Welcome to the MSI Blog.
We are asking our bloggers to write about any subject of interest to them, in addition to items of interest pertaining to our business. So I am taking advantage of that freedom for this, our first blog.
My full time job is CEO of MSI. In my spare time I write psychology books with support from the psychology department of the University of Wisconsin.
My specialty: The biology of human irrationality. In a nutshell, when we act irrationally, it’s usually our brain’s limbic system acting out, capturing our intellect, so to speak. That capturing might be for an hour or for years. And by the way, we share that system with chimpanzees, et al.
I thought you might be interested in a conversation I had with Richie Davidson, who was named by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of the top 100 thinkers in the nation. He is a psychologist, psychiatrist and neuroscientist and a co-founder of the Health/Emotions Researcher Institute (I’m on its externalboard of advisers…very external), among other credentials.
I asked Richie how he thought we would get rid of our greatest mental flaws twenty five or fifty years from now. For example, the flaws of an extreme paranoid - who is afraid to cross the street. Or a psychopath who can feel little or no guilt, remorse, embarrassment or empathy, while having an abundance of aggression and egomania. It turns out that about 1% of the world’s population is psychopathic, and probably an additional 12% or so are downright mean and ruthless. If we could fix them, look at the peace and quiet the rest of us might have.
All of our emotions, more than 200 of them are controlled by brain circuits or specific organs. Fear, for example is controlled by the amygdala, about the size of a walnut. These circuits and organs usually lie dormant until they are triggered by a sighting or a thought. They are like third parties in our brains, ready to make us happy or drive us nuts, or make us too cautious, or a nuisance or a danger to others.
Since they are all biologically based, eventually we may be able to adjust the most wayward of them physically, sort of like fixing a hernia. When I was writing a book about power freaks, I attended a seminar and sat next to Mary Ellen Oliveri, then chief of the Behavioral Science Research Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. I told her I was surprised at the lack of research on the topic. She said that if they did the research and came up with a pill for power freaks, psychopaths, et al, who would take it? In other words, she was suggesting, the Adolph Hitlers of the world were not about to take a pill. People like that think the rest of us aren’t thinking straight.
Richie surmised that the answer way off in the future might lie in a genetic missile, introduced in our bloodstream that would somehow be directed to the specific brain circuitry involved. For psychopaths it might be the circuits controlling guilt, remorse, nurturance, and empathy which may not be operating at all. The missile would attack the DNA in the cells of the circuitry involved and turn them on. Boom, you’d have a psychopath who wants to hug you rather than kill you.
A lot more would be involved in this including the questions of ethics, morality, judgment and so forth, but thought you’d appreciate the snapshot, if at this point you haven’t wandered off.
