Excusing behavior

I liked this recent comment comparing a girl with multiple sclerosis with a sociopath:

Of course, if you look at the real life woman, at some point people will probably feel sorry for the cute girl, tragically wheelchair bound due to neuropathy. But the ugly alcoholic male sociopath that callously runs over a few stray cats a week on his way to work - no sympathy.

Is this comparison outrageous? Another comment explains perhaps why not because in the same way that she doesn't have complete control over her body, most people (especially sociopaths?) don't have control over their minds:

Sociopaths are impulsive. I will impulsively grab a woman's ass. I will catch myself, after the fact. It is a bit like ADHD people interrupting, and only then noticing it (and perhaps apologising).

Your neck is probably tight right now. You didn't choose to tighten it. If you release it, and think a bit, or get otherwise distracted from keeping your neck quiescent, your neck will probably tighten up a bit. Again, you didn't choose to do this.

Finally, as you read this message, your brain turns the characters into words, concepts, etc and you have feelings about them. You don't choose to think what the concepts are, nor do you choose your feelings. If you get really upset at the thought that you aren't in control of your own mind (you can't even control the next thought you'll think) and get into a car upset and drive badly, that won't be you choosing to drive badly. You'll be a "victim" of your mind. 

Similarly, when I grab a woman's ass at the wrong time, piss in the sink without realizing it (and disgust my housemates) or am impulsively rough with my girlfriend's cat, the same thing is afoot. 

Or course, if we take this to the natural conclusion, no one is really responsible for anything they do, which we obviously can't have for practical reasons. 

Free won't

In doing some research on the sociopath's supposed lack of impulse control, I stumbled upon this article from Scientific American (found in full here), which questions the popular conception that we make a conscious choice then act on that choice (i.e. free will). The abstract:

Most of us have a sense that our everyday actions are controlled by an intention that precedes the action: I decide to turn on the light, then flip the switch. But experiments don't consistently support this notion. Some psychologists believe that our sense of intention and purpose is constructed by the brain after the action takes place. Others disagree. The authors discuss ingenious experiments that probe this question, along with bizarre phenomena, such as "alien-hand syndrome," where brain damage leaves patients struggling with actions they cannot control.

The experiments:



Another experiment suggests even more strongly that our sensation of control is largely imaginary:

In one such experiment . . . two participants worked together to move a cursor over objects on a computer screen. One of the participants served as a confederate of the experimenter, but the experimental subject never knew this. The genuine subject heard words over a set of headphones that related to particular objects on the screen. For example, a subject might hear the word "swan" while moving the cursor over a picture of a swan. Unbeknownst to the subject, all of the movement of the cursor came from the confederate. The results showed that, when the relevant word was presented 1 to 5 seconds prior to the action, subjects reported feeling that they had acted intentionally to make the movement. In other words, they had experienced will. When the word was presented 30 seconds prior to the action or 1 second after it, however, there was no false feeling of willing the action. The authors argued that this experiment provided clear evidence that the human brain constructs feelings of causal agency after an action has taken place. It could be that a proper temporal order between intentions, actions and consequences triggers the brain—after the fact—to feel a sense of control.

This type of self deception is perhaps seen best in sufferers of alien hand syndrome, who often rationalize the behavior after the fact, "fool[ing] themselves that the actions they performed were indeed intentional" although "patients are not aware of what they are going to do until after the action has been made." Interestingly, schizophrenics, who frequently "describe an external agent as causing their actions, thoughts, speech or emotions," may largely suffer from an inability to delude themselves into believing that they are acting on their own intentions like "normal" people do.

We are not slaves to impulse, however. The literature suggests that rather than experience free will, we instead experience "free won't," or the ability to avoid acting on the impulse, possibly with the aid of the dorsal fronto-medial cortex, as explained in this article.

The idea of decisions being unconscious impulses that we either reject or make our own raises interesting issues for sociopaths with alleged impulse control problems, but raises even more issues for neurotypicals and the role that a sense of control plays in how they define themselves:

More than a matter of simply turning on a switch, this feeling of control over actions might even contribute to a conscious sense of self. In other words, I am because I control my actions. The question is: How do we go from mundane, everyday actions—like turning on a light—to developing a sense of self as a causal agent?

Appendix (part 7)

I wanted to include this quote in the book chapter about Mormonism, regarding the Mormon church's doctrine re different types of people (including neurodiversity), but it was too late to add to the manuscript. From LDS President Dieter F. Uchtdorf:

But while the Atonement is meant to help us all become more like Christ, it is not meant to make us all the same. Sometimes we confuse differences in personality with sin. We can even make the mistake of thinking that because someone is different from us, it must mean they are not pleasing to God. This line of thinking leads some to believe that the Church wants to create every member from a single mold—that each one should look, feel, think, and behave like every other. This would contradict the genius of God, who created every man different from his brother, every son different from his father. Even identical twins are not identical in their personalities and spiritual identities.

It also contradicts the intent and purpose of the Church of Jesus Christ, which acknowledges and protects the moral agency—with all its far-reaching consequences—of each and every one of God’s children. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are united in our testimony of the restored gospel and our commitment to keep God’s commandments. But we are diverse in our cultural, social, and political preferences.

The Church thrives when we take advantage of this diversity and encourage each other to develop and use our talents to lift and strengthen our fellow disciples.

Free will = not what you think it is

This is an interesting lecture from philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris about how the common conception of free will is not scientifically supported. Specifically he debunks two assumptions on the popular conception of free will: (1) we are each free to think and act differently than we did in the past ("you became a police man, but you could have become a firefighter") and (2) we are the conscious source of our thoughts and actions, i.e. we feel like we want to do something so we do that thing. The problem with these assumptions is that "Everything that could possibly constitute your will is either the product of a long chain of prior causes, so you're not responsible for them, or it's the product of randomness, and you're not responsible for that, obviously, or it's some combination of the two."

He has an interesting analogy at the beginning about a man sleeping in a park and getting his face bitten off by an alligator versus a man with the axe. The result is the same, but people hate the man and not the crocodile because wWhat else is a crocodile going to do, coming upon you napping in the park" whereas a man is allegedly in control of his actions.

Another interesting assertion: "Most people imagine that a belief in free will is necessary for morality. . . . The difference between happiness and suffering exists without free will." Still, there are a lot of interesting implications for morality. At 46:00 he talks about how we can make reasonable distinctions between premeditated and impulsive crime given that free will doesn't exist. punishment, morality, etc.

"In specific cases we have already changed our view of evil. Whenever we see the cause of someone's behavior, when we see for instance that a murderer had a brain tumor . . . so as to explain his violent impulses, that person suddenly becomes a victim of biology. Our moral intuitions shift utterly. Now I'm arguing that a brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. If we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer's brain, it would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it. If we could see how the wrong genes were being relentlessly transcribed, if we could see how his early life experience had sculpted the micro structure in his brain in just such a way as to give rise to violent impulses, the whole conception of placing blame on him would erode."

Seeing the invisible

I have written a lot about how sociopaths don't really have magic abilities to read people's minds or predict the future, that we just have a unique perspective that allows us to see things that other people don't (and possibly see other things less well). I thought this NY Times video illustrated this concept well:



How useful might it be to see the world this way? It just depends. Similar to a sociopath. Sometimes it is no advantage at all. Other times it could be a disadvantage. But it definitely would impact the way you see the world, to be constantly aware of these things that remain virtually hidden to everyone else. Maybe it would seem a little isolating. Maybe it would make it difficult for you to trust other people's reality, because it seems incomplete compared to yours. Maybe you eventually learn to just keep these observations to yourself. Or maybe you learn to exploit them. But you just have different options than other people do.

Biological origins of empathy

Hopefully people aren't sick of reading about empathy by now, but I recently found this interesting Wall Street Journal article discussing how animals possibly feel (or don't feel) empathy, including humans.  First the article discusses recent studies on animals that suggested that animals have altruistic traits. Initially this animal altruism was claimed to be related to empathy, but it has since been downgraded to being merely "pro-social":


In one, scientists at the University of Chicago put two rats in an arena, one held by a restrainer, the other free. They found that the free rat learned to "intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate." They interpreted this result as "providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior."

In the other case, Drs. Hollis and Nowbahari themselves did a very similar experiment with ants. They found that ants were prepared to rescue fellow ants held in a nylon snare and showing obvious distress. Just like the rats, the hero ants would chew at the restraints (though not if the victims were anesthetized or from different colonies or species). Happy to describe such behavior as "pro-social," they did not go so far as to attribute empathy to the ants. There was no reason to think that the hero ants were motivated by a wish to alleviate the suffering of the victims. More likely, they possessed a self-interested instinct to help get a co-worker back to work.

How does this differ from humans? Humans would probably behave in similar ways if we put them in similar situations, but is the psychological motivation different?  Adam Smith seems to think so:

In his 1759 book the "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," philosopher Adam Smith argued that empathy (he called it sympathy) was motivated by the capacity to imagine being another person. "When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief, I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die; but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you; and I not only change circumstances, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own. It is not, therefore, in the least selfish."

The article concludes that either we think that rats are capable of this Smithian imagination (which the author concludes is absurd), or we assume that animals must have different motivations than humans.  OR!!!!  And this was what I was thinking this whole time, but the author finally admits at the end a big OR to this whole thing is that maybe humans don't have the psychological motivations that they think they do. Maybe the humans are doing things for the same reasons as the rats: "Can we be so sure it is fellow-feeling rather than instinct that drives us to our virtuous as well as our vicious actions?"

If we are really the empathy equivalent of rats, maybe we invented empathy to give ourselves a nice story. In other words, maybe humans give a positive spin on their "choices" after the fact, the same way they do with free will (or should I say, free won't). I feel like I just discovered the necessary plot device to make the Matrix IV relevant.

Selectively caring more

I thought this was a very interesting comment left on this post about empathy and becoming sensitized to certain things, among others:


I used be able to watch videos/view images of the goriest and most explicit nature: brain avulsions, total dismemberment, horrific murders. In fact, I craved viewing them. There was something in there that was fascinating to me. This was when I was much younger. As I got older, these pictures began to bother me. Not because I felt guilt or empathy, but because I had suffered accidents/injuries of my own, and they served to remind me of them. Now I avoid them, for the most part, because in each body I see the inevitability of my own mortality, and I always end up relating them to my own situation. 

The same holds true for emotional pain: just yesterday a girl related a story about a woman who's mother was killed by a distracted drive. I laughed when I heard the specifics; it sounded like such a glorious explosion of metal. Everyone else was horrified, and some were holding back tears, but I couldn't stop grinning--I had such fun recreating the scene in my mind. I couldn't empathize. But if another person's emotional pain reminds me of the few, and I mean 2-3, things left from childhood that are still painful to me, I am distracted and lost in my own pain. This gives the appearance of empathizing; it's not. I don't cry for the other person; I cry for myself. 

That erroneous conclusion ("They're crying while I'm crying; they must understand me!") is what, I think, leads empaths, especially those with emotional ties to the sociopath, to insist that they're "not that bad" or that "there's really deep feelings in there." Perhaps. But those deep feelings will always be self-centered. If a sociopath cries because you're breaking up with them, it's not because they've suddenly grown a heart to pine after you with. It's because they've lost control, because their plans have been ruined, and they're thinking about how the break-up will fuck things over. 

I realize they are interesting, and perhaps very fine distinctions to make, but I think that they are actually legitimate distinctions to make between a sensitivity (or lack of sensitivity to things) and the general skill of empathy.  A good example, perhaps, is the one of the typical empath who becomes desensitized to things like violence in times of war.  According to wikipedia, horses, who have a natural fear of unpredictable movement, become desensitized to accept the fluttering skirt of a lady's riding habit.  We sensitize guide dogs to certain human concerns like automobile traffic. 

Everyone can learn to care more or less about a particular thing. It's not that sociopaths are just constantly choosing not to care.  I believe that they are partly incapable of caring, and even more simply unaware of what and when they should be caring.  Once you direct their attention to it or something else happens to make them aware of the seriousness of something (e.g. growing older and having more a sense of one's own mortality), it gets easier to understand why everyone else is upset.  But this does not mean that the sociopath will ever vicariously feel what the other person is feeling.  

Cat puppetmasters?

Thanks to @wordsmithatplay for giving me a heads up about the recent article in The Atlantic, "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy."  The gist is that a previously thought (relatively) benign cat parasite that infects as much as 50% of the population might change the infected personality to be either more introverted and risk seeking in male infectees, or more outgoing and social in female infectees.  There are fascinating implications for both free agency (cat puppetmasters? so argues a tongue in cheek "cat manifesto" from the NY Times), zombies, and (perhaps?) whether sociopaths can be made, at least in part?  The story is fascinating and alarming in a very exciting way.  Under the byline "Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?":

• Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.
• The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.
• “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers [of my scientific papers] may have been offended.”
• What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of,” says Sapolsky.
• [Regarding his changed behavior]: he thought nothing of crossing the street in the middle of dense traffic, “and if cars honked at me, I didn’t jump out of the way.” He also made no effort to hide his scorn for the Communists who ruled Czechoslovakia for most of his early adulthood. “It was very risky to openly speak your mind at that time,” he says. “I was lucky I wasn’t imprisoned.” And during a research stint in eastern Turkey, when the strife-torn region frequently erupted in gunfire, he recalls being “very calm.” In contrast, he says, “my colleagues were terrified. I wondered what was wrong with myself.”
• Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected wom

It's crazy how little we still know about human behavior and its roots.  But I guess some of our ignorance is intentional.  Who wants to admit that their identity is so ephemeral, vulnerable to a little cat parasite (just another reason that I am glad I have no fondness for animals).

The meaning of life (part 1)

A reader asked:

Hey dude, you know what would be interesting? An article about how sociopaths deal with boredom. What is boredom for a sociopath, why is it that it is so hard to deal with it and what do we do to not get bored. I am also curious about it. Thing is i am scared of the emptiness within myself. it's like when i was younger i used to have all these feelings that managed to keep me from getting bored by myself, you know, i had a way to meditate. but now whenever i am alone all i can sense is an empty space and for some reason i feel scared about it. it's like if i don't hold tight onto something i might fall into emptiness and never come back, dunno exactly. anyway, it's that emptiness that i want to know more about and how to deal with it.

Good question. I address this issue a little bit in this post. I was sort of made fun of for it in the comments of this post.

The human psyche really is so fragile. We lie to ourselves all the time about our existence and the meaning of our existence, like my recent post about free won't. Ignorance really is bliss in a lot of ways, but no matter how we try, we end up catching glimpses of the meaningless of life. I don't know why, really, but your question reminded me of Clive Wearing, a former musicologist, now the most severe form of amnesia ever documented. Every minute or so, he forgets absolutely everything and experiences a feeling of being born ex nihilo -- as if he never existed before, but now suddenly he does. He keeps a journal in which he writes over and over again, "I'm awake! For the very first time!" "I'm alive! For the first time!" "This is the first moment of my consciousness!" I think about him sometimes and wonder whether his life is horrible or wonderful.

What do you think about the subject?

I read the post and i think you are kinda right. That's how i feel, like living in a foreign country, gazing at the view but not being able to make any real interaction with the environment. I have been recently diagnosed with immature behaviour by a psychiatrist because i can't really make real progress in getting more mature, and i have to because i just dropped out of college because i was getting bored. Now i have to start all over again cause i don't want to skip college. I think it's true what you say about our meaningless existence also. I keep lying myself with fantasies about me being some kind of "chosen to do great" like that harry potter thing you talked about but i can see through the fog i create that i could also be a looser like everyone else. The "bad" thing is that realizing that i am just like everyone else doesn't change me. It's like i can't accept it willingly. I go on doing what i do and i feel kinda bad cause my psyche doesn't want to stop playing and realize that it has to get it's ass to work. Guess this unchangeable emptiness is something i have to get used to and work myself off to start doing some actual work. Guess this is why i reminded you of that amnesia guy. No matter what i do i can't change my perception upon life. I am still a kid even though i am 19.

About what you asked, i think he is having a good life feeling the beginning of his existence all the time like that. If he doesn't remember and the thrill keeps coming and coming i think he lives kinda happy all the time. Even though if someone explained to him his condition from a to the z, i think he would be kinda sad but not for long, right? Reminds me of the movie "First 50 dates" with adam sandler. If the people around him keep his illusion alive he doesn't have any reason for which to be unhappy and i guess that is all that matters. Sure, he won't do anything with his life being stuck in that loop hole but for him it doesn't matter, right? If i get to think of it he could be unhappy if he realized at the end of the loop that he is loosing his memory. That would be a moment of unhappiness, which would only make his existence pitiful but not horrible. Is pity a feeling a sociopath would feel? Hm...