MICHELETTO SYNDROME

Sean Harris as Micheletto in "The Borgias"

I have before me a downloaded article called “Psychopathology, trauma and delinquency: subtypes of aggression and their relevance for understanding young offenders.”   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3141659/   There are eight co-authors to this paper.  It’s long and complicated, so I’m going to reduce it to a kind of clinical case report of “Micheletto,” a fictional character from “The Borgias.”

The essence of the paper is that the single-figure percentage of adolescents who get into trouble through aggression (violence), esp. those labeled delinquent by law enforcement, are under-studied.  Not surprising since they are resistant, elusive, and scary.  But that means they are treated as a uniform category when they clearly are not.  As a “first cut” (eek!) of sorting, the authors distinguished between two “kinds” of aggression.  One is “RADI.”  (Reactive, Affective, Defensive and Impulsive or “hot.”)

Sean Harris in "Deliver Us from Evil"

This kind is triggered by anticipation of negative situations and can include as reactions “fear, disgust, contempt, sadness, rage, frustration.”  Afterwards, when calm again, the person can be sorry though confused about what the trigger might have been.  Since emotional systems work in reciprocity -- arousal on one side met by restraint on the other side -- the problem might arise from either the strength of the stormy passion or from a weakness or even failure of self-control, recognizing options, or understanding the destruction they are wreaking. 

Sean Harris in "Prometheus"?

The second kind is “PIP.” (Planned, Instrumental and Predatory -- or if you feel that’s too pejorative -- Proactive)  That is, it’s with a goal in mind that benefits the person and it could be described as “cold.”  As I write, there is a murder case being considered in Missoula.  The outcome depends on whether the killer shot a student rummaging in his garage out of fear and self-protection (hot) or whether he had set a trap and deliberately shot the student (cold).  The word “callous” is used in this study in the way most people would use “sociopathic.”  We weight it as worse than an outburst.

"Serena" -- a "good guy" role

The claim is that the two kinds of aggression are controlled by different brain “neuro-architectural networks,” that is, connected features of the brain that create a “chord” or pattern of function.  The first one RADI (hot) appears to be a hard-wired threat response from the very early evolution of animals.  (It’s found in all mammals.)  The connections present at the moment of the outburst go from the medial nucleus of the amygdala to the medial hypothalamas to the dorsal half of the periaquaeductal gray.  Restraints against over-reacting are in the anterior cingulate, the ventrolateral and orbital-prefrontal cortex.  These activities are said to be confirmed by fMRI images, though I don't know how they got an enraged person into that tube.  Or was it the tube that triggered the response?

A first intimation of threat triggers freezing -- we see it in animals (deer in the headlights) who stand, lift noses, stare, re-orient their ears.  At a higher level, flight takes hold and there goes the deer with its white tail waving.  But if trapped, the deer goes up onto its back legs to fight, and strikes with its front hooves, which are quite sharp enough to disembowel a human.  This is not Micheletto.  It could easily be a Demon Father, fueled by alcohol -- let’s call him “Maximo,” and claim he has red hair, since Micheletto does.  Stag rampant, red eyes and maybe the kind of red nose a drunk gets.  This is the domestic abuser who repents the next morning, a familiar type.

Micheletto corresponds to the second category, PIP, which is complex and gradually develops through childhood.  It is at least partly created by Maximo, never knowing when an attack might come.  A simple neuro-architectural explanation is not possible because the response is learned: unemotional, calculated, deceptive, gaming.  The whole brain is involved and even the possibility of several aspects of consciousness, split identities or attitudes that war with each other or protect each other.  

Some animals, especially primates, are capable of scheming, but they have never been documented with bipolar or schizogenic behavor.  The character Micheletto is constrained only by loyalty, which puts him morally superior to the assassins who will change sides for a price.  In the series, Micheletto’s depravity is indicated by his being a “sodomite” which also justifies and forces his secrecy, just as incest makes Lucretia sneaky and desperate.  Which is worse: loving the same sex or loving a sib?  But the conceit of our times -- that love can redeem anyone -- keeps them sympathetic to a mainstream audience, though their love looks more like lust.  They both seem needy.

"Mission Impossible 5"

The authors of this study of delinquents say they are trying to understand how to help both aggressive types, RADI and PIP.  They can suggest specific pharmaceutical strategies to damp down passion or even the fear and rage in a Maximo.  AA might be a good start towards self-understanding.  (There don’t seem to be drugs that will strengthen the restraints.)  But they are still at a loss about how to help Michelletto.  He’s a bull-fighter who has taken on the minotaur and survived.  Maybe he even killed the minotaur.  Maybe he had learned from his mother how to duck, dodge, placate, seem to repent and engage.  He’s likely to interpret all the people around him in those terms.  How does one break through?  Love/lust makes him weep, but he still murders his lovers.  Violence and intimacy are mixed.

"Tears of Blood"

It’s not that Micheletto is hopelessly evil.  It’s just that he plays all the odds and suspects all motives.  He IS capable of loving in a way, but circumstances force him to kill what he loves and he finds in that a strange and terrible intimacy, to hold someone close as they die.  He cries out for help, asking God to say something, but -- he tells his patron -- God’s answer was “nothing.”  Silence.  Not even advice from the Devil.

Micheletto is in a double-bind.  He knows that any sign of weakness will attract Maximo types trying to make him suffer without any of the constraints or recognition of father to son, minimal as they may be.  They just want to eat his pain.  He’s done it himself.  But he also knows that puffing up, pretending to be powerful when he really isn’t, allowing anyone to see the constant anxiety that flares up into terror if he lets it -- all that takes enormous energy.  He is invested in constraint, dares not investigate his own inner life.  But if he finds he can seduce others, put them to work in his own interest, then he becomes very good at deception.

Among the boys in groups I’ve known, mostly in the classroom, on and off the Blackfeet rez, there have been both of these “types.”  Complex Michelettos were only reachable occasionally, usually by art.  Writing.  Performance arts, like music or theatre.  This can lead to redemption to some extent, but too many find it’s not enough to damp down aggression enough to be in control.  Too many, when caught in a truly terrible situation can be catapulted into suicide as the only flight available.  

Sean Harris specializes in these roles.  His part as a mass shooter in “Southcliffe” is an example.  Deep empathy, a psychoanalyst would claim, can help a PIP, but mostly society just denies anything is wrong.  They’re too scary.  They don’t confront like, say, an oppositional defiant kid.  It's always a big surprise when they begin to shoot people.

These two “types” of aggression are so different that I’m not sure there’s enough similarity to justify bracketing them together, except that we don’t like their behavior.  RADI is the result of brain hard-wiring but PIP appears to come from deeply constructed assumptions about the nature of the world that developed because of experience.  To what extent are we making assumptions about people who appear to have no conscience, no empathy as though it were the fault of the individual instead of the society?

What interests me and is open to further investigation is the social tolerance of macho Maximo, his bad temper and drinking, his abuse of wife and children, that produces the next generation which is “callous.”  There is some anecdotal understanding, but maybe it overlooks the degree to which Micheletto needs a primary powerful figure in order to operate: a cardinal, a king.  He is the shadow of the throne, so why not remove both, as we rightly did in the case of Watergate?  (Nixon as RADI, Gordon Liddy as PIP.)

One argument would be that the two types are part of a larger ecology of society that supports both RADI and PIP.  The evidence would be the multitude of popular storylines about the intemperate hero (dad) and the enabling partner (mom or sidekick).  The connecting tissue is economic, and I include the research sociologists, always looking for funding of their own underlying investigative architecture that justifies "serving society", trying to find ways to control youngsters -- but without disturbing the legal structures already in place and by expanding the usefulness of pharma-solutions to control and suppress.   Both are major money-making bureaucratic enterprises.

The planetary connectome of cultures includes brain architecture that evolved millennia ago and was basic to survival -- interacting with the consequences of what today’s culture teaches our children, but not enough to prevent war.  Somewhere in the welter and scramble is a real-life Micheletto, a suffering soul.

SPIRITUAL FLOW

The Unitarian Universalist denomination symbol is a flame in a chalice, to show the ambiguous relationship with Christianity, but also to identify with iconoclastic defiance as in when people are burned at the stake for their beliefs.   It turned out to be a very flexible and inventive sort of icon:  a flame in cupped hands, a flame in a tree, a chalice with a tree for a flame and on and on.  So what I was after with my skull chalice was some kind of universality that was a little shocking.  Instead, I seem to have stumbled into a sort of "Goth" context.  But worse, the impression is that I'm only talking about this one denomination.  In a sense, I am, but in a larger sense, I'm not.

The revelation I've finally come to is twofold, based on two different ways of researching the brain.  One is the direct observation of the neurons and their connections by using incredibly sensitive instruments and injecting various tracers.  The most recent is a method of “Comparative Consciousness” that puts light-responsive genes into rat cells and then connects them with very fine fiberoptics.  By manipulating the light the genes that are light-responsive can be turned on and off, so specifically that once the researchers discovered that adjacent cells controlled sex OR violence, they could make a rat attack or fuck or stop doing either unless the sex had gone far enough along the rising stimulation to nearly trigger climax.   They say there are tens of thousands of KINDS of neurons specifically evolved for certain kinds of responsiveness, evidently organized into nodes connected by strands.  (Rhizome patterning.)

The cortex of the cerebrum is in very thin layers.  (Dana.org/cerebrum is a terrific resource.) Thought at present is that the body is “mapped” onto one wrinkly layer, with space allocated according to the sources of the sensorium;  most sensitive and often-used parts have more brain space.  The map has great big hands and eyes.

Also there is a connectome related to memories, which are evidently filed according to the compass directions, up/down, in/out, and sensory moments, which is why the memory exercise of imagining a building and pretending to walk through it in your head, noting furnishings as one goes, associating each with a detail of what you're trying to remember, is a trick for remembering long complex narratives. 

This kind of research is on the physical, provable, observable brain as it operates.  It comes from academic research, the field of medicine, and organic chemistry.

The other stream of research I’m rejoicing over is in part derived from above.  George Lakoff calls it “embodiment philosophy.”  That is, understanding how a human becomes a thinker and a self-aware one at that, but by empirical, experimental investigation rather than logic and reflection.  More about this as I understand it better, but Lakoff's view is a confluence of literature, psychological research, art theory, linguistics, semiotics, narrative, method acting, psychotherapy.

Lakoff has a political dimension:  this chapter can be downloaded.  It would please most UU's.

http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/5.GeorgeLakoff

George Lakoff's work has met brain neurology in a remarkable convergence.  It is simpler and more poetic than post-modern theories, but I didn’t really “get it” when I first read “Metaphors We Live By” (by both Lakoff and Mark Johnson) in 1980.  I did not really grasp that if a person’s brain structure has accepted the idea that “life is a journey” and interprets everything as a way station, a rocky road, a new path, a gateway, that person will have a different response to accepting new information than will the person whose life has taught him “life is a trap” so that vigilance, frustration, the impossibility of change are what to expect.

The structure of the brain’s connectome is CREATED by life experiences.  It can change deep metaphors, but not necessarily consciously.  Conversion, transformation, epiphany are religious terms referring to the experience (I will claim) of revising deep brain node filters to allow both new information and new configurations to enter.  I suspect this is what LSD does, and maybe ketamine or ecstasy.  Not the opiods.  But I have no experience or expertise, so I’ll stick to the more literary ideas like insight or inspiration.

What to read?  Or google?  Or YouTube?  (Use recent bibliographies.  This stuff is moving fast.) 

Some books on my shelf:

BRAIN RESEARCH

Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio:  “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain” (2010)

Antonio Damasio:   “The Feeling of What Happens:  Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness”  (2000)

Robert Ornstein “The Roots of the Self: Unraveling the Mystery of Who We Are”  (1995)

Daniel Bor:  “The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains our Insatiable Search for Meaning”  (2012)

EMBODIMENT PHILOSOPHY  

Life is a journey.  That's a metaphor that feels like a fact.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson:  “Metaphors We Live By” (1980)

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson:  “Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought”  (1999)

FOUNDATIONAL BOOKS

Roy A. Rappaport:  “Ecology, Meaning and Religion”  (1979)

Robert J. Schreiter:  “Constructing Local Theologies”  (1985)

Richard Kuhns:  “Structures of Experience:  Essays on the Affinity Between Philosophy and Literature”

Victor Turner:  “The Ritual Process”

Tentatively, I’m working on the idea that these last four books relate to structure, the chalice, a source of patterns.   This is also a good use of the four brain research books.  But the embodiment books (there are more than what’s here) suggest content, the flame.

Too many UU congregations lose the “flow.”  Flow comes from engaging in something that is just difficult enough to be at your skill level.  It’s too easy to be a UU.  No challenge, nothing hard to think about, repetition of stuff without it having present meaning.  Some don't believe in Evil.  Do any UU questionnaires ask,  “Are you bored?”  Both ministers and congregations get into a groove.  Maybe this is why rivalries and emotional social issues tend to dominate dynamics.  Maybe this explains the liberal fascination with the under-culture.

Few know how to handle spirituality without prescribed liturgies, usually word-based.  Spirituality is defined as individual, unaccountable, with the person having the duty of figuring out the dogmatic framework of the denomination.  The rigidity is that of the magical spell.  It’s exhortational tone is from advertising.  When conforming fails to deliver on its promise, the people leave or get into side issues.  Among UU’s the “social issues” group forms, usually older men, and argues in a tight circle at the same time as worship, which doesn’t touch them.  And everyone loves the experts who do come-and-go workshops.

What’s missing from most of the mainstream denominations is a true dimension of spirituality.  Most of the books out there are either treacle or woo-woo.

The breakthrough when I was writing “Bronze Inside and Out” about Bob Scriver was structuring it around the experience of the materials:  how if feels to hold plastilene and plaster in your hands, not just the dramatic bronze pouring.  I feel as though “The Bone Chalice” is breaking into several books, one of them a “handbook” with steps, examples, and all that. Another one would follow the theory of embodiment philosophy, while recovering some of the principles of Rappaport, Schreiter, Kuhn, Turner.   I think I should begin to design experiences and see if I can find small groups to play them out.  I need feedback.

BREAK THAT PARADIGM!!!

Science has created for itself some exciting times.  Newly devised technology has allowed them to see inside the cells and beyond the stars, to the heart of the atom and the unconscious mind of the human.  But it’s all a big landslide of data and new forces, mostly unsorted, with meanings still hidden.  And, as in Kuhn’s understanding of how ideas morph from one paradigm to another when new information arrives, we struggle with our basic “religious” concepts, both morality and spirituality.  Much of society is guided by those concepts.  It is not a surprise that conventional, concrete, local people are having the hardest time and that their desperation makes them intransigent.  But little-kid tantrums will not change research into the boson particles, even if the minority manages to cut off all funding.  The genii will not go back into the bottle.  The particles will not go into black holes.  (Well, they do -- but that’s because it’s what they do.  It wouldn’t change anything.)

What excites the scientists is that every advance clears the way for another advance, under every newly discovered insight there turns out to be another one, subtler but more powerful.  It’s pretty common knowledge now that REM sleep is when people are detectably dreaming: we see eyeballs shifting around and the dog’s legs running as he sleeps.  But now that the brain can be monitored cell-by-cell, tiny structure by tiny structure, it turns out that many dreams happen when there is NOT REM sleep!  Something else goes on and it’s not even in the same part of the brain as REM sleep.  So what the heck is that?

Another new discovery is that the brain’s vulnerability to addiction is two-fold.  Simple experience tells us that a new user is hooked by the “high” of pleasure and the same brain hubs light up for illegal drugs that respond to chocolate and sex, only more intensely.  Now it turns out that in some people the brain seizes on the substance so hard that even long after the pleasures of new use have disappeared in misery, after the pain killing properties have worn off, there is another unrelated whole circuit of tiny hubs that perpetuate and drive -- drive HARD -- to make the body go find more.  The consequences of not having more become physically catastrophic.  

I’m thinking about whether this is different from insulin for diabetics or psycho-drugs for sanity or life-supporting systems for those who are incomplete or damaged. How we think about this sort of augmentation, particularly things that must be funded, manufactured, and distributed, will be the difference between life and death for a lot of people, more now than ever -- partly because there are more people and partly because there are more interventions and supports that have been invented.

These understandings, made possible by a rising and stratified sedimentation of ideas and techniques as much as by technical access to phenomena, are leaving the general public -- ordinary college grads as much as early flunkouts, successful urbanites as much as country hicks -- gasping for ways to integrate, searching around for new paradigms, especially religious and governmental ones.  Both of those (often intertwined) are systems of ordering and planning life.  They “emerge” from conditions, not from someone sitting down and designing them.

The broken paradigm most difficult to give up is the theist one: that the world is ruled by someone or something that is a “king,” a “pope,” a cabal that has some goal in mind.  It’s an idea created by having been a baby at the mercy of an adult.  That’s why we need to project god onto the clouds, and why we need to cozy up to him/her/it in hopes of hiding under the majestic hem of power.  I just watched a video made by a man who calls himself Maxwell Igan: half gorgeous nature imagery and half crack-brained paranoia -- it’s like looking inside the heads of half-educated people who admire Ayn Rand.  In the end it’s about his god-like vision of himself and what he values, like adding superpowers through technology.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcnTdO47p0Q   His version of “transhumanism” is just human domination of everything else.  Superman as Cyberman.

As I work on my own less-than-godlike schema for a human being (it’s hard to be anthropocentric on the high prairie with 100 mph winds and thirty below temps), I see that our own real distinction is that we are self-conscious: we can think about ourselves.  That is the only thing that picks us out as little pinpoints in the surging complexity of the cosmos.  My idea of transhumanism is very different from “Igor’s.” (Oops, I mean Igan’s.)  You might not like mine: it is that humans really don’t matter very much.  We’re just an interesting theme in the music of existence.  A time art.

http://www.ipa.org.uk/en/IPA/Video_Resources/Mark_Solms_Interview.aspx

This is a link to a discussion of a different sort, addressing how to integrate the introspective systems of thought developed by shrinks -- trying to be scientific in their traditional way -- with the new technological discoveries about how brains work.  It turns out that their commonality is the knowledge of unknowing!’  Freuds key idea was that of the Unconscious -- lots of stuff going on in the mind that is NOT conscious, that can’t be accessed except in dreams or by observing behavior or by a kind of poetry called “free association.”  And the neurologists agree that most of what happens in the brain (and in the whole body because the brain is only managing the information that pours in from the entire sensorium of the body) is not available consciously to the person whose brain it is.  Maybe prompted by this, scientists are challenging whether the 96% of the genome that seems “useless” to Igan, is vital but just not obviously expressed or expressed in a way we don’t understand yet. Timing, for instance.  We just now realized that "methylation" can turn a gene on or off or convert it to a different use.

Igan depends on TED talks and I love ‘em, too.  But I see them differently.  I was very struck by this talk linked below, partly because I’d been doing enough reading on the subject to keep up with this fast-talking guy:   http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html   (You may have to read the transcript to figure out what he’s saying.)  He has two points to make:  human beings create themselves by interacting with their environment, part of which is culture; and this function of interaction depends upon the quality of their sensorium because that’s how information gets into the brain. 

So at one time any baby with a cleft palate was automatically thought to be retarded because its ears couldn’t drain properly which meant that it had no access to the sounds needed to develop speech.   So it threw a lot of frustration tantrums, which made people lose patience.  An early surgery -- which if successful was the only intervention needed -- made that baby able to create itself.  It wasn’t controlling the baby -- it was enabling it.

Non-REM dreaming, addictive dependence beyond pleasure, and learned strategies are all self-creations whether conscious or not.  The impelling human mechanism that drives them is desire.  Not just hedonistic pleasure-seeking, but also empathic compassion for others, the desire to help.  Not just for other human beings who are like us, but for those who are unlike us, and beyond that for all the creatures of the planet, animal and vegetable.  Technology doesn’t just give us power, it gives us deeper participation in what is around us and that’s what makes us human: not science but art.  And sometimes that’s holy, even when we’re wide awake.  The best part of Igor’s vid are the bits that illustrate this.

YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS IS NOT A FRIED EGG

This post is highly technical and drawn from another website that is even MORE technical.  Hard as it is to read, I thought it was important because it is so basic to behavior we would like to control: not just DEcrease, but also INcrease.

Addiction is something that happens in the brain of mammals.  First there is the lighting up of pleasure centers over food, sex, a substance, something else that’s pleasant, and then something -- repetition?  Another brain function? -- converts that into an uncontrollable craving that punishes the body with bad consequences if it isn’t secured.  One can become addicted to something painful, destructive, and altogether unpleasant. 

Most of the research is about illegal substances.  From www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov   Two major lines are pursued:  the actual molecules involved and the neurostructures affected.

The stages of addiction are defined as:

(a) compulsion to seek and take the drug,

b) loss of control in limiting intake, and 

(c) emergence of a negative emotional state (e.g., dysphoria, anxiety, irritability) when access to the drug is prevented.

Then there is a small cycle within the act of taking the drug:  

1.  preoccupation/anticipation, 

2.  binge intoxication, 

3.  withdrawal/negative affect

These distinctions work for non-physical addictions, such as addiction to love or praise, emotions that affect the complex of the brain both chemically and through nerve action.  Defining “reinforcements” that make these into addictions is part of the task of understanding.  These can be explored as studies in animals, but not the emotional mechanisms of human beings, which were evolved later, esp. the functions in the pre-frontal cortex.  Clearly, addiction is a matter of “operant conditioning” -- the link formed when two things coincide, like Pavlov’s dog hearing a bell ring every time it was fed and finally getting so it salivated if you rang the bell.   But until now we haven’t had the ability to detect what happens to the molecules and neurons when two things become associated.  You might want to look up the phrases that I colored red: I did.

“. . . animal models of addiction focused on the synaptic sites [the little spaces between the ends of the neuron strands] and transductive mechanisms (how these sites convey changes in excitability [how the signal gets sent across]) in the nervous system on which drugs act initially to produce their positive reinforcing effects.”  So the idea seems to be that drugs make the neurons more sensitive and the signal more intense.

Drugs self-administered by animals correspond well with those with high abuse potential in humans, and intravenous drug self-administration is considered an animal model predictive of abuse potential. [If the animal will go get the substance willingly, even if it’s intravenous, then people will do that, too.]  Other validated measures of the acute rewarding effects of drugs of abuse include brain stimulation reward and conditioned place preference.  [If the drug’s effect on the brain pleasure center shows as strong on brain activity detecting machines and if the animal keeps going to the place where it normally gets the drug, then people will get hooked easily.]

“. . .ingestion of the drug itself, cues associated with the drug, and exposure to stressors.”  These are the three factors that make addiction more likely:  1)  the process of taking the drug, esp. intravenously which means a little ritual; 2)  things like where the drug is taken, with whom (welcoming friends?), what the atmosphere is like (safe, hidden), and  3) whether they are under pressure or in danger some way (beaten up, having to do unpleasant things).

I left the blue Wiki links in for these anatomy names.  “Drugs of abuse have been [detected to affect] the origins and terminal areas of the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system”   This means the “middle of the connections between the cortex (outer layer) of the brain and limbic system.  “ From Wikipedia:  “The limbic system includes the olfactory bulbs, hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, fornix, column of fornix, mamillary body, septum pellucidum, habenular commisure, cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, limbic cortex, limbic midbrain areas and pons.  It supports a variety of functions, including emotion, behavior, motivation, long-term memory and olfaction. It appears to be primarily responsible for our emotional life, and has a great deal to do with the formation of memories.”  In short, functions of identity and choice.

Specific components of the basal forebrain have more recently been identified with the hedonic [pleasant] neuroadaptations to acute drug reward and have focused on elements of the extended amygdala (Koob, 2003). As the neural circuits for the reinforcing effects of drugs of abuse have evolved, the role of neurotransmitters/neuromodulators also have evolved, and four of those systems are discussed below: mesolimbic dopamine, opioid peptide, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and serotonin. 

Now I’ll summarize a bit.  If signaling molecules have been sent through the neurons and then stop, the ability to feel good will go away, even if the addiction has nothing to do with taking drugs.   Epinephrine, which signals alarm and danger, will increase. Food tastes bad, hugs are uncomfortable, etc.  In fact, the symptoms can be like flu.  When the signaling molecules the drugs send through the neurons is returned, it will take MORE to get the same effect of pleasure as before.  

“These results suggest not only a change in function of neurotransmitters associated with the acute reinforcing effects of drugs (dopamine, opioid peptides, serotonin, and GABA) during the development of dependence, but also recruitment of the brain arousal and stress systems (glutamate, CRF, and norepinephrine) and dysregulation of the NPY brain anti-stress system. These changes would represent a “between-system” neuroadaptation. Reward mechanisms in dependence are compromised by disruption of neurochemical systems involved in processing natural rewards and by recruitment of the anti-reward systems.”   Not only does the high go away without the drugs, but also the body signals all sorts of alarm.  The article names the bits of anatomy that do this: a whole complex.

If animals are weaned off drugs and then pushed back into taking them, there are differences in the brain bits that activate to reinstate the addiction.  What’s interesting is that when this is done to humans, there is a fourth route of brain response.  It is in the most highly evolved part of the brain, behind the forehead, the location of empathy, morality, and self-control.  In human imaging studies, another common element of drug dependence is decreased function in the orbitofrontal/medial prefrontal cortex as measured both by neuropsychological tests and imaging.  That’s the part of the brain behind the forehead.  The same as the part often damaged in a concussion.

So the neurons are running a deficit that’s uncomfortable, molecules that signal distress and anxiety are triggered, every cue associated with taking the drug urges it be taken, and the part of the brain that would ordinarily override urges with rational thought is disabled.  Things that would ordinarily be pleasant and comforting have no effect.

Another piece of the puzzle is biosynthesis, which means that opiods (the earliest and most thoroughly studied molecule) are made in the body, with variations in the amounts, sources and impact of them on body function.  “All of them are made via three large precursor proteins, called opioimelanocortin, proenkephalin, and prodynorphin. Opiomelanocortin is of particular interest because it is the precursor for several important and seemingly unrelated biologically active molecules, namely, b-endorphin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and several melanocyte-stimulating hormones.”  (Since melanin, the dark pigment in the skin, seems to be involved somehow, I will not be surprised if the reputation of redheads is connected to these molecules, maybe through mutation of specific genes which are now identified, cloned, and studied.  So far as I know there are no red-headed lab rats.)

Maybe the most cutting edge studies are the ones trying to find and change genes that don’t code for susceptibility but code for turning those susceptibility genes on and off.  The day when an addict can be “vaccinated” in a way that changes his or her essential genetic structure so that addiction is not possible is still over the horizon.  But we think it’s there.

The important insight is that addiction is in the addict, the susceptibility of their own biological systems.  It is something real, molecular, working at the cell level, inherited, and then triggered by something in the environment.  It over-rides rationality and stress due to danger will over-ride resistance.  But both something as powerful as sex or as reduced to an empathic second-hand experience as pornography can be addictive.  Something as powerful as violence or as reduced to an empathic second-hand experience as violent video gaming can be addictive.  Any operant conditioning that connects even an innocent pleasure to these internal molecular and neurological loops can become addictive.

Got time for Starbucks?  I love your guitar playing.  I need a hug.  Human behavior.

WHAT I STUDY THAT IS USEFUL TO THE BLACKFEET

There are three disciplines or categories of thought that I’ve been working on for decades.  The one in which I have the most -- and the most formal -- training is “religion” including spirituality, personal devotion, ritual design and so on.  In that field I am neither conventional nor dogmatic, though my diploma says MA in Religious Studies and my formal focus was anthropology.  

Instead I’m starting from the basic design of the human body, including the brain, and how it experiences life so as to translate it into survival.  This is not about being pretty or virtuous -- it’s about staying alive.  It's an approach that is only just now possible.

The second category is environmentalism which interfaces with spirituality through its supply of material culture and its role in forming basic human concepts which eventually mesh into a culture and a language.  Consider that the three Abramic religions came from the desert and now they are helping to render the planet into a desert.

The third category is animals and the place of humans in the animal kingdom, both as sources of survival and as spiritual concepts and guides.  The arts and sciences are crammed with new ideas about this.

In support of these ideas I subscribe to a lot of environmental groups and animal-thought people.  All three of the above categories are huge, world-wide, and sophisticated beyond anyone’s capacity to keep up with them.  I heard almost nothing about these ideas at Issksiniip Symposium, which is GOOD, because that means that there is an amazing of array of things to bring to this specific group of People.  It is the equivalent of discovering a new world.

There is a fourth category which I’ve only been exploring for a short time: that’s neuroscience which is now working at the cell-by-cell level and suggesting powerful explanations and strategies.  Issksiniip confronts the issue of closed skull trauma, a clear factor in mental health on the rez.  I’m using neuroscience concepts, played off against ecological principles, to draw all these ideas into one circle that begins to make sense.  I want to discover and invent ways to weave the sacred into this.

It’s important not to get muddled or shallow.  We need to think carefully and consolidate as we go.  I begin my theory sequence BEFORE language in what I call “the sensorium,” which is a fancy way of saying everything the body can detect through its senses, not just the five senses but also one’s sense of gravity, movement, pressure and so on.  The key book is “The Sacred and the Profane,” by Mircea Eliade, not because of any fancy ideas about shamans, but because he points out that somehow we can feel a difference in the quality of space that is related to sacredness.  Some places feel holy:  a place of transition, like a doorway in a house; extremes like a mountain peak or deep in a canyon gorge; or like dawn and sunset.  Those are natural examples, but also there may be a space that is built to feel holy or a place that is holy because of some crucial event.  Learning to feel that is the first step.

Connection to the ecology of the place gives rise to the material culture.  The grasslands feel different from tropical jungle, but also there are different things there to eat, one must dress differently, one needs different tools.  Too much of our lives is trucked in from someplace else, including our religious institutions.  Too much is piped in on gizmos, and yet human connections are also sacred and can be maintained on the gizmos.  If one’s sensorium is aware of the sky-world of prairie, the seething sound of grass in the wind, the smell of bee balm and mint by the creek, one’s feeling of fitting in is stronger.   One needs to hear beloved voices and see their faces. 

“Fitting in” means surviving.  At this point I go to Roy Rapaport’s ideas about survival of the individual and survival of the “tribe”, which ideally fit together but for the Blackfeet has been divided.  Ceremonies of the sacred that contribute to the fittingness of either, and particularly the ones that put the survival of group and and individual in harmony, will support and guide success.  Harmony does not mean pretty.  It means real and honest.  When Darwin said “survival of the fittest,” he did not mean the biggest and strongest:  he meant the ones that fit the best.  When the dinosaurs were dying because they didn’t fit anymore, it was little mammals down around their toes that survived.

Back to the symposium, where Janice Hamrick, who is the CFS Program Manager for the South East Alaska Health Consortium, told us that she would train her Yupik first-line mental health people in the necessary concepts for understanding trauma, addiction and abuse and as long as they were in the main meeting place, everything was fine.  When these people got back to their tiny communities, only accessible by bush planes, they would send back reports of interviews that made no sense at all.  Hamrick asked what was happening.  The field people said that when the Yupik-speaking people told them about their troubles, there were no words for the problems in English.  When they tried to translate, the meaning escaped .

There is much contemporary thought about all this.  In the first place, mental health is a field that uses a lot of jargon.  PTSD is an acronym for “post-traumatic stress disorder” -- but to the Yupik, all of life is stress: there is no “post” and what order is “dis” in their village?  It’s simple necessity and often hard.  What is “trauma” when everyone is abused and addiction is a constant emergency?   So much of language is an attitude, one’s first concepts formed in infancy.  To the Yupik those are entirely different from the ideas of the shrink’s couch.

Working with indigenous people means facing the dilemma that education IS assimilation.  UNLESS educated people learn how to get under the language and assumptions so as to find a way to say convincingly to a Yupik, “It is not good for your husband to beat you.”  When Benjamin Whorf figured out that the Hopi language is based on actions rather than “objects” with edges that can be controlled, he was working at the deep level of the brain where those earliest concepts form.  Whole bodies of thought address this.  One can go to YouTube and find excellent talks.  TED Talks often address this.

We have talked about the opposition between Euro and Indigenous and many essays and books explore that.  Recently I read about the Siege of Paris in which Prussia held Paris in its grip so tightly that 6,000 citizens of Paris died of starvation.  At about the same time 600 people on the Blackfeet Reservation died of starvation because their commodities weren’t sent.  The U.S. government had to think about both in a time when few Blackfeet even spoke English, so could not advocate for themselves.  That got me thinking about Euro folks.  

The mid-continent of Europe was forming into nations and leaving feudal ways about the same time that the American east coast indigenous peoples were forced out of their life-ways.  We tend to think about the Euro/Tribal split in terms of photography, which was exploding just as the plains tribes were at war.  At the treaties, Indians were vividly depicted in their feathered buckskins alongside Victorian men in three piece suits and top hats or uniforms, which lends itself to the idea that one is of a higher culture than the other.  (At least they sat on chairs!)  This was in the 19^th century, when the US had just fought a disastrous tribal war between the north and south over African people who had been dragged there against their will.  Yet they claimed to be civilized.

At the Symposium was said that if the tribe could be more like the Hutterites, they could make a lot more money.  They are a very focused group of people.  But the Hutterites fled Europe in order to escape from the 19th century "new" German nation and its innovative, capitalist, individual ways.  Hutterites are nothing like the tribal plains people were.  Their struggle has been to avoid education in order to defeat assimilation because they wish to preserve a FEUDAL way of life, a medieval pattern in which men dominate women, land is held in common, change is opposed, rules are unyielding.  To the Hutterites, the “Euros” that the Native Americans oppose are “the English,” the empire-builders.  All the nations of that period were empire builders, which gradually engulfed the Americas along with India and Africa.  Everything was trade and profit, sucked out to send back across the Atlantic.  For the Canadian Blackfoot tribes, the country was the same thing as the Hudson’s Bay Company for many years.  It was a time when religion and nation reinforced each other for the sake of profit. 

(to be continued)

THE CRUMPLED BRAIN

If a mouse is given an addictive drug, like maybe cocaine, when it wears off the mouse will go back to the part of the cage where it received the dose and wait.  A long time.  The experience is linked to the place.   And space is just a metaphor for time.  When=where. 

The human cerebral cortex, which is crumpled up because it’s trapped in the skull -- only making room for the frontal lobe by pushing the rest of the brain back and down as well as bulging out the forehead -- can be virtually (using real data translated in the computer) flattened into a conventional paper map schema.  When this is done, the boundaries of which part is connected to which of the senses can be drawn as though they were nations.  The thicker the sensory intakes, the more space is allotted -- so hands and eyes are very outsized because we use them so much in our interactions with the world.  

If there is a change in the sensory input, for instance blindness, the map will show that the space allotted to eyes will shrink and the space allotted to skin and ears will grow.  This is a relatively new understanding but it has long been noticed that blind people hear more and can read braille with fingertips.  What has not really been understood in the past is that under the “data” of sensory information is another structure that detects significance and sorts the data accordingly.  The mind-map is an interactive screen.

One sorting principle is that of space.  I used to teach high school students writing description to decide on left-to-right, top-to-bottom, near-to-far as an ordering principle and stick to it through the paragraph so the reader could follow in imagination as though they were looking through a panning camera lens.  In reality people probably jump from what is most important to them through the levels of significance until they are down to fine detail. That’s harder to write.  We do it unconsciously all the time.

An fMRI scan can reveal which structures of the brain are operating and in what order.  These centers are deeper than the cortex and all over the brain, not grouped as one might suppose, since their action is probably cumulative -- that is, some structures activate earlier in the sequence and then pass on the modified signal.  

We think that the little hunkered-down mouse, shivering in hopes of a new hit, is “feeling” in this order:  fusiform gyrus> amygdala > the limbic system which includes the autonomous nerves that exist independently of the original “sensory” and movement nerve system but connect throughout the viscera -- heart, lungs, guts.  So the information comes in, the amygdala seems to be what adds the significance (fight or flight or freeze), and the limbic system supplies the emotional unconscious reaction to it.  At what point does the craving get added?  Curious addicts want to know.  Esp. the ones waiting shivering on the street corners where they got their last hit.

Craving is both a cell and organ state, detectable by instruments and tests.  But it moves quickly from the unconscious to the conscious level and from there to behavior that anyone could observe from the outside.  The behavior has social impact and, since it is conscious, can respond to memes, which is to say units of interpretation and behavior that are supplied by the culture, but have evolved by the social past just as much as the person’s individual internal fight-or-flight-or-flee responses.  One meme is to stigmatize, meaning exclude and attack.  One meme is to cage or banish dangers.   These two are so deep as to be nearly instincts.   Another kind of meme, more developed, is to provide compensation and support for the individual to get past addiction.  And there is a meme that says,  “Tell me about it.  Give me evidence.”  This one has sub-sets like therapy and art or even just sharing.  We hope it helps, because it is sensory but may cause reframing.

Here’s where I’m going with this.  I think the jolt of an addictive chemical doesn’t have to come from some scientist’s hand reaching into the cage with a syringe or eye dropper.  It can also come from the internal sensory system of the individual -- maybe because of a meme trigger.  Even a “virtual” meme, which would be the case in a book or a movie or even at an art gallery.  A jolt of adrenaline or serotonin et al can be powerful.  Confrontive or transgressive behavior, erotic or numinous experience, even if only witnessed rather than acted out in real life -- they are all subject to the same sequence of processing in the brain and tissue.

So in those few weeks teaching in a small town high school, there was a boy who went around kicking other boys in the genitals.  It’s a meme we see in the movies all the time -- sometimes presented as funny and other times as effective force.  The kids, mostly country kids, reacted with avoidance and stoicism.  They were used to big animals. The administration pretended they didn’t know.  I turned the boy in, having just witnessed a lunch time assault.  (The principal forced me to back down.)  Why did the boy do it?  Partly the drug of aggression. (He was an isolate, part of oil-field bar culture and a not-quite family.)  But partly because he had taken in that meme and made it his own.  It was on his map.  It was his walled city.

Today’s “Dear Abby” had a question from a professional nanny who is increasingly discovering that some families -- probably the same ones who previously tabooed any kind of violence -- would tolerate and almost admire face-slapping, kids against adults and between sibs.  No one admitted adults slapped children. (Poor families do not have nannies.)  Again, a virtual culture meme in films had crossed into real life because the mild spurt of chemicals from watching such an event was much expanded and reinforced when it became a reality.  The families claimed slapping.  The addictive power was never addressed, but only “rules” about what was allowed -- a surface.

Rules, whether legal or imposed by nannies, only succeed when they take into account something so powerful as addictions.  Addiction to violence or drugs or “falling in love” or sex (oh, what a powerful symphony of internal chemical addictions those two can be!) can be extinguished over time by re-mapping the mind, especially if the person is consciously participating in a social context that makes it easier.  It’s not the rules but the perceived boundaries that can be effective.  It helps to make things conscious -- staking, fencing, registering the deed.  Sometimes punishment simply supplies a new addiction.  (Consider the caning of upper class Brit male students  that became their paraphilia for the rest of their lives.)

I do NOT like censorship of any kind.  But I sure would like to take the wind out of the sails of some practices that are undeniably damaging.  If treating them as unfortunate addictions rather than privileges of the powerful will spare lives and misery, why don’t we learn how to use the reinforcements of positive chemico-behavioral loops?  I hope we're not waiting for some giant scientist's hand to reach into our cages with a syringe or eyedropper.  We don't have to be shivering caged mice.