The Folly of Fools (19 page)

There is little doubt that pain from a relationship is among the worst of pains. With physical pain, you can almost always do something to ease it, but with emotional pain, you have to wait until it eases itself. The pain is felt on the inside and the outside—there is a social dimension that only adds to the personal. Remember that betrayal often links your partner to a web of lies involving many others—people who knew but did not speak, and so on.

Another very painful part of the interaction is that when evidence suggests that a long-term relationship is hopeless, the best strategy may be to cut the relationship in half, discard the other person, and minimize interactions, but this in itself is very painful, as if you are cutting yourself in two. Grown up between the two of you may be multiple lines of communication, now severed, so that you suffer extreme social deprivation. Two or three phone calls a day give way to oppressive silence. The sharing of joys, of minor insights, of hopes and fears, all fall by the wayside. The desire to reestablish contact—even hostile contact—is almost overwhelming. You find yourself talking to the person, and not usually in a nice way, either. If you engage in spiteful behavior or fantasize about payback time, you risk being caught in a passionate embrace, not warm but passionate, time-consuming, painful, costly, and negative.

We now have come full circle, from some of the most tender, loving, and physically exciting moments in our lives to some of the bitterest memories, as victims of lies, treachery, and even public shaming. From love to murderous impulses. This transformation is not created by self-deception but is fed by it at every stage.

CHAPTER 6

The Immunology of Self-Deception

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o far we have concerned ourselves with an individual’s relationship to the outside world—his or her competitors, friends, mates, and family. How does success or failure in each of these relationships involve deceit and self-deception? What kinds of self-deception are special to each realm, and what are their costs? But there is also an inner world that has strong effects on the costs and benefits of self-deceptive behavior (costs and benefits, as usual, are ultimately defined and measured by their effects on survival and reproduction). This inner world consists of a very large number of parasites (which cause disease)—invading organisms bent on eating us from the inside—and a very complex immune system of our own arrayed against them.

The importance of this world to self-deception comes primarily from the fact that the immune system is very expensive. It can act as an immense reservoir of energy and proteins and is very flexible—benefits and costs can be transferred to other functions at the flick of a molecular switch. Divert resources to attacking another male for possible immediate reproduction? Let’s deal with disease later. Such decisions have very important downstream effects on health, freedom from disease, and ultimately survival and reproduction. And many of these decisions, as we shall see, involve choices between psychological states with differing degrees of self-deception. Put differently, self-deception may have strong negative or, less often, positive effects on the immune system and therefore survival and reproduction—in short, reproductive success (RS).

The inner world is populated by a series of antagonistic actors, mostly parasites—that is, species specialized to attack and devour us from the inside but also including cancer cells, mutated forms of one’s own cells now replicating out of control. Parasites come in such major categories as viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and worms. They cause an enormous array of diseases: malaria, AIDS, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, dysentery, smallpox, mumps, whooping cough, and elephantiasis, to name only some of the deadlier forms. Indeed, it is a sobering thought that more than half of all species on earth are parasitic on the other half—and this is a gross underestimate of the relative frequency of the two, since species of parasites are usually much smaller and harder to detect than are their host species. Most parasites have relatively mild effects, but in aggregate effects on RS, the inner world of parasites is almost as important as the outer, causing perhaps as much as 30 percent of total mortality every generation. This huge selective force has generated a very large, complex, and highly diverse system to counter the internal enemies—our immune system.

The immune system sends many cellular types to detect, disable, engulf, and kill invading organisms. One part, the innate immune system, is automatic, acts as the first line of defense, and does not rely heavily on learning. The second is based on experience and learning, the preferential production of defenses against parasites one has already encountered. This system produces as many antiparasite defenses (antibodies) as there are parasites. It has been called our “sixth sense,” directed inward to spot invaders as well as cancer cells and stop them. This kind of defense, with a detailed memory of past parasitic attacks, is so important it is found even in bacteria (whose parasites are viruses).

So disease is important and we invest heavily in protecting ourselves from it—nothing surprising there. What does this have to do with deceit and self-deception? Surprisingly enough, the answer is “a lot.” As we shall see, hiding one’s sexual orientation (or HIV status) is costly—not just in social relations and identity but in impaired immune function and associated early death. Shame, guilt, and depression are all associated with depressed immune function, but shame has greater effects than does guilt. Sharing thoughts about a trauma—even with a private journal—is associated with improved immune function. Good marriages appear to be associated with immune benefits and bad ones with immune costs. Meditation that improves mood also improves immune function. Religiosity is associated with better immune function, as is optimism. And so on. In short, there seems to be a general rule that suppressing the truth is costly to immune function and health, as is negative affect. The key is to understand why. Why should psychological suppression of reality be associated with immune costs and sharing reality or facing it, with immune benefits? And why should an upbeat personality be associated with immune benefits, and depression with immune costs?

Perhaps the most important aspect of the immune system in this regard is its enormous cost, measured in energy and protein consumption. These resources can easily be diverted for other purposes. No one has figured out yet how to estimate the aggregate cost of the immune system, whether in energy or in other critical units, but there can be no doubt that it is large, probably on the order of the brain itself (20 percent of resting metabolic energy). We turn first to this key point.

THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS EXPENSIVE

The beginning of wisdom about our immune system is to understand that it is extremely costly, both in energy and in the building blocks of life, proteins. It is ongoing and active twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To keep it running, every two weeks (roughly the maximum life span of many white blood cells), the body produces a set of cells greater in volume than two grapefruits. Some immune cells are among the most metabolically active cells in the body. Each of several thousand B cells specialized to produce antibodies grinds out about two hundred antibodies per second. Put differently, in one day’s time, they generate their own weight in antibodies, the proteins that bind to parasites and disable them. Of course, they can manage this feat for only about a day and a half and must be continually replenished. Because the immune system employs a bewildering array of cell types in a very complex manner, nobody has come close to estimating its total metabolic cost, though survival costs of heightened immune activity have been measured in several bird species. Mice lacking an immune system have been created in the lab, but these animals are prone to infections of every sort and must be maintained in sterile or near-sterile conditions, where they do not thrive, in part because they are not exposed to the useful bacteria we depend upon (for digestion and skin health, for example).

Scientists have been able to show that the short-term immune response to an immediate parasite attack typically is costly in energy. Fever is often a response because it is harder on the parasite than on the host, but for every 1 degree C increase in human temperature due to fever, there is about a 15 percent increase in metabolic rate (roughly translated: the rate at which we consume energy), so the response is costly. Immunizations, which merely mimic parasite attack, commonly elevate metabolic rate by about 15 percent for several days, while real attacks impose twice the metabolic cost per unit time. This is measured not only in energy but also protein consumed—as much as 20 percent loss in total body protein in sick humans, while in some sick rats more than 40 percent of muscle protein is broken down and new synthesis is sharply reduced. Chickens reared in germ-free environments enjoy about a 25 percent gain in body weight compared to those raised in conventional environments. Of course, this reflects absence of immune costs as well as those of the parasites themselves. The metabolic requirements of mammals raised in germ-free environments drops by as much as 30 percent. Supplying antibiotics in food is associated with growth gains in birds and mammals on the order of 10 percent. The take-home message should be clear. Inside us is a system of which we are mostly unconscious that is vast, powerful, and very expensive. As we shall see, it has numerous psychological correlates, cause and effect often go in both directions, and processes of self-deception produce striking effects.

It is also striking that about one-tenth of all the proteins our cells produce are promptly degraded and their peptides recycled—a wasteful process involving largely two cell organelles specialized for this purpose (the proteosome and lysosome). Some of this involves regulating proteins that are being produced at too high numbers or are misshapen, but the rest consists of grinding up proteins made by viruses, bacteria, and cancerous cells, both to mediate their effects and to recognize them for future attack.

Thus the immune system is expensive in both energy expended and proteins consumed. But this also means that it is an energy and protein reservoir that can be drawn on for other purposes—and this is probably the key to understanding many of its behavioral and psychological correlates.

One piece of evidence for how expensive (and important) the immune system is comes from “sickness behavior”—the cost the immune system imposes on the rest of the body when it needs to repair itself. Right after the immune system has fought off a parasitic invader—let us say a virus or bacteria—it is physiologically exhausted. It has drawn down heavily on its own resources to deal with the invader, and it now needs to rebuild itself to be ready for the next one. To do this, it induces a state of torpor, apathy, and lack of interest in life in the larger organism—the “blahs.” This is achieved by releasing a hormone (a particular cytokine) that acts on the brain to make the person anhedonic, that is, not taking pleasure in anything. In rats, this can be shown experimentally by releasing into healthy individuals the immune cytokine that targets the brain—the rat simply will not work as hard (on a treadmill) for sugar or other rewards.

To me, this finding was especially striking because I had always thought you felt bad after the initial attack of parasites (disease) because you were still fighting them, perhaps just mopping up operations but still enough to keep the immune system busy. Now I see that the immune system—fresh from heroic work on the barricades—merely wants to rebuild itself, and can we kindly help out by becoming inactive? To redirect energy to itself, the immune system makes other activities unrewarding so they will no longer be sought out. Internally you experience this as akin to depression. Would we suffer it better if we understood its purpose and went along with the program? Stay in bed; do not try to eat or have sex or pursue other activities that are usually fun but that make demands on the immune system and its regeneration—be satisfied with a “vacation from pleasure.” Preserve your energy and be humble. Things will soon get better.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP

A profound role for sleep and immune replenishment is emerging from a variety of studies. The simple logic goes as follows—more sleep is more time for immune system regeneration (which occurs preferentially at low activity levels, such as during sleep). But self-deception often interferes with sleep. It causes internal conflict and dissatisfaction—tossing and turning mentally and physically. Since active suppression of thoughts and repression of emotions may cause a rebound effect—people may think more about what they are trying to suppress than if they didn’t even try—it may directly interfere with sleep. Other things being equal, one predicts better sleep—and, therefore, better health—with less self-deception.

What the immune work shows is that there is a direct, strong, and positive relationship between sleep, immune function, and health: the more the better. Mammals generally respond more strongly to infection with increased sleep, while those rabbits that sleep more following artificial infection survive better. Meanwhile, totally sleep-deprived rats soon die from systemic bacterial infections. It is probably wise to be conscious of this connection. If you find yourself sleeping more, you may already be infected. You should probably indulge the sleep and “go with the flow.”