Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (6 page)

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On 19 July 2012, James Holmes, a 24-year-old student who had dropped out of a neuroscience doctoral programme, opened fire in the darkness of a cinema in Aurora, Colorado. His target was an innocent audience attending the premiere screening of
The Dark Knight
Rises
, the third film of the Batman saga. Holmes carried a Remington 870 shotgun and an assault rifle, and wore an oxygen mask and a Kevlar suit that made him look like the movie’s evil villain Bane. When Holmes threw a smoke bomb, some of the witnesses who survived the rampage said that at first they thought it was all part of the spectacle of the premiere, believing the man in disguise was an enthusiastic Batman fan dressing up like one of the characters in the film.
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Holmes killed twelve innocent cinema-goers and wounded fifty-eight. He was caught and still awaits judgement. At the time of the crime, Holmes was in therapy with a psychiatrist, and he tried to reach her on the phone just minutes before starting his rampage.
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Unfortunately the Aurora shooting was not an isolated event. In the US, in 2012 alone, several similar events preceded and followed Holmes’s attack. In June 2012 a gunman shot three people at a pool party near the campus at Alabama’s Auburn University. Two weeks after the cinema rampage in Aurora, a man killed seven and wounded three at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. In December 2012, just eleven days before Christmas, 20-year-old Adam Lanza carried out one of the most atrocious and deadly rampages ever witnessed on a US school campus. He opened fire on innocent staff and children in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, after killing his own mother at home, murdering twenty-eight people in total.
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Twenty of these were children between six and ten years old. The toll of victims at Newtown’s elementary school is second only to the shocking loss of lives caused by the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, which left thirty-two people dead. And, of course, everyone will remember the 1999 massacre at the Columbine High School in Colorado.

While neuroscience refines its tools to understand the biological basis of violence, it will always be useful to keep an eye on how society deals with crime, and with mental pathology. Ever since the first links between genes and behaviour such as aggression were discovered, a few intellectuals – including scientists – have voiced their concern about the danger that granting genes and brains the exclusive power of governing behaviour would exempt us from critically assessing and modifying some of society’s policies that may contribute to aggressive and violent behaviour. For instance, if we really believed that genes are all it takes to mould intelligence, there would be no reason to invest in improving our systems of education or in promoting culture. Similarly, the identification of the biological components of aggression and violence has somehow shifted the attention from some of the social factors that contribute to their rise. An equal worrying consequence is the tendency to misunderstand mental illness in general.

In the weeks following the Newtown shootings, geneticists set out to examine Adam Lanza’s DNA to screen for the presence of anomalies in its sequence or for any variation that could be linked to violence.
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As yet, no results have been revealed. However, it is unclear how the information obtained would be used and for what purposes. One guess is that if any conclusive information is gathered, it might be used to screen the population for the same anomalies and prevent future crime by identifying potential offenders in advance, even among school children.
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But this is not a straightforward undertaking. There is no doubt that genetic variation shapes our brains and that our neurotransmitter levels fluctuate during aggressive reactions. Yet granting such genetic changes the power to directly cause particular behaviours or decisions requires careful consideration. In the case of MAOA, for instance, it would mean that all those carrying the low-activity version of the gene should be given a shorter sentence for their crimes, but it is certainly not the case that all people carrying the low-activity version go around attacking people. To gain a more precise perspective, it is useful to bear in mind that the prevalence of the low-activity form of the MAOA gene, at least in Caucasian populations, is 34 per cent. This means that in such a group about one in three individuals carries the low-activity form, but certainly not one in three goes around committing crimes.

Launching prevention campaigns among the population would surely create stigma. As we have seen, the environment alone plays an enormous role in the increase of violence. An upbringing marked by hostility, and factors in a person’s life trajectory such as abuse, abandonment and, in general, a violent environment are often a prelude to the onset of violence. Genes are only modulators that can either magnify or attenuate the effect of these, like the volume knob of a hi-fi. There is something else that can be done in parallel or instead of screening for DNA mutations. That is to invest in successful social welfare programmes.

We may peer into the brains of violent perpetrators to look for anomalies in the prefrontal cortex. We may even check their genotype for MAOA and various other genes. But every brain is different and every brain changes constantly. So, in order to find the exact physiological conditions that made someone commit a violent crime, we would have to inspect their brain at the time of the act.
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Finally, let us not forget that, at least in America, individuals like James Holmes and Adam Lanza, as well as all those with a malfunctioning prefrontal cortex or the low-activity version of the MAOA gene, could not commit crimes if there were stricter regulations for purchasing guns or rifles.
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Only days after the Aurora killings, terror spread on a crowded Manhattan sidewalk on West 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue, close to the Empire State Building. A man pulled a gun to shoot his former employer who had sacked him one week before. As reported in a
New Yorker
article following the Manhattan shooting, at the end of a press conference held to brief the public on the events, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said laconically: ‘There’s an awful lot of guns out there.’
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Pacify your frustrations

I have talked at length about anger as a prelude to unacceptable, deplorable violence, as a negative emotion to be avoided and kept at bay. But anger is not always followed by aggression. Violence can also erupt in the absence of anger. Psychologists and philosophers debate the benefits of ignoring anger in the attempt to stay cool, rather than venting it. As Aristotle said in his
Nicomachean Ethics
, anybody can get angry. But expressing anger in the right tone, at the right time and for the right purpose demands careful judgement and a touch of virtue. This is an ability that we begin practising as kids, when we need to learn how to react to the first forms of injustice – when, say, somebody bullies us, or a school mate nicks our brand-new pencil – and then gets polished over the years, when we become adults and, hopefully, reach some level of wisdom, though I believe we never stop learning.

Sometimes, banging your fist on the table or clearly remonstrating is better than allowing resentment to brew inside, and may prevent you from ending up taking unpleasant actions.

Both spontaneous outbursts of anger and anger that stews inside us can have serious repercussions on our health. Primarily, anger has a toll on the mechanics of the heart. There have been studies clearly showing that reacting to stressful situations with anger increases the risk of premature cardiovascular diseases, particularly myocardial infarction.
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On the other hand, letting out anger constructively, especially in everyday episodes that don’t escalate into aggression, has positive consequences.
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If our anger is justified, lucidly expressing the reasons for it can improve relationships and lead to healthy solutions that benefit all parties involved. So, it’s worth striving to stay within a moderate threshold of anger.

Knowledge of the brain circuits governing emotional control has spawned the development of techniques that aspire to teach us how to quench or control our anger by looking inside our brain. In the near future, such self-control may be gained by this informed taming of the brain. David Eagleman calls it the ‘prefrontal workout’ and, as you would expect, it has to do with exercising the regulatory power of the frontal lobes.
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The technique would consist in watching on a screen the activity of your brain circuits when you are fighting the temptation to indulge in something you know is bad for you, like eating chocolate cake, or when you are trying to avoid bursting out in anger. As you restrain yourself, you watch a bar that signals the involvement of your frontal circuits and the achievement of control. If it stays high, you need to work harder. As you concentrate to tame your urge, you learn which mind strategies help you bring the bar down, and the corresponding brain circuitry will be trained to achieve the desired goal. If such techniques find concrete application in the years to come, it is imaginable that they could be applied to the rehabilitation of offenders, as a parallel or even alternative solution to imprisonment. This sounds like a much less disturbing version of the Ludovico Technique, the therapy used on Alexander DeLarge, the protagonist of
A
Clockwork Orange
, that conditioned him to feel nauseous each time he witnessed or even thought about committing violence. With the help of a pill, DeLarge was taught to feel sick while watching scenes of violence. In the ‘prefrontal workout’, one would actually teach the brain to abstain from violent behaviour.

Almost two millennia ago, the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca wrote an entire book on anger and came up with a smart approach to avoid it. Seneca knew well that anger was an inevitable component of existence. He lived all his life in ancient Rome, which, even then, was not the calmest place on the planet. ‘If one runs off on many different activities, one will never have the luck to spend a day without some annoyance arising, from someone or something, to dispose the mind to anger.’
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If we venture into crowded areas in a city, it is likely that we will bump into many people, or that someone will step on our feet. In life, something will always go the opposite way to what we would like. Plans do not always take the course we anticipate: ‘No one has fortune so much on his side as always to answer to his wishes . . . ’ said Seneca. Indeed, it is extremely easy to lose one’s temper and become angry at the person or the situation that provoked the annoyance, and even at oneself and one’s bad luck. Yet, for Seneca, anger was demeaning and was best avoided. ‘It is not how the wrong is done that matters, but how it is taken.’ For Seneca, it was important to take one’s time to examine the real nature of the annoying incident or situation and, above all, to avoid falling prey to provocation: ‘Beyond any doubt, one raises oneself from the common lot to a higher level by looking down upon those who provoke.’

Coda

Much of what we know about the biology of disinhibited behaviour, aggression and violence has emerged from the singular stories of individuals whose observed actions, localized brain lesions, genetic deficits and life vicissitudes have contributed to the sketching out of a preliminary physical map of emotion regulation. From the almost legendary Phineas Gage and Damasio’s improbable patients to Jay’s bizarre behaviour and the criminal actions of Abdelmalek Bayout, James Holmes and Adam Lanza – and even Bruce’s impatient impulsive reactions in the car – we have seen anger and the loss of emotional control in various complexions. Like obscure characters in crime fiction, these figures traced their own life paths. Each of them was or is a unique individual with distinct intentions, motivations and values. They each possess a brain that bears the signature of their own past. They display behavioural similarities and differences and share biological features, but they all retain a degree of individuality. Gage’s brain is slightly different from Elliot’s, which in turn differs from Jay’s. Gage and Elliot did not become criminals. Jim Fallon and Abdelmalek Bayout both carry the low-activity version of MAOA, but Fallon never committed a violent crime.

The stories of the characters in this chapter have shown how specific abnormalities in the brain and the genome have tangible, sometimes dramatic, effects on behaviour. Yet the overall essence of each individual and what makes them who they are is the outcome of a vast and complex set of contributing factors – all in conversation with their biology – that we are only beginning to understand.

Our brains, and more generally our whole bodies, are the physical substrates of our actions. However, they don’t simply work in complete isolation from the intricate interpersonal, social and historical contexts in which we live.

The neuroscientist Steven Rose offers a fascinating vision of human beings as living organisms who build their life trajectories through time and space and according to their biology. He recognizes the power of genes and our material selves without subscribing to determinism. We are not slaves to our genes. Rose calls such trajectories ‘lifelines’, for they are like paths we construct and decide to follow.
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As we move along these trajectories we may in time narrow the distance between the behaviour we display, the choices we make, the feelings we have, and what we know about what goes on in our brains. The concluding message of this chapter is that behavioural features emerge from a biological architecture that makes them possible, and whose variation gives individuals personal and unique shadings of those features. The truth is, however, that our every action can be explained at multiple levels, from individual neuronal firing and chapters in our biographies, to environmental circumstances and social contexts.