The Domesticated Brain (20 page)

Filth, harm, lust and Jesus

For some individuals, intrusive thoughts and behaviours completely undermine their ability to behave appropriately in social situations. Impulse control disorder (ICD) covers a variety of conditions acquired through disease and injury as well as those that arise during development. Phineas Gage and Alexander Laing had acquired ICD from frontal damage and there are various forms of dementia resulting from brain disease of the frontal lobes that produce syndromes where behaviour becomes inappropriate. However, for some individuals, they are born with ICD that impairs their social functioning.

One developmental disorder, named after French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, that has become synonymous with ICD is
Tourette Syndrome
(TS). TS is a condition characterized by involuntary thoughts and behaviours. These can be body jerks but they include vocal tics, from simple grunts to shouting obscenities in public or
corporallia
. This is often how they come to the attention of others, because strangers fail to understand that these individuals are unable to control their impulses. To someone who is not aware that an individual has TS, this can seem like the height of rudeness, which is why TS sufferers often end up in difficulty in social settings.

TS is a spectrum disorder that first appears around school age, increases during pre-adolescence but, for most, declines by the beginning of adulthood. The incidence may
be as many as one in a hundred children, is more common in males than females and runs in families, indicating that it is a developmental brain disorder with a genetic basis. The typical symptoms relate to impulse control, which supports the idea that ICD must be related in some way to the PFC. This link has been confirmed by imaging studies that reveal that the connectivity of the PFC to an area of the brain that regulates behaviours known as the
basal ganglia
is altered in persons with TS.
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Those with TS fight a constant battle to inhibit their tics, especially in public, which usually makes the condition much worse, just like Basil Fawlty trying not to mention the war. As the pressure to behave normally in a social situation increases, the urge to tic increases, which makes it build up like a sneeze. And just like a sneeze, it becomes involuntary so that they must tic in order to get some relief. As one boy, Jasper, with TS explained on a HBO television special, ‘When I try to hold back too much, you can’t think of anything except holding them back and you can’t think of anything except doing them.’
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Similar intrusive thoughts are also reported in individuals with
obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD), another ICD that affects around two out of every hundred adults in the West.
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Obsessions are the tormenting thoughts whereas compulsions are the activities that the sufferer must engage in to counteract the obsession. If I am obsessed by thoughts of filth then I may feel the compulsion to wash my hands repeatedly.

Sir Aubrey Lewis, an English psychiatrist, described how obsessions generally fall into one of four categories: thoughts
related to filth, thoughts related to harming oneself or another, thoughts about sex and the urge to blaspheme. What makes all these ICDs relevant to social acceptance is that all of these topics are associated with behaviours that need domestication. Inappropriate and excessive filth, harm, lusting and blasphemy would be frowned upon and so there is a need to keep such thoughts and behaviours in check. Currently the same inhibitory circuitry of the PFC and basal ganglia implicated in TS is also a prime suspect for OCD.
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Like TS, there is a heritability factor, with OCD running higher in families, and it is more common in identical than non-identical twins. Not surprisingly, around half of those with TS exhibit obsessive-compulsive behaviours.

Many of us have intrusive thoughts from time to time or engage in peculiar habits. It could be our morning bathroom routines or it might be the coffee break that we always take at the same time of the day at the same coffee shop. Habits and routines are part of normal life, but we can happily switch or stop them should the need arise. They don’t get in the way of us living our lives. However, individuals with ICDs can be ostracized from normal social integration. For many ICD sufferers, the worst aspect of their condition is not the disabling nature of their thoughts and behaviours, but the stigmatizing shame and embarrassment they can feel in public.

It wasn’t me but the wine talking

Most of us lose control occasionally and, for many, letting go is part of being sociable. Otherwise we are uptight, too rigid and too inhibited. This is one reason why people
drink alcohol. Contrary to popular misconceptions, alcohol is not a stimulant that turns someone into a party animal, but rather a depressant that weakens the inhibitory capacity of the frontal lobes, thereby unleashing the wilder, undomesticated animal with all its untethered drives. That is why we eat more, get into fights, lose reason and become more sexually active when we are drunk. After a night of misguided behaviour, many people wake up and explain that ‘I was not myself’ or ‘It was the wine talking’. Of course, wine doesn’t talk and if you were not yourself, then who were you?

As a domesticated species that has evolved to get on with each other, we must be careful not to insult or upset other members of our group. However, some of us harbour illicit thoughts and attitudes that are best kept to ourselves. If we care about what others think, then we try to keep all of these stereotypes, biases, drives and mistaken beliefs under wraps because we know that they are unacceptable. We may even understand that they are wrong but nevertheless they linger in our unconscious. However, just like white bears and earworms, the more we try to suppress these negative aspects of our self, the more they can rebound back despite our best efforts.

Whether we can suppress unwanted thoughts or not, it does call into question what our true nature is. Is it the inner secrets that we keep under lock and key in our mind, or the public persona we share with the world? Most of us probably would prefer to know about someone’s secrets because ultimately we would be suspicious that individuals were not being honest about their true self. Even though someone
might successfully hold back unpleasant aspects of their personality, the danger is that they might not always be able to control them.

The cost of control

Have you ever come out of a stressful exam or interview and thought that you could devour a whole tub of ice-cream? Or maybe it was an emotional movie that left you drained. Why do many people who endure a stressful experience want a stiff drink or to raid the fridge in search of comfort foods that are high in fat and sugar? One intriguing idea is that when we succumb to these temptations, we are experiencing ego depletion.

Ego depletion
comes from American psychologist Roy Baumeister, who believes that enduring something stressful exhausts our capacity for willpower to the extent that we give in to temptations that we would rather avoid.
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In one of his studies, he made hungry students eat bitter radishes rather than delicious chocolate cookies.
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Even people who like a bit of radish in their salad would find that task difficult. However, Baumeister was not interested in eating habits. He was really interested in how long the students would persevere on an insoluble geometry task. The students who had been allowed to eat the cookies stuck at the geometry task on average for about twenty minutes, whereas those who were forced to eat the radishes gave up after only eight minutes. They had used up all their willpower to eat the radishes so they were left with less reserve to cope with another situation of completing a difficult problem.

Performance on one task that requires effort can therefore have unforeseen consequences for a subsequent situation that is completely unrelated except that it requires effort. This is why Baumeister regards willpower as a mental muscle that can become exhausted. We apparently spend quite a bit of time avoiding temptations. For one week, German adults carried around BlackBerries that quizzed them once in every two-hour period what they were thinking about. They were found to spend an average of three to four hours of each waking day avoiding temptations and desires.
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Just maintaining one’s composure can be ego depleting. Not being allowed to laugh at hilarious comedy sketches, firing employees, enduring others in crowds are all situations where we have to exert self-control that leads to ego depletion. We exhibit more ego depletion at the end of the day, which is when couples are more likely to fight, after a hard day at the office. We become less tolerant of others and blame our spouses for the problems that are really generated by work.

When we are ego depleted, we eat more junk food, drink more alcohol, spend more time looking at scantily clad members of the opposite sex and generally have less control over our behaviour. Not only do we give into temptation, but we have an increased desire for forbidden fruit.

There’s no one in control

Most of us believe that we are in control. We may dilly and dally about making decisions, but we still think that we are the ones making the choices. We feel the authorship of
actions and ownership of thoughts. And yet we sometimes surprise ourselves when we do things that seem so out of character. It’s as if we have an inner scorpion determined to behave the way it wants to.

We must keep these beasts at bay. In order to be domesticated, we must be able to control ourselves and learn when and where behaviour is appropriate. This self-control is our capacity to regulate and coordinate competing drives and urges. It develops over childhood, supported by the executive control mechanisms of the PFC that act to suppress and inhibit thoughts and actions that may potentially sabotage our goals. By observing others and learning what is appropriate, children learn to engage their self-control. When these control mechanisms are impaired, individuals are at the mercy of automatic thoughts and behaviours. Moreover, they are unable to foresee the consequences of their actions and become impulsive, trapped in the moment of immediate gratification.

If impulse control emerges as the interaction between biology and environment, it would seem that it is wise to provide children with guidelines about what is socially acceptable but not try to enforce them by external pressure. Nor should they be left alone or indulged. One size does not fit all and strategies for domesticating children will depend on the individual child, the parents and the culture. This variation in impulsivity reflects both individual temperaments but also the social environments that foster strategies for shaping and modifying thoughts and behaviours. If our social interactions are to be successful, we need to maintain control in company but that comes at a cost. When we resist the temptation to
act inappropriately or not say what is on our mind because we might offend or upset others, then there can be consequences. Rebound effects and ego depletion show that there can be a price to pay for maintaining a veneer of respectability and when disease, damage or drugs compromise our self-control, we become victims of unconscious thoughts and behaviours as the story of the coherent individual that we try to maintain comes apart. When someone loses control, they often end up in trouble since they break moral codes and laws that society has put into place to guide our domestication. But what if there were no rules? Would we still learn to live together or would all hell break loose?

‘Kill
the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!’

This chilling chant comes from a dramatic scene in William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, when English schoolboys, marooned on a desert island, work themselves into a blood-lust frenzy before they descend on the innocent boy Simon, beating him to death with sticks.
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It is a tale about the inherent evil of mankind because, far away from the confines of civilization, Golding thought children would descend into savagery. He wrote the book based on what he thought was the true nature of humans after witnessing the atrocities of World War II. Prior to the war, Golding believed that man was inherently good but afterwards would later lament,

I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
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The true nature of man is a question that has preoccupied thinkers for centuries. Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, believed that children were born selfish and needed to be taught how to become useful members of society. In the West, this view of the lawless child prevailed up until the last 100 years and it was thought
that the best way to parent was through a regime of strict discipline, since only harsh schooling would instruct children how to behave in society. Children, according to this view, lacked a moral compass and, left to their own devices, would run amok and descend into an animalistic battle for survival as captured in Golding’s nightmarish vision.