On happiness and mind control.

Many of us would like to feel happier.

In the United States, people are having sex less often. And between alcohol, marijuana, recreational painkillers – not to mention anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication – we take a lot of drugs.

Many of us work long hours at jobs we dislike so that we can afford to buy things that promise to fill some of the emptiness inside. The most lucrative businesses are advertising companies … one of which, Facebook, is designed to make you feel worse so that you’ll be more susceptible to its ads.

The suicide rate has been rising.

From Dan Diamond’s Forbes blog post
“Stopping The Growing Risk Of Suicide: How You Can Help.”

It might seem as though we don’t know how to make people happier. But, actually, we do.

Now, I know that I’ve written previously with bad medical advice, such as the suggestion that intentionally infecting yourself with the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii could make you happier. This parasite boosts dopamine levels in your brain (dopamine is a neurotransmitter that conveys feelings of pleasure and mirth) and makes you feel bolder (in controlled laboratory experiments, infected mice show less stress when making risky decisions, and observational data suggests the same to be true for infected humans). You also might become more attractive (infected rodents have more sex, and portrait photographs of infected human men are perceived as more dominant and masculine).

There are drawbacks to Toxoplasma infection, of course. Infected rodents are more likely to be killed by cats. Infected humans may become slower as well, both physically and intellectually. Toxoplasma forms cysts in your brain. It might increase the chance of developing schizophrenia. It can kill you if you’re immunocompromised. And the surest way to contract toxoplasmosis, if incidental exposure hasn’t already done it for you, is by eating cat excrement.

My advice today is different. No feces required!

And I’m not suggesting anything illegal. I mentioned, above, that people in the United States take a lot of drugs. Several of these boost dopamine levels in your brain. Cocaine, for instance, is a “dopamine re-uptake inhibitor,” ensuring that any momentary sensation of pleasure will linger, allowing you to feel happy longer.

But cocaine has a nasty side effect of leading to incarceration, especially if the local law enforcement officers decide that your epidermal melanin concentration is too high. And jail is not a happy place.

Instead, you could make yourself happier with a bit of at-home trepanation, followed by the insertion of an electrode into the nucleus accumbens of your brain. Now, I know that sounds risky, what with the nucleus accumbens being way down near the base of your brain. But your brain is rather squishy – although you’ll sheer some cells as you cram a length of conductive wire into your cranium, the hope is that many neurons will be pushed out of the way.

The nucleus accumbens tends to show high activity during pleasure. For instance, cocaine stimulates activity in this part of your brain. So does money — tell research subjects that they’ve won a prize and you’ll see this region light up. If rats are implanted with an electrode that lets them jolt their own nucleus accumbens by pushing a lever, they’ll do it over and over. Pressing that lever makes them happier than eating, or drinking water, or having sex. They’ll blissfully self-stimulate until they collapse. From James Olds’s Science paper, “Self-Stimulation of the Brain”:

If animals with electrodes in the hypothalamus were run for 24 hours or 48 hours consecutively, they continued to respond as long as physiological endurance permitted.

Perhaps I should have warned you – amateur brain modification would carry some risks. Even if you have the tools needed to drill into your own skull without contracting a horrible infection, you don’t want to boost your mood just to die of dehydration.

After all, happiness might have some purpose. There might be reasons why certain activities – like eating, drinking water, having sex … to say nothing of strolling outdoors, or volunteering to help others – make us feel happy. After discussing several case studies in their research article “How Happy Is Too Happy,” Matthis Synofzik, Thomas Schlaepfer, and Joseph Fins write that using deep brain stimulation for the “induction of chronic euphoria could also impair the person’s cognitive capacity to respond to reasons about which volitions and preferences are in his or her best interests.”

When an activity makes us feel happy, we’re likely to do it again. That’s how people manage to dedicate their lives to service. Or get addicted to drugs.

And it’s how brain stimulation could be used for mind control.

If you show me a syringe, I’ll feel nervous. I don’t particularly like needles. But if you display that same syringe to an intravenous drug user, you’ll trigger some of the rush of actually shooting up. The men in my poetry classes have said that they feel all tingly if they even see the word “needle” written in a poem.

For months or years, needles presaged a sudden flush of pleasure. That linkage was enough for their brains to develop a fondness for the needles themselves.

If you wanted to develop a taste for an unpalatable food, you could do the same thing. Like bittermelon – I enjoy bittermelons, which have a flavor that’s totally different from anything else I’ve ever eaten, but lots of people loathe them.

Still, if you used deep brain stimulation to trigger pleasure every time a person ate bittermelon, that person would soon enjoy it.

Bittermelon. Image by [cipher] in Tokyo, Japan on Wikimedia.

Or you could make someone fall in love.

Far more effective than any witch’s potion, that. Each time your quarry encounters the future beloved, crank up the voltage. The beloved’s presence will soon be associated with a sense of comfort and pleasure. And that sensation – stretched out for long enough that the pair can build a set of shared memories – is much of what love is.

Of course, it probably sounds like I’m joking. You wouldn’t really send jolts of electricity into the core of somebody’s brain so that he’d fall in love with somebody new … right?

Fifty years passed between the discovery of pleasure-inducing deep brain stimulation and its current use as a treatment for depression … precisely because one of the pioneering researchers decided that it was reasonable to use the electrodes as a love potion.

In 1972, Charles Moan and Robert Heath published a scientific paper titled “Septal stimulation for the initiation of heterosexual behavior in a homosexual male.” Their study subject was a 24-year-old man who had been discharged from the military for homosexuality. Moan and Heath postulated that the right regimen of electrode stimulation – jolted while watching pornography, or while straddled by a female prostitute whom Moan and Heath hired to visit their lab – might lead this young man to desire physical intimacy with women.

Moan and Heath’s paper is surprisingly salacious:

After about 20 min of such interaction she begun [sic] to mount him, and though he was somewhat reticent he did achieve penetration. Active intercourse followed during which she had an orgasm that he was apparently able to sense. He became very excited at this and suggested that they turn over in order that he might assume the initiative. In this position he often paused to delay orgasm and to increase the duration of the pleasurable experience. Then, despite the milieu [inside a lab, romping under the appraising eyes of multiple fully-clothed scientists] and the encumbrance of the electrode wires, he successfully ejaculated. Subsequently, he expressed how much he had enjoyed her and how he hoped that he would have sex with her again in the near future.

The science writer Lone Frank recently published The Pleasure Shock, a meticulously researched book in which she concludes that Heath was unfairly maligned because most people in the 1970s were reticent to believe that consciousness arose from the interaction of perfectly ordinary matter inside our skulls. Changing a person’s mood with electricity sounds creepy, especially if you think that a mind is an ethereal, inviolable thing.

But it isn’t.

The mind, that is. The mind isn’t an ethereal, inviolable thing.

Zapping new thoughts into somebody’s brain, though, is definitely still understood (by me, at least) to be creepy.

Discussing the contemporary resurgence of electrical brain modification, Frank writes that:

In 2013, economist Ernst Fehr of Zurich University experimented with transcranial direct current stimulation, which sends a weak current through the cranium and is able to influence activity in areas of the brain that lie closest to the skull.

Fehr had sixty-three research subjects available. They played a money game in which they each were given a sum and had to take a position on how much they wanted to give an anonymous partner. In the first round, there were no sanctions from the partner, but in the second series of experiments, the person in question could protest and punish the subject.

There were two opposing forces at play. A cultural norm for sharing fairly – that is, equally – and a selfish interest in getting as much as possible for oneself. Fehr and his people found that the tug of war could be influenced by the right lateral prefrontal cortex. When the stimulation increased the brain activity, the subjects followed the fairness norm to a higher degree, while they were more inclined to act selfishly when the activity was diminished.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking thing was that the research subjects did not themselves feel any difference. When they were asked about it, they said their idea of fairness had not changed, while the selfishness of their behavior had changed.

Apparently, you can fiddle with subtle moral parameters in a person without the person who is manipulated being any the wiser.

The human brain evolved to create elaborate narratives that rationalize our own actions. As far as our consciousness is concerned, there’s no difference between telling a just so story about a decision we made un-aided, versus explaining a “choice” that we were guided toward by external current.

Frank believes that Heath was a brilliant doctor who sincerely wanted to help patients.

When bioethicist Carl Elliott reviewed The Pleasure Shock for the New York Review of Books, however, he pointed out that even – perhaps especially – brilliant doctors who sincerely want to help patients can stumble into rampantly unethical behavior.

The problem isn’t just that Heath pulsed electricity into the brain of a homosexual man so that he could ejaculate while fooling around with a woman. Many of Heath’s patients – who, it’s worth acknowledging, had previously been confined to nightmarish asylums – developed infections from their electrode implantations and died. Also, Heath knowingly promoted fraudulent research findings because he’d staked his reputation on a particular theory and was loathe to admit that he’d been wrong (not that Heath has been the only professor to perpetuate falsehoods this way).

Elliott concludes that:

Heath was a physician in love with his ideas.

Psychiatry has seen many men like this. Heath’s contemporaries include Ewen Cameron, the CIA-funded psychiatrist behind the infamous “psychic driving” studies at McGill University, in which patients were drugged into comas and subjected to repetitive messages or sounds for long periods, and Walter Freeman, the inventor of the icepick lobotomy and its most fervent evangelist.

These men may well have started with the best of intentions. But in medical research, good intentions can lead to the embalming table. All it takes is a powerful researcher with a surplus of self-confidence, a supportive institution, and a ready supply of vulnerable subjects.

Heath had them all.

It’s true that using an electrode to stimulate the nucleus accumbens inside your brain can probably make you feel happier. By way of contrast, reading essays like this one make most people feel less happy.

Sometimes it’s good to feel bad, though.

As Elliott reminds us, a lot of vulnerable people were abused in this research. A lot of vulnerable people are still treated with cavalier disregard, especially when folks with psychiatric issues are snared by our country’s criminal justice system. And the torments that we dole upon non-human animals are even worse.

Consider this passage from Frans De Waal’s Mama’s Last Hug, discussing empathy:

[University of Chicago researcher Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal] placed one rat in an enclosure, where it encountered a small transparent container, a bit like a jelly jar. Squeezed inside it was another rat, locked up, wriggling in distress.

Not only did the free rat learn how to open a little door to liberate the other, but she was remarkably eager to do so. Never trained on it, she did so spontaneously.

Then Bartal challenged her motivation by giving her a choice between two containers, one with chocolate chips – a favorite food that they could easily smell – and another with a trapped companion. The free rat often rescued her companion first, suggesting that reducing her distress counted more than delicious food.

Is it possible that these rats liberated their companions for companionship? While one rat is locked up, the other has no chance to play, mate, or groom. Do they just want to make contact? While the original study failed to address this question, a different study created a situation where rats could rescue each other without any chance of further interaction. That they still did so confirmed that the driving force is not a desire to be social.

Bartal believes it is emotional contagion: rats become distressed when noticing the other’s distress, which spurs them into action.

Conversely, when Bartal gave her rats an anxiety-reducing drug, turning them into happy hippies, they still knew how to open the little door to reach the chocolate chips, but in their tranquil state, they had no interest in the trapped rat. They couldn’t care less, showing the sort of emotional blunting of people on Prozac or pain-killers.

The rats became insensitive to the other’s agony and ceased helping.

You could feel happier. We know enough to be able to reach into your mind and change it. A miniscule flow of electrons is enough to trigger bliss.

But should we do it? Or use our unhappiness as fuel to change the world instead?

On mind control versus body control

In jail last week, we found ourselves discussing mind control. Ants that haul infected comrades away from the colony – otherwise, the zombie will climb above the colony before a Cordyceps fruiting body bursts from its spine, raining spores down onto everyone below, causing them all to die.

Several parasites, including Toxoplasma gondii, are known to change behaviors by infecting the brain. I’ve written about Toxo and the possibility of using cat shit as a nutritional supplement previously – this parasite seems to make its victims happier (it secretes a rate-limiting enzyme for dopamine synthesis), braver, and more attractive.

I told the guys that I used to think mind control was super-terrifying – suddenly your choices are not quite your own! – but I’ve since realized that body control is even more terrifying.

We’d thought that each fungus that makes ants act funny was taking over their brains. But we were wrong. The Ophiocordyceps fungus is not controlling the brains of its victims – instead, the fungus spreads through the body and connects directly to muscle fibers. The fungus leaves an ant’s brain intact but takes away its choices, contracting muscles to make the ant do its bidding while the poor creature can only gaze in horror at what it’s being forced to do.

If a zombie master corrupts your brain and forces you to obey, at least you won’t be there to watch. Far worse to be trapped behind the window of your eyes, unable to control the actions that your shell is taking in the world.

A sense of free will is so important to our well-being that human brains seem to include modules that graft a perception of volition onto our reflex actions. Because it takes so long for messages to be relayed to the central processing unit of our brains and back outward to our limbs, our bodies often act before we’ve had a chance to consciously think about what we’re doing. Our actions typically begin a few hundred milliseconds before we subjectively experience a decision.

Then, the brain’s storytelling function kicks into gear – we explain to ourselves why we chose to do the thing that we’ve already begun doing.

If something goes wrong at that stage, we feel awful. People report that their bodies have “gone rogue.” If you use a targeted magnetic pulse to sway a right-handed person to do a simple task left-handed, that person probably won’t notice anything amiss. The storytelling part of our brain hardly cares what we do – it can come up with a compelling rationalization for almost any action.

“Well, I chose to use my left hand because … “

But if you use a targeted magnetic pulse to incapacitate the brain’s internal storyteller? The sensation apparently feels like demonic possession. Our own choices are nightmarish when severed from a story.

On playing outdoors, and allergies.

K has been on a big kick reading books about sending students outside. Obviously, I approve. Being outdoors seems to make most humans happier, and people who spend time outside seem more likely to care about preserving our environment. Plus, K even has scholastic reasons to ask students to sit contemplatively outside — it’s reasonable for students in a college-level biology course to practice fieldwork.

I try to get N outside a lot, too, but with her it’s probably not reasonable to use “learning to do fieldwork” as an excuse. She’s a bit young to practice the extreme patience needed for successful fieldwork, so I thought it might be worthwhile summarizing a few of the recent studies on exposure to the world, allergies, and autoimmune disorders.

I should declare my conflict of interest upfront, though. I’m extremely biased because I want you, dear reader, and your friends, and your family, to spend more time outside. Unless you’re, I don’t know, living in a tent, roasting carrots & beats & whatnot over a firepit every evening… then you’re probably outside plenty. It’s the rest of us, those who lead more normative modern lives, sleeping in air-conditioned homes, zipping about town inside our cars, hoofing it down concrete sidewalks, spending long hours pecking at our computers, who could use a bit more outdoor time. I’ll try my best to keep this short so that you can rush outside and play, but if you feel antsy & want to go out now, go ahead! I won’t begrudge your priorities!

The basic idea behind all of this was proposed by David Strachan in the article “Hay Fever, Hygiene, and Household Size.” He observed that younger siblings were less likely to get asthma and proposed that the messy, disease-prone lifestyle of multi-child families was protecting those younger children. As in, getting sick more often as a child, and having an absentminded older sister who tracks mud through the house, might lead to better health as an adult.

Which is a lovely theory. At birth, our immune systems are relatively ignorant. They instinctively know that they should destroy things — we are the product of untold millennia of selection for those who can survive routine infections — but they don’t know what they should destroy. Exposure to pathogens trains our immune systems to recognize & attack those pathogens. Repeated exposure to innocuous substances trains us to ignore those ever-present harmless components of our environment.

The modern world is very clean, though. We wash our hands. We eat less dirt. We’re less likely to even walk barefoot through the dirt. Most people in the United States don’t pull their drinking water from a river that another tribe upstream defecates into. And that’s good. We get sick less. Children are more likely to survive to adulthood. But it also means that many people’s immune systems encounter fewer pathogens than they “expect.”

If you’re in the market for a really evil social psychology experiment, I’ve got one for you: find a small child & every day explain to that child that he should expect to get into at least one fight per week at school. Tell him, “There are so many bullies out there! You’ll have to be ready for them! Don’t let them catch you off guard. One fight a week! Maybe two! It’s a jungle and they prey on the weak!”

Once that kid starts kindergarten, even if it’s in a total fluff district where his classmates are all sunshine and rainbows, he’s probably going to get into fights. Because he’ll assume those fights are supposed to happen, so he’ll blow tiny slights way out of proportion… you used the blue crayon too long! Pow!

The hygiene hypothesis purports that our immune systems are the same. They expect fights, and so if we put them into too-clean environs, they become the bullies they’ve been warned about (bonus points if you’re thinking about the shipwrecked sailer from The Watchmen now). Immune systems can rage against innocuous compounds — those are allergies. Or, worse, they get so incredibly bored, they’re expecting fights and everyone is so incredibly nice, that they begin to attack their own hosts. As in, our own bodies.

Fighting off foreign infections helps the immune system learn to distinguish self from other, but if there are too few outsiders, the immune system just starts wailing on a mirror. Wondering why the kid on the other side can’t ever be knocked down.

Autoimmune disorders are the pits.

And for years it seemed like there was nothing to do, once you contracted an allergy, except avoid the thing that triggers your itching and snurfling. Or, worse, triggers your anaphylactic shock, dizziness, maybe death from loss of breathing.

But there might be hope!

Recently, researchers have been testing whether you can retrain an immune system to ignore innocuous compounds. For instance, peanuts: by eating a small amount of peanuts every day you might be able to train your immune system to just leave them be instead of going berserk trying to pick a fight. Because it’s the immune system’s fit of rage that kills people, not the peanuts themselves. If peanuts are always around, that familiarity might breed lassitude.

(NOTE: there are a lot of references for this, and theoretically the idea is sound. But let’s say you or someone you know has a peanut allergy — please DO NOT try to cure yourself this way without contacting a medical professional & undertaking the project in a hospital setting. If you want to look up more papers on this, go to PubMed and search for “oral immunotherapy,” but please note that very low doses of the allergens are used, and even with those very low doses some people can go into shock.)

Another strategy that seems to be working well is to introduce punching bags into classrooms… that way the battle-ready children have something to smack without disrupting anybody’s education.

Err, wait. I mean, intentionally introducing parasites into the human body so that the immune system has something to attack & is less likely to inflame the bowels, joints, liver, etc. Apparently the symptoms of several autoimmune diseases can be ameliorated by parasites; here is one recent reference but there are many others.

Of course, harboring parasites is often not fun. But as long as the parasites make you less ill than your own body’s attacks against itself did, why not? Because autoimmune disorders are horrible — attempting to treat them with parasites is way more reasonable than using tapeworms to lose weight.

And, as a new parent, I also spend time thinking about prevention. I slather my pale baby with sunscreen before we play outside. And I make her play outside — major lifestyle changes over the last few decades probably explain our current allergy epidemic, with the incidence of peanut allergies & celiac disease up to 1% or higher. Huge numbers of people who’ll suffer from these ailments for their whole lives.

The most striking data on allergy prevention suggests that you should raise children on a farm. For a lot of people, that’s not really feasible. Even if K & I had the space, we wouldn’t raise animals — given that we can live well without subjugating any critters, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. But we can still take N to visit the pigs at our local farmed-animal sanctuary, and hopefully that’ll help a little.

Plus, we play outside. Yes, the epidemiological data suggests that being outside on a farm helps most, but you can do pretty well just by getting out, running around, and playing in the dirt.

(Although even playing in the dirt is tricky. It has to be clean dirt. Bacteria are fine. Some other soil parasites — a kid might get sick, but it’ll often be temporary sickness. The whole thing about an immune system needing work to do means that nothing comes free. But, ingesting petroleates would be bad. Or heavy metals. Halogenated aromatics. And — yay pretend capitalism where businesses are allowed to impose negative externalities for free! — a lot of that dreck has been dumped for years. Here in Bloomington we have a big tire factory & dirt on the properties downhill from it are poisoned. Unless you have access to a good mass spec, your best bet for learning whether land is safe for a kid to grubble around on is to read up on its history. Which is crummy to have to do, but the peculiar incarnation of capitalism indoctrinated by the U.S. has resulted in many horrors that still reverberate.)

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: parasites

On happiness and mind control.

On mind control versus body control

On playing outdoors, and allergies.