TOXO - A Conversation with Robert Sapolsky [12.2.09]
in terms of free will, determinism — my feeling has always been that there's not a whole lot of free will out there, and if there is, it's in the least interesting places and getting more sparse all the time. But there's a whole new realm of neuroscience which I've been thinking about, which I'm starting to do research on,... it's got to do with this utterly bizarre world of parasites manipulating our behavior.
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it turned out Toxo [the protozoan Toxoplasma] preferentially knows how to home in on the part of the brain that is all about fear and anxiety, a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala is where you do your fear conditioning; the amygdala is what's hyperactive in people with post-traumatic stress disorder;...
Next, we then saw that Toxo would take the dendrites, the branch and cables that neurons have to connect to each other, and shriveled them up in the amygdala. It was disconnecting circuits. You wind up with fewer cells there. This is a parasite that is unwiring this stuff in the critical part of the brain for fear and anxiety.
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Meanwhile, there is a well-characterized circuit that has to do with sexual attraction. And as it happens, part of this circuit courses through the amygdala, which is pretty interesting in and of itself, and then goes to different areas of the brain than the fear pathways.
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you take Toxo-infected rats, right around the time when they start liking the smell of cat urine, you expose them to cat pheromones, and you don't see the stress hormone release. What you see is that the fear circuit doesn't activate normally, and instead the sexual arousal activates some. In other words, Toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. And you get males infected with Toxo and expose them to a lot of the cat pheromones, and their testes get bigger. Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to rodents, and they go and check it out. Totally amazing.
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A small literature is coming out now reporting neuropsychological testing on men who are Toxo-infected, showing that they get a little bit impulsive. ...two different groups independently have reported that people who are Toxo-infected have three to four times the likelihood of being killed in car accidents involving reckless speeding.
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A few years ago, I sat down with a couple of the Toxo docs over in our hospital who do the Toxo testing in the Ob/Gyn clinics. And they hadn't heard about this behavioral story, and I'm going on about how cool and unexpected it is. And suddenly, one of them jumps up, flooded with 40-year-old memories, and says, "I just remembered back when I was a resident, I was doing a surgical transplant rotation. And there was an older surgeon, who said, if you ever get organs from a motorcycle accident death, check the organs for Toxo. I don't know why, but you find a lot of Toxo." And you could see this guy was having a rush of nostalgic memories from back when he was 25 and all because he was being told this weird factoid ... ooh, people who die in motorcycle accidents seem to have high rates of Toxo. Utterly bizarre.
Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
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REASONABLE BELIEFS
... Liberals' commitment to material progress necessitated that technological advance be regarded as, in itself, a social goal. The tension in the liberal perspective was that the mechanics of technology were ideologically required to work for the betterment of man in society, and yet the imperatives of professional expertise and "pure research" insisted that they remain free from social control--... Atomic weaponry questioned the benign potential of technology, but, perversely, required the ever more fervent assertion of that article of faith. The danger was again displaced: it lay not in the technology of nuclear destruction itself, but in man's capacity to employ it. Fear
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was diverted from the fact of the Bomb, which, of course, no rational man would ever use, to the possibility of that crazy finger on the button. The existence of such totalitarian weaponry gave credence to the need for eternal vigilance, and the need to compromise liberal idealism with the realism that accepted totalitarian forms of debate. ... The ascending helix of complex technological development was based on the assumption... that the machine was good for man. The problem, as seen by the liberal technocrat, was whether man was good enough to control the machine.
Perhaps nowhere did the liberal technocracy express its inherently schizoid nature so tellingly as in its attempts to resolve this fundamental dilemma. One solution, covertly practiced much more than it was openly articulated, was the adoption of a behaviorist psychology,... Yet while this solution was to all practical purposes adopted in the automation of industrial processes and the application of military technology, it remained philosophically unacceptable to liberal idealists.
Instead, they sought perversely to assert man's supriority over the machine by stressing his irrationality or at least his capacity for irrational action. The unpredictability of human behavior became, for many liberals, a necessary, if somewhat uncomfortable, virtue.
But such a fundamental contradiction required some mediating device to disguise and displace it. To counteract its insecurities, liberalism instituted the humanitarian concept of understanding, a word whose meaning crucially blurred the distinctions between compassion and comprehension. ... Understanding was an emotional quality
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rather than an intellectual process. To understand people meant to identify sympathetically with them; it was a form of emotional acquisition of them, or of their problems. ...to be understood was to be absorbed into the benevolence of the liberal consensus, and to be understanding was to be an active part of that consensus. ... The liberal employment of the word played with the dualistic meaning it gave "understanding" so that the rational basis of human understanding could be asserted at the same time that its emotional nature could be exploited. ...
Certain areas of concern were, of course, more problematic than others. Those groups or individuals who refused to correspond with the liberal myth of men of goodwill had either to be forcibly placed within the orthodoxy, or to have their unorthodoxy "understood" and explained. ... Answers to the question "how?" were available through the compilation of sufficient data, but the question "why?" was much more problematic, because it required the explanation of motive in terms of a rationalist psychology that could not encompass the irrational. ...
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The narrow limits to comprehension which their idea of understanding as a process of emotional subjugation and control afforded them inevitably prevented their coming to terms with such aberrations as Nazism except by resolving them in terms of individual psychopathology. Liberal explanations could bracket off the psychopath from "normal" society and declare him an aberration, but so long as he remained unintegrated and beyond control--so long, that is, as he evaded a rationalistic understanding--he threatened the total system of that understanding. ...
... Having philosophically rejected the idea of absolute evil, it strove all the more to accommodate, or at least explain, the psychopathic "personality disorder" in terms which denied individual responsibility and spread the blame in rhetorical gestures of sentimental sympathy. Here as elsewhere liberal orthodoxy found a precarious balance between individualism and determinism, which purported to grant free will to those who fell within the benevolent conventions of its consensual framework , and denied it to those who demonstrated an anarchic free will by rejecting the restrictions of that framework.