The Idiot Brain

by Dean Burnett

  Another study from 2007 by Sarah B. Martin and her colleagues scanned the brains of dozens of subjects with varying scores on the experience-seeking personality scale and their paper claims that sensation-seeking behaviour is correlated with an enlarged right anterior hippocampus.33 The evidence suggests that this is the part of the brain and memory system that is responsible for processing and recognising novelty. Basically, the memory system runs information via this area and says, ‘Have a look at this. Have we seen this before?’ and the right anterior hippocampus says yes or no. We don’t know exactly what the increased size of this area means. It could be that the individual has experienced so many novel things that the novelty-recognising area has expanded to cope, or maybe it’s that the novelty-detecting region is overly developed so requires something a lot more unusual to be truly recognised as novel. If this were the case, novel stimulations and experiences are potentially more important and salient to these individuals.

  Whatever the actual cause for this anterior hippocampal enlargement, for a neuroscientist it’s actually quite cool to see something as complex and subtle as a personality trait potentially reflected by visible physical differences in the brain. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as the media implies.

  Overall, some people actually enjoy the experience of encountering something that causes fear. The fight-or-flight response triggered by this leads to a wealth of heightened experiences occurring in the brain (and the palpable relief that occurs when it ends), and this can be exploited for entertainment purposes within certain parameters. Some people may have subtle differences in brain structure or function that cause them to seek out these intense riskand fear-related sensation, to sometimes alarming extents. But that’s nothing to pass judgement on; once you get past the overall structural consistencies, everyone’s brain is different, and those differences are nothing to be afraid of, even if you do enjoy being afraid of things.

  You look great – it’s nice when people don’t worry about their weight

  (Why criticism is more powerful than praise)

  ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ This claim doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny, does it? Firstly, the hurt caused by a broken bone is obviously quite extreme, so shouldn’t be used as a casual baseline for pain. Secondly, if names and insults genuinely don’t hurt at all, why does this saying even exist? There’s no similar saying to point out that, ‘Knives and blades will slash you up but marshmallows are pretty harmless.’ Praise is very nice but, let’s be honest, criticism stings.

  Taken at face value, the title of this section is a compliment. If anything, it’s actually two compliments, as it flatters both appearance and attitude. But it is unlikely that the person it’s directed at will interpret it as such. The criticism is subtle and requires some working out, as it is mostly implied. Despite this, it is the criticism that becomes the stronger element. This is just one of countless examples of a phenomenon that arises from the workings of our brains; criticism typically carries more weight than praise.

  If you’ve ever had a new haircut or outfit or told a funny story to a group or anything else like this, it doesn’t matter how many people praise your look or laugh at your jokes, it’s the ones who hesitate before saying something nice or roll their eyes wearily at you that will stick with you and make you feel bad.

  What’s happening here? If it’s so unpleasant, why do our brains take criticism so seriously? Is there an actual neurological mechanism for it? Or is it just some morbid psychological fascination with unpleasantness, like the bizarre urge to pick at a scab or poke a loose tooth? There is, of course, more than one possible answer.

  To the brain, bad things are typically more potent than good things.34 At the very fundamental neurological level, the potency of criticism may be due to the action of the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is released by the brain in response to stressful events; it is one of the chemical triggers of the fight-or-flight response, and is widely regarded as the cause of all the issues brought about by constant stress. Its release is controlled mainly by the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, which is a complex connection of neurological and endocrine (meaning hormone-regulating) areas of the brain and body that coordinate the general response to stress. It was previously believed that the HPA axis was activated in response to a stressful event of any sort, such as a sudden loud noise. But later research found it was a bit more selective than that and was activated only under certain conditions. One theory today is that the HPA axis is activated only when a ‘goal’ is threatened.35 For example, if you’re walking along and some bird droppings land on you, that’s annoying and arguably harmful for hygiene reasons, but it’s unlikely to activate the HPA mediated response because ‘not being soiled by an errant bird’ wasn’t really a conscious goal of yours. But if the same bird were to target you while you’re walking to a very important job interview, then it is very likely to trigger the HPA response, because you had a definite goal: go to the job interview, impress them, get the job. And now it’s been largely thwarted. There are many schools of thought about what to wear to a job interview, but ‘a generous layer of avian digestion by-product’ doesn’t feature in any of them.

  The most obvious ‘goal’ is self-preservation, so if your goal is to stay alive and something occurs that might interfere with your goal by stopping you being alive, the HPA axis would activate the stress response. This is part of the reason it was believed the HPA response responded to anything, because humans can and do see threats to the self everywhere.

  However, humans are complex, and one result of this is they rely on the opinions and feedback of other humans to a considerable degree. The social self-preservation theory states that humans have a deep-rooted motivation to preserve their social standing (to continue being liked by the people whose approval they value). This gives rise to social-evaluative threat. Specifically, anything that threatens someone’s perceived social standing or image interferes with the goal of being liked, and therefore activates the HPA axis, releasing cortisol in the system.

  Criticisms, insults, rejections, mockery, these attack and potentially damage our sense of self-worth, especially if done publicly, which interferes with our goal of being liked and accepted. The stress this causes releases cortisol, which has numerous physiological effects (such as increasing release of glucose), but also has direct effects on our brain. We are aware of how the fight-or-flight response heightens our focus and makes our memories more vivid and prominent. Cortisol, along with other hormones released, potentially causes this to happen (to varying degrees) when we’re criticised; it makes us experience an actual physical reaction that sensitises us and emphasises the memory of the event. This whole chapter is based on the brain’s tendency to go overboard when looking for threats, and there’s no real reason why this wouldn’t include criticism. And when something negative happens and we experience it first hand, producing all the relevant emotions and sensations, the hippocampus and amygdala processes spark into life again, and end up emotionally enhancing the memory and storing it more prominently.

  Nice things, such as receiving praise, also produce a neurological reaction via the release of oxytocin, which makes us experience pleasure, but in a less potent and more fleeting manner. The chemistry of oxytocin means it’s removed from the bloodstream in about five minutes; cortisol, by contrast, can linger for over an hour, maybe even two, so its effects are far more persistent.36 The fleeting nature of pleasure signals may seem a bit of a harsh move by nature, but when things cause us intense pleasure for long periods they tend to be quite incapacitating, as we’ll see later.

  However, it’s easy but misleading to attribute everything that goes on in the brain to the actions of specific chemicals, and this is something that more ‘mainstream’ neuroscience reports do often. Let’s look at some other possible explanations for this emphasis of criticism.

  Novelty may also play a role. Despite what online comment sectio
ns might suggest, most people (with some cultural variations, admittedly) interact with others in a respectful manner due to social norms and etiquette; shouting abuse at someone in the street is not something that respectable people do, unless it’s directed at traffic wardens, who are apparently exempt from this rule. Consideration and low-level praise are the norm, like saying thank you to the cashier for handing you your change even though it’s your money and they’ve no right to keep it. When something becomes the norm, our novelty-preferring brains start to filter it out more often via the process of habituation.37 Something happens all the time, so why waste precious mental resources focusing on it when it’s safe to ignore?

  Mild praise is the standard, so criticism is going to have more impact purely because it’s atypical. The single disproving face in a laughing audience is going to stand out more because it’s so different. Our visual and attention systems have developed to focus on novelty, difference and ‘threat’, all of which are technically embodied by the grumpy-looking person. Similarly, if we’re used to hearing ‘well done’ and ‘good job’ as meaningless platitudes, then someone saying, ‘You were crap!’ is going to be all the more jarring because it doesn’t happen as often. And we shall dwell on an unpleasant experience all the more to figure out why it happened, so we can avoid it next time.

  Chapter 2 discussed the fact that the workings of the brain tend to make us all somewhat egotistical, with a tendency to interpret events and remember things in such a way as to give us a better self-image. If this is our default state, praise is just telling us what we already ‘know’, whereas direct criticism is harder to misinterpret and a shock to the system.

  If you put yourself ‘out there’ in some form, via a performance, created material or just an opinion you think is worthy of sharing, you are essentially saying, ‘I think you will like this’; you’re visibly seeking people’s approval. Unless you’re alarmingly confident then there’s always an element of doubt and awareness of the possibility that you are wrong. In this instance you are sensitive to the risk of rejection, primed to look for any signs of disapproval or criticism, especially if it’s regarding something that you take great pride in or that required a lot of time and effort. When you’re primed to look for something you’re worried about, you’re more likely to find it. Just as a hypochondriac is always able to find himself showing worrying symptoms for rare diseases. This process is called confirmation bias – we seize on what we’re looking for and ignore anything that doesn’t match up to it.38

  Our brains can really make judgements based only on what we know, and what we know is based on our own conclusions and experiences, so we tend to judge people’s actions based on what we do. So if we’re polite and complimentary just because social norms say we should be, then surely everyone else does the same? As a result, every item of praise you receive can be somewhat dubious as to whether it’s genuine or not. But if someone criticises you, not only were you bad, you were so bad that someone was willing to go against social norms to point it out. And thus, once again, criticism carries more weight than praise.

  The brain’s elaborate system for identifying and responding to potential threats may well have enabled humankind to survive the long periods in the wilderness and become the sophisticated, civilised species we are today, but it’s not without drawbacks. Our complex intellects allow us not only to identify threats but to anticipate and imagine them too. There are many ways to threaten or frighten a human, which leads to the brain responding neurologically, psychologically or sociologically.

  This process can, depressingly, cause vulnerabilities that other humans are able to take advantage of, resulting in actual threats, in a sense. You may be familiar with ‘negging’, a tactic used by pick-up artists where they approach women and say something that sounds like a compliment but is actually meant to criticise and insult. If a man approached a woman and said the title of this section, that would be negging. Or he might say something like, ‘I like your hair – most women with your face wouldn’t risk a style like that’, or, ‘I normally don’t like girls as short as you, but you seem cool’, or, ‘That outfit will look great once you lose some weight’, or, ‘I’ve no clue how to speak to women because I’ve only ever seen them through binoculars so I’m going to use cheap psychological trickery on you in the hope that I will do enough damage to your self-confidence that you are willing to sleep with me.’ That last one isn’t a typical negging line, admittedly, but in truth it’s what they’re all saying.

  It doesn’t need to be this sinister, though. We probably all know the type of person who, when someone has done something to be proud of, will immediately jump in to point out the bits they did wrong. Because why go to the effort of achieving something yourself when you can just bring others down to make yourself feel better?

  It’s a cruel irony that in looking for threats so diligently, the brain ends up actually creating them.

  Notes

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  4 S. Fyfe et al., ‘Apophenia, theory of mind and schizotypy: Perceiving meaning and intentionality in randomness’, Cortex, 2008, 44(10), pp. 1316–25

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