The Trouble with Testosterone

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Do animals or people ever unlearn such superstitious behavior? In some cases, often when they are less dependent upon the reinforcing reward. It merely takes some variability, whether intentional or by accident, in the carrying out of the behavior—some details are missed, the behavior is done a bit wrong, the individual forgets to do it entirely, and . . . the reward still pops up. And that is about the time that the individual may begin to entertain that skeptical, agnostic thought, “Maybe it doesn’t have to do with my wearing my lucky underwear after all.”

  Most broadly, what this teaches us is that during times of great need and dependency upon reinforcers, people (and other beasts as well) are particularly vulnerable to deciding that there are causes and effects going on that really aren’t. And the leap from “superstition” as used by psychologists to its everyday use is obvious. A recent finding that anchors this in neurobiology: damage a certain part of the brain, and animals become more vulnerable to superstitious conditioning, less capable of discerning a cause-and-effect relationship in explaining how the world works. And out of this comes a corollary that is the typical next step for a neuroscientist—it could well be that individual differences in the workings of that part of the brain might explain individual differences in how readily superstitious behaviors occur.

  There are other links between abnormalities of the brain and patterns of behavior relevant to this article. Neurologists are coming to recognize that certain types of epilepsies cause characteristic changes in the personalities of their sufferers, and not just around the time of a seizure. Perhaps the most fascinating are the changes seen in individuals with a certain type of seizure centered in the temporal lobes of the brain. As was reviewed in “How Big Is Yours?” these individuals evolve into people with a markedly serious, humorless style. They tend to be extremely rigid in their ways, shying away from novel situations and people, demonstrating a sticky or viscous personality. In addition, temporal lobe epileptics tend to become “hypergraphic,” displaying a bizarre compulsion toward lengthy writing. Most interestingly, the disorder is also associated with developing a deep interest in religious and philosophical issues. This is not to say that this form of epilepsy is associated with becoming religious; rather, it appears to be associated with becoming interested in religion. (This distinction is shown in a wonderful story I heard about the late Norman Geschwind, the towering figure in neurology who first discerned temporal lobe personality. A medical resident on Geschwind’s team was reporting on an adolescent with temporal lobe epilepsy he had just seen in the clinic. Perhaps wanting to poke the great man a bit as some sort of dominance display, the young resident announced that, oh, by the way, the patient didn’t quite fit Geschwind’s personality scheme. And why? Geschwind inquired. Well, he had asked the boy if he was religious, and he had said he wasn’t. Geschwind led a troop of residents down the hall to find the patient, in order to display what he was sure this resident had missed. Geschwind turned to the epileptic and asked him if he was religious. No. And then he asked the critical follow-up: And why not? And the boy proceeded to give an impassioned half-hour lecture on Martin Buber’s analysis of God’s treatment of Job, on Bertrand Russell’s critique of the Sermon on the Mount, on the Flood Story as myth as shown in the Epic of Gilgamesh . . . until Geschwind departed, satisfied.)

  What does all of this mean, this intertwining of psychiatric and neurological disorders with faith? Despite the caveats I opened with at the beginning of this piece, some readers will be upset by the material covered. These are indeed disturbing ideas. But it is important to contain them by first emphasizing what disturbing things these ideas do NOT mean.

  First, I am not saying that you’ve got to be crazy or neurologically impaired to be religious. Let’s state that in a way slightly less in-your-face: It is not the case that any of a number of neuropsychiatric disorders are prerequisites for certain types of religious belief. Instead, the situation is much milder. For individuals with any of a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, certain types of religious beliefs or activities supply a remarkably good fit and a remarkably effective and consoling refuge.

  Second, I am not saying anything quantitative, such as that most people, or even that a substantial minority of people, with certain religious orientations have come to them because of their neuropsychiatric difficulties. The quantitative issues are irrelevant; the points raised would be equally pressing if they applied to the religious beliefs of only a single person.

  Finally comes the most subtle disclaimer. The purpose of this piece has not been to sarcastically or caustically emphasize that there are some people whose religious beliefs are nothing more than the mechanistic twitchings of their neuropsychiatric problems. The point is not that, for them, it is “just biological.” I have no doubt that there are as many neuropsychiatric clues (although far less researched) as to why people lose faith as gain it and, as a fervent atheist, I find it equally fascinating to think about someone’s atheism being “just biological” as would be someone’s faith.

  That is the main point. It does not matter in the slightest whether these biological insights tell us something about a million people or only about a single individual, or whether they tell us something about ardent faith or about the ardent loss of faith. It is the mechanistic implications of these studies that are, to me at least, most important. For many of us, how we feel about God, gods, or the absence of them, what moral imperatives we face here on earth and what rewards we might anticipate afterward—the decisions we have made about our religious beliefs—are among the most intense, most personal, often most difficult, of our lives. They are among the stances that most define us as individuals. Half my adolescence was taken up with the consequences of my own struggles with those issues, and I still feel their echoes decades later; it is a rare week in which, at some point, I do not rage at this god for ceasing to exist for me, in which I do not lament the discrepancy between what I wish to feel and what I can. What does it mean if, amid this intensely personal journey of defining who we are, this often critical way in which we anchor our sense of self, there exists even a single person on this planet who has reached that state of resolution as a result of peculiar neurotransmitter levels?

  This is the same disquieting point where we began this volume, a similar type of question that was posed toward the end of the first piece, “How Big Is Yours?” with its tour of frontal disinhibition syndromes, Tourette’s, OCD, and other neuropsychiatric disorders. What will it mean as we learn about deterministic factors influencing what makes us who we are—how and whether we go about being religious, whether we take pleasure in novelty or in familiarity, how readily we speak our minds, whether our bent is toward monogamy or infidelity, and what the gender is of the person around whom these issues of faithfulness revolve? And the intervening pieces in this volume have simply added further to this question—what does it mean that there are biological constraints to how we move through our life histories, to how we go about some of our most personal junctures such as mourning? What do we make of the fact that at point after point, our traits prove us to be nothing more than a not-terribly-unique form of primate?

  At the end of “How Big Is Yours?” I posed this question and tried to frame some of my own answers relevant to the societal or political implications of the biology of our behavior. What does it all mean? For one thing, that we must forever be on guard against the ideologues who would distort this science to design and justify the next holocaust. And it means that we must recognize that this science of what constrains and links us all into similar patterns should be a rallying point for our being more empathic, tolerant, and pluralistic, should be a call to recognize new biological realms in which people might need our help.

  But as I’ve lectured to students about these subjects over the years, I’ve seen them become uncomfortable with the implications of this science at various points, and it is rarely because of their wrestling with the sociopolitical implications. Instead, it is the philosophical
implications that plague and challenge our sense of who we are. What does it all mean?

  It seems to me that people become upset for two related reasons. The first has to do with the sheer complexity of what biology is revealing to us—the stupefying array of neurotransmitters and synaptic connections, the intertwining of interactions between hormones and environment, the dizzying subtlety with which early experience can influence how our bodies work forever after. The problem here is not just that one can easily despair at ever understanding any of this. It’s that this complexity runs counter to an image many of us have about living systems, where life and its processes are thought to unfold with a simplicity free of calculation or design. Natural. And instead, every facet seems the very antithesis of simplicity—where something even as seemingly straightforward as the timing of puberty involves our bodies machinating, ticking off the rules of evolution, monitoring the state of the world around us, adding and subtracting the costs and benefits of each step. All of this brings home a lesson learned by most biologists: To the extent that we think of “natural” as effortless, unplanned, unaffected, and simple, it is rarely the nature of our bodies or our behaviors to be natural. We cannot afford such a luxury.

  The more resonant way in which people often become upset at this point has to do with so many of these findings in behavioral biology running counter to an image many of us have about ourselves. There is a pleasure that most of us hold in our breasts, the notion that we are each a mysterious, shimmering flame of uniqueness. And there is the fear that that is precisely what the scientists will try to capture and thus destroy as a result of gaining this sort of knowledge—the image of the never-to-be-seen-again snowflake melting because of the warm breath of someone looking too closely, the image of a unicorn hemmed into a corral, gawked at by crowds oblivious to its sadness and loss.

  This image is also encompassed in the classic Arthur C. Clarke short story “The Nine Billion Names of God.” It is the perfect metaphor for the fear that many people have about where scientific knowledge will lead us and the price it will exact. In the story, Tibetan monks team up with some scientists who possess the most powerful high-speed computer on earth. The goal in their collaboration is to generate the nine billion different names of God posited by Tibetans to exist. And as they come close to obtaining this impossible, unobtainable knowledge, the inevitable happens: the stars in the sky begin to fade.

  This is what many people fear, that scientists, as they learn more and more about less and less, will inadvertently go and explain everything, will turn us with their knowledge into sterile assemblages of molecules and networks and equations, and that with each new fact accrued, another light in the heavens will be extinguished.

  I do not worry about this. This is not because I am an unemotional scientist just intent on reaching that holy grail of turning dancing flames into equations. I am a reasonably emotional person and that is central to the science that I do. Yet I am not worried if the scientists inadvertently go and explain everything. This is for a very simple reason: an impala sprinting across the savannah can be reduced to biomechanics, and Bach can be reduced to counterpoint, yet that does not decrease one iota our ability to shiver as we experience impalas leaping or Bach thundering. We can only gain and grow with each discovery that there is structure underlying the most accessible levels of things that fill us with awe.

  But there is an even stronger reason why I am not afraid that scientists will inadvertently go and explain everything—it will never happen. While in certain realms, it may prove to be the case that science could explain anything, it will never explain everything. As should be obvious after all these pages, as part of the scientific process, for every question answered, a dozen newer ones are generated. And they are usually far more puzzling, more challenging than the prior problems. This was stated wonderfully in a quote by a geneticist named Haldane earlier in the century: “Life is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” We will never have our flames extinguished by knowledge. The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.

  FURTHER READING

  Some references regarding schizotypal personality disorder were given at the end of the first essay, “How Big Is Yours?” An introduction to schizophrenia can be found in most psychology textbooks. However, for a moving, evocative view of the disease, read Susan Sheehan’s Is There No Place on Earth for Me? (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

  The psychopathology of shamanism is discussed in a number of places. Paul Radin and his thinking are considered in S. Diamond, “Paul Radin,” in S. Silverman, ed., Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History of Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). The quote by Radin, as well as by his Winnebago informant, came from this article. Also see E. Ackerknecht, “Psychopathology, Primitive Medicine and Primitive Culture,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 14 (1946): 30; J. Silverman, “Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia,” American Anthropologist 69 (1967): 21; G. Devereux, “A Sociological Theory of Schizophrenia,” “Psychoanalytical Review 26(1939): 338; R. Shweder, “Aspects of Cognition in Zinacanteco Shamans: Experimental Results,” in W. Lessa and E. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 1979) 327; A. Kroeber, “Psychosis or Social Sanction?” Character and Personality 8 (1940): 204. For a historical perspective on the subject, also see J. Atkinson, “Shamanisms Today,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 307.

  The statistics regarding the supernatural beliefs of Americans come from G. Gallup and J. Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the Nineties (New York: Macmillan, 1989); and G. Gallup and F. Newport, “Belief in Paranormal Phenomenon among Adult Americans,” Skeptical Inquirer 15 (1991): 137.

  The Beecher quote can be found in J. Braude, Lifetime Speaker’s Encyclopedia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962), 682.

  As referenced at the end of “How Big Is Yours?” the most accessible book on obsessive-compulsive disorder is Judith Rapoport’s The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing (New York: Signet, 1989). More technical discussions of the frequencies of different ritualistic behaviors in OCD patients can be found in S. Rasmussen and J. Eisen, “The Epidemiology and Differential Diagnosis of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 53 (1992): 4; J. Rapoport, S. Swedo, and H. Leonard, “Childhood Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 53 (1992): 11; T. Insel, “Phenomenology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 51 (1990): 4. Some technical discussions of the possible neurobiological correlates of OCD can be found in D. Robinson, H. Wu, R. Munne, M. Ashtari, J. Ma, J. Alvir, G. Lerner, A. M. Koreen, K. Cole, and B. Bogerts, “Reduced Caudate Nucleus Volume in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” Archives of General Psychiatry 52 (1995): 393.

  The ritualistic content of Hinduism can be found in M. S. Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born (Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp., 1971). Jewish rituals are found in H. Donin, To Be a Jew (New York: Basic Books, 1972). The 613 rules in Orthodox Judaism are discussed in Rabbi Dr. Chavel, trans., Sefer Ha-Mitzvoth of Maimonides in Two Volumes (London: The Soucino Press, 1967); and Sefer ha Hinnuch: The Book of Mitzvah Education, ascribed to Rabbi Aaron ha Levi of Barcelona, based on the first edition (Venice, 1523) (Jerusalem, N.Y: Feldheim Publishers, 1989). Note that this represents a case of the two lists of the 613 rules differing.

  The ritualism of Islam is apparent in Al-Ghazzali, The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazzali, translated by W. Montgomery Watt (Chicago: Kazi, 1982). Lutheran ritual is covered in the Lutheran Church of America’s Lutheran Book of Worship, Ministers Desk Edition (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1978); also see M. Stulken, Hymnal Companion to the Lutheran Book of Worship (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981).

  Freud’s thought on the subject can be found in his 1907 work “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices.” Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud (New Yo
rk: Collier Books, 1963). Also see R. Paul, “Freud’s Anthropology: A Reading of the ‘Cultural Books,’” in E. Garcia, ed., Understanding Freud: The Man and His Ideas (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and E. d’Aquili and C. Laughlin, “The Biopsychological Determinants of Religious Ritual Behavior,” Zygon 10 (1975): 32.

  Orson Scott Card’s 1991 science fiction novel, Xenocide, is published by Tor Books, New York.

  Luther has been considered in endless biographies. The classic one delving into his psychological makeup is Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (New York: Norton Library, 1958), the work that defines psychobiography. Quotes by and about him come from this work.

  An introduction to superstitious conditioning can be found in most psychology textbooks. One might also consult any of a number of books by Skinner on conditioning and learning, including B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (New York: Vintage, 1985).

  References regarding temporal lobe personality disorder can be found at the end of the first essay in this book.

  Arthur C. Clarke’s “Nine Billion Names of God” can be found in a collection by the same name (New York: Ballantine Books, 1953). Versions of J. B. S. Haldane’s quote appeared in numerous of his books, including Adventures of a Biologist (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940).

  ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY is professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford University. He is a regular contributor to Discover and The Sciences, and his previous book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1987, Sapolsky was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

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