Truth serum?

I had dinner with some doctor friends of mine who were relating stories about how people react under anesthesia. My favorite story was about a 14 year old kid started hallucinating and feeling like he was being kidnapped by his doctors. When the doctors told him, "No, we like you, we're your friends."

The kid screamed back, "You like me?! You want to rape me?!"

After like 10 minutes of trying to calm him down, they decided to give up on the procedure for the day. The patient had stopped screaming enough for the doctors to explain that they were about to get his parents, and that seem to relax him. While the doctor was in the waiting room explaining to the parents about the child's adverse reaction to the drugs he heard a nurse yelling, "He's running!"

The child had apparently faked compliance to trick his captors into thinking he would cooperate with them. Really, he was just biding his time to escape. Unfortunately, as he sprinted away from the clinic, he seemed to be headed directly for a busy street and was still in his impaired condition. The doctor kicked off his clogs and started running after him in his socks. When the kid saw the doctor behind him, he freaked out again, running even faster. Finally the doctor caught up with him and tackled him to the ground before he ran out into the busy intersection.

But the stories that I thought were most interesting from a philosophical point of view were the stories about patient reactions to the drug Versed/Midazolam. Apparently it is a psychoactive drug with some funny side-effects. From Wikipedia:

In susceptible individuals, midazolam has been known to cause a paradoxical reaction, a well-documented complication with benzodiazapines. When this occurs, the individual may experience anxiety, involuntary movements, aggressive or violent behavior, uncontrollable crying or verbalization, and other similar effects. This seems to be related to the altered state of consciousness or disinhibition produced by the drug.

From the doctors' stories, it seems that the most common manifestation of this in female patients is to cry. For the male patients, a very common manifestation of the verbalization is to turn into complete perverts. One of the female doctors was telling me that it was really eye-opening to her to have this uptight conservative businessmen come in for their procedures and then say raunchy-as-hell things once the Versed gets flowing.

I asked them perhaps the age old question, which is the real them? is the Versed version the more authentic version of the patient? (In vino veritas?) Or does the Versed alter their natural thought patterns? The doctors seemed to think it was definitely the former. As an example, one doctor told me about one of her patients that seemed so inappropriate on Versed that she looked him up online afterwards and found out that he was a relatively prominent public figure who had a history of sexual indiscretions and cover-ups. The thing about Versed is that it also causes temporary amnesia, so the patient doesn't typically remember how they behaved on the drug.

I, of course, thought that an enterprising unethical doctor should start taking video of these patients and using the tapes for blackmail. What better way to ruin someone's life than to shame them in the court of public opinion, right? And they deserve it too, I bet. Best case (?) scenario, the patient/target is not aware that he has these particular flaws and we're doing him/her a favor by letting him/her know about them in no uncertain terms. Worst case scenario, the patient/target already knows about his/her character flaw and has been working overtime to mask it from the general public. Fakers. We should not have to tolerate this level of deception and/or hypocrisy from our fellow humans. These people deserve to be outted. If they are innocent, harmless, or if there is nothing really wrong with what they're doing then I'm sure they'll be fine. If bad things happen to them, then they obviously must have gotten what they deserved. 

Why not prey on the weak?

I think it's a myth that sociopaths tend to prey on the very weak. I typically don't, at least. I don't have a categorical rule against preying on the weak, but unlike the mighty lion I just don't tend to go for the weakest wildebeest. And why is the lion always going after the weak? It must be because eating is more or less a chore for him. He must not get much additional pleasure in taking down a fast wildebeest and eating it then just settling for the slowest one. Eating's more or less a chore for me too. I also will not go out of my way to make eating more difficult than it needs to be -- for instance won't travel to the grocer in inclement weather. Not to say I don't enjoy eating or even sometimes the experience of eating/acquiring food, but like the lion I just don't see the point in making it harder than it is to achieve my endgame.

If the endgame in eating is largely consumption of calories, what is the endgame of interacting with people? It's not pure consumption, although that is certainly part of it. No matter how you describe "consumption" with regards to people, whether number of sexual partners or number of friends or people that love you or who would do anything for you, everyone has some level of standards. You don't want to consume just any person, you want to consume a particular type of person, a particular quality of person or for a particular reason. Consumption isn't just about numbers for anyone, including sociopaths. Yes, I could target more people if I only went after the weak, but I don't need to do so, nor do I want to do so. I don't see the point in mindlessly stacking up conquest after conquest, it just doesn't appeal to me. My endgame is not adding another name to my list of conquests, it's the process and pleasure of making the attempt.

In fact, if I see someone weak, I usually just ignore them. If I see someone emotionally limping along in front of me, most of the time I make like the Levite priest in the good Samaritan story and cross over to the other side of the street so I don't have to even look at them. I like my prey to be strong with a tragic flaw, like Achilles. My dream prey would take every ounce of mental strength, agility, and ingenuity to conquer. My dream prey would keep me up at night wondering how I was going to win. I would suffer setbacks and wonder if I would ever recover. I would experience small victories and feel the exhilaration of attaining some progress, however incrementally small. My dream prey would take everything out of me, and that would be the value of it -- all of me.

I wonder if lions ever hunt for pleasure. Other animals certainly seem to:

Song: Never gonna give you up

Sound like some of your relationships?

Here's a question, does the person who chooses to stay in a relationship with a sociopath (particularly once they realize what is going on) lose their ability to complain about it later?

Manipulation 106: Listening

We talk a little about datamining here and I think some people think it sounds nefarious, like we are going through people's trash or stealing their mail or something.  Not always! Most of the time we are just using the secret tactic of "good listening skills". See also, this NY Times article "At Airports, a Misplaced Faith in Body Language." After going on about for quite a bit about how useless the billion dollar United States' TSA (airport security) body language training program is (an attempt to get TSA workers to identify criminals and terrorists by how they comport themselves physically), I loved this gem:

In experiments at the University of Chicago, Dr. Epley and his colleagues have found that people vastly overestimate how much mind reading they can do by looking at someone’s facial expressions.

“Reading people’s expressions can give you a little information, but you get so much more just by talking to them,” he says. “The mind comes through the mouth.”

Mastermind! The words people say often says more about them than what their body language says about them. That's where most of the datamining is coming from -- what you volunteer. This is especially true with social media. I think people just don't realize this because most of the time they don't care what people are saying, so they assume that no one cares what they are saying either. If you've ever been charmed by someone you have a crush on remembering your birthday, you'll understand how effective it is to listen and remember what people say. Or creepy:

Quote: Blame

“There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men's sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for every one and for all things.”

 ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov