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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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You are on a plane, thirty thousand feet above ground. Four hundred and fifty snakes crawl into the passenger cabin. You think this is terrifying? Hollywood producers certainly gambled on that when they released the 2006 summer blockbuster “Snakes on a Plane.” Israeli scientists, however, have come up with an even creepier scenario.
You are in an MRI machine. Your head is fixed in a round cage. Your body is rolled into a narrow tube. Magnetic pulses are beamed into your brain. A meter-and-a-half-long snake is strapped with Velcro atop a small box on a conveyor belt just inches behind your head. Your eyes meet the snake’s beady gaze through a tiny mirror above your head. You can’t move.
Why would Uri Nili and Yadin Dudai, two scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, want to put a snake in the MRI scanner with you? Obviously, not to scan the snake’s brain (although this might be an interesting possibility). They wanted to scan your brain while you perform an act of courage. They wanted to push research on fear one step further – from understanding how we passively react to fear, through actively avoiding it, to actually confronting it.
FBI agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) could have been an ideal candidate for the experiment. Grabbing and fighting the snakes on the plane with his bare hands, Flynn came to the rescue of the passengers on red-eye flight 121. But there was no FBI or Mossad agent at the Weizmann Institute. The participants in the experiment had to face the snake on their own. All they had were two buttons. Pressing one would roll the snake closer. Pressing the other would slide it away. ‘Advance’ or ‘Retreat’, were their two options. They could choose either one, instructed only to do their best in pulling the snake toward their heads. (See the video here.)
“Courage,” wrote Mark Twain, “is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” And so, the participants who chose to ‘Advance’ the snake closer and closer to the backs of their heads did it despite being afraid. They were now scientifically courageous and their courage was quantitative and measurable (in ‘Snake-Advance’ units).
With those courage units in hand, Nili and colleagues thoroughly scrutinized the participants who were sliding the snake back and forth. They measured their brain activation with the MRI scanner, hooked them up with electrodes to measure how much they were sweating, and gave them questionnaires to fill out about how fearful and anxious they felt.
The results, reported in Neuron, revealed an interesting dissociation between fear reactions, a sort of internal disagreement paving the way to courageous acts.
Fear of the snake manifests itself in two ways – either you simply say, “I’m afraid,” or your body says it for you, with sweat. When Nili and colleagues analyzed the questionnaires (in which participants rated their level of fear) and the electrical resistance of the skin (indicating how much they sweated), they realized that the two facets of fear do not always go together.
You could say that you are not afraid but sweat a lot, or say that you are freaked out and sweat not at all. But here is the interesting thing: as long as these two disagree, you would act courageously. It is only when you scored high on both, sweat and fear, that you would succumb to cowardice. It is as if you have two brakes. Release either one, and you could drive on.
Where is this driver in the brain? Imagine you stick a pencil straight into the bridge of your nose between your eyes. You push it in and stop right before the line between your ears. There it is, a brain region called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC, to make it short).
The sgACC was the only part of the brain whose activation went hand in hand with courageous acts. Bringing the snake closer to the head strongly activated the sgACC. The more the participants were afraid but did not succumb to fear, the more active was their sgACC, as if more “mental effort” was required to act in the face of fear.
When they did succumb to fear, another region came into play: the amygdala, an area known as a seat of primitive fear, among other things. (To find it, now imagine you take two pencils, stick one in your eye and the other in your ear; the amygdala is where the pencils meet). Only a strongly active sgACC silenced the amygdala.
The mechanics of courage in the brain, it seems, involves a competition. When fear reaches a certain threshold, pushing both your subjective feeling of it and your bodily sweat, you would succumb. Your amygdala drives that fear, but internal disagreement overcomes it. The agent behind this disagreement is the sgACC. It acts to control and suppress bodily fear responses, and sends nerve projections into the amygdala that shut it down.
Why should we care about this? Of course there is a “brain correlate” to whatever we say, think, or do. So what? Well, every car can break down and so does our brain. Sometimes the brakes in the brain are stuck and you are perpetually petrified. Knowing how the brain works up the courage to confront fear could help. Perhaps someday, to help people with anxiety disorders, we could inject drugs, insert electrodes, or just train the brain to act differently. With this knowledge, perhaps, eventually, fear will not prevail.
Does finding a basis for courage in the brain cast a shadow on the great heroes of history? Were they merely men of great and powerful sgACCs? Such a conclusion would be way overboard. There is no evidence for actual genetic, anatomical or physiological differences between the sgACCs of the brave and the fearful. Perhaps any sgACC could work up enough courage. We don’t know. But more importantly, do we really care?
What matters is that we have seen courage at work in the brain, and we all have the same basic neural equipment. From this point on, it’s up to us. Perhaps one day there will be a “courage pill” or maybe we could electrically stimulate the sgACC to boost up our courage. Whether we choose to do this or not is a matter of broader social and ethical debate over our growing ability to fiddle with the plasticity of the brain. At least, if we choose to try to enhance courage, we now know where to begin.
Oh, and one final note: no snakes were harmed in the course of the experiment.
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24 Comments
Add CommentTrue courage cannot be determined when there is no choice, if you cannot move, you have no choice...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRichieo, I think you missed an important point.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe participants in the experiment could freely choose whether to advance the snake closer despite of fear and hence display courage, or to succumb to fear and accordingly move the snake further away
Or this research could support development of a drug to be given in combat to make all soldiers fight heroically, couldn't it? How would you like to face such an opponent in combat, or in a dark alley?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjust being forced to read this article scares me ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpeaking as a long time anxiety sufferer, I'm all for any and all research on the brain circuitry involved. Of course there is potential for misuse. Even a car could be misused to run over a pesky neighbor. Here's a question for you jtdwyer. How would you like to go your whole life absolutely terrified for no good reason and having to go through an utterly exhausting struggle just to function on a day to day basis while you watch your body fall apart from the stress? Not sounding too cool? Yeah I think it sucks myself. So how about you think about that when commenting about research that could help people like me. Yes, caution is important too, but say that. "Clearly caution is needed to ensure ethical use of this research". It gets your point across without fear mongering and lurid tales.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor the record, lack of fear in soldiers isn't generally considered a good quality (pop cultural crap aside. Ask real ones if you don't believe me). Fear is good. The ability to act inspite of fear saves lives, including your own. As for facing such an opponent in a dark alley or on battle fields? Soliders already do this every day. Sorry I fail to find this a very monstrous scenario... How about this one... After weeks and months of living on the ragged edge a soldier comes home with rampant PTSD and research like this allows him to recover and function instead of having to rely on an underfunded veterans administration for the rest of his life...
Can the subjects of this experiment tell whether or not the snake is poisonous? I have to assume it isn't, in which case I don't think I'd be afraid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think shimkusj has a good point here. Also: does the subjects' assumption that they will not be harmed (no lab wants a lawsuit) affect their response? It would seem to me that I would be far more scared of a snake in the wild. In the machine, my rational understanding of the situation would at least temper my fear response and perhaps allow me to act uncharacteristically "courageously." But in this case, the action would be calculated. That must matter, no?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisE-boy - Nothing personal. I'm a Viet Nam vet, and I've been in the alley the the city-wide reigning Golden Gloves heavyweight champion intending to hurt my already broken jaw. I'm not making this stuff up to make anyone uncomfortable. It's real out there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've also sometimes experienced serious anxiety, especially during the 3 months I spent seeking medical treatment with a pressurized abdomen, preventing my diaphragm from extending to expand the lungs to bring in oxygen, especially when reclining to attempt sleep, all the while unable to eat since that aggravated the abdominal pressure. Hospital nurses always think you're just overreacting. I was eventually immediately relieved by beta-blocker medication for heart failure, to block the receptors of the adrenaline overproduced in response, to compensate for the heart failure. Not being able to breathe, eat or sleep for 3 months, I appreciate anxiety and hope you find an effective treatment.
But I know that was nothing. One thing I've had to learn: no matter how bad things get, it could still get a lot worse.
Did you really think I was just having fun with this? Relax.
Great! Just what Al Quaeda needs to make the training of suicide bombers easier.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe subjects know the snake is not poisonous. Naturally, in a laboratory experiment one will never (for ethical reasons) expose participants to real danger. Nevertheless, fear, like other emotions we experience, occurs unwillingly and does not always obey rules of rationality. For example, most healthy individuals have some fear of heights (which is a good thing that prevents us from getting hurt by falling from a high place). Accordingly, an individual that goes bungee jumping will usually have to overcome some level of fear (for many a very high one) in order to force himself to leap, even if he is at a site where thousands of people have jumped before safely, and he rationally knows the real danger of getting hurt is practically zero. Even more so, most fear related disorders involve fear that has no rational basis. This is so for the person who is afraid of flying, who may rationally realize that statistically there is a higher chance of being involved in a car than in a plane accident, yet has no hesitation when getting into his car, but cannot bring himself to board a plane. This is even more so for the agoraphobic who cannot bring himself to step outside the door of his house, and so on and so forth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bottom line is that even if individual A will not feel fear in a certain situation because he knows there is no rational justification for fear, individual B who may share this rational knowledge might still experience fear. Courage as defined in this study involves overcoming of fear, regardless of whether it is rationally justified or not. Accordingly, snake fearing participants who felt fear and overcame it were courageous, even if they rationally knew there is no real danger. This is also the reason why participants that do not fear snakes who brought the snake closer were regarded as fearless and not as courageous. Courage is determined by whether an individual feels fear and overcomes it, and not by whether the fear was rationally justified or by whether others would or would not have also felt fear in the same situation.
i wonder if they had any people that love to handle snakes in the group...what did they show?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisalso the pencil descriptions cause me to wince more than the snakes...a simple picture of the region of the brain would have worked better;-)
Wayne Williamson - Right! The pencil pointer procedure was the really scary part!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbut how do the researchers know what they are measuring- a.) fearlessness per se-participants that do not fear snakes or b.) fearlessness which is exhibited by overcoming fear, by individuals who do fear snakes
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe researchers could tease apart courage and fearlesness because for each choice made by the participants, they also rated the amount of fear they felt while making the choice.Thus, decisions to bring the snake closer despite of subjectively experienced fear were analyzed as moments of courage whereas those involving a choice to bring the snake closer in the absense of fear were regarded as involving fearlesness and not courage..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSkeptic76
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr Mosad and FBI to make their killers more fearless while murdering innocent people.
Hi un - As Sir David Frost said on at least one occasion"It's not flying that people are afraid of - it's crashing". Similarly fear of heights ( vertigo ) is fear of falling what instinct, and sometimes experience, tells us would be a painful vertical drop. People don't stay away from Denver, though it is quite high above sea level, but are quite anxious about abrupt changes in elevation of only a few feet. Flying close to a mountain ridge in a sailplane does not engender the same fears as walking close to the edge of that ridge.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf Not poisonous, Where could the problem (fear) be?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHeavens,
I just knew the snake was my old friend pictured; and am happy to find the name and function of a brain center less known than the famous and craven amygdala
He looks friendly, thoughtful, cute, and flying. Is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSchiller asks whether the great heroes of history were merely men of great and powerful sgACCs. I suspect that's a bad question: the 'merely' there is unjustified. One would do better to leave the 'merely' out and claim (although, as she writes, there's a long way to go before this is justified) that the great heroes of history were men of great and powerful sgACCs. The courageous act was still the person's choice, because he could have done otherwise had he thought leaving the struggle would be better than putting himself in danger. And rewards and praise would still be in place, since we want to encourage this kind of behaviour in those capable of it. Courage remains a virtue irrespective of its physiological basis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt might indeed turn out that courage is genetic and that many can't work up enough courage: this should not make us think less highly of the courageous or more highly of the coward. The fact that their heroism has a physiological mechanism at its basis does not detract from courage, just as the fact that beauty and wisdom have physiological basis does not make a person less beautiful or wise. You don't admire less a precise clock because you know how it works.
So irrespective of neurological findings, the courageous are courageous and they choose to do what they do, and therefor they are worthy of admiration and praise. Therefore, unlike the author, I think that her "do we really care" may be answered in the affirmative, and her "what matters" might turn out to grant too little to genetics and physiology, but still our older opinions of courage will remain intact.
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It loos very terrible!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcellently written article, if only all bloggers offered the same content as you, the internet would be a much better place. Please keep it up! welcome to my site:
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This study is bs - the individual does not even see the snake...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Imagine you stick a pencil straight into the bridge of your nose between your eyes. You push it in and stop right before the line between your ears."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI tribd dat anb itbs nob plesebnt
Good point, Steve3--that's the true, courageous scientific spirit you have there! LOL!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEr, I think I meant 'point', but on second thoughts, let's not pencil that part in at all. :-D