonio Damasio’s “Looking for Spinoza” I stumble across the description of a scientific study that gets into this very concept. In the study, a group of people were “subjected to hand pain (their hands were immersed in ice cold water.)” Another group was exposed to a vibratory stimulus on their hand (the book doesn’t say, but I’m guessing it’s a French tickler.) While this was going on, the subjects’ brains were being scanned. Now, our brain has several regions that activate when we experience the sense of touch. For the people exposed to pain (the cold water) to regions — the insula and was called the SII — lit up. Both those areas are known to be related to the processing of emotion. In the case of the people holding vibrators, another area, called SI, activated.
Then the experiment was repeated but in this case, the subjects were given painkillers. The people whose hands were being doused in water reported less pain, and there was less activity observed in their insula and SII. For the people with vibrators, there was no change.
This seems to make a couple points. One, pain can be broken down into different components. And we can directly correlate this emotional component of pain — the “agony” of pain — to the insula and SII. I’d be curious as to whether those mystics who walk on hot coals or sleep on a bed of nails have figured out some way to quiet these particular parts of the brain.
I’m on the final chunk of the book “Music, Language, and the Brain” and it’s revealing its treasures faster than a French whore undressing in your hotel room. The final section of the book discusses the human ability to perceive a beat e.g. our ability to tap in time with a song. This is so innate that we probably don’t think about it much, but it’s a skill lost on most animals. The book argues that this skill might have developed from a more generic skill called “temporal anticipation.” A good example of temporal anticipation is this: I throw you a ball. You have to position your hands in the right place at the right time in order to catch it. Basically, you have to anticipate when the ball will be at a certain coordinate in three dimensional space. Similarly, with beat perception we anticipate when the next beat will fall based on what we hear as a pattern. In both cases we are predicting an event in time. Beat perception may have evolved out of temporal anticipation.
I’ll add my own thoughts here. Perceiving beats is one of the more satisfying aspects of listening to music. Who doesn’t love pumping their fists in the air in time with AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and feeling Satan’s power coursing through your veins? I’d argue that when we correctly perceive a temporal event (say, the fall of a drum hit, or catching a ball in space) we probably get a little neurotransmitter “reward” – perhaps a mild blast of dopamine or serotonin – that gives us a sense of pleasure. Thus we enjoy musical grooves and going to AC/DC concerts (and catching balls.)
I’ll add a further level to this. Scientists have theorized about the existence of what are called mirror neurons – brain neurons that fire both when we perform an activity and when we watch someone else perform an activity. Thus when we seen a drummer nail a drum hit, or a ball player catch a ball, we get a little thrill because our mirror neurons are firing with the performer’s.
I’m reminded of my time in Olympia Washington at the height of the punk rock, riot grrl movement in the early 90’s. The level of musicianship in that town, especially in the dominant musical scene, was simply atrocious, mainly because these pseudo-egalitarian commie socialists felt that judging a person’s ability by any standards was a notion derived from the loathed, dominant patriarchal hierarchy (or some similar nonsense.) Thus there was an attitude of “Play drums in time? Why would I do that when I can express my non-comformity by banging away on the drums like a fucking retarded monkey??!” I can recall watching bands and being perplexed by the horrible rhythm I was hearing. I wanted to pump my fist in time, but when I hit the beat the drums weren’t there to support me. These idiots thought they were violating the laws of “society” (the particular law being “play drums in time”) but I would argue they were violating a much older law encoded into the human brain. If some four-foot tribal caveman from the past visited Olympia back then he probably would have said, “Man, you fuckers suck!!” If there was any justice he would have thrown his feces at them.
Anyway, the book mentions another interesting tidbit. A few other animal species can create a steady beat, including elephants. There’s even an elephant orchestra in Thailand. Check this out:
I’m finishing up this tome “Music, Language, and the Brain.” It’s been one of the more difficult books I’ve ever read primarily because its excessive use of academic terminology, but worth plowing through because occasionally you stumble across really fascinating nuggets of science. For instance, at one point the author is describing an experiment involving baby chickens and quails. As eggs, the embryonic birds were housed in isolation so that they could not hear the sounds of their parents. When they were hatched, the chicks showed a preference for the sound of chickens, and quails showed a preference for the sound of quails. This would seem to indicate that we have a genetic, inborn preference for the “talk” of members of our species.
But here’s where it gets weird. Check this out…
A decade after this original study, Long performed an impressive experiment that probed the neural basis for this preference. Using surgical techniques pioneered by Balaban, the researchers cut small holes in the eggs and operated on the embryos, transplanting different portions of the developing neural tube of quails into chicks. They then sealed up the eggs and housed them in incubators isolated from adult bird sounds. After hatching, they tested these chimera birds for their perceptual preferences using the methods of Park and Balaban. They found that when the transplant was in a specific region of the developing midbrain, the chimeras showed a preference for the quail maternal call.
It seems insane that they can even perform such surgeries, and even crazier that it actually worked: the chunk of brain responsible for responding to quail sounds happily set up shop in the chicken brain.
One must wonder if these mutant birds grew to gigantic proportions and developed an unceasing hunger for human flesh. The book doesn’t mention this, but that would be somewhat off-topic.
Many people know that monologuist Mike Daisey is an acquaintance of mine and that he even wrote the cover blurb to my Acid Logic book. You also might know that he’s been in some hot water recently; it’s been revealed that parts of his spoken word performance piece damning Apple Computers for using mistreated Chinese labor are untrue. This op-ed piece has a good overview of the story and its ethical dilemma.
My take so far is that, yeah, it sounds like Mike crossed some lines and I don’t buy his defense along the lines of, “I had to lie to tell a greater truth.” But this section from the op-ed got me thinking.
Daisey is great with his other persuasive tools — particularly his signature long pause that precedes a fact on which he wants you to linger, for maximum outrage. One such fact is that the sullen-looking Chinese factory guards carry . . .
. . . guns. It’s a sharp little moment, placing Daisey up against dangerous people who clearly have something to hide. Unfortunately that turned out to be . . .
. . . untrue.
Although Daisey still says he remembers guns, the evidence overwhelmingly is that there were none.
I’m prone to thinking Mike’s full of it and knows damn well they didn’t have guns. But I just read a recent Wired article on the fallibility of memory.
In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.
…
The scientists aren’t sure about this mechanism, and they have yet to analyze the data from the entire 10-year survey. But Phelps expects it to reveal that many details will be make-believe. “What’s most troubling, of course, is that these people have no idea their memories have changed this much,” she says. “The strength of the emotion makes them convinced it’s all true, even when it’s clearly not.”
Reconsolidation provides a mechanistic explanation for these errors. It’s why eyewitness testimony shouldn’t be trusted (even though it’s central to our justice system), why every memoir should be classified as fiction, and why it’s so disturbingly easy to implant false recollections. (The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has repeatedly demonstrated that nearly a third of subjects can be tricked into claiming a made-up memory as their own. It takes only a single exposure to a new fiction for it to be reconsolidated as fact.)
Basically: memories can’t be trusted and should even be viewed with suspicion (just like Jews.) So maybe Daisey honestly did recall guns where there were none. And more to the point: we should be viewing every personal account with skepticism. Even our own.
Lately I’ve been composing a piano sonata that I’m pretty happy with (so far.) This morning, I was eating breakfast and thinking about it and I got pretty excited about working on the tune – I was raring (sic?) to go, so to speak. I managed to get a little work in after breakfast, then had to do some shit, and here I am now – a bit after lunch – and while I have the free time, I’m not as amped up to work on the song. It feels more like “work” now.
I’m describing an experience everyone has had thousands of time. One minute you’re hot to go, the next you’re not. There’s a lot of conventional wisdom and psychobabble that describes this sort of thing – “You’re a morning person,” “You wake up refreshed and tire after lunch.” But what does that really mean? I think we can look to neuroscience to describe this in more detailed, chemical terms. I’m guessing here, but I suspect that I have more dopamine – the neurotransmitter associated with anticipation and reward (often blamed for gambling addiction) – in my brain in the morning.
That opens up an interesting idea: Could I induce this excited, “I want to work on my project” state in my brain by consuming more dopamine? Maybe. But where does one get more dopamine? From other people’s brains of course! As such, it seems quite sensible that I should kidnap homeless children off the street, house them in an attic and run an IV type connection from their brains to mine. When my excitement flags I could simply press a button and have more hot, fresh dopamine delivered to my brain.
Another possibility: simply carving open the heads of these teenagers and sipping the dopamine out of their brains with a straw. More low tech, certainly, but no less effective.
There’s is a negative side to all this: dopamine increases are associated with schizophrenia. Can you imagine me crazy?
Last night I watched an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” that kind of perturbed me. The plot was that these two little girls were killed in a fire and at the mid point of the show the cops had arrested the father for the crime. But then he made an emotional plea to one of the detectives (including trying to commit suicide in front of her) and the cops re-examined the case. They brought in a fire expert who concluded the deaths were accidental.
It was an interesting turn for a crime show because there was no real crime, but I found myself a little disappointed. “You mean there’s no murderer for me to hate?” I asked the television. Silence was its only reply, so I threw a bottle of brandy at it. I wanted a bad guy who could be defeated.
OK, so let me take a left turn here. I’ve often, when reading about neuroscience, or psychology, or philosophy, come across a fact that bedazzles me. I think to myself, “This is fascinating. Why doesn’t everyone know about this? Why isn’t everyone talking about this?” It’s a question(s) that really confounds me. I walk past people on the street talking about celebrity gossip, or office gossip, or what their stupid kids are doing, or what Mitt Romney is doing and I’m baffled how they can think those topics are important whereas, say, arguments against the existence of free will aren’t.
Now, there might be an obvious explanation for this difference of priorities between myself and the vast stinking masses of mankind. It’s possible I’m just intellectually superior to most people and their feeble brains can’t begin to comprehend my thoughts. Perhaps… but I think there’s something more.
I’ve always been baffled by sports. Why do people give a fuck about such a meaningless activity? I’m also baffled by people’s interest in the granular detail of politics. I mean, sure, I’m interested in who wins the presidential election, but why does anyone care about the Governor of Arizona yelling at Obama or some offhand comment Ron Paul makes. But, as I think about it, I get it. Sports and politics have conflict. It’s my team or side against the other bastards. We want to crush them, to DESTROY THEM!!! Humans are tribal creatures. But science has none of that. If you figure out what protein this gene programs for, it might have great ramifications, maybe cure some illness, but nobody really loses. The gene doesn’t care if you’ve figured it out. There’s no conflict.
That was the problem with that “Law & Order.” The was no loser. And the same is true with much of science.
(Obviously, the politics of science – scientists racing to beat each other to a Nobel Prize – has plenty of conflict, but that’s a different story.)
The above is a pretty interesting video detailing a process in which scientists poured wet concrete into an giant anthill. They waited a bit and then removed all the dirt surrounding the now solidified concrete and were able to get a good view into the structure and architecture of this gigantic ant metropolis. What was impressive was that the design and construction of this ant city — carried out by numerous worker ants — seemed as if it had been designed by a single architect, a mind that had some kind of oversight of the larger project.
This is, of course, impossible, because as we all know, ants are stupid. The other day, I saw an ant and I said, “Hey, ant, can you tell me the chemical structure of chlorophyll?” He didn’t even answer; he just wandered off. Then I saw another ant and I said, “Hey ant — what movie starring comic songsmith Weird Al Yankovic also featured Michael Richards (Seinfeld’s “Kramer”) among its cast?” The ant just kept climbing up a tree. I was like, “Don’t ignore me! Get back here you cocksucker! The answer is ‘UHF’!”
So we’re left with a conundrum. How can a population of feebleminded creatures design a habitat of such complexity that it is clearly beyond their individual intelligences? Do the ants have some kind of bizarre and complex communication system by which the bits of information possessed by individual ants can somehow be combined into a group ant intelligence?
Can these questions offer insights into our own human intelligence? If an individual human designs a complex building or structure, it’s not considered all that unusual. But in that case, who is doing the designing? A single human entity, or the brain, a collection of billions of neurons grouped together in networks which perform specific calculations which are then passed on to other parts of the brain? Is our brain really nothing more than a swarming collection of ants, writhing in the dirt, crawling through filth, antennas ever quivering?
Or, dig this: are we — individual humans — nodes in a vast cosmic intelligence, a super advanced ant colony? Are we merely parts of a machine whose complexity is so vast and overwhelming that we can’t begin to comprehend it?