Monday, March 12, 2012

Unfit for life

A reader sent me a link to this video.  Under the title "The Bermuda Triangle of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black," a very quirky gentleman criticizes a recent paper/presentation basically advocating again for eugenics with sociopaths as a target of those branches of humanity to force into extinction:


In October of 2009, at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas held at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, Dr. Julian Savulescu presented a paper entitled ‘Unfit for Life: Genetically Enhance Humanity or Face Extinction,’ which appears as a couple of videos on Vimeo (vimeo.com/7515623 and vimeo.com/7681585).

Dr. Savulescu is presently a philosophy professor at Oxford University and the Director of Oxford’s Centre for Neuroethics. In his paper Dr. Savulescu argues that we ought ‘to consider’ taking immediate steps to engineer better human beings, human beings who, in his words, are more “Fit,” that is, “wiser and less aggressive.” We ought to consider, he claims, genetically altering human beings in order to weed out those he categorizes as the Unfit, by which he means the psychopaths and terrorists among us, as well as the ‘freeriders, fanatics, criminals, sociopaths, and, finally, the anti-social types.’ He also argues that we humans ought to consider rethinking the idea of liberal democracy, as it facilitates the existence of the Unfit among us. 

Savulescu spends more time basing his conception of who should be considered ‘Fit’ by pointing out who should be considered Unfit—of which he provides countless examples. For instance, in his response to a question after his talk, he approvingly cites the infamous Marshmallow Experiment as an indicator of who should, and who should not be considered Fit. The Marshmallow Experiment was carried out in the US in 1972 by Walter Mischel at Stanford University. A group of four-year-olds were given a marshmallow and then promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Approximately 30% of the children could wait, while the other 70% could not. Mischel’s research team then followed the personality development of each child into adolescence and claimed to demonstrate that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted, more dependable and smarter, that is, socially “fitter,” especially according to their parents.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Dopamine: treatment for sociopathy?

I think my brain produces unusually high amounts of dopamine -- and I think I've recently learned how to trigger my brain into producing more, sort of like mental masturbation. Apparently some women can think themselves to orgasm -- imagine thinking your way to mental ecstasy.

As I've mentioned before, I experience supersensitivity, and it is quite easy for me to achieve ecstasy based on external stimulus, particularly while experiencing rich food, beautiful music or imagery. Sometimes people think I am on drugs, but it's all me. Recently, perhaps due to some lifestyle changes, it has been especially easy for me to achieve ecstasy with relatively little prompting. It was happening so frequently that I started experimenting. First I tried to simply prolong and increase the intensity of the ecstasy when it came. After I got better at doing that, I successfully tried inducing it myself. I found that it was easiest to achieve ecstasy by focusing on an external stimulus as before, like music, food, or sunlight. After a while I was able to do it by focusing on a single sound or visual image and just trip on it. Now I can do it pretty much just by concentrating.

Perhaps this ability is just one more side benefit of the large degree of control I have over my mind and emotions. Or maybe there is a stronger link. Autism has also been linked with excessive amounts of dopamine in the brain, and is specifically associated with the autistic's stereotypical behavior. Physicians have achieved modest success in minimizing these behaviors by giving patients dopamine inhibitors. If sociopathy is on the autism spectrum, along with with asperger syndrome, then sociopaths may also have elevated amounts of dopamine, but not high enough to hamper social functioning.

Excessive amounts of dopamine seem to adversely affect behavior on the autism spectrum, but so do insufficient amounts. Sociopaths with lower levels of dopamine would presumably be lower functioning than those with higher levels of dopamine, because higher levels of dopamine would allow the sociopath's need for excitement and stimulation to be fulfilled by lower risk behavior, whereas sociopaths with less dopamine have to engage in riskier, more antisocial behavior to get the same high. At least one study has confirmed this intuition, that "low levels of dopamine-beta-hydroxylase (DBH) are associated with undersocialized conduct disorder and psychopathy whereas high levels of the enzyme were associated with socialized conduct disorder and secondary sociopathy." If individuals with autism are able to improve symptoms by decreasing dopamine levels, maybe criminal sociopaths could be treated by increasing dopamine levels.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Bystander effect

This is a follow up to the Yueyue video. I think that every culture is capable of horrible cruelties, in fact I think that the very institution of "culture" encourages it in ways (bystander effect) that make me sort of proud to be "anti-social."

 

And a lengthy explanation of why this is a result of some of our "pro-social" impulses:




Personally, I blame Burt Bacharach for all of this.  Instead of "walk on by" it should have been "stop to help."

Friday, March 9, 2012

Is sociopathy a real thing? (part 3)

From the reader:


On another subject, I totally agree with the conception of sociopathy being some sort of a nuance of character. There are smart people and dumb people, strong spirited and weak spirited, beautiful on the outside, ugly on the outside and so on. But it all happens on the inside and even if somebody is labeled as a sociopath or borderline or anything, you can only say that that's their way to deal with life. It's all about adapting to the environment with the brain and body that has been given to you. 

I also think that the primary attraction on your blog is not the fact that it's about "SOCIOPATHS", the whole ambiguous thing around it. It's because you manage to bring particularities that you notice within yourself together in a bundle and people relate to that. When you say, I noticed this very weird thing about myself and I think that this might be the cause, I am blind to actually notice it, but I perceived through other senses, That is great, I mean, it brings joy to see that someone somewhere is having the same sort of more uncommon struggle that you are having at that moment. And I notice people trying to not show their emotions around your comment section and be all cool and stuff because they want to belong there. They feel lonely and they want to belong. I don't know whether it's sociopathy that we're dealing with here, but it's certainly a thing that only a bunch of people relate to somehow. 

I know cause when I first started reading your blog I felt the same kind of lost and it helped me keep it all together. I knew those things about myself. I knew that I was noticing things and that I wasn't like everybody else and I wasn't crazy. If I actually took the time to explain, people would understand but after that I always felt too vulnerable and open and so I started keeping to myself. And it was the same kind of thing that you are bringing with your posts. That sense that somehow you don't belong around but you can shut up about it and be taken as normal and use whatever is making you different to your advantage to get things, Not some things that you always wanted or stuff because I get the sense that that kind of craving that other people have for "whatever" never occurred in us, but whatever floats your boat at a certain moment. That's just great. 

On a somewhat related note, dear reader, I have been reading an interesting New Yorker article about the television show Portlandia, where they discuss the phenomenon of the urban hipster and how people will go out of their way to play up small differences to distinguish themselves from others in what Freud termed the narcissism of small differences.  Sometimes I suspect the SociopathWorld community of this, myself included.  It's easy to lose perspective about how much we actually share in common with every other human on this planet in a race to make ourselves as distinct as possible from people and beliefs that we may not respect.  

But this isn't to say that there aren't real differences between people too.  I guess it's what makes the development of "standards" like the DSM-5 so controversial.  

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Is sociopathy a real thing? (part 2)

My response:

This is a very insightful question.  I think this is one of the issues that comes from basing the diagnosis of sociopathy primarily on behavior.  First of all, I agree.  I am not sure that sociopathy is even a "real thing".  I do think it's interesting that there seem to be people that are very similar to each other, but I think that is bound to happen in the spectrum of human personalities and behavior -- that you would be able to find people clumped together in any part of the spectrum.  Sociopathy may just be a particularly intriguing segment of personality traits because of the disparately large effect they seem to have on the lives of others and the unique motivations that drive their behavior.  Yes, I think that sociopaths brains may look different, but our brains are constantly adapting and are constantly being impacted by our experiences, thoughts, and decisions (caveat, there is some evidence that aspects of the brain you wouldn't expect to see changing in a lifetime are also statistically different in sociopaths than the general population).  There's just so much we don't know about sociopathy that I am hesitant to actually come to any conclusions myself about its nature.

Even assuming that sociopathy is a "real thing" (as much as anything can be real), I think that it is difficult to study and understand.  There's a chicken and the egg problem in terms of coming up with a diagnosis -- you need to identify sociopaths before you can make a list of their traits and you need a list of their traits to identify them.  To the extent that there is somewhat of a history of what constitutes a "sociopath," that helps, but there really is so much variation between even modern researchers in terms of their conception of the defining characteristic(s) of a sociopath.  On top of that, everyone seems to agree that environment plays a big role in any gene expression, and particularly a tendency to become a sociopath, with some researchers believing that certain subtypes are born while other types are made.

I personally don't feel like most of my behavior is all of that shocking or antisocial, particularly when compared to certain populations like the prison population.  It's interesting that you say that [Eastern Europe] has a calloused population.  I've visited other places that have an overall low baseline level of empathy and prosocial behavior (the Netherlands, Israel, Egypt, Vietnam, among others).  I don't know what sociopaths would look like in those cultures.  My guess is not necessarily any worse than the general population, just like uranium pollution may be difficult to detect in an environment with a high baseline level of radioactivity.

One thing is for certain, sociopaths do not have a monopoly on calloused behavior.

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