Last, the constellation of traits associated with the estrogen and related oxytocin system include verbal fluency and other language skills, empathy, nurturing, the drive to make social attachments and other prosocial aptitudes, contextual thinking, imagination, and mental flexibility.
We are each a different mix of these four broad temperament dimensions. But we do have distinct personalities. People are malleable, of course, but we are not blank slates upon which the environment inscribes personality. A curious child tends to remain curious, although what he or she is curious about changes with maturity. Stubborn people remain obstinate, orderly people remain punctilious, and agreeable men and women tend to remain amenable.
We are capable of acting “out of character,” but doing so is tiring. People are biologically inclined to think and act in specific patterns—temperament dimensions. But why would this concept of temperament dimensions be useful in our human cognitive toolkit? Because we are social creatures, and a deeper understanding of who we (and others) are can provide a valuable tool for understanding, pleasing, cajoling, reprimanding, rewarding, and loving others—from friends and relatives to world leaders. It’s also practical.
Take hiring. Those expressive of the novelty-seeking temperament dimension are unlikely to do their best in a job requiring rigid routines and schedules. Biologically cautious individuals are not likely to be comfortable in high-risk posts. Decisive, tough-minded high-testosterone types are not well suited to work with those who can’t get to the point and decide quickly. And those predominantly of the compassionate, nurturing, high-estrogen temperament dimension are not likely to excel at occupations that require them to be ruthless.
Managers might form corporate boards containing all four broad types. Colleges might place freshmen with roommates of a similar temperament rather than similarity of background. Perhaps business teams, sports teams, political teams, and teacher-student teams would operate more effectively if they were either more “like-minded” or more varied in their cognitive skills. And certainly we could communicate with our children, lovers, colleagues, and friends more effectively. We are not puppets on a string of DNA. Those biologically susceptible to alcoholism, for example, often give up drinking. The more we come to understand our biology, the more we will appreciate how our culture molds it.
The Personality/Insanity Continuum
Geoffrey Miller
Evolutionary psychologist, University of New Mexico; author, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
We like to draw clear lines between normal and abnormal behavior. It’s reassuring, for those who think they’re normal. But it’s not accurate. Psychology, psychiatry, and behavioral genetics are converging to show that there’s no clear line between “normal variation” in human personality traits and “abnormal” mental illnesses. Our instinctive way of thinking about insanity—our intuitive psychiatry—is dead wrong.
To understand insanity, we have to understand personality. There’s a scientific consensus that personality traits can be well described by five main dimensions of variation. These “Big Five” personality traits are called openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The Big Five are all normally distributed in a bell curve, statistically independent of one another, genetically heritable, stable across the life course, unconsciously judged when choosing mates or friends, and found in other species, such as chimpanzees. They predict a wide range of behaviors in school, work, marriage, parenting, crime, economics, and politics.
Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the Big Five traits. Overconscientiousness predicts obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas low conscientiousness predicts drug addiction and other “impulse control” disorders. Low emotional stability predicts depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline, and histrionic disorders. Low extroversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders. Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder. High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy and schizophrenia. Twin studies show that these links between personality traits and mental illnesses exist not just at the behavioral level but also at the genetic level. And parents who are somewhat extreme on a personality trait are much more likely to have a child with the associated mental illness.
One implication is that the “insane” are often just a bit more extreme in their personalities than whatever promotes success or contentment in modern societies—or more extreme than we’re comfortable with. A less palatable implication is that we’re all insane to some degree. All living humans have many mental disorders, mostly minor but some major, and these include not just classic psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia but also diverse forms of stupidity, irrationality, immorality, impulsiveness, and alienation. As the new field of positive psychology acknowledges, we are all very far from optimal mental health, and we are all more or less crazy in many ways. Yet traditional psychiatry, like human intuition, resists calling anything a disorder if its prevalence is higher than about 10 percent.
The personality/insanity continuum is important in mental health policy and care. There are angry and unresolved debates over how to revise the fifth edition of psychiatry’s core reference work, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), to be published in 2013. One problem is that American psychiatrists dominate the DSM-5 debates, and the American health insurance system demands discrete diagnoses of mental illnesses before patients are covered for psychiatric medications and therapies. Also, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves psychiatric medications only for discrete mental illnesses. These insurance and drug-approval issues push for definitions of mental illnesses to be artificially extreme, mutually exclusive, and based on simplistic checklists of symptoms. Insurers also want to save money, so they push for common personality variants—shyness, laziness, irritability, conservatism—not to be classed as illnesses worthy of care. But the science doesn’t fit the insurance system’s imperatives. It remains to be seen whether DSM-5 is written for the convenience of American insurers and FDA officials or for international scientific accuracy.
Psychologists have shown that in many domains our instinctive intuitions are fallible (though often adaptive). Our intuitive physics—ordinary concepts of time, space, gravity, and impetus—can’t be reconciled with relativity, quantum mechanics, or cosmology. Our intuitive biology—ideas of species essences and teleological functions—can’t be reconciled with evolution, population genetics, or adaptationism. Our intuitive morality—self-deceptive, nepotistic, clannish, anthropocentric, and punitive—can’t be reconciled with any consistent set of moral values, whether Aristotelian, Kantian, or utilitarian. Apparently our intuitive psychiatry has similar limits. The sooner we learn those limits, the better we’ll be able to help people with serious mental illnesses, and the more humble we’ll be about our own mental health.
ARISE
Joel Gold
Psychiatrist; clinical assistant professor of psychiatry, NYU Langone Medical Center
ARISE, or Adaptive Regression In the Service of the Ego, is a psychoanalytic concept recognized for decades but little appreciated today. It is one of the ego functions, which, depending on whom you ask, may number anywhere from a handful to several dozen. They include reality testing, stimulus regulation, defensive function, and synthetic integration. For simplicity, we can equate the ego with the self (though ARISS doesn’t quite roll off the tongue).
In most fields, including psychiatry, regression is not considered a good thing. Regression implies a return to an earlier and inferior state of being and functioning. But the key here is not the regression but rather whether the regression is maladaptive or adaptive.
There are numerous vital experiences that cannot be achieved without adaptive regression: The creation and appreciation of art, music, literature, and food; the ability to sleep; sexual fulfillment; falling in love; and, yes, the abilit
y to free-associate and tolerate psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy without getting worse. Perhaps the most important element in adaptive regression is the ability to fantasize, to daydream. The person who has access to his unconscious processes and mines them without getting mired in them can try new approaches, can begin to see things in new ways, and, perhaps, can achieve mastery of his pursuits.
In a word: Relax.
It was ARISE that allowed Friedrich August Kekulé to use a daydream about a snake eating its tail as inspiration for his formulation of the structure of the benzene ring. It’s what allowed Richard Feynman to simply drop an O-ring into a glass of ice water, show that when cold the ring loses pliability, and thereby explain the cause of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Sometimes it takes a genius to see that a fifth-grade science experiment is all that is needed to solve a problem.
In another word: Play.
Sometimes in order to progress, you need to regress. Sometimes you just have to let go and ARISE.
Systemic Equilibrium
Matthew Ritchie
Artist
The second law of thermodynamics, the so-called arrow of time, popularly associated with entropy (and by association, death), is the most widely misunderstood shorthand abstraction in human society today. We need to fix this.
The second law states that, over time, a closed system will become more homogeneous, eventually reaching systemic equilibrium. It is not a question of whether a system will reach equilibrium; it is a question only of when a system will reach equilibrium.
Living on a single planet, we are all participants in a single physical system that has only one direction—toward systemic equilibrium. The logical consequences are obvious; our environmental, industrial, and political systems (even our intellectual and theological systems) will become more homogeneous over time. It’s already started. The physical resources available to every person on Earth, including air, food, and water, have already been significantly degraded by the high burn rate of industrialization, just as the intellectual resources available to every person on Earth have already been significantly increased by the high distribution rate of globalization.
Human societies are already far more similar than ever before (does anyone really miss dynastic worship?), and it would be very tempting to imagine that a modern democracy based on equal rights and opportunities is the system in equilibrium. That seems unlikely, given our current energy footprint. More likely, if the total system energy is depleted too fast, is that modern democracies will be compromised if the system crashes to its lowest equilibrium too quickly for socially equitable evolution.
Our one real opportunity is to use the certain knowledge of ever-increasing systemic equilibrium to build a model for an equitable and sustainable future. The mass distribution of knowledge and access to information through the World Wide Web is our civilization’s signal achievement. Societies that adopt innovative, predictive, and adaptive models designed around a significant, ongoing redistribution of global resources will be most likely to survive in the future.
But since we are biologically and socially programmed to avoid discussing entropy (death), we reflexively avoid the subject of systemic changes to our way of life, both as a society and individuals. We think it’s a bummer. Instead of examining the real problems, we consume apocalyptic fantasies as “entertainment” and deride our leaders for their impotence. We really need to fix this.
Unfortunately, even facing this basic concept is an uphill battle today. In earlier, expansionist phases of society, various metaphorical engines such as “progress” and “destiny” allowed the metaphorical arrow to supplant the previously (admittedly spirit-crushing) wheel of time. Intellectual positions that supported scientific experimentation and causality were tolerated, even endorsed, as long as they contributed to the arrow’s cultural momentum. But in a more crowded and contested world, the limits of projected national power and consumption control have become more obvious. Resurgent strands of populism, radicalism, and magical thinking have found mass appeal in their rejection of many rational concepts. But perhaps most significant is the rejection of undisputed physical laws.
The practical effect of this denial of the relationship between the global economy and the climate-change debate (for example) is obvious. Advocates propose continuous “good” (green) growth, while denialists propose continuous “bad” (brown) growth. Both sides are more interested in backing winners and losers in a future economic environment predicated on the continuation of today’s systems than in accepting the physical inevitability of increasing systemic equilibrium in any scenario.
Of course, any system can temporarily cheat entropy. Hotter particles (or societies) can “steal” the stored energy of colder (or weaker) ones, for a while. But in the end, the rate at which the total energy is burned and redistributed will still determine the speed at which the planetary system will reach its true systemic equilibrium. Whether we extend the lifetime of our local “heat” through war or improved window insulation is the stuff of politics. But even if in reality we can’t beat the house, it’s worth a try, isn’t it?
Projective Thinking
Linda Stone
High-tech industry consultant; former executive, Apple Computer and Microsoft Corporation
Barbara McClintock was ignored and ridiculed by the scientific community for thirty-two years before winning the 1983 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering “jumping genes.” During the years of hostile treatment by her peers, McClintock didn’t publish, preferring to avoid the rejection of the scientific community. Stanley Prusiner faced significant criticism from his colleagues until his prion theory was confirmed. He, too, went on to win a Nobel Prize, in 1997.
Barry Marshall challenged the medical “fact” that stomach ulcers were caused by acid and stress and presented evidence that bacterial infection by H. pylori is the cause. Marshall noted in an 1998 interview that “Everyone was against me.”
Progress in medicine was delayed while these “projective thinkers” persisted, albeit on a slower and lonelier course.
“Projective thinking” is a term coined by Edward de Bono to describe generative rather than reactive thinking. McClintock, Prusiner, and Marshall offered projective thinking, suspending their disbelief regarding scientific views accepted at the time.
Articulate, intelligent individuals can skillfully construct a convincing case to argue almost any point of view. This critical, reactive use of intelligence narrows our vision. In contrast, projective thinking is expansive, “open-ended,” and speculative, requiring the thinker to create the context, concepts, and the objectives.
Twenty years of studying maize created a context within which McClintock could speculate. With her extensive knowledge and keen powers of observation, she deduced the significance of the changing color patterns of maize seed. This led her to propose the concept of gene regulation, which challenged the theory of the genome as a static set of instructions passed from one generation to the next. The work McClintock first reported in 1950, the result of projective thinking, extensive research, persistence, and a willingness to suspend disbelief, wasn’t understood or accepted until many years later.
Everything we know, our strongly held beliefs, and in some cases even what we consider to be “factual,” creates the lens through which we see and experience the world and can contribute to a critical, reactive orientation. This can serve us well. (Fire is hot; it can burn if touched.) It can also compromise our ability to observe and to think in an expansive, generative way.
When we cling rigidly to our constructs, as McClintock’s peers did, we can be blinded to what’s right in front of us. Can we support a scientific rigor that embraces generative thinking and suspension of disbelief? Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery.
Anomalies and Paradigms
V. S. Ramachandran
Neuroscientist; direc
tor, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California–San Diego; author, The Tell-Tale Brain and Phantoms in the Brain
Do you need language for sophisticated thinking, or do words merely facilitate thought? This question goes back to a debate between two Victorian scientists, Max Mueller and Francis Galton.
A word that has made it into the common vocabulary of both science and pop culture is “paradigm”—and the converse, “anomaly”—the former having been introduced by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn. “Paradigm” is now widely used and misused both in science and in other disciplines, almost to the point where the original meaning is starting to be diluted. (This often happens to “memes” of human language and culture, which don’t enjoy the lawful, particulate transmission of genes.) The word “paradigm” is now often used inappropriately, especially in the United States, to mean any experimental procedure—such as “the Stroop paradigm” or “a reaction-time paradigm” or “the fMRI paradigm.”
However, its appropriate use has shaped our culture in significant ways, even influencing the way scientists work and think. A more prevalent associated word is “skepticism,” originating from the name of a Greek school of philosophy . This is used even more frequently and loosely than “anomaly” and “paradigm shift.”
One can speak of reigning paradigms—what Kuhn calls normal science and what I cynically refer to as a mutual-admiration club trapped in a cul-de-sac of specialization. The club usually has its pope(s), hierarchical priesthood, acolytes, and a set of guiding assumptions and accepted norms zealously guarded with almost religious fervor. (Its members also fund one another, and review one another’s papers and grants, and give one another awards.)
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