The Cortical Factor: What Is Going On In Our Brains With Gay Marriage and All That?

Picking up from where we left off:

According to Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, the amygdala and the frontal cortex essentially regulate each other. The projections from the frontal cortex are inhibitory, as are the projections from the amygdala. In Sapolsky's words: “The frontal cortex is trying to get the amygdala to restrain itself. The amygdala is trying to get the frontal cortex to stop sermonizing at it.”

The two parts of the brain essentially work in opposition, and when the amygdala succeeds in silencing the frontal cortex, “that’s the world in which you are making astonishingly bad decisions. ... That’s the world of the amygdala getting very inaccurate rapid-fire information.” Out comes behavior that is seriously unregulated.

Eventually, in certain situations, the amygdala will habituate and learn not to be afraid, but only if the frontal cortex is healthy enough to convey the lesson.

Enter the anterior cingulate (ACC), part of the cingular cortex snaking beneath the outer cortices. This is a region of the brain implicated in empathy. Typically, in hypothetical exercises involving agonizing moral choices (such as do you strangle a crying baby to save the lives of a group of people hiding out from the Nazis?), those who make the cold-blooded utilitarian decision are shown to have the least activation in the ACC.

But life is more complicated than simple thought vs emotion, especially when the brain goes metaphorical on us. We are called upon to make judgments concerning abstract moral concepts. The problem is our brains did not evolve for doing symbols and metaphors. We are stuck with the old circuitry.

Thus, a test subject handed a warm drink in an elevator by a stranger will rate that individual as warm. Cold for a cold cup. This really happens. The brain mixes metaphor with reality.

Wait, it gets even more weird. Registering moral disgust? The insular cortex activates. This is the part of the brain that processes foul stimuli such as rotting fish. Contemplate the etymology of the word, disgust. Further contemplate that every language on earth employs similar terms for the same phenomenon. Says Dr Sapolsky: “When humans came up with something as fancy as moral transgression, where are you going to stick the sense of outrage you feel? I know - let’s hijack the part of the brain that tells you you’re eating rotten food.”

Dr Sapolsky cites a number of studies, one of which includes people wanting to wash their hands a la Pontius Pilate after recounting some moral failing in their lives.

As you will recall from the previous piece, Dr Sapolsky mentioned that by age 5 there is already a correlation between socio-economic status and the thickness of the frontal cortex and its resting metabolic rate. No question about it - this stinks. Dr Sapolsky agrees. As he observed: “That is one of those factoids that should have people rioting at the barricades.”

But Presidential candidate Mitt Romney would disagree. As he recently declared: “I'm not concerned about the very poor.” (And no, this is not out of context.)

This is a guy who obviously has no problem digesting unpleasant factoids and who is not losing any sleep over it, but that’s mixing yet another metaphor. Could it be that Mitt is one of those low-activating anterior cingulate types?

Dr Sapolsky does not mention Republicans, but that shouldn’t stop us from making our own connections. Says Sapolsky, citing Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.”

Dr Sapolsky points out that love and hate are physiologically very similar. From a strictly biological perspective (such as brain activation, heart rate, and so on) it is very difficult to tell the two apart. Indifference is the real evil, which is another good reason to register our disgust.

But hold on. We may be disgusted at people who are indifferent to injustice (who obviously lack the capacity to register a mental gustatory response), but then we have a whole class of liberal-haters who define themselves as being disgusted with the disgusted. Recall this from yet another Presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, in reference to Occupy Wall Street: “Go get a job, right after you take a bath.”

Ah, another stinking Republican (using a bath metaphor at that) who makes liberals want to throw up. Confused? So, apparently, is everyone. Dr Sapolsky cites the work of John Haidt of the University of Virginia in support of the proposition that affective response drives moral decision-making rather than the other way around.

Say, for instance, a brother and a post-reproductive sister want to have a sexual relationship? Is it okay for them to have one in private? How about burning a flag and stomping on it? Or cutting up your dead pet and eating it?

I don’t know about you, but I definitely registered a high-level gut reaction to that last proposition. Fine, but can I come up with a rational answer in response to the question: “What’s wrong with that?”

This is essentially the same question Dr Haidt asked his test subjects. They, too, had trouble framing rational responses. Basically, on an emotional level, something doesn’t “feel right.” The frontal cortex is spinning its wheels, the gut makes the call. Eventually, the thinking parts of the brain lock in, but too often in a rationalizing display of post hoc rubber-stamping.

As Sapolsky explains: “We are dealing with a very ancient brain, one that is not very good yet at separating the limbic world from the cortical one.”

Maybe that’s why we need a judiciary to protect ourselves from our own inept decision-making. Yesterday, a federal appeals court struck down California’s infamous Proposition 8, a voter referendum passed in 2008 that would have banned gay marriages in the state.

Is there anything wrong with disgust? Of course not. Of all things, disgust is morally neutral. Whether we’re dealing with moral issues or food, this is basically a rotten fish reaction we are talking about. We need our rotten fish reactions. They drove the civil rights movement, which is why we need to be suspicious of low-activation anterior cingulate guys who lack the kind of empathy that makes us capable of moral outrage in the first place.

The problem is we often fail to couple thinking to our disgust. “What is wrong with that?” It’s a question we need to be asking - over and over and over.

***

This concludes my three-part series on The Cortical Factor, based on Lecture 18 from Robert Sapolsky’s 25-part video series. See Part I, Part II. Stay tuned for more of Sapolsky, probably in another week or two ...

The Cortical Factor: Developing the Optimum Brain

Take the teen-age brain - please!

First, a quick review: In our previous post, Robert Sapolsky of Stanford (pictured here) explained how the frontal cortex is about doing the harder thing, if it is the right thing to do. Essentially, the more developed cortical areas modulate our more primitive limbic impulses, including learned (and virtually automatic) behaviors that are no longer stored in the frontal cortex.

This tends to involve the frontal cortex, boosted by dopamine, amping up weaker neural circuits and inhibiting stronger ones. Those with cortical damage or dementia experience major system failures. Their brains default to the stronger circuits, even if these represent the wrong thing to do in the particular situation. They fail to stay on task. They give into temptation. They fail to delay gratification in pursuit of the long-term reward.

REM sleep offers a spectacular example of the frontal cortex going off-line. We dream all kinds of crazy stuff. We do things in our dreams we would never contemplate doing awake, that is assuming we are adults. But there is a strange phenomenon called teen-agers.

The frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully develop - to fully form all the myelin on its axons, to get its full complement of synapses. The front part of the brain fully goes online for the first time at around age 25. Younger than that and we’re dealing with limbic systems with feet.

Interestingly enough, says Dr Sapolsky, because the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to develop it is the part of the brain least constrained by genes and most sculpted by environment and experience.

So - take an adult and take a teen-ager. Assign each one a task and give a greater reward than anticipated. Dopamine levels go up, driving frontal metabolism, but a lot higher in the teen-ager. Then change things around. Do not give out the reward. Dopamine levels go down, only much lower in the teen-ager. Says Sapolsky:

The gyrations are much more extreme. The dopamine-driven metabolic changes in the frontal cortex are more dramatically large for reward, are more dramatically having the floor fall out from under it for lack of reward, for disappointment. It is a system that is essentially less regulated.

Major bummer: The frontal cortex loses neurons as it ages, which explains your grandmother telling you that your new hairdo looks rotten.

Can elevated resting metabolism in the frontal cortex be too much of a good thing? Dr Sapolsky gives the example of repressive personalities, individuals who are highly regimented, highly disciplined, not depressed or anxious, who do not express emotions very readily and are very bad at reading emotions in other people. “This is the roommate who always has all the work done three weeks before the due date.”

But low resting metabolism in the frontal cortex is not such a good thing, either. Think sociopath. Give a sociopath a routine brain task and they have to activate more of the frontal cortex than other people do.

Meanwhile, see how long a marshmallow on the table lasts with a four-year-old kid in the vicinity. Can the kid rein in his impulse with the promise there will be more marshmallows in 20 minutes if he leaves that one alone? In other words, how many frontal synapses do you have? Funny you should ask. The kids who held out the longest scored much higher on their SATs and other success measures years later.

Depressing fact: Already by age five there is a relationship between your socio-economic status and the thickness of your frontal cortex and its resting metabolic rate. What is that all about? This is the part of the brain that has one of the highest rates of receptors for glucocorticoids. Glucocorticoids are released in response to stress, and when too many of them are on the rampage neurons atrophy. Get born into the wrong family, be raised with the stress of poverty and already by age five the size and activity of the brain has taken a major hit.

Says Sapolsky: “That is one of those factoids that should have people rioting at the barricades.”

Instead, we have the phenomenon of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who recently declared: “I'm not concerned about the very poor.”

Have no fear, there is a neurobiological explanation for that. There is also an explanation for your moral outrage. More to come ...

Highly recommended: Dr Sapolsky's 25-part video lecture series, Human Behavioral Biology.

The Cortical Factor

I just finished viewing Lecture 18 in a 25-part video series by Robert Sapolsky of Stanford. Dr Sapolsky is to human behavior what Carl Sagan was to astronomy. There is no one better at explaining the topic to the general public than this man. It’s not even close. I first stumbled into Sapolsky in early 2003 and I’ve been something of a groupie ever since.

The video series I am watching is an actual undergraduate course in human behavior. I was looking forward to blogging on various highlights once I’d completed the series, but Lecture 18 represents the best exposition I’ve ever come across concerning how different parts of the brain talk to each other, so let’s get straight into it ...

Lower mammals have an olfactory hotline to the amygdala, the part of the brain in the limbic system that mediates fear and arousal and kickstarts fight or flight. Furry creatures are literally primed to react when they smell something funny. Mammalian limbic systems are standard issue for humans, except ours are wired to respond mainly to visual stimuli.

Ordinarily, the cortical areas of the brain are responsible for visual processing and sending info to the amygdala, but we don’t always have time to wait. There is a short-cut in the brain through the lateral geniculate (LG). The trade-off is that this information is less accurate. We’re more likely to make mistakes. As Dr Sapolsky explains, there is now strong evidence that this pathway is hyper-excitable in those with PTSD.

According to Dr Sapolsky, the frontal cortex should be regarded as part of the limbic system. Its role, essentially, “is getting you to do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do,” as in behaving appropriately. Below is a screenshot of Dr Sapolsky illustrating in a very simple way two contrasting neural circuits. The circuit on the left has more axonal inputs going into its target neuron than the right. This makes it easier to activate this particular neural pathway.

But what if this pathway represents doing the wrong thing? To offset this, the frontal cortex essentially massages both circuits, inhibiting the left and biasing (rather than causing) excitation in the right. To accomplish enhanced excitation, the frontal cortex gets a boost from dopamine via projections shooting out of the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens. Dopamine acts as the fuel in goal-directed behavior.

One illustration of doing the harder thing would involve reciting the months backward. The frontal cortex needs to be on its toes in processing the task, but those with damage in this area may have trouble over-riding the more habitual forward-recitation response.

Over time, learned behavior becomes automatic and gets stored elsewhere in the brain. Thus, someone with Alzheimer’s may not know what decade it is but still knows how to knit. This brings us to the famous example of Phineas Gage.

According to Dr Sapolsky, they take away your neurobiology license if you fail to mention this guy. In 1848, while tamping down blasting power during the construction of a railroad line, the powder exploded, sending the tamping rod through the side of Gage’s skull and out the top, taking out his left eye and emptying out most of his frontal cortex. (See top left image.) Amazingly, because the rod cauterized his blood vessels, Gage was able to get up and walk a mile-and-a-half to the nearest doctor.

Gage achieved a partial recovery, but experienced major problems controlling his behavior, leading his physician to conclude that this part of the brain “reins in our animal energies.” Interestingly enough, about a quarter of those on death row have a history of concussive trauma to the head.

Doing the harder and right thing tends to involve delaying gratification and not giving into temptation. Consider the m&m test. You hold five morsels in one hand and one in the other. The rule is you reach for five you get one, and vice-versa. People with cognitive impairments, even knowing the rule, may still reach for the five - they just can’t help it.

Lack of cortical input explains why our dreams make no sense. In REM sleep our frontal cortices are at their least active. That’s why in our dreams we do all sorts of things we would never want to do in real life. Thank heaven we're merely dreaming. Imagine, if we did some of that stuff in while awake. Oops - sometimes we mess up, and we find ourselves living with the consequences.

Much more to come ...

Robert Sapolsky Talks About the Biology of Human Behavior

We think in categories. But there are these problems. The first one being that when you think in categories you underestimate how different two facts are when they fall in the same category. When you think in categories you overestimate how different they are when there happens to be a boundary in between them. And when you pay attention to categorical boundaries you don’t see big pictures.

The speaker was leading neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky addressing a 2010 class in human biological behavior at Stanford. Dr Sapolsky is a leading researcher into how stress influences behavior, an endeavor that ranges from tracking brain circuitry in lab animals to studying baboons in the wild. He also possesses that rare gift of being able to communicate complex topics to the general public, with a number of highly readable mainstream books to his credit, including “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.” 

My whole approach to mental illness owes much to Dr Sapolsky, and it has been that way for years.
  

“How many people believe in free will?” he asked. He smiled. “That’s going to change,” he advised. Then he addressed the classic nature-nurture debate. “Who thinks human nature is all explained by nature?” he asked. “Who thinks it’s all explained by nurture?” Another smile. “Who thinks there’s a magnificent fascinating nuanced interaction between nature and nurture?”

The categories thing again. Thinking in categories does make it easier for us to remember stuff and evaluate stuff, Dr Sapolsky acknowledged. But there are a bunch of problems, especially if you overestimate the importance of the bucket you live inside of. “And thus everything about this behavior is explained by  - a gene, a neurotransmitter, a childhood trauma, a living inside one bucket.”

Human behavior is harder than that. On one hand:

Sometimes the stuff that’s going on in your body can dramatically influence what’s going on in your brain. (Such as the food we eat, with the notorious example of the “Twinkie defense.”) 

And on the other:

Sometimes what’s going on in your head will affect every single outpost in your body. (Such as trying to get to sleep as you are contemplating your own mortality. Chances are your heart rate will increase.) 

Rather, it’s more like ...

 ...the intertwining, the interconnections between your physiology and your behavior, the underlying thoughts, emotions, memories,  all of that, and the capacity of each to deeply influence the other under all sorts of circumstances.

First, we ask - what does the behavior look like? Then we ask what went on in that organism a half-second before that behavior occurred to cause it to occur? This is the world of what’s going on with neurons and circuitry, but ...

Just as we are about to get happily settled into that bucket, we push back a bit and say what smell, what sound, what sensory stimulation in the environment caused those neurons to get activated and produce that behavior? 

And then push it one step further behind, to hormone levels in the blood in the last few hours that changed how sensitive you are to those sounds and smells. Then we work our way further back through early development, fetal life, the genetic make-up of an individual, the genetic makeup of an entire population species.

From an endocrinologist’s perspective, Dr Sapolsky goes on to say, Hormone X may explain a behavior. But Hormone X is coded by a gene, so we’re not just talking about endocrinology, anymore -  we’re talking about genetics. And genes are subject to selection, so we’re also talking about evolution. And if we’re talking about sounds and smells and so on - acute triggers for human behavior - by definition we’re also talking about fetal development, which determines how sensitive those systems are to those sorts of stimuli.

Here’s the pathological danger of thinking in buckets. Dr Sapolsky asks us to guess who said this:

Normal psychic life depends upon the good functioning of brain synapses, and mental disorders appear as a result of synaptic derangements. Synaptic adjustments will then modify the corresponding ideas and force them into different channels. Using this approach we obtain cures and improvements but no failures.

The speaker was Egas Moniz, developer of the prefrontal lobotomy, speaking at the occasion of being honored with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949. (Yes, you read that right. No, you are not experiencing psychosis.) Adding our own spin to this, it would be very easy to attribute that statement to any leading psychiatrist bought out by the pharmaceutical industry (which would include just about all of them).

Moniz wasn't an isolated example, Sapolsky informs us. Hence the challenge of breaking out of our buckets.

Dr Sapolsky tells us we have three intellectual challenges. The first is recognizing human circumstances where there is nothing fancy about us whatsoever. “Some of the time we are just a plain old off-the-rack animal.” (Put two female hamsters in a cage, for instance, and their cycles will sync. Put two female humans in a dorm room together, and the same thing happens.)

The second challenge is that although we appear to be just like every animal out there, we do something different with the similarities. For instance, we get stressed by the inevitability of our mortality or by reading something awful that has happened to a child on the other side of the planet.

The flip side of this is we can have compassion and empathy for loved ones and strangers. “It’s the same boring physiology as every other animal out there and we are using it in a way that is unrecognizable.” 

The third challenge is when we are doing something that no other animal out there has anything remotely similar to. For example - a couple comes home, talks, has dinner, talks, goes to bed, has sex, talks, falls asleep. They do this the next day and 30 days running. 

“Hippos would be repulsed by this,” Sapolsky lets us know. "Hardly any animal has nonreproductive sex, let alone day after day, and nobody else talks about it afterward."

The old way of looking at human behavior was by thinking of the brain as an intricate clock with pieces you can take apart and study and then put back together. But it is not as simple as that, Dr Sapolsky informs us. Behavior is more like a cloud, “and you don’t understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together.”

Dr Sapolsky believes everyone on earth should be forced to learn about behavioral biology. Whether we’re on a jury or voting or wondering about a family member sunk in depression, “we’re behavioral biologists all the time, so it’s probably a good idea we be informed ones.”

***

Check out Dr Sapolsky’s 57-minute talk on YouTube