THE RAT IN THE TUBE

Hey, buddy!  Want out?

Scientists spend a lot of time figuring out how to test things that are impalpable, like the deep patterns in the limbic brain.  Some might be physical, dependent on some small cell or curl of flesh.  Others might simply be assumptions about the nature of the world that one learned in infancy.  So the psych folks, not all of them shrinks, run people through the fMRI, ask them questions, use various smoke and mirror techniques.  But sometimes nothing will do but to test a rat.  How do you question a rat?  With behavior.

Peggy Mason, a highly qualified professor of neurobiology at the U of Chicago who offers an open online course “Understanding the Brain: the Neurobiology of Everyday Life” through coursera (https://www.coursera.org/course/neurobio).  Her blog is at http://thebrainsocool.com

Peggy Mason and hooded rat friend

In the attempt to understand “empathy” -- understanding what another creature is feeling and addressing that helpfully -- Mason and her co-conspirators put a rat in a rat-sized tube of plexiglas that it couldn’t open from inside and then put another rat in the same larger space.  The tube was in the middle, which meant that the outside rat already had to violate its protocol, since rats like to stay on the boundaries.  In fact, if you have rat traffic in a building, a “black light” will reveal their trails by making their pee florescent --  always along the walls. 

So the rat in the tube wants out, the second rat sees that, and being a good-hearted rodent goes over to see how to get him out.  And does.  Then they run off together.  Not necessarily a hetero pair and not for sex.  Here’s the kicker: the rat will only release a rat that looks like rats he was raised with.  An albino rat won’t release a hooded rat unless he was raised with them.  But if he grew up with only hooded rats, he won’t release albino rats.

Social cohesion holds groups together by getting their emotional states in sync.  The eventual impact of this on the others outside the group is not considered here.  The study is about the emotional sharing called empathy, one-on-one.  Without empathy the result might be a shrug or targeted cruelty.  Think homeless on the streets. 

Prob'ly just spend it on booze.

The interaction between an emotional state and its expression in muscles and the functions of the autonomic nervous system is two-way.  Put on a happy face and one’s mood may lift.  Surprised or embarrassed and your face, if it is pale enough, is likely to change color.  I once had a black counselor who would remark with laughter at how much my face blanched or blushed.  These are the kinds of clues we pick up on as empathic observers.

What prevents people from experiencing empathy or acting to help a person in distress?   Being upset and in trouble oneself.  But helping the other who is in distress, one’s own feelings improve.  Sadly, not everyone realizes this.  “Emotional contagion” is not a universal response.  It appears that it is learned in childhood through interaction with family, whether or not the family is genetically related.

Family secrets

Another experiment is designed for both chimps and children.  An experimenter puts an object in the reach of the subject but out of his own reach.  He or she shows desire for the object trying to get it and failing.  Chimps handed over the object about 40% of the time.  Human infants (infants!) handed over the object 60% of the time.  It’s pretty difficult to discover whether this is because of the brain structures for empathy are missing or whether they were simply never developed by group identification that would lead to practice of helping others.  (“Please pass the butter.”)  Some of the specific brain parts and paths are known because of fMRI studies.

There is a phenomenon called “down-regulation” which is when the helper has learned to block empathy for the distress of others.  This is helpful to people vulnerable to excessive social distress and anxiety, leading them to withdraw to their own safe group and place.  But it also is a response of professionals who must cause distress, for instance, medical people who give shots and so on.  

Think of this in terms of cops or soldiers, who trouble us so much when their “down-regulation” is so thorough that they only have empathy for “their own kind” or -- as they put it -- “the man on my left and the man on my right.”  It will take work for them to bond with female soldiers if they have down-regulated in gender terms.  Cops who have down-regulated too far will use force even on children.  It isn’t righteous or rational -- just a survival mechanism in a group that must expose themselves to danger.

The whole point of empathy is to cause groups to form, because they protect the individual and make shared projects possible.  But it is probably a biological accident that this means like-bonding-to-like, whether all Irish sticking together or criminals having each other’s backs or HIV sufferers forming a political block -- though that’s a bit more problematic because it’s hard to tell who belongs by looking, which is why they need that red ribbon loop.  Maybe the success of zebras is due to their strong ability to recognize each other.

Group identification has been experimentally formed by giving people such small clues as eye color or wrist bands.  When nice college kids are divided into mock “guards” and “prisoners,” the experiment can cause the more powerful group to “down-regulate” to the point that the experiment has to be stopped.

The Lucifer Effect

But it is possible for the prefrontal cortex functions of justice, protection, and higher goals, to curb personal distress enough to manage behavior.  A comrade who is plainly distressed by over-reactive behavior due to down-regulated empathy may cause enough competing empathy for the more empathic comrade to become aware of what he or she is doing enough to become rational, realizing that an action is not really wanted.  Once, in a classroom situation, I became so angry at a defiant student that I was on the verge of striking him.  Another student cried out, “Stop, Mrs. Scriver!” and it worked.  I was literally stopped, frozen, my brain slowly coming back online.  In fact, the whole class realized that they weren’t powerless and their social anxiety diminished.  The girl who cried out was a teacher’s daughter, less anxious about challenging a category she didn’t consider quite so threatening.

Most of the time we see each other “through a glass darkly,” esp. if "they" look different, but sometimes it seems as though someone distant or submerged approaches us until we can read their faces.  Media stories sympathetic to the "other" help.  But survival anxiety -- constant fear of losing one’s home or having enough food, being able to cope with diseases or pressure at work -- can set up “fear contagion” and “down-regulation” that makes us willing to accept behavior that erodes our solidarity until we find ourselves at war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrsXOaTDATU

Anonymity drives group callousness.

This way of thinking makes it easier to understand those among us who have no empathy -- maybe their limbic system lacks that ability, maybe there is no rational control in the prefrontal cortex, maybe their bonded group is too small, maybe they are just too anxious to be conscious.  We need their “black boxes” for more study.  Clearly they are trapped in there.  We might not be willing to release them, but empathy would let us enter their world if we can keep our own distress under control.

"Black Box" was a tv series.

The neuroscientist is on the right.

YOU DIRTY RAT!

The white rat released the hooded rat in the tube.

Late Fifties “white rat” experiments were sneered at in the romantic Sixties where people insisted on free will.   But even hippies had to admit that a stimulus to a living creature led to a response of some kind.  Skinner and his notorious boxes in which a cat could learn how to trip the latch have by now led to far more elaborate experiments in which rats had to cooperate with each other like Air Force guys down a missile silo, both tripping switches together.  Or, even more intriguingly, rats would actually throw the lever to free their fellow rat from a transparent tube.

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-social-empathetic-pro-social-behavior-rats.html

Stimulus/response plus conditioning have, since those early days, been joined by a host of ingenious experiments that teach chimps to talk, cause you to buy things you don’t need, and twist your mind politically.

At first the conditioning was pretty obvious:  ring a bell when you feed the dog and pretty soon the dog slobbers when you ring the bell, even if there’s no food.  But then the SR conditioning went into the subconscious.  So much of the mind is subconscious.  FAR more than is conscious.  SR conditioning works even at the level of the knob at the top of the spine that is the earliest precursor of brain.  But it’s not conscious.  “Why do I do what I would not do?” asked Saint Paul.  (I shudder at the possibilities of just what that might have been.)  Why do I go on a diet and then find myself standing in front of the refrigerator holding half a ham sandwich without any memory of how I got there.  SR conditioning.

Reference Ranges for Blood Tests

We can see operant conditioning on an fMRI.  Neurons love to travel on the paths they know, a repertoire of connectome patterns.   And they’re not necessarily conscious.  Anyway, neurons aside, much of consciousness and thought is at least influenced and possibly the product of hormone messaging.  We know enough about testosterone to make jokes and enough about street drugs to realize how much they change behavior, but not everyone thinks about the hormones their own bodies necessarily and constantly make until they get out of whack.  Luckily, we can monitor them with frequent blood draws and chemical assays and compensate with med antagonists.  Of course, it’s a drag to test blood all the time, even if it’s just a blood glucose test at home.  If you’re rural, you’ll have to drive.  Often.  Calibration of meds is now a given of many treatments.

Certainly organs can be taught schedules and expectations:  how do you think your stomach knows to growl when you miss a meal?  But we think of the molecules themselves as being inert, just passive substances.  Now we begin to realize that our situations change our responses which change our secretions which affect our minds but not CONSCIOUSLY.  Fertile and pregnant women have such drastic changes in their body chemicals that their resulting behavior becomes obvious to themselves and others.  In the best of cases, after the baby is born or after the woman has aged past menstruation, everything returns to normal -- whatever that is -- but not always.

ANY dimension necessary for function can go rogue and threaten survival.

Maintain homeostasis!

The “solutions” of the body’s dispersal of molecules in fluid in turn affect organs.  So in finding out whether or not metformin has given me a susceptibility to lactic acidosis -- which is a change in the acid/alkali balance of the fluids of the body -- the Ph.D. nurse practitioner gave me a lot of information about kidneys reacting to the base number.  I listened closely because when I did my clinical pastoral education, a young girl was brought in who died from drinking too much lemonade on a hot day -- the acid level of her blood was beyond the level that would allow function.  They keep telling us this is the same thing happening in the world’s oceans, which are becoming too acid to allow the formation of lime-based shells on the little marine creatures.

One’s acid/alkali balance is managed unconsciously but voluntary behavior can overcome it, causing us to do harmful things.  Is making the world’s oceans more acid a voluntary behavior or an involuntary behavior?   The medical/social research people tell us that only thirty per cent or so of patients are compliant when they are told what they need to do to say healthy:  pills, diet, exercise, both public and intimate behavior, may be involved.  Why is that?  The unconscious reaches up from our internal sea and grabs us.  We are conditioned to eat our neighbor’s pie at a church social.  Want to talk about smoking?  How about a steamy Saturday night?

It goes even deeper than that.  We creatures are really colonies of one-celled animals who cooperate to keep the complex process that is “us” surviving in the world.  And now that we can detect what goes on in a cell, each little blob turns out to have preferences and prejudices about what it will take in and what it will kick out.  Fold the proteins wrong, introduce strange molecules, alter the temperature -- you might or might not survive as a whole process.  Human planetary society is the same thing only larger.  This is called “fractal,” when one little part’s pattern is repeated by the whole.

A fractal pattern

So that implies that the behavior of the people of the planet is about thirty per cent of what it ought to be.  Is there a difference between the white powder of cocaine and the white powder of sucrose or the white powder of processed wheat flour?  The Ph.D. nurse practitioner said that the warning label on metformin, which is very definite about the danger of lactic acidosis, is so scary that it makes people obsess.  Therefore the medical community tries to resist testing people’s blood.  In fact, they’d just as soon keep the problem secret because it is “very rare.”  It’s such a nuisance to have to give the test.   At least this person filled me in on what conditions are likely to trigger the condition, mostly failure to hydrate or a suddenly high demand on muscles.  You know -- cramps.

It turns out that research devised to understand rat behavior is often more useful and interesting than research on their internal organs after they are cut open.  And since death is not involved in behavior research, much of what is learned will transfer to people when experimenting on them.  It is not reassuring.  You know the one about the person who thinks he is shocking a disobedient volunteer and takes the level of supposed shock to a life-threatening intensity?  You know the one about the person sitting in a room with others when the room begins to fill with smoke?  The others know it is an experiment and pretend nothing is happening -- so the person being tested just sits there as well.

But now the experiments have gone online.  Here are two to ponder.  
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/29/internet-human-experiment-facebook-dating-sites

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/facebook_unethical_experiment_it_made_news_feeds_happier_or_sadder_to_manipulate.html

They don’t call it experimenting.  They call it “tweaking the algorithm.”  Such funny business can make a person paranoid.  Pretty soon we think there’s an “evil cabal” planning all this stuff.  But the real danger is the conditioning that forms all by itself, the habitual behaviors we trigger over and over until they are part of our lives, though we never really intended either them or their consequences.  The laws of convergence, emergence, synergy and the like are not human-planned events -- they are the realities of interacting forces in the physical world.

No one planned ebola, but now we’re faced with the need for some kind of monitoring and counter-meds, just as we were with the World Flu epidemic and the present World HIV  -- and global warming.  The trouble is that so much is unconscious -- but our consciousnesses can only deal with so much at one time. 

So where is your free will now, Mr. Romance?  But, hey, I'm not ready for the return of John Calvin yet.  If religion is a way of guiding one's behavior so as to maintain homeostasis for one's self, one's society and one's planet, which religion is it?  Science?  Tao?  Some hybrid?  Start from scratch?