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Astrological Insight
How You Approach Life and How You Appear To Others
Ferociously proud and somewhat vain, you like to be impressive and to be seen as Somebody Special. You are not timid, meek, or self-effacing, and are rarely content being in the background or in the subordinate position. You are a natural leader, and do not take orders from others very well. You must have something of your own, something creative - be it a business, a project, a home or whatever - that you can develop and manage according to your own will and vision. Whatever you do, you do it in a unique, dramatic, individual way. You like to put your own personal stamp on it.
The Inner You: Your Real Motivation
You are a person who thrives on challenge, and you often feel that you must battle your way through life, depending upon no one and nothing but your own strength, intelligence, and courage. You believe in being totally honest, true to oneself and one's own vision and convictions, even if that means standing alone. Honesty, integrity, personal honor, and authenticity are your gods, and you have no sympathy for weakness of character in others.
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My Pictures
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 | My Cambridge College Commencement June 8, 2003 |
 | Me Last Year at my Uncle\'s House for Thanksgiving (sitting on the top of the stairs) |
 | Me Last Year at My parent\'s House for a Lobster Cook Out |
 | Me This Year Taking a Picture of Myself (with a mean Face) |
 | My Messy Workspace (all the time) |
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Web Developer/Designer | I've been developing websites for over 6 years now. If you count the time I spent in college fooling around with html, javascript and graphics, I guess you could say I've been developing websites since roughly 1995. I pride myself on clean sites and great use of space. I try to make all my sites esthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. | Back to top
| The "Go-To Guy" | I am the "Go-To Guy". The guy you look for when you need a solution. I got that way at first by being a strong technical resource, but moreover by being a strong diagnostician. I can tell you what is wrong when everyone is asking, "What's wrong?" I know how to pull apart technical, interpersonal, and organizational crises. That allows me to create calm from chaos and deliverables from disasters. I apply methodical diagnostic techniques to all kinds of issues, and find a way to make it work.
I am Adam Scarcella. I am - the "Go-To Guy". | Back to top
| People Skills | I am a Natural Born Leader. I'm honest. I can admit when I'm wrong and I do everything that I can to fix it. I'm highly responsive to others' suggestions. I'm willing to continuously learn and relearn in order to keep up with today's light speed pace. I love figuring out how things work. I love nature, which is where I get my sense of curiosity and adventure. | Back to top
| My Hobbies | Taking care of my PowerMac G4 and saving money to buy it new fun toys. Thinking of all the amazing products that would emerge from a merger between Apple Computer and Volkswagen. Brainstorming new business ideas and then building a mock website. Working in my father's garden. Building furniture. Cutting hair. Playing street hockey. Driving my VW Jetta GLX really fast. Installing kick-ass car stereo systems with other peoples money. Building websites (of course). Painting. Drawing. Reading. Writing. Going to sporting events. Talking to people about domestic and global politics. Figuring out what makes people happy and what makes them sad. Philosophy, psychology, physics, poetry, art and anything that was made or discovered with passionate persistence. | Back to top
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Intelligence Quotient
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Download My IQ Report
Download My Super IQ Report
According to Emode.com, my IQ is between 144 - 152. I scored in the 100th percentile in all 4 categories of intelligence (mathematical, visual-spacial, linguistic and logical). My Intellectual Type is either a Visual Mathematician, or a Visionary Philosopher.
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Here Is An Excerpt From My IQ Reports
People who are Creative Theorists are highly intelligent, complex people. They are able to process information of nearly every kind with ease, using both creativity and analysis to make sense of the world. Compared to others they also have very rich imaginations.
You have a strong ability to process visual-spatial and mathematical information. These skills combined with your strengths in logic are what make you a Visual Mathematician.
You're able to understand patterns visually and in numbers. That means your mind can create a mental picture for any problem. In addition to that skill, you possess an intelligence that allows you to apply math to that picture, too. That helps you manipulate multiple parts of the picture (or problem) to come up with a solution.
You have many skills that are critical to success and problem-solving. Your talents help you understand the "big picture," which is partly why people may turn to you for direction - especially in the workplace. You flourish in environments where tasks are clearly defined, and you are a whiz at improving processes and making things more efficient. Like Einstein, your ability to detect patterns and your skills in math and logic, make it natural for you to come up with ideas and theories that simplify processes for everyone.
Outside of work, Visual Mathematicians tend to do well at strategic activities like chess. It must be that ability to recognize patterns - both as they are and how they develop. Regardless of how you put your mind to use, you've got a great set of talents. You will be able to envision a clear path and calculate the risks, and more importantly, the rewards, of anything you take on.
Your mind's strengths allow you to think ahead of the game - to imagine or anticipate what should come next in just about any situation. Because you're equally skilled in the numerical and verbal universes of the brain, you can draw from multiple sources of information to come up with great ideas. The timelessness of your vision and the balance between your various skills are what make you a Visionary Philosopher.
In addition to your strengths in math and linguistics, you have a knack for matching and anticipating patterns. These skills and your uncanny ability to detect the underlying blueprint of most of life's situations add to your Visionary Philosopher mind.
Two philosophers who share the same combination of skills you possess are Plato and Benedict Spinoza. Spinoza had insight into how things worked in the world. He could envision a future based on the patterns he saw in life, and used mathematical logic as a structure within which to present his philosophical arguments. With that base he was able to use logic to formulate his theories. Borrowing from his linguistic strengths he wrote eloquent texts and, therefore, was able to bring his philosophical ideas and structure to the rest of the world. His story exemplifies the talents that are present in the Visionary Philosopher intellectual type.
Whatever you decide to do in life, you've got a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a wide variety of ways. You can expand your mind to understand a situation. Your strong balance of math and verbal skills will help you explain things to others. For example, if you were on an archaeological dig and discovered an object, you could probably use your deductive powers to figure out not only what the object was but also how it was used. Given your ability to put things together, you are more than capable of inventing a life plan that is in synch with your perspective on how things were, how they are, and how they might be one day.
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Emotional Intelligence Quotient
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Download My EQ Report
According to Emode.com, my EQ is 142. I scored in the 99.7th percentile in all 4 categories of emotional intelligence (Perception, Expression, Empathy, and Emotional Management).
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Here Is An Excerpt From My EQ Report
The above chart shows where you fall on the Emotional IQ scale compared to others. You scored higher than 99.7% of other test takers.
Your Emotional IQ measures how well your emotions guide you towards smart decisions. In fact, increasingly, researchers are pointing to Emotional IQs as better indicators of overall success in life than traditional IQ tests alone. Healthy relationships and flourishing careers are impossible without interacting successfully with others. Even someone who possesses a genius Intellectual Quotient (IQ) can miss out on the wisdom that comes from understanding another human being.
What makes Emode's Emotional IQ test more comprehensive than others, is that we structured the test to actually isolate different interpersonal skills and how well you use them to your benefit.
As such, each of your scores on the 4 emotional intelligence dimensions, Perception, Expression, Empathy, and Emotional Management , are independent of one another, despite the fact that only in combination do they yield your true EIQ.
That also means that you can score high on all dimensions, low on all dimensions, and any permutation in between. There are plenty of reasons to understand where your strengths and weakness lie. In so doing, you can play to your strengths and work on improving your skills on all the dimensions.
As we noted in your initial results, your emotional strength, or the dimension on which you scored the highest is Emotional Management . For an in-depth look at those dimensions, read on about your Emotional IQ profile.
Did you know?
- Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt, were known for being affable, not for their huge IQs. They both get higher marks for leading the country than men considered to have higher IQs, like Richard Nixon.
- Almost 75% of careers are thrown off track due to issues related to emotional, not intellectual smarts. People who are unable to handle interpersonal problems, or who prove to be poor leaders or managers lose their positions more often than people who are simply considered less smart than colleagues.
- Emotions help stimulate your brain, which in turn helps us recall things better.
- Businesses lose customers primarily for EQ-related actions. If employees have low EQs, it generally affects customers more than if employees have low IQs.
- Memories are best made when information is thought of in context and connected with feelings, not when it is memorized straight out from a book.
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Short Stories |
A Dad'S Story
On July 22nd I was in route to Washington, DC for a business trip. It was all so very ordinary, until we landed in Denver for a plane change. As I collected my belongings from the overhead bin, an announcement was made for Mr. Lloyd Glenn to see the United Customer Service Representative immediately. I thought nothing of it until I reached the door to leave the plane and I heard a gentleman asking every male if he were Mr. Glenn. At this point I knew something was wrong and my heart sunk.
When I got off the plane a solemn-faced young man came toward me and said, "Mr. Glenn, there is an emergency at your home. I do not know what the emergency is, or who is involved, but I will take you to the phone so you can call the hospital." My heart was now pounding, but the will to be calm took over. Woodenly, I followed this stranger to the distant telephone where I called the number he gave me for the Mission Hospital. My call was put through to the trauma center where I learned that my three-year-old son had been trapped underneath the automatic garage door for several minutes, and that when my wife had found him he was dead. CPR had been performed by a neighbor, who is a doctor, and the paramedics had continued the treatment as Brian was transported to the hospital.
By the time of my call, Brian was revived and they believed he would live, but they did not know how much damage had been done to his brain, nor to his heart. They explained that the door had completely closed on his little sternum right over his heart. He had been severely crushed. After speaking with the medical staff, my wife sounded worried but not hysterical, and I took comfort in her calmness.
The return flight seemed to last forever, but finally I arrived at the hospital six hours after the garage door had come down. When I walked into the intensive care unit, nothing could have prepared me to see my little son laying so still on a great big bed with tubes and monitors everywhere. He was on a respirator. I glanced at my wife who stood and tried to give me a reassuring smile. It all seemed like a terrible dream. I was filled-in with the details and given a guarded prognosis. Brian was going to live, and the preliminary tests indicated that his heart was OK, two miracles in and of themselves. But only time would tell if his brain received any damage.
Throughout the seemingly endless hours, my wife was calm. She felt that Brian would eventually be all right. I hung on to her words and faith like a lifeline. All that night and the next day Brian remained unconscious. It seemed like forever since I had left for my business trip the day before.
Finally at two o'clock that afternoon, our son regained consciousness and sat up uttering the most beautiful words I have ever heard spoken. He said, "Daddy hold me" and he reached for me with his little arms.
TEAR BREAK
By the next day he was pronounced as having no neurological or physical deficits, and the story of his miraculous survival spread throughout the hospital. You cannot imagine, we took Brian home, we felt a unique reverence for the life and love of our Heavenly Father that comes to those who brush death so closely.
In the days that followed there was a special spirit about our home. Our two older children were much closer to their little brother. My wife and I were much closer to each other, and all of us were very close as a whole family. Life took on a less stressful pace. Perspective seemed to be more focused, and balance much easier to gain and maintain. We felt deeply blessed. Our gratitude was truly profound.
The story is not over!
Almost a month later to the day of the accident, Brian awoke from his afternoon nap and said, "Sit down Mommy. I have something to tell you." At this time in his life, Brian usually spoke in small phrases, so to say a large sentence surprised my wife. She sat down with him on his bed, and he began his sacred and remarkable story.
"Do you remember when I got stuck under the garage door? Well, it was so heavy and it hurt really bad. I called to you, but you couldn't hear me. I started to cry, but then it hurt too bad. And then the 'birdies' came."
"The birdies?" my wife asked puzzled.
"Yes," he replied. "The birdies made a whooshing sound and flew into the garage. They took care of me."
"They did?"
"Yes," he said. "One of the birdies came and got you. She came to tell you "I got stuck under the door." A sweet reverent feeling filled the room. The spirit was so strong and yet lighter than air. My wife realized that a three-year-old had no concept of death and spirits, so he was referring to the beings who came to him from beyond as "birdies" because they were up in the air like birds that fly. "What did the birdies look like?" she asked.
Brian answered, "They were so beautiful. They were dressed in white, all white. Some of them had green and white. But some of them had on just white."
"Did they say anything?"
"Yes," he answered. "They told me the baby would be all right."
"The baby?" my wife asked confused.
Brian answered. "The baby laying on the garage floor." He went on, "You came out and opened the garage door and ran to the baby. You told the baby to stay and not leave."
My wife nearly collapsed upon hearing this, for she had indeed gone and knelt beside Brian's body and seeing his crushed chest whispered, "Don't leave us Brian, please stay if you can." As she listened to Brian telling her the words she had spoken, she realized that the spirit had left His body and was looking down from above on this little lifeless form. "Then what happened?" she asked.
"We went on a trip," he said, "far, far away." He grew agitated trying to say the things he didn't seem to have the words for. My wife tried to calm and comfort him, and let him know it would be okay. He struggled with wanting to tell something that obviously was very important to him, but finding the words was difficult.
"We flew so fast up in the air. They're so pretty Mommy," he added.
"And there are lots and lots of birdies." My wife was stunned. Into her mind the sweet comforting spirit enveloped her more soundly, but with an urgency she had never before known. Brian went on to tell her that the "birdies" had told him that he had to come back and tell everyone about the "birdies." He said they brought him back to the house and that a big fire truck, and an ambulance were there. A man was bringing the baby out on a white bed and he tried to tell the man that the baby would be okay. The story went on for an hour.
He taught us that "birdies" were always with us, but we don't see them because we look with our eyes and we don't hear them because we listen with our ears. But they are always there, you can only see them in here (he put his hand over his heart). They whisper the things to help us to do what is right because they love us so much. Brian continued, stating, "I have a plan, Mommy. You have a plan. Daddy has a plan. Everyone has a plan. We must all live our plan and keep our promises. The birdies help us to do that cause they love us so much."
In the weeks that followed, he often came to us and told all, or part of it, again and again. Always the story remained the same. The details were never changed or out of order. A few times he added further bits of information and clarified the message he had already delivered. It never ceased to amaze us how he could tell such detail and speak beyond his ability when he talked about his birdies.
Everywhere he went, he told strangers about the "birdies." Surprisingly, no one ever looked at him strangely when he did this. Rather, they always got a softened look on their face and smiled. Needless to say, we have not been the same ever since that day, and I pray we never will be.
Some people come into our lives and quickly go... Some people become friends and stay a while... leaving beautiful footprints on our hearts ... and we are never quite the same because we have made a good friend!!
Yesterday is history. Tomorrow a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it's called the present! Live and savor every moment... this is not a dress rehearsal!
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Learning Series |
Fear
Recent research shows that when something bad happens to you, part of your brain begins thinking independently, storing its own memories so it can save you next time. That worked fine a million years ago...
By Steven Johnson
Photograph by Elinor Carucci
Graphics by Don Foley
 You are driving at night down a quiet suburban street, listening to Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" on the stereo. As you cross an intersection, your peripheral vision picks up the flash of headlights descending on the right side of the car. In the split second before you hear the sound of metal grinding into metal, your body tenses, blood flows to your extremities, adrenaline surges, and time slows down. At impact you find yourself noticing surreal details - the bright orange jacket of a startled pedestrian, the low-hung branches of a dogwood tree at the side of the road. After a split second that seems like 10 minutes, your car lurches to a halt against the curb.
The physical event of one car colliding with another has run its course, but its emotional impact continues. The adrenaline and other stress hormones released in your body have brought you to a state of almost superhuman alertness; you feel more awake than you've felt in your entire life. You can review the details of the crash as though you were replaying a DVD of the event, all the details immaculately preserved. For weeks, as memory fades, details continue to haunt you. Driving through an intersection causes you to flinch, anticipating another crash; the flash of headlights makes your gut tighten. For months, driving at night seems far more dangerous than driving during the day. Even a year later, the sight of drooping dogwood flowers triggers a sense of dread. Hearing "Brown Eyed Girl" brings the whole sequence back to consciousness with astonishing clarity.
Anyone who has been through a traumatic event will recognize this scenario immediately- the sudden physical response of fear and its often debilitating persistence in memory. The feeling of fear, like all emotions, is something that happens to the body and the mind. Few memories are as easily triggered and as hard to shake as those in which we are confronted with an immediate threat. For people who have undergone serious trauma, including war veterans and rape survivors, memories of fear can sometimes play a dominant role in shaping personality, a condition we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Unraveling the mystery of how the mind experiences fear- perhaps the most primal and enduring of all the emotions- turns out to be one of the most interesting and instructive quests in the annals of recent neuroscience. We have learned that fear plays tricks with our memory and our perception of reality; we have also learned that the fear systems in the brain have their own perceptual channels and their own dedicated circuitry for storing traumatic memories. As scientists have mapped the path of fear through the brain, they have begun to explore ways to lessen its hold on the psyche, to prevent that car accident from keeping us off the road months later.
It seems intuitive to us that we would remember vividly the details of a frightening event like a car accident. But here is a question with a surprising answer:
Would we remember our fear if we had no long-term memory?
An experiment performed nearly 100 years ago by Swiss psychologist Édouard Claparède provides a clue: Claparède was treating a woman suffering from a debilitating form of amnesia that left her incapable of forming new memories. She had suffered localized brain damage that preserved her basic mechanical and reasoning skills, along with most of her older memories. But beyond the duration of a few minutes, the recent past was lost to her- a condition brilliantly captured in the movie Memento, in which a man suffering similar memory loss solves a mystery by furiously scrawling new information on the backs of Polaroids before his memories fade to black.
Claparède's patient would have seemed straight out of a slapstick farce had her condition not been so tragic. Each day the doctor would greet her and run through a series of introductions. If he then left for 15 minutes, she would forget who he was. They'd do the introductions all over again. One day, Claparède decided to vary the routine. He introduced himself to the woman as usual, but when he reached to shake her hand for the first time, he concealed a pin in his palm.
It wasn't friendly, but Claparède was onto something. When he arrived the next day, his patient greeted him with the usual blank welcome- no memory of yesterday's pinprick, no memory of yesterday at all- until Claparède extended his hand. Without being able to explain why, the woman refused to shake. She was incapable of forming new memories, yet she had nevertheless remembered something- a subconscious sense of danger, a remembrance of past trauma. She failed utterly to recognize the face and the voice she'd encountered every day for months. But somehow, buried in her mind, she remembered a threat.
About 25 years ago, a young postdoctoral student at weill Medical College of Cornell University in Manhattan named Joseph LeDoux was casting about for a research focus. Cognitive science, with an emphasis on computer modeling, was the hot new field. But LeDoux was interested in emotions, and "there wasn't a lot going on there," he remembers, sitting in his office at New York University, where he is a professor of neural science. "So I read around and came across studies on fear conditioning." Claparède's pin turns out to be a somewhat diabolical twist on the classic behaviorist experiment of fear conditioning: Put a rat in a cage, play a tone, and simultaneously deliver a shock to the animal. After a few rounds of tone and shock, the rat starts to fear the tone even if it's not accompanied by the shock. The fear reaction- noticeable because the rat freezes in place- has been observed in species as diverse as pigeons, rabbits, baboons, and humans. It is called a conditioned response. The rat has an unconditioned innate fear of shocks, but it can be conditioned to be afraid of tones if the two are associated with each other. In Claparède's version of the experiment, the pin was the shock. His outstretched hand was the tone. After only one exposure to the shock and the tone, the amnesiac patient acquired a conditioned fear response to shaking hands with her doctor.
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Conditioned fear is easy: Fruit flies, marine snails, even lizards can be trained to display defensive behavior in response to threatening stimuli, along the lines of the tone and shock experiments. Conditioned fear turns out to be one of the most essential techniques that natural selection stumbled across to increase the survival odds of organisms in an unpredictable environment. But until a few decades ago, we had almost no idea how that learning actually took place. The ubiquity of conditioned fear in the animal kingdom, combined with the amnesiac's ability to remember potential threats, made it clear that learning to be afraid involved different mechanisms than, say, learning how to ride a bicycle or memorizing the capitals of all 50 states. But what was the mechanism? That's what LeDoux set out to determine. There had been almost no research into how the fear response actually came into being. "In fact," LeDoux says with a smile, "my first grant on this topic in the early 1980s was turned down," because scientists reviewing his application believed it was impossible to scientifically study emotions.
LeDoux forged ahead anyway. "I started from the outside," he says. "I had the sound that produced the fear response. I wanted to know: How does that sound go through the brain and create the response?" Like most brain researchers in the age before advanced imaging technology, LeDoux's approach was surgical subtraction. Take a healthy rat and begin extracting specific parts of his brain. If you remove a region and the rat can still learn to associate the tone with the shock, then the region you've removed isn't relevant to fear conditioning. But if the rat stops learning, you know you've got something relevant.
"Because the auditory pathways are fairly well worked out in mammals, I could use that as a starting point. I started with the top of the auditory pathway, which is the auditory cortex. I took that out, and the animals learned fine. Then I went down one station to the auditory thalamus, took that out, and they couldn't learn at all. So that meant that the sound had to go through the system to the level of the thalamus but didn't go through the cortex. So where was it going?" The question was puzzling because the traditional understanding of the brain's activity emphasized the role of the cortex over most other regions. The cortex was where the sensory information- in this case, the sound of the tone- was integrated into conscious awareness, alongside other sensory data transmitted from other parts of the brain. The auditory thalamus was supposed to be just a relay station from the ear to the primary destination, the auditory cortex. So there was something strangely inverted about LeDoux's result. You could eliminate the primary destination altogether without affecting the learning, but if you took out the relay station, the learning stopped.
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LeDoux's assumption was that the auditory thalamus harbored a link to another part of the brain, in addition to its link to the cortex. Using a tracer dye to follow pathways out from the auditory thalamus, LeDoux discovered a connection to the amygdala, an almond-shaped region in the forebrain long associated with emotional states. When he removed the amygdala, the rats failed to learn. Perusing the literature, he found earlier experiments that demonstrated a crucial part of the amygdala known as the central nucleus contained links to the key brain stem areas that control the autonomic functions involved in the fear response, like acceleration of breathing and heart rate. "I didn't start out looking for the amygdala," LeDoux says. "The research led me to it."
The key insight that emerged is that the experience of danger follows two pathways in the brain: one conscious and rational, the other unconscious and innate. These were quickly dubbed the high road and the low road. Say you're walking though a forest, and out of the corner of your eye you detect a slithering shape to your left, accompanied by a rattling sound. Before you even have time to formulate the word snake, your body has frozen in its tracks; your heart rate has accelerated; the sweat glands on your palms have dilated. In your brain, the information flow looks something like this: Your eyes and ears transmit basic sensory information to the auditory and visual thalamus, where the information is then transmitted along two paths. One stream of data heads towards the cortex, where it will be integrated with other real-time sensory data, along with more elaborate associations like the word rattlesnake, or your childhood memories of a pet python, or the snake scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. At the same time, the slithering is also transmitted- in less rich detail- to the amygdala itself, which blasts out an alarm to the brain stem, alerting the body that a potential threat is nearby. The key difference between the two paths is data transmission time. It might take a few seconds to establish the presence of the snake and formulate a response via the high road, but the low road kicks the body into a freezing response within a fraction of a second. And you don't have to learn the elaborate bodily choreography involved, the way you might learn a complicated yoga position. Your body knows how to execute the freezing response without any training at all. In fact, it knows the response so well that it is nearly impossible to keep it from happening.
As a survival mechanism, LeDoux's low road made perfect sense. But other questions remained: How did the amygdala know to be afraid of a snake in the first place? How could Claparède's patient learn to be afraid if she lacked memory?
We're accustomed to describing someone as having a good or a bad memory, as though memory were a single attribute that covers the entire range of storing and recalling information. We now know that the brain's memory systems are far more diverse than this. There are systems devoted to explicit or declarative memories, like your childhood recollection of that pet python, and systems devoted to procedural memories that usually involve physical movement, like learning how to ride a bicycle. And then there are emotional memories. If you watch the activity in someone's brain using a modern fMRI scanner, you see a different profile depending on which kind of memory the subject is conjuring up.
In ordinary cases of fear conditioning- encountering that snake in the grass- a declarative memory will occur more or less simultaneously with an emotional memory. You'll feel the freezing response kick in, and moments later you'll remember seeing that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The latter feels like our traditional idea of memory; there's a mental picture from the past experience that comes into consciousness, as though you were sifting through pages of a photo album. The transition to a freezing response doesn't feel like a memory in that conventional sense of the term, but for all intents and purposes it is one. It is recalled information from past experience that alters your state of mind. The transition to a freezing response happens too fast for it to be a conscious, deliberate memory, but it's a form of memory nonetheless.
In brain anatomy terms, the declarative memory of Indiana Jones in the snake pit is laid down by the hippocampus, a long, curved ridge located next to the amygdala. The emotional memory of a threat, on the other hand, is mediated by the amygdala itself. This explains the mystery of the remembered pinprick: Claparède's patient lacked the ability to form declarative memories, but she had a functioning amygdala that kept the memory alive, albeit unconsciously. If you had a past encounter with a snake and you felt actively threatened, a trace of that memory would have been stored by the amygdala as well as by the hippocampus. Some brain scientists believe that our fear systems are prepared to learn about threats- snakes, spiders, or heights- that have been major obstacles to survival over the millions of years it has taken the modern brain to evolve, which explains why it is easier to develop phobias about snakes than about threats that are statistically much more likely to kill you, such as electricity.
Some scientists believe the amygdala doesn't have its own discrete storage system for emotionally charged memories but rather marks memories created by other brain systems as being somehow emotionally significant. In 2001 James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine conducted a telling variation on the classic fear-conditioning experiment. He took a rat and subjected it to the traditional foot shock if the animal took a step. After administering the shock, McGaugh injected cyclic AMP- a cellular messenger that strengthens neuronal synapses, leading to stronger memory- into the animal's cortex. Two days later, the rats were tested to see how well they were conditioned; those that received the injections turned out to have enhanced memories of the shock. "So we know the cortex is involved in the memory that's based on fear in that situation," McGaugh says. "Now, if we make a lesion of the amygdala, the stimulation of the cortex doesn't do anything. In other words, you have to have a working amygdala for the cortex to do its job."
McGaugh concludes, "That experiment tells me that fear is not learned in the amygdala. Amygdala projections are coming up to brain regions where information is being stored, and they're saying: 'You know this memory you're storing? Well, it turns out to be a very important one, so make it a little stronger, please.' It provides selectivity in our lives. You don't need to know where you parked the car three weeks ago, unless it was broken into that day." You can think of it as the brain's way of underlining.
The trouble with emotional memories is that they can be fiendishly difficult to eradicate. The brain seems to be wired to prevent the deliberate overriding of fear responses. Although there are extensive neural pathways from the amygdala to the neocortex, the paths running the reverse direction are sparse. Our brains seem to have been designed to allow the fear system to take control in threatening situations and prevent our conscious awareness from reigning.
This may have been an optimal design for predator-rich environments in which survival was a minute-by-minute question, but it is not a good adaptation for modern environments in which the stressors can be job performance reviews. The amygdala may be looking out for your best interests by preserving a memory of that nighttime car accident, but if the result is an inability to drive after dark, the fear circuitry has gone too far. Because the low-road memories are so tenacious, one question neuroscience is now wrestling with is how to subdue the amygdala when those memories hurt the organism.
As a New Yorker who works in downtown Manhattan, LeDoux has been thinking a lot about these issues since September 11, 2001. Many local residents experienced a conditioned fear response that day, making it hard for them to work in tall buildings or visit the downtown area. LeDoux suspects those traumatic memories will persist in the brains of New Yorkers. The treatment possibilities are not about eliminating the memories so much as retraining the amygdala to respond differently when those memories are triggered.
"The contrast," LeDoux says, sitting in his university office above Washington Square Park, with Ground Zero lurking not far to the south, "is between taking action and being stuck, frozen in fear, headed toward despondency, unable to control your life. There's an interesting experiment along these lines: You have a rat that goes into a chamber. A tone goes off, and he gets a shock, and he freezes with the fear response. The next day he goes into chamber B, the tone goes off, and he freezes. But if he takes a step, the tone stops. Eventually he learns that he has to crawl across the chamber to eliminate the tone completely. So by taking that action, he's able to prevent fear from existing in his life.
"In order for the rat to do this," LeDoux continues, standing up to sketch out his ideas on a cluttered white board, "he's got to throw a switch in the amygdala. Normally, the fear response goes from the lateral nucleus to the central nucleus and then out of the amygdala. In order for the rat to take a step, the stimulus has to go not to the central nucleus but to the basal nucleus, and then out to the parts of the brain that are involved in active behavior." In other words, the amygdala wants to associate the memory with the freezing response, but it can be trained to associate it with something less debilitating. When you hear an airplane rumbling overhead, you can freeze, or you can take a step. And with every step you reroute the path of fear through the amygdala.
Our new understanding of fear has also led to cunning pharmacological treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. McGaugh talks about two recent studies that involved giving beta-blockers to people who had recently suffered a traumatic event, studies that built on McGaugh's own research: "Say you have a traumatic experience. The memory of that experience will pop into your brain the next day, whether you want it to or not. And when that memory pops into your brain, you're going to have that whole autonomic response that you had originally. It's going to come back again. So it's not only that you remember that you were mugged, but you also get very emotionally excited about it when the memory happens." That emotional excitement triggers the memory-enhancing cycle all over again, making the traumatic memory even stronger, like a spinning tire deepening the muck hole it's stuck in with each jab on the accelerator. By preventing the autonomic reaction, beta-blockers keep the memory from forming deeper grooves in the brain, making post-traumatic stress symptoms less severe, "which I think is a really interesting development," McGaugh says with a hearty laugh. "Forty-five years of my life I've spent studying rats and out pops something useful!"
Because the fear response can play a direct role in life-and-death struggles, it's not surprising to find that the brain contains elaborate machinery dedicated to its routines. The fact that the amygdala's basic architecture reappears in so many species is testimony to its evolutionary importance: Natural selection generally doesn't tinker with components that have proved essential to basic survival. Of course, the persistence of the low road in a world where predators are largely nonexistent may no longer be adaptive, but that's the trade-off of human culture. Evolution made our brains so smart that we ended up building environments that made some of our mental resources obsolete. No matter how calculating and erudite the neocortex becomes, it can't simply switch off the amygdala. In that sense, you can see the battles between these different regions as a re-enactment of Freud's clash between man's civilized superego and his primal id.
There is great elegance in the way this system has evolved, with its complex mix of instinct and learning. Like all emotions, the fear circuitry steers the organism toward desirable states- away from predators or other threats- without knowing that much in advance about the world that the organism will actually inhabit. We are not slaves to our emotions, but they are hardly at our beck and call either. They propel us in directions that our rational minds don't always understand- fear most of all. The amygdala, like the heart in Pascal's famous phrase, has reasons of which reason knows nothing. |
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Laughter
If evolution comes down to survival of the fittest, then why do we joke around so much? New brain research suggests that the urge to laugh is the lubricant that makes humans higher social beings...
By Steven Johnson
Photograph by Elinor Carucci
Graphics by Don Foley
 Robert Provine wants me to see his Tickle Me Elmo doll. Wants me to hold it, as a matter of fact. It's not an unusual request for Provine. A professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, he has been engaged for a decade in a wide-ranging intellectual pursuit that has taken him from the panting play of young chimpanzees to the history of American sitcoms— all in search of a scientific understanding of that most unscientific of human customs: laughter.
The Elmo doll happens to incorporate two of his primary obsessions: tickling and contagious laughter. "You ever fiddled with one of these?" Provine says, as he pulls the doll out of a small canvas tote bag. He holds it up, and after a second or two, the doll begins to shriek with laughter. There's something undeniably comic in the scene: a burly, bearded man in his mid-fifties cradling a red Muppet. Provine hands Elmo to me to demonstrate the doll's vibration effect. "It brings up two interesting things," he explains, as I hold Elmo in my arms. "You have a best-selling toy that's a glorified laugh box. And when it shakes, you're getting feedback as if you're tickling."
Provine's relationship to laughter reminds me of the dramatic technique that Bertolt Brecht called the distanciation effect. Radical theater, in Brecht's vision, was supposed to distance us from our too-familiar social structures, make us see those structures with fresh eyes. In his study of laughter, Provine has been up to something comparably enlightening, helping us to recognize the strangeness of one of our most familiar emotional states. Think about that Tickle Me Elmo doll: We take it for granted that tickling causes laughter and that one person's laughter will easily "infect" other people within earshot. Even a child knows these things. (Tickling and contagious laughter are two of the distinguishing characteristics of childhood.) But when you think about them from a distance, they are strange conventions. We can understand readily enough why natural selection would have implanted the fight-or-flight response in us or endowed us with sex drives. But the tendency to laugh when others laugh in our presence or to laugh when someone strokes our belly with a feather—what's the evolutionary advantage of that? And yet a quick glance at the Nielsen ratings or the personal ads will tell you that laughter is one of the most satisfying and sought-after states available to us.
Funnily enough, the closer Provine got to understanding why we laugh, the farther he got from humor. To appreciate the roots of laughter, you have to stop thinking about jokes.
There is a long, semi-illustrious history of scholarly investigation into the nature of humor, from Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which may well be the least funny book about humor ever written, to a British research group that announced last year that they had determined the World's Funniest Joke. Despite the fact that the researchers said they had sampled a massive international audience in making this discovery, the winning joke revolved around New Jersey residents:
A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?"
The operator says: "Take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says, "OK, now what?"
This joke illustrates that most assessments of humor's underlying structure gravitate to the notion of controlled incongruity: You're expecting x, and you get y. For the joke to work, it has to be readable on both levels. In the hunting joke there are two plausible ways to interpret the 911 operator's instructions—either the hunter checks his friend's pulse or he shoots him. The context sets you up to expect that he'll check his friend's pulse, so the—admittedly dark—humor arrives when he takes the more unlikely path. That incongruity has limits, of course: If the hunter chooses to do something utterly nonsensical—untie his shoelaces or climb a tree—the joke wouldn't be funny.
A number of studies in recent years have looked at brain activity while subjects were chuckling over a good joke—an attempt to locate a neurological funny bone. There is evidence that the frontal lobes are implicated in "getting" the joke while the brain regions associated with motor control execute the physical response of laughter. One 1999 study analyzed patients with damage to the right frontal lobes, an integrative region of the brain where emotional, logical, and perceptual data converge. The brain-damaged patients had far more difficulty than control subjects in choosing the proper punch line to a series of jokes, usually opting for absurdist, slapstick-style endings rather than traditional ones. Humor can often come in coarse, lowest-common-denominator packages, but actually getting the joke draws upon our higher brain functions.
When Provine set out to study laughter, he imagined that he would approach the problem along the lines of these humor studies: Investigating laughter meant having people listen to jokes and other witticisms and watching what happened. He began by simply observing casual conversations, counting the number of times that people laughed while listening to someone speaking. But very quickly he realized that there was a fundamental flaw in his assumptions about how laughter worked. "I started recording all these conversations," Provine says, "and the numbers I was getting—I didn't believe them when I saw them. The speakers were laughing more than the listeners. Every time that would happen, I would think, 'OK, I have to go back and start over again because that can't be right.'"
Speakers, it turned out, were 46 percent more likely to laugh than listeners—and what they were laughing at, more often than not, wasn't remotely funny. Provine and his team of undergrad students recorded the ostensible "punch lines" that triggered laughter in ordinary conversation. They found that only around 15 percent of the sentences that triggered laughter were traditionally humorous. In his book, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, Provine lists some of the laugh-producing quotes:
I'll see you guys later./Put those cigarettes away./I hope we all do well./It was nice meeting you too./We can handle this./I see your point./I should do that, but I'm too lazy./I try to lead a normal life./I think I'm done./I told you so!
The few studies of laughter to date had assumed that laughing and humor were inextricably linked, but Provine's early research suggested that the connection was only an occasional one. "There's a dark side to laughter that we are too quick to overlook," he says. "The kids at Columbine were laughing as they walked through the school shooting their peers."
As his research progressed, Provine began to suspect that laughter was in fact about something else—not humor or gags or incongruity but our social interactions. He found support for this assumption in a study that had already been conducted, analyzing people's laughing patterns in social and solitary contexts. "You're 30 times more likely to laugh when you're with other people than you are when you're alone—if you don't count simulated social environments like laugh tracks on television," Provine says. "In fact, when you're alone, you're more likely to talk out loud to yourself than you are to laugh out loud. Much more." Think how rarely you'll laugh out loud at a funny passage in a book but how quick you'll be to make a friendly laugh when greeting an old acquaintance. Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It's a form of instinctive social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit.
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Provine's lab at the Baltimore County campus of the University of Maryland looks like the back room at a stereo repair store—long tables cluttered with old equipment, tubes and wires everywhere. The walls are decorated with brightly colored pictures of tangled neurons, most of which were painted by Provine. (Add some Day-Glo typography and they might pass for signs promoting a Dead show at the Fillmore.) Provine's old mentor, the neuroembryologist Viktor Hamburger, glowers down from a picture hung above a battered Silicon Graphics workstation. His expression suggests a sense of concerned bafflement: "I trained you as a scientist, and here you are playing with dolls!"
The more technical parts of Provine's work—exploring the neuromuscular control of laughter and its relationship to the human and chimp respiratory systems—draw on his training at Washington University in St. Louis under Hamburger and Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini. But the most immediate way to grasp his insights into the evolution of laughter is to watch video footage of his informal fieldwork, which consists of Provine and a cameraman prowling Baltimore's inner harbor, asking people to laugh for the camera. The overall effect is like a color story for the local news, but as Provine and I watch the tapes together in his lab, I find myself looking at the laughers with fresh eyes. Again and again, a pattern repeats on the screen. Provine asks someone to laugh, and they demur, look puzzled for a second, and say something like, "I can't just laugh." Then they turn to their friends or family, and the laughter rolls out of them as though it were as natural as breathing. The pattern stays the same even as the subjects change: a group of high school students on a field trip, a married couple, a pair of college freshmen.
At one point Provine—dressed in a plaid shirt and khakis, looking something like the comedian Robert Klein—stops two waste-disposal workers driving a golf cart loaded up with trash bags. When they fail to guffaw on cue, Provine asks them why they can't muster one up. "Because you're not funny," one of them says. They turn to each other and share a hearty laugh.
"See, you two just made each other laugh," Provine says.
"Yeah, well, we're coworkers," one of them replies.
The insistent focus on laughter patterns has a strange effect on me as Provine runs through the footage. By the time we get to the cluster of high school kids, I've stopped hearing their spoken words at all, just the rhythmic peals of laughter breaking out every 10 seconds or so. Sonically, the laughter dominates the speech; you can barely hear the dialogue underneath the hysterics. If you were an alien encountering humans for the first time, you'd have to assume that the laughing served as the primary communication method, with the spoken words interspersed as afterthoughts. After one particularly loud outbreak, Provine turns to me and says, "Now, do you think they're all individually making a conscious decision to laugh?" He shakes his head dismissively. "Of course not. In fact, we're often not aware that we're even laughing in the first place. We've vastly overrated our conscious control of laughter."
The limits of our voluntary control of laughter are most clearly exposed in studies of stroke victims who suffer from a disturbing condition known as central facial paralysis, which prevents them from voluntarily moving either the left side or the right side of their faces, depending on the location of the neurological damage. When these individuals are asked to smile or laugh on command, they produce lopsided grins: One side of the mouth curls up, the other remains frozen. But when they're told a joke or they're tickled, traditional smiles and laughs animate their entire faces. There is evidence that the physical mechanism of laughter itself is generated in the brain stem, the most ancient region of the nervous system, which is also responsible for fundamental functions like breathing. Sufferers of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig's disease—which targets the brain stem, often experience spontaneous bursts of uncontrollable laughter, without feeling mirth. (They often undergo a comparable experience with crying as well.) Sometimes called the reptilian brain because its basic structure dates back to our reptile ancestors, the brain stem is largely devoted to our most primal instincts, far removed from our complex, higher-brain skills in understanding humor. And yet somehow, in this primitive region of the brain, we find the urge to laugh.
We're accustomed to thinking of common-but-unconscious instincts as being essential adaptations, like the startle reflex or the suckling of newborns. Why would we have an unconscious propensity for something as frivolous as laughter? As I watch them on the screen, Provine's teenagers remind me of an old Carl Sagan riff, which begins with his describing "a species of primate" that likes to gather in packs of 50 or 60 individuals, cram together in a darkened cave, and hyperventilate in unison, to the point of almost passing out. The behavior is described in such a way as to make it sound exotic and somewhat foolish, like salmon swimming furiously upstream to their deaths or butterflies traveling thousands of miles to rendezvous once a year. The joke, of course, is that the primate is Homo sapiens, and the group hyperventilation is our fondness for laughing together at comedy clubs or theaters, or with the virtual crowds of television laugh tracks.
I'm thinking about the Sagan quote when another burst of laughter arrives through the TV speakers, and without realizing what I'm doing, I find myself laughing along with the kids on the screen. I can't help it—their laughter is contagious.
We may be the only species on the planet that laughs together in such large groups, but we are not alone in our appetite for laughter. Not surprisingly, our near relatives, the chimpanzees, are also avid laughers, although differences in their vocal apparatus cause the laughter to sound somewhat more like panting. "The chimpanzee's laughter is rapid and breathy, whereas ours is punctuated with glottal stops," says legendary chimp researcher Roger Fouts. "Also, the chimpanzee laughter occurs on the inhale and exhale, while ours is primarily done on our exhales. But other than these small differences, chimpanzee laughter seems to me to be just like ours in most respects."
Chimps don't do stand-up routines, of course, but they do share a laugh-related obsession with humans, one that Provine believes is central to the roots of laughter itself: Chimps love tickling. Back in his lab, Provine shows me video footage of a pair of young chimps named Josh and Lizzie playing with a human caretaker. It's a full-on ticklefest, with the chimps panting away hysterically when their bellies are scratched. "That's chimpanzee laughter you're hearing," Provine says. It's close enough to human laughter that I find myself chuckling along.
Parents will testify that ticklefests are often the first elaborate play routine they engage in with their children and one of the most reliable laugh inducers. According to Fouts, who helped teach sign language to Washoe, perhaps the world's most famous chimpanzee, the practice is just as common, and perhaps more long lived, among the chimps. "Tickling . . . seems to be very important to chimpanzees because it continues throughout their lives," he says. "Even Washoe at the age of 37 still enjoys tickling and being tickled by her adult family members." Among young chimpanzees that have been taught sign language, tickling is a frequent topic of conversation.
Like laughter, tickling is almost by definition a social activity. Like the incongruity theory of humor, tickling relies on a certain element of surprise, which is why it's impossible to tickle yourself. Predictable touch doesn't elicit the laughter and squirming of tickling—it's unpredictable touch that does the trick. A number of tickle-related studies have convincingly shown that tickling exploits the sensorimotor system's awareness of the difference between self and other: If the system orders your hand to move toward your belly, it doesn't register surprise when the nerve endings on your belly report being stroked. But if the touch is being generated by another sensorimotor system, the belly stroking will come as a surprise. The pleasant laughter of tickle is the way the brain responds to that touch. In both human and chimpanzee societies, that touch usually first appears in parent-child interactions and has an essential role in creating those initial bonds. "The reason [tickling and laughter] are so important," Roger Fouts says, "is because they play a role in maintaining the affinitive bonds of friendship within the family and community."
A few years ago, Jared Diamond wrote a short book with the provocative title Why Is Sex Fun? These recent studies suggest an evolutionary answer to the question of why tickling is fun: It encourages us to play well with others. Young children are so receptive to the rough-and-tumble play of tickle that even pretend tickling will often send them into peals of laughter. (Fouts reports that the threat of tickle has a similar effect on his chimps.) In his book, Provine suggests that "feigned tickle" can be thought of as the Original Joke, the first deliberate behavior designed to exploit the tickling-laughter circuit. Our comedy clubs and our sitcoms are culturally enhanced versions of those original playful childhood exchanges. Along with the suckling and smiling instincts, the laughter of tickle evolved as a way of cementing the bond between parents and children, laying the foundation for a behavior that then carried over into the social lives of adults. While we once laughed at the surprise touch of a parent or sibling, we now laugh at the surprise twist of a punch line.
Bowling Green State University professor Jaak Panksepp suggests that there is a dedicated "play" circuitry in the brain, equivalent to the more extensively studied fear and love circuits. Panksepp has studied the role of rough-and-tumble play in cementing social connections between juvenile rats. The play instinct is not easily suppressed. Rats that have been denied the opportunity to engage in this kind of play—which has a distinct choreography, as well as a chirping vocalization that may be the rat equivalent of laughter—will nonetheless immediately engage in play behavior given the chance. Panksepp compares it to a bird's instinct for flying. "Probably the most powerful positive emotion of all—once your tummy is full and you don't have bodily needs—is vigorous social engagement among the young," Panksepp says. "The largest amount of human laughter seems to occur in the midst of early childhood—rough-and-tumble play, chasing, all the stuff they love."
Playing is what young mammals do, and in humans and chimpanzees, laughter is the way the brain expresses the pleasure of that play. "Since laughter seems to be ritualized panting, basically what you do in laughing is replicate the sound of rough-and-tumble play," Provine says. "And you know, that's where I think it came from. Tickle is an important part of our primate heritage. Touching and being touched is an important part of what it means to be a mammal."
There is much that we don't know yet about the neurological underpinnings of laughter. We do not yet know precisely why laughing feels so good; one recent study detected evidence that stimulating the nucleus accumbens, one of the brain's pleasure centers, triggered laughter. Panksepp has performed studies that indicate opiate antagonists significantly reduce the urge to play in rats, which implies that the brain's endorphin system may be involved in the pleasure of laughter. Some anecdotal and clinical evidence suggest that laughing makes you healthier by suppressing stress hormones and elevating immune system antibodies. If you think of laughter as a form of behavior that is basically synonymous with the detection of humor, the laughing-makes-you-healthier premise seems bizarre. Why would natural selection make our immune system respond to jokes? Provine's approach helps solve the mystery. Our bodies aren't responding to wisecracks and punch lines; they're responding to social connection.
In this respect, laughter reminds us that our emotional lives are as much outward bound as they are inner directed. We tend to think of emotions as private affairs, feelings that wash over our subjective worlds. But emotions are also social acts, laughter perhaps most of all. It's no accident that we have so many delicately choreographed gestures and facial expressions—many of which appear to be innate to our species—to convey our emotions. Our emotional systems are designed to share our feelings and not just represent them internally—an insight that Darwin first grasped more than a century ago in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. "The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever their origin may have been, are in themselves of much importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of communication between mother and infant; she smiles approval, and thus encourages her child on the right path. . . . The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it."
And even if we don't yet understand the neurological basis of the pleasure that laughing brings us, it makes sense that we should seek out the connectedness of infectious laughter. We are social animals, after all. And if that laughter often involves some pretty childish behavior, so be it. "I mean, this is why we're not like lizards," Provine says, holding the Tickle Me Elmo doll on his lap. "Lizards don't play, and they're not social the way we are. When you start to see play, you're starting to see mammals. So when we get together and have a good time and laugh, we're going back to our roots. It's ironic in a way: Some of the things that give us the most pleasure in life are really the most ancient." |
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Love
Are we finally getting good enough at biochemistry to understand the mystery - and magic - of romance?
By Steven Johnson
Photograph by Elinor Carucci
Graphics by Don Foley
 Near the end of the movie A Beautiful Mind, the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash decides he wants to stay off his medication and out of the hospital, despite experiencing incessant delusions. "If I can just think through this," he explains to his long-suffering wife, "I can make it better." She takes his hand and puts it against her head. "Maybe the part that knows the waking from the dream—maybe it isn't here," she says. She moves his hand down to her heart. "Maybe it's here."
It's an ancient trope, but a false one. Several decades from now, when TV watchers encounter A Beautiful Mind on a classic movies channel, the idea of love residing in the heart as opposed to the head will seem as absurd as bloodletting. That's because the physiological reality of love belongs no more to the heart than it does to the liver. Like all emotions, love originates in the brain as surely as brilliant mathematical theorems do. We feel the passions of love because our brains contain specific neurochemical systems that create those feelings in us. We are not torn between the heart and the brain but rather between different parts of the brain, parts that specialize in the cornerstones of rational thought, such as long-term planning, and parts that give our lives emotional color.
Scientists who study the brain have traditionally spent far more time exploring the neural pathways of negative emotional responses: On our current map of the mind, the regions of fear are clearly delineated. Not so the kingdom of love and attachment, which has been a vast terra incognita until recently. But a new portrait of love has begun to emerge, and at its center lies a fascinating hormone called oxytocin that may well follow in the footsteps of serotonin, which shot into the popular consciousness a dozen years ago as Prozac was introduced. We are entering an age of brain biochemistry that can grasp the undecipherable—love.
You Tarzan, Me Jane
In March of 1998, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles named Shelley Taylor attended a guest lecture at the university's Westwood campus. The topic was stress and the fight-or-flight instinct, a subject she knew a thing or two about, having studied human stress response for 20 years. At one point in the lecture, the speaker told a story about the levels of aggression he had witnessed in laboratory rats placed in stressful situations. After they had been repeatedly shocked with an electrical charge, the rats began to bite and claw each other to death.
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"That went off like a lightbulb in my head, because it's not at all descriptive of what we typically see in human studies," Taylor recalls, sitting in her campus office, a Los Angeles cityscape hovering behind the pine branches outside her window. "I went back to my lab group, and I said, 'What do you make of these disjunctions between the animal studies and what we see in humans?' And one of them said, 'You know, the animal studies are all based on males. They hardly ever include females, because females cycle so rapidly.' And then someone else said, 'You know, I think that's true for the human literature as well.' So we started looking through the literature to see how well female responses to stress were represented, and the answer was very poorly. Prior to 1995, females constituted 17 percent of participants. There were virtually no studies where you had enough female participation to do a comparative study."
The lack of gender parity was not just a political issue. For decades, the scientific literature on stress response revolved around a fundamental causal chain: Introduce a stressor—a lunging predator, say, or a rival stealing your food supply—and the body initiates the now-famous fight-or-flight response. Confronted with stress, the theory went, our bodies instinctively primed themselves to strike back or run away. Fight or flight was compatible with the old Darwinian nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw stereotypes, but it didn't leave much room for an equally common human response to traumatic events: reaching out to loved ones. A parent reacting to a sudden threat will often put himself or herself in greater danger if it means protecting a child or a partner. That selfless behavior makes perfect sense to anyone who has felt parental or romantic love, but under the fight-or-flight paradigm, the behavior seems anomalous.
Taylor suspected that the fight-or-flight response was only half the story, and that gender differences might help shed light on the other half. "I said to my group, 'OK, let's start from scratch. What are women doing? Is fight or flight a reasonable description of women's response to stress?' And within seconds, all of us had an immediate response: No. Because what differentiates female responses to stress from those of males is that female responses have to incorporate the protection of offspring, at least for the period of time that there are offspring. Our idea was that fight behavior works fine if you're an individual, but if you're trying to protect young, fighting just isn't going to work. The same goes for flight—only ungulates like deer have offspring that are capable of fleeing shortly after birth." Two years after attending that guest lecture, Taylor had formulated a new theory, in the form of an essay published in Psychological Review titled "Behavioral Responses to Stress in Females." Fight or flight was one way of dealing with stress, she acknowledged, but there was another option: tend and befriend. You can combat threats by literally going to combat with them, or you can lean on your friends and family for support.
Taylor believes the tending instinct is more commonly expressed in women. "There was recently a meta-review of 28 different studies, and 26 of them found that women sought social support more than men. Short of childbirth, there is no sex difference in humans that looks like that. With most sex differences—men have a slight spatial advantage, women have a linguistic advantage—when you actually look at the curves, there's an enormous overlap." But when it comes to seeking out social bonds in the face of stress, the contrast is emphatic.
Taylor and her team even had a solid hunch about the brain chemistry behind the tending instinct. Researchers had long since detected the release of the peptide oxytocin during some of the key life experiences that involve intense emotional attachment: birth, breast-feeding, and sexual climax. In recent years, higher oxytocin levels had been linked to stressful experiences as well. While oxytocin was present in both male and female brains, evidence suggested that estrogen enhanced the peptide's effects, making it less powerful in males because of testosterone levels. If there was a biologically grounded tending instinct, oxytocin probably played a role.
Taylor's "tend or befriend" enjoyed its 15 minutes as a media sound bite following the publication in 2002 of her book The Tending Instinct, but the underlying concept was more than just a passing slogan. The idea that brain circuitries devoted to affiliation and social bonds may well be as sophisticated as our fear mechanisms had been percolating for almost a decade. And while an aggressive pack of lab rats might have provided Taylor with her eureka moment, the search for the brain science of attachment began with a more unlikely test subject.
Load up on adrenaline, or cool down with oxytocin
About 20 years ago, neuroendocrinologist Sue Carter began examining the brains of prairie voles to understand why the small rodent indigenous to the midwestern plains of the United States is one of the natural world's great romantics. After mating, most voles remain monogamously attached for life, raising pups together in a rodent version of domestic bliss. This is, to say the least, an unusual practice in nature: Less than 5 percent of all mammals show monogamous, biparental behavior.
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"I became interested in oxytocin then because I knew that oxytocin was released during sexual behavior," Carter says. "There was already research coming out showing that oxytocin facilitated parent-child bonding in sheep." When Carter injected oxytocin into the brains of voles, they formed bonds more quickly than usual. She and her colleagues also explored the effects of oxytocin from the reverse angle, by injecting chemicals that blocked the oxytocin receptors, cutting off the supply of the hormone. The voles' lifestyle began to look less like Leave It to Beaver and more like Woodstock: indiscriminate mating without any lasting attachment. "The most compelling evidence for oxytocin's role in bonding is simply that when you block the oxytocin receptors, the animals don't form pair-bonds," Carter says.
Several years later, Tom Insel, a former colleague of Carter's who is now president of the National Institute of Mental Health, began a comparative study analyzing the brains of prairie voles and their less monogamous cousins, the montane voles. Insel discovered a remarkable difference between the two species: In the faithful voles, the oxytocin receptors overlapped with dopamine receptors in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens; in the nonmonogamous voles, the oxytocin receptors were located elsewhere. The nucleus accumbens is generally regarded as one of the brain's essential pleasure centers. Dopamine coordinates many seeking and appetitive behaviors. In the monogamous voles, oxytocin receptors were planted firmly in the reward circuitry of the brain. The architecture suggested that behaviors associated with oxytocin release would feel good in the brains of the prairie voles but leave the montane voles relatively unaffected. If oxytocin encouraged the animals to stay attached to a partner, it was no wonder the prairie voles turned out to be so committed. Their brains were wired to make forming attachments pleasurable.
For the first time, researchers glimpsed the underlying circuitry that made pair-bonding desirable. The temptation to extrapolate the vole studies to the brain chemistry of humans was irresistible. Could the voles give us an answer to the age-old question, Why do fools fall in love?
By most accounts, exploring the neurochemical basis of love in the human brain has proved to be a thorny enterprise. When I ask Carter about the difficulty of designing experiments with human subjects, she laughs. "Well, do you want to be in the study? I mean, this is powerful stuff. It's extremely powerful and important to human behavior. Suppose you agree to participate in a love study, and I pick out a random partner for you? They do that on TV, but you can't do it in universities."
Despite the inherent difficulties, a number of recent studies have shed light on the brain chemistry of human love. Like those of the monogamous prairie vole, human oxytocin receptors are located in several dopamine-rich regions of the brain, suggesting that oxytocin is embedded in our reward circuitry. One study compared the brain activity of people looking at pictures of loved ones or at pictures of non-romantic friends. The pattern of activity in the cortex was markedly different depending on which type of face the subject was exposed to. FMRI scans of brains processing a romantic gaze bear a striking resemblance to the brain activity of new mothers listening to infants' cries. They also resemble brain images of people under the influence of cocaine.
The face-recognition studies are of particular interest because a number of animal studies have convincingly linked oxytocin to the formation of social memory. One hypothesis is that oxytocin release during key pair-bonding events like sexual climax or childbirth helps cement the image of a partner or a newborn in the mind's eye. Mothers who breast-feed their children often describe powerful memories of infants gazing up at them during nursing. The vividness of those memories, and their association with warm feelings, may well be the imprint of oxytocin.
Oxytocin has also been widely implicated in human responses to stress. "Because of my whole personal history of feeding my children, I became interested in breast-feeding as a protective mechanism," Carter says. "We were able to compare the effects of stress on lactating and non-lactating women. With the lactating women, we know they have more oxytocin, and we know they manage stress better." A number of studies have convincingly demonstrated that oxytocin is what scientists call a down regulator of the body's stress-axis system, which creates the bleak, gut-tightening feeling you experience when you get the news that the promotion didn't come through. People under the influence of oxytocin have smaller, briefer stress responses than others do; bad news seems to roll off them more readily.
The link between stress response and social attachment is at the heart of Taylor's idea of the tending instinct. You can fight your way out of stress by destroying your enemies, or you can reduce stress by reaching out to loved ones. In terms of brain chemistry, you can load up on adrenaline and fight or flee, or you can cool down with oxytocin and tend and befriend.
Love Potion No. 9 Doesn't Exist
While the range and potency of oxytocin make for a fascinating story, Taylor cautions that its effect on human emotions is far from simple: "A lot of people say, 'Oxytocin is the cuddly hormone,' or 'Oxytocin's the love hormone.' Oxytocin is much more evasive than that, and it doesn't have one-to-one correspondence with psychological states. It's real risky trying to map these molecules onto specific states.
"For instance," Taylor says, leaning forward in her chair for emphasis, "older women who are living with husbands and finding those husbands to be nonsupportive have chronically higher levels of oxytocin. Now it's not clear what the direction of causality is. But a tentative conclusion that I would make is that when social-support needs are not being met, oxytocin levels go up as a signal to seek out social contact. And then once found, oxytocin may be restored to normal levels. So oxytocin isn't the 'feel good' hormone. At times, it may be the 'feel crummy' hormone that leads you to take steps to feel better."
Some scientists believe oxytocin works in tandem with the body's natural opiates, with oxytocin triggering the drive for social attachment and the opioids supplying the warm, fuzzy feeling of being in the company of loved ones. "The oxytocin story has come on like gangbusters, and it's certainly a big-ticket item," says Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio whose laboratory began working on opioids and social attachment in the 1970s. "But unfortunately, the oxytocin people forgot about the earlier opioid story."
Panksepp believes that one of the effects oxytocin has is to reduce the tolerance effect that plays such a devastating role in drug addiction. Just as addicts develop a tolerance to heroin that causes them to take ever-larger doses, the brain develops an identical tolerance to naturally occurring opiates. In tests with animal subjects, oxytocin injections dramatically reduced tolerance to opiates. In other words, oxytocin may not create the visceral pleasure of love and attachment, but it does enable that pleasure to last for a longer period of time.
All of which suggests that the phrase "addicted to love" may be more than poetry. Drugs like heroin do their damage because they tap directly into the brain chemistry that regulates the bonds of love. When people become addicted to drugs, one of the most common reactions expressed by close friends is a sense of bewilderment at the addict's ability to turn his or her back on family and friendship. Not knowing firsthand the tremendous force of addiction, it seems monstrous to us that someone could trade a child's love for the prick of a needle. But that needle contains the very drug that helps make the child's love appealing. We understand intuitively why someone might sacrifice a life for a child. When drug addicts make comparable sacrifices, it seems positively inhuman. Yet neurochemically, those sacrifices are laid at the same altar.
The link between opioids and oxytocin underscores Taylor's point about the "love drug" reductionism. Folklore and literature are filled with tales of love potions, but the story is far more complicated than that. There is a biologically grounded brain system that creates and maintains the feeling we call love, but its cause can't be reduced to a single molecule. There are undeniable interactions between oxytocin and opioids, and the prairie vole's brain anatomy suggests a strong connection between dopamine and oxytocin. More important, oxytocin's effects are heightened by estrogen and dampened by androgens like testosterone, which may help explain differences between male and female stress responses. Love may not reside in the heart, as folk wisdom would have it, but neither does it reside in a single molecule. When we feel the stirring of romantic love or parental attachment, we are sensing a complex interplay of brain chemicals, triggering activity in specific regions of the brain. Oxytocin is critical to that interplay, but it is not the whole story.
Why do voles fall in love?
The complexity of the human brain—and the ethical problems of experimenting with humans—may mean that the scientific understanding of attachment will not proceed quickly. When I ask Taylor what breakthrough she'd most like to see in this field, she doesn't miss a beat. "I'd like to have a human equivalent to the prairie-vole model," she says, looking wistful. "The prairie-vole model is a beautiful one."
But while our knowledge of human neurochemistry is finite, the extent to which the chemistry repeats itself in other mammals suggests that love is as much a part of our evolutionary heritage as heartbeat regulation or stereovision. If we had evolved as a species with different mating and child-rearing habits—abandoning our children at birth and moving indiscriminately from partner to partner, like most reptiles—it's likely our brains would be incapable of feeling love.
Reptiles lack our neocortex, the seat of language and higher learning, and have a very primitive limbic system, the part of the brain that plays a key role in regulating emotional response. Reptile brains produce only a very preliminary version of the oxytocin molecule. If some accident of evolution had led reptiles to develop a neocortex while maintaining their nonexistent child-rearing habits, they might have ended up writing powerful verse about some other deep-seated biochemical urge—temperature regulation, say—but there would be no love sonnets in the reptile canon.
The biological capacity for love is one way the brain prepares us for offspring who are born young and helpless and need tending to have the slightest hope of survival. That tending comes in the form of social bonds—between parent and child, between parents, among the extended social family members who help raise the child. The glue that keeps those bonds strong is the feeling of pleasure and reward and satisfaction that our brains concoct for us when we enter into loving relationships.
It can be daunting to think that the core ingredients of that glue are shared by humans and prairie voles. Because love is the source of so many of humanity's highest creative achievements, we like to think that the feeling itself is just as unique. But the commonalities of brain chemistry—and the commonalities of behavior—suggest that at least some part of love's intoxication is experienced by other mammals. "I think reasonable people have to open their minds to the possibility that very similar basic feelings occur," Panksepp says. "Other mammals can't make movies or art or other great things with their feelings the way we can. But it would be foolish for us to deny the continuity of the foundational elements."
When asked how the subjective experience of prairie-vole love might differ from the human experience, Panksepp is speechless. "I don't think that question can be answered," he says, then starts to formulate an answer. "We know much more about the chemistry of attachment and love in prairie voles than we do about that chemistry in humans. I mean, the animal work has yielded such riches in terms of the underlying details. We just don't know that much about our own species. But everything we're learning from the human and animal genome projects, about the conservation of neurochemistries and the neuroanatomies, all of this points me to the conclusion that we are learning about ourselves when we study these little critters." |
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PHP Web Sites
There is a tremendous amount of PHP reference material online. With everything from the annotated PHP manual to sites with periodic articles and tutorials, a fast Internet connection rivals a large bookshelf in PHP documentary usefulness. Here are some key sites:
- The Annotated PHP Manual: http://www.php.net/manual/
- Available in seventeen languages, this includes both official documentation of functions and language features as well as user-contributed comments.
- PHP mailing lists: http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php
- There are many PHP mailing lists covering installation, programming, extending PHP, and various other topics. A read-only web interface to the mailing lists is at http://news.php.net/.
- PHP Presentation archive: http://conf.php.net/
- A collection of presentations on PHP given at various conferences.
- PEAR: http://pear.php.net/
- PEAR calls itself "a framework and distribution system for reuseable PHP components." You'll find lots of useful PHP classes and sample code there.
- PHP.net: A Tourist's Guide: http://www.php.net/sites.php
- This is a guide to the various web sites under the php.net umbrella.
- PHP Knowledge Base: http://php.faqts.com/
- Many questions and answers from the PHP community, as well as links to other resources.
- PHP DevCenter: http://www.onlamp.com/php/
- A collection of PHP articles and tutorials with a good mix of introductory and advanced topics.
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PHP Books
This section lists books that are helpful references and tutorials for building applications with PHP. Most are specific to web-related programming; look for books on MySQL, HTML, XML, and HTTP.
At the end of the section, I've included a few books that are useful for every programmer regardless of language of choice. These works can make you a better programmer by teaching you how to think about programming as part of a larger pattern of problem solving.
- Programming PHP by Kevin Tatroe and Rasmus Lerdorf (O'Reilly).
- HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy (O'Reilly).
- Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Guide by Danny Goodman (O'Reilly).
- Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (O'Reilly).
- XML in a Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O'Reilly).
- MySQL Reference Manual, by Michael "Monty" Widenius, David Axmark, and MySQL AB (O'Reilly); also available at http://www.mysql.com/documentation/.
- MySQL, by Paul DuBois (New Riders).
- Web Security, Privacy, and Commerce by Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford (O'Reilly).
- Web Services Essentials, by Ethan Cerami (O'Reilly).
- HTTP Pocket Reference, by Clinton Wong (O'Reilly).
- The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike (Addison-Wesley).
- Programming Pearls by Jon Louis Bentley (Addison-Wesley).
- The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks (Addison-Wesley).
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