Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Vigilantism

I've recently had experiences where I was nice to someone, a stranger or someone I didn't think mattered, and then had them show up again in my life in another context, or turn out to be a connection I needed to a third person, or I ended up developing a crush on them. I used to be less careful about being nice to strangers, but have learned that it frequently pays off, particularly very visible kindness to strangers.

Behaving better when people are watching turns out to be a trait that everyone shares. In this Ars Technica article covering a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences issue dedicated to human cooperation.
Some studies do find that we empathize with the plights of others, and just want to help out. Participants in one study saw a worker getting a series of electrical shocks. When told that they could reduce the number of shocks the worker got by volunteering to get shocked themselves, most volunteered for the jolt. The response was the same whether the participant would continue to see the worker after their decision or not, indicating that they weren’t just trying to make the unpleasant situation disappear. Instead, the researchers suggest that the participants wanted the best for the worker.

However, studies show that the prospect of someone else watching—even if it’s just a drawing of a pair of eyes—makes us more cooperative. Similarly, when participants in the Ultimatum Game are told that their offers will be made public, they tend to offer a greater proportion of their cash. Clearly, our motives aren’t all selfless.
Why are people worried about a pair of watching eyes? The article answers that unlike the rest of the animal kingdom "we are the only species that seems to be offended by inequalities that we aren't affected by, and as far as we know, we're unique in our liberal use of punishment." In other words, we're worried about rampant vigilantism.

And there will almost always be a pair of eyes looking out for misbehavior, if not a vigilante, the victim himself. The truth has a way of getting out. I used to be more reckless when I was younger because I didn't have much to lose if people discovered that I am black hearted. My current life position makes negative behavior more difficult for me to explain away, so I just default to being courteous to most people, and obsequiously charming to some.

If vigilantism doesn't scare you, google "necklacing."

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

I'm not an addict

People have suggested to me several times that drugs might enhance my ability to "feel," particularly MDMA or cannabis. I haven't tried either, but even if I were to feel different things I think my brain would reject them as not coming from me. Already when I have emotional hallucinations, I basically ignore them as being quirks in my brain chemistry, like you might ignore voices in your head. I think the same would go double for narcotics, particularly if I knowingly consumed them as opposed to be drugged.

Sociopaths are supposedly prone to addiction. I can sort of see why that might be true for some--chronic boredom would mean self medication in some form or another. I have never been drawn to narcotics, though, in fact I would say that I affirmatively dislike them because they hamper my brain function/control. Not only do I not like narcotics, a recent study, discussed in this NY Times article, suggests that sociopath's brains may make them particularly unsusceptible to addiction. The article first discusses how addicts tend to have an underactive reward system in the brain:
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has shown in several brain-imaging studies that people addicted to such drugs as cocaine, heroin and alcohol have fewer dopamine receptors in the brain’s reward pathways than nonaddicts. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter critical to the experience of pleasure and desire, and sends a signal to the brain: Pay attention, this is important.

When Dr. Volkow compared the responses of addicts and normal controls with an infusion of a stimulant, she discovered that controls with high numbers of D2 receptors, a subtype of dopamine receptors, found it aversive, while addicts with low receptor levels found it pleasurable.

This finding and others like it suggest that drug addicts may have blunted reward systems in the brain, and that for them everyday pleasures don’t come close to the powerful reward of drugs.
In contrast, there is research that suggests that sociopaths have an overactive reward system, which would presumably make them largely immune ("aversive") to at least certain substance addictions.

Interestingly, the article cites the borderline personality disordered as being particularly susceptible to addiction ("People with borderline personality disorder, who struggle to control their impulses and anger, often resort to drugs and alcohol to soften their intolerable moods."). Is this possibly a way to distinguish between the brains of sociopaths versus those with BPD for purposes of diagnosis? If so, it might be a step toward ending the gender stereotype for sociopathy and BPD.

In any case, those facing drug addiction problems can always rely on Vermont addiction services or other similar programs across the United States for treatment help.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Limitless

A few readers had suggested I watch the movie Limitless for being sociopath related, and I finally got a chance to watch it on a plane. It is a pretty fun movie, particularly when he first becomes genius smart. They don't really explore how he changes emotionally with all of his brain changes, which is too bad, but it's not really that deep of a movie. Here's the scene that probably shows the sociopath angle the best:

Sunday, July 31, 2011

DSM-5

This was a fascinating Wired article conveying some of the most common criticisms of the proposed DSM-5: "To critics, the greatest liability of the DSM-5 process is precisely this disconnect between its ambition on one hand and the current state of the science on the other. On the authority of doctors and psychologists' dirty little secret:
The authority of any doctor depends on their ability to name a patient’s suffering. For patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering. This is why, as one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, “there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.”
The solution and the problem that the solution created:
Since 1980, when the DSM-III was published, psychiatrists have tried to solve this problem by using what is called descriptive diagnosis: a checklist approach, whereby illnesses are defined wholly by the symptoms patients present. The main virtue of descriptive psychiatry is that it doesn’t rely on unprovable notions about the nature and causes of mental illness, as the Freudian theories behind all those “neuroses” had done. Two doctors who observe a patient carefully and consult the DSM’s criteria lists usually won’t disagree on the diagnosis—something that was embarrassingly common before 1980. But descriptive psychiatry also has a major problem: Its diagnoses are nothing more than groupings of symptoms. If, during a two-week period, you have five of the nine symptoms of depression listed in the DSM, then you have “major depression,” no matter your circumstances or your own perception of your troubles. “No one should be proud that we have a descriptive system,” Frances tells me. “The fact that we do only reveals our limitations.” Instead of curing the profession’s own malady, descriptive psychiatry has just covered it up.
What is at stake:
At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children. If, as Frances warns, the new volume is an “absolute disaster,” it could cause a seismic shift in the way mental health care is practiced in this country. It could cause the APA to lose its franchise on our psychic suffering, the naming rights to our pain.
The future:
Some mental health researchers are convinced that the DSM might soon be completely revolutionized or even rendered obsolete. In recent years, the National Institute of Mental Health has launched an effort to transform psychiatry into what its director, Thomas Insel, calls clinical neuroscience. This project will focus on observable ways that brain circuitry affects the functional aspects of mental illness—symptoms, such as anger or anxiety or disordered thinking, that figure in our current diagnoses. The institute says it’s “agnostic” on the subject of whether, or how, this process would create new definitions of illnesses, but it seems poised to abandon the reigning DSM approach. “Our resources are more likely to be invested in a program to transform diagnosis by 2020,” Insel says, “rather than modifying the current paradigm.”

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Crime pays

A reader sent this link to an article of the 10 criminals who "made a killing" financially, just in case people were wondering whether crime does or does not pay. Interestingly the list includes basically only CEOs and drug dealers.
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