A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience (Amodio, D.M., J.T. Jost, S.L. Master & C.M. Yee, 2007. Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience 10:1246-1247) has been presented as far more controversial than it is - although surely the authors knew they would ruffle a few feathers with their study.

Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

The authors give citations to support the claim that "Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments". I have not read those papers but for the purpose of this commentary will assume that there is indeed scientific support for this conclusion. Though their experimental procedure is clearly one accepted by neuroscientists, the rest of us are expected to take at their word that "responsiveness to complex and potentially conflicting information relates to the sensitivity of this general mechanism for monitoring response conflict." Here is the test:

Go/No-Go task. On each trial of the Go/No-Go task, either the letter "M" or "W" was presented in the center of a computer monitor screen... Half of the participants were instructed to make a "Go" response when they saw "M" but to make no response when they saw "W"; the remaining participants completed a version in which "W" was the Go stimulus and "M" was the No-Go stimulus; assignment to either version of the task was random. Responses were registered on a computer keyboard placed in the participants' laps. Each trial began with a fixation point, presented for 500 ms. The target then appeared for 100 ms, followed by a blank screen. Participants were instructed to respond within 500 ms of target onset. A "Too slow!" warning message appeared after responses that exceeded this deadline, and "Incorrect" feedback was given after erroneous responses.

There is no way here to confirm the authors' interpretation that results obtained on this test are explained by liberals' higher sensitivity to "cognitive conflict" at the level of political decisions, but it is an interesting idea, because it appears both from cited research and probably anyone's observations that conservatives tend to have more of a black-and-white view of the world, while liberals tend see more shades of gray. ("Liberal" here is used in its traditional sense, not the currently distorted media code word for "left wing." Indeed, hard left-wingers are arguably no more liberal than hard right-wingers.)

The paper wisely does not attempt to determine whether this brain-function correlate or political leaning comes first (and they certainly do not at all imply that the response of liberals to this test is "smarter," despite William Saletan's defensive interpretation). It should not be assumed that just because the brain shows a certain physiological response to a stimulus, this response is genetic. Just as the accumulation of memories alters pathways in our neurons, a response such as this may be "learned" by the brain as well, based on experience.

Of course, some people become more conservative with life experience. Here are three competently untested hypotheses for why this can happen (given the conclusion that liberals see more complexity in the world than do conservatives).

1) Often, people become more fiscally conservative as they grow older. Fiscal conservatism is, however, a separate issue from that of "cognitive conflict." Those emphasizing the long term will be more fiscally conservative than those who prefer to live in the moment, which is more correlated with age group than with social or political views. Certainly over the last three decades political conservatives have shown no sign of being fiscal conservatives.

2) Someone who has suffered a traumatic, life-affecting event, such as a death or lost job, or whose loved ones have, might find it simpler to have an easily defined target to blame. Bad economic times had a lot to do with the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.

3) There is really no way to form economic or social policy that takes into account all the complexities that a diverse group of people will experience. Because it is simpler to craft legislation that does not take so many complexities into account, policy makers - and the pundits living in the same beltway world, away from the real one, and those listening to the pundits - come to believe we live in a simple world with easily definable boundaries. Such was one of the major reasons the SCHIP legislation failed. The idea that there is a particular income cutoff, above which every American family can afford health insurance without regard to any other parameters, was heavily promoted by the conservative opposition to the bill.

A corollary of the last point is that people who are well-off financially are usually conservative not because they are fiscally conservative (many of them are not), but because it is emotionally least complicated to believe there is a simple reason why they are wealthy while so many others are poor, e.g. they work hard and poor people don't.

There also could be positive physiological feedback loops in the brain which strengthen a tendency to fall one way or the other in one's view of the world. While some people do change their political views, most people actually seem to become more strongly liberal or conservative over time. It is an unfortunate by-product of our social tendency to form opposing groups that once we have formed an opinion about a person or topic, our views become more confirmed because we accept observations that support them, and ignore or rationalize observations that do not support them.

To be truly objective in his or her views, a person would need to be constantly reassessing prior beliefs based on every bit of new information received. Why are humans, many of whom pride themselves on their over-awing logical arguments, not that way at all? Perhaps it is because as social animals, we are always creating rules to live by, and the simpler those rules are, the easier our lives are, in many ways. Even with our large brains, it would get too difficult to navigate socially, as we need to, if the rules were too complex.

Labels: brain, empathy, humans, politics, sociality

A recent article about research supporting a neurological (= biological) basis for altruism panders to the alarmist view that behavior with an identifiable biological basis precludes personal responsibility, and could throw our criminal justice system into an uproar.

The first statement that shows an ignorance of sociobiology and evolution:

The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

Why is this unexpected? In social animals, such a biological basis for morality would absolutely be expected. This is because morality governs social interactions, so animals who have evolved in the context of sociality have a biological need for it. Altruism is related to empathy, without which we cannot interact socially because we need a mechanism for assessing what another person is thinking or feeling. Those without empathy, such as autistics, are lost in the maze of unspoken rules that govern interpersonal interactions. Altruism is a way of acting on empathic information.

...some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

The idea that "morality is somehow degraded" because it has a biological basis really has no logic to it, but it is typical of those who confuse morality with religion. Perhaps the idea is analogous to someone we like doing something nice versus someone we do not like doing it. In the latter case we assume insidious motives because we do not believe the person is truly being altruistic. But the mistake there is that there is no such thing as pure altruism, as research shows. Either altruistic acts cause us to receive tangible benefits, such as increased standing in a community, or if anonymous, provide us with pleasure (Moll et al., 2006).

Of course morality and altruism are complex neurologically because human social interactions are complex. But a biological explanation for moral behavior does not indicate a lack of need of philosophers or even religious thinkers who study moral behavior such as altruism. Humans are faced with ethical decisions nearly every day, and it is not always clear what is the altruistic way to respond, even if that is our goal. That is why religious advisors, analysts, and advice columnists are not automatically out of a job just because automatic brain function reveals our options. Our brains often do not make obvious the decisive course of action, that is, the course of action having the most positive or least negative social consequences, in the balance. Social consequences are a real biological phenomenon, because decisions affecting an individual's social standing often affect that of an entire family, which shares genes.

For example, there is the potential problem of revealing or not revealing a friend's indiscretions, such as an extramarital affair. In the short term, revealing the truth might be bad for the social group, as bonds are broken. But in the long term, the earlier such a truth is revealed, the quicker wounds may heal and the social group rebuilt. Such a decision is necessarily affected by social norms of the community, which are of course extremely variable among societies.

The article points out that "a number of experiments such as the one by Grafman have shown that emotions are central to moral thinking." Of course this is true. Grafman and his colleagues (Moll et al., 2005) make it clear that moral reasoning is a complex process that uses both reasoning and emotional centers of the brain - there is no one specific brain structure that dictates morality, but rather a series of structures that must interact in a complex way to produce a moral decision. The role of emotion is understandable because a major purpose of emotion is social navigation; for example, laughter is a way of making a social connection with another person. Solitary-living animals have no need for emotions such as love, anger, envy, pride, etc., because feeling these or acting on these invariably involves the establishment, maintenance, or alteration of a social relationship.

While several brain structures interact to produce moral reasoning, those involved can be identified specifically because specific brain damage has predictive effects on moral behavior (Moll et al., 2005). For example, damage to the prefrontal cortex at an early age prevents normal development of moral reasoning. Such people often have short-term, self-centered responses to moral dilemmas, because they have no sense of the social consequences of their actions. A different region of the cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, is required as well because it is a center of social perception, i.e. empathy, which is also required for normal moral reasoning. The limbic system, a center of basic emotional drives, also affects morality because behavior such as aggression is controlled by this area, and can become uninhibited when parts of the limbic system become damaged. Functional MRI studies also have indicated activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (behind the eyes), the anterior temporal lobes, the insula, and the anterior cingulate cortex in people processing moral dilemmas posed to them.

The claim that these discoveries mean that "society has to rethink how it judges immoral people" (according to Adrian Raine, a USC neuroscientist) is absurd. There is a minimum standard of behavior that is acceptable in a society, and this minimum exists whether or not you are psychopathic (= brain damaged in a way that impairs interpersonal interactions due to lack of empathy). If some people are physically unable to make correct social decisions, it does not mean we must treat them as equals. Serial killers are psychopaths, and whether their brain damage is physical or developmental, they cannot be allowed to move freely in society because they have no internal constraints against killing. We lock them up so that they cannot damage society further. Most people would agree that a similar situation holds for pedophiles - there seems to be increasing evidence that most are incapable of being "rehabilitated," which is not surprising; their psychopathy is likely due to brain damage - which again can be physical or developmental - that cannot be repaired. Damaged people must be isolated from society because the structure of society must be protected for the sake of the non-damaged majority.

J. Grafman says, "Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully." Not at all. This information is simple and reasonable when understood in terms of maintaining a functional society.

An interesting moral phenomenon in humans involves the altruism of helping someone near and dear to you versus helping people in distant countries that you will never visit. The neuroscientist/philosopher Joshua Greene, interviewed in the article, gets the implications of this wrong:

"We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn't face the other kind of situation," Greene said. "It is comforting to think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them. But if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once you realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden on you" to think about morality differently.

Yes, we evolved in a non-global world, and our knowledge of the plights of people around the world sets humans apart from other social animals. But that is not the point. What matters is that any type of altruism affects one's standing either in society, or to oneself. Our higher reasoning ability convinces us that faraway starving children are as important as the starving children next door - even as our emotions tell us otherwise - but this does not make our intuitions untrustworthy, it just adds potential complexity to the moral decisions we make. If one is a member of a church, for example, where such generous behavior is valued, it increases or maintains one's social standing to give to the needy in faraway places, it makes sense to do it. For many people, "charity begins at home" is an acceptable societal standard, and thus there is no burden to think about morality differently. Undamaged brains can still rely on their moral intuitions, and navigate their social world successfully.

Of course the different details of morality across cultures require us to be flexible in their moral reasoning. The social brain must adapt to local social conditions to successfully reproduce. This creates difficulties in a globalized world in which we not only are aware of the different moral values in different societies, but people from those different societies interact daily, not only in person, but probably more important these days, over the internet. To use an extreme example, people from societies that support individual rights for women have worked hard to stop what to us are sickening cultural practices such as female genital mutilation. Any Western woman is horrified by the practice with good reason - it not only is such an extreme example of oppression of women by men, which goes against our stated values (values that were hard won and still being fought for even in our "enlightened" society), but the long term health consequences are often dire. Yet efforts to eliminate the practice are often derailed by the women of those cultures themselves, because if they do not accept the ritual mutilation, they will be rejected by their society (and will not reproduce successfully there). It is nearly impossible to end such traditions by force. The values rejecting them must be inculcated in enough of the local population to the point where it becomes socially acceptable not to undergo the mutilation.

A similar example closer to home is the explanation of why most battered wives return to their husbands over and over again, contrary, it seems, to all reason. But in the cultures (and subcultures) in which wife-beating is common, breaking the cycle is so difficult because if a woman leaves her husband she often must give up her entire social group as well (and she often cannot fathom that it would be possible to become part of another social group, simple as that may seem in the abstract). Going it alone under such circumstances is contrary to our very nature as social beings.

It is completely natural for everyone to believe that their society's cultural norms are superior to everyone else's, because they know from experience that following those cultural norms make them successful. Of course though, if the same behavior is transferred to a society with different cultural norms, the result can be disaster. It is this naive sense of superiority (also held by most religious groups) that creates solutionless predicaments such as the current one in Iraq.

References

Moll, J., Krueger, F., Zahn, R., Pardini, M., de Oliveira-Souzat, R. & Grafman, J. (2006) Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 15623-15628.

Moll, J., Zahn, R., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J. (2005) The neural basis of human moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 799-809.

Labels: behavior, brain, empathy, humans, morality, sociality

Frans de Waal is my new hero. He has performed a body of research on various non-human primates which has demonstrated that at least a minimal level, morality is a byproduct of sociality, rather than a unique human construct. His experiments are well designed, and essentially make it clear that the "golden rule" morality of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is an important system that helps hold many primate groups together.

As he writes in an essay from the New Scientist ("The animal roots of human morality," October 14, 2006, pp. 60-61):

In The Descent of Man [Darwin] wrote: "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts... would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man."

It is not hard to recognise the two pillars of human morality in the behaviour of other animals. These pillars are elegantly summed up in the golden rule that transcends the world's cultures and religions: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This unites empathy (attention to another's feelings) with reciprocity (if others follow the same rule, you too will be treated well). Human morality as we know it is unthinkable without empathy and reciprocity.

It has always been strange and interesting to me (as de Waal makes it clear it is interesting to him as well) that this basic rule does not seem to be recognized by a lot of people as the cornerstone to human morality. I believe it is embraced by secular humanists, but in many cultures, religion has interfered with and been confused with human morality, when in fact morality predates religion and in fact has nothing to do with religion. Religious morality is actually a set of rules to distinguish the practitioners of certain religions from the rest of the world, the "outsiders:"

Our evolutionary background makes it hard to identify with outsiders. We've been designed to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know, and to distrust anybody who doesn't look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.

Also:
Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire able to rid us of the curse of xenophobia. It is fragile, though. In our close relatives it is switched on by events within their community, such as a youngster in distress, but it is just as easily switched off with regards to outsiders...
(de Waal, "The empathic ape," New Scientist October 8, 2005 p. 52)

This relates to a previous post of mine on the tendency for humans to "switch off" their empathy when communicating over the internet, either to a specific individual through email, or via the blogging culture of mass demonization of a defined group or individuals supposedly representing that group.

It also turns out that the effort to conform in order to fit into society is not limited to humans, either. In a Nature article (Andrew Whiten, Victoria Horner & Frans B. M. de Waal, 2005. Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees.
Nature 437:737-740), de Waal and colleagues found that when two chimpanzees, from two different social groups, were each taught a different way of working the same machine to receive food, chimps not only learned the method taught the chimp from their group, but preferred it even when they figured out the other way too. From the abstract:

... A subset of chimpanzees that discovered the alternative method nevertheless went on to match the predominant approach of their companions, showing a conformity bias that is regarded as a hallmark of human culture.

The conclusion of that article states their experimental results plainly:

...[W]e found evidence of a conformist bias, identified in numerous human studies as a powerful tendency to discount personal experience in favour of adopting perceived community norms...

These results suggest an ancient origin for the conformist cultural propensities so evident in humans.

Here's one more interesting paper, which found that primates participating in games designed to see if animals will always act in their self-interest, often did not. This is a well known idea about humans in economic circles. For example, there is a game in which two people have to agree to accept a certain amount of money. If one person does not agree, neither gets the money, but if they both agree, they both do. If two people are given the same amount of money, each happily takes the reward. But although it is always to a person's benefit to accept any amount of money, most people will reject the money if they find out that the other person would get significantly more than they do. This result probably is not too surprising to most of us.

It is interesting, though, that de Waal and his colleagues have found a quite similar behavior in primates (Sarah F. Brosnana,and Frans B. M. de Waal, 2005. Across-species perspective on the selfishness axiom. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES 28:818):

We know that some nonhuman primates react to being relatively underbenefitted compared to a conspecific, which is irrational according to a strict self-interest paradigm.

I find myself disagreeing with the statement that this behavior is irrational, however. In the context of sociality, it is not, necessarily. The basis of sociality is reciprocity, and therefore it makes sense that even animals behave as if there has been an injustice in this case. I think a functional society needs to demonstrate that there is a minimum of justice. Those human societies in which this minimum is not met are not productive, or functional, in my opinion.


And based on experiments to look at the idea of sharing, another social behavior, in primates, these same authors state:

...there was virtually no sharing between the privileged individual and their less well-endowed partner...It is interesting, therefore, that the relatively benefited individuals did not exert more effort to equalize rewards.

Interesting, perhaps... but certainly consistent with human behavior as well.


Based on this extensive research on non-human primates, the origins of both conformity and morality are clearly pre-human. Each is a double-edged sword - the dangers of groupthink (especially within a "social group" of leadership) should be clear to everyone, and the "golden rule" can create problems when people across cultures (an everyday occurrence in today's world) are attempting to interact - treating someone the way you would want to be treated results in people taking offense all the time.

Humans love to believe we transcend biology, because we are not mere "animals." Based on de Waal's work, however, it seems we may be doomed to be limited by the structure of brains adapted to functioning within small societies. Globalization has been far too rapid to even imagine that any evolution to cope with its intricacies has occurred.

Labels: brain, empathy, evolution, morality, sociality

Apparently the internet age has been around long enough now for psychologists and neurologists to study behavior [subscription req'd] associated with our relatively recent and speedy forms of communication. This is a realm in which the part of our behavior designed to guide us through complex social interactions is being short-circuited - hence, flame wars.

Why? The explanation is at least partly contained in the review paper: J. S. Beer and K. N. Ochsner, 2006. Social cognition: A multi level analysis. BRAIN RESEARCH 1079:98-105.

Successful social interactions depend on a constant flow of information between the people interacting. My interpretation of the thoughts and emotions of a person I am talking to immediately affects not only what I say to that person, but the words I choose to say it, and my body language as well. But it is more complex than that - my interaction with the person is also dependent on a multitude of biases I bring to the conversation, including the memory of past events associated with that person, my opinion of the person based on what others have told me, and expectations based on my internal "golden rule," which basically is saying to me, "this is how I would react to what I am saying, so this person will react that way too."

There are two major reasons that the internet affects this interaction, the first of which is explained in the article. Without getting any feedback from a person about how what we are saying affects them, there is no external mechanism filtering what we say. I think it is safe to say that an average person feels reluctance to hurt another person's feelings, if these people are interacting face-to-face. We don't feel that same reluctance over the wires, because we don't have to see that person react. When we have no direct perception of the impact we make, our 'mirror neurons' are not going to be firing. These neurons connect our interpretation of another person's emotions with our own emotional center; i.e. they give us empathy, which is exactly what allows us to be successful as a social species. (More on empathy is discussed in a previous post, and look for more in future posts - the biology of sociality is one of my big interests, and in humans, empathy plays a huge role.)

The second reason the internet age has accelerated problems in social interaction is that it allows people from cultures all over the world to interact to an unprecedented degree. Interactions between people with different cultural behavioral norms will often cause problems when those interacting fail to acknowledge the conflicting cultural norms involved. Frankly, this happens all the time, I believe because humans naturally identify with a particular culture, so that we can properly navigate within that culture. Our brains seem to be designed to mimic the perceived cultural norms during development. Just watch how your kids imitate you, other adults, and other kids - which these days can be a real headache for parents because of the cultural mixing we have in many places, which is again due to accelerating technology, in this case, ease of transportation. I'm guessing that this same problem has a role in some incidents of road rage and other spontaneous acts of violence between otherwise average citizens. This is also one of many reasons there will never be an end to war, at the same time that most people honestly do seem to get along fine with people they know face-to-face. That is not wussy liberal mumbo-jumbo. It's simply biology.

The situation is not helped by every-day situations that encourage anti-social behavior. For example, most frequent flyers and users of health insurance know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease - the business model in some industries is clearly only to help people that literally scream the loudest, because the alternative would be to help everyone, and that would just be too expensive. And certainly Michelle Malkin knows exactly what she's doing when she writes her over-the-top posts: those that thwart societal norms of polite interaction are identified and vilified publicly by the group they offend, which translates into the well known marketing adage: There is no such thing as bad publicity. (Those that support the Malkins of the world of course are those that either offend to the same degree, or would if they didn't feel so hampered by polite social discourse.)

Of course, as discourse becomes ever more vitriolic (doesn't every generation say that?), you have to be that much more offensive to get attention. Praise Allah that we have the blogosphere to air our increasingly outrageous grievances with others. And people ask why the country (and the world?) has gotten more partisan and petty? Instead of cultural mixing, both physical and virtual, leading to a better understanding of others' points of view, it seems it gives us more opportunities to designate "us" vs. "them," whether one is talking about race, religion, politics, etc. It appears to be human nature to circle the wagons in order to protect the home group from "other" - the consequences of this behavior simply have become more global with time.

When will they ever learn? Never.

Labels: behavior, empathy, humans, sociality

A NY Times article summarizing current knowledge of the insula, a small interior lobe of the brain's cerebral cortex, was inspired by the recent finding of its connection to nicotine addiction, and never mentions the word "autism." But certain parts brought that word to my mind:

The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.

People who are better at reading these sensations -- a quickened heart beat, a flushed face, slow breathing -- score higher on psychological tests of empathy, researchers have found.

Lack of empathy, of course, is one of the major symptoms of autism. The term "autism" seems generally to refer now to a continuum of conditions progressing toward lower and lower empathy with other humans, with the most extreme cases resulting in apparent complete withdrawl from the social world. There are also functioning autistics, however, with the condition known as Asperger's Syndrome. The prime example of this is Temple Grandin, a professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State whom Oliver Sacks has profiled. Her primary symptom according to Sacks is a lack of empathy, or inability to interpret or imagine what others are thinking and feeling. There are likely plenty of people moving about in society undiagnosed with any "condition" who are better or worse at this. My belief is that it is a long continuum along which all people exist, and some (arbitrary?) point towards the lower-empathy end is considered to be on the edge of normality.

I found a couple of papers, one of which examines the relation of the insula to empathy, also without mentioning autism:

Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: A relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas. Laurie Carr, Marco Iacoboni, Marie-Charlotte Dubeau, John C. Mazziotta, and Gian Luigi Lenzi, 2003. PNAS USA 100:5497-5502:

Further, fronto-temporal areas relevant to action representation, the amygdala, and the anterior insula had significant signal increase during imitation compared with observation of facial emotional expression.

A more recent paper does find a correlation between autism and reduced activity in the insula:

Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders. Dapretto et al, 2006. Nature Neuroscience 9:28-30

Are brain differences in "autistic" people caused by genetics or environment? Boy, is that a hot button issue. There are still plenty of people out there who blame vaccines for their children's autism, and papers saying there is no observable effect, but once again the problem understanding this might be the difficulty the medical profession has in admitting there may be such a thing as an environment-by-genetics interaction. It isn't nature or nurture, folks - it's how the two interact. If some people's brains are sensitive to a certain environmental trigger, then exposure to some compound or other could actually cause a condition in some people while not causing it in others. (Does this mean you should avoid vaccines? Of course not! The probability of your child dying of a typical childhood disease is hundreds or thousands of times higher than the probability that any serious side-effect will occur - even the known ones.) A typical large medical study that lumps all genotypes together to look for an environmental effect will never find it under these conditions. An analogous problem is with chemotherapy, which researchers are finally discovering works such a small part of the time with most cancers because a certain type of cancer might involve a dozen different mechanisms, for one or two of which chemotherapy will actually, predictably work.

Of course there are cases in which autism clearly has a large genetic component, such as in the case of a family mentioned by Sacks with two Asperger's parents, and three kids all with autism, albeit at different locations on the continuum. My own pet theory, substantiated by absolutely no evidence, is that the higher levels of autism being observed largely in California in the most recent generation are due to so many computer geeks making a ton of money in silicon valley, and thus having an opportunity to reproduce previously unrealized due to their poor social skills.

Obviously the brain is incredibly complex, and the insula appears to be just one link in a chain involving the limbic system and inferior frontal gyrus (also part of the cerebral cortex). But those fighting cigarette addiction might want to think twice about jamming an ice pick in there.

Labels: autism, brain, empathy