schizophrenia
Schizophrenia and Autism: The Two Cultures.
5 years ago
Mind Hacks has highlighted two posts from the BPS Research Digest that highlight the work of Daniel Nettle, related to Scizotypy and evolutionary benefit especially the linkages between schizotypy and artistic creativity.
To recap the schizotypy dimensions:
- Unusual experiences: The disposition to have unusual perceptual and other cognitive experiences, such as hallucinations, magical or superstitious belief and interpretation of events . In the clinical form manifests as positive symptoms of hallucinations and delusions.
- Cognitive disorganization: A tendency for thoughts to become derailed, disorganized or tangential. In the clinical form manifests as the positive symptoms of disorganized speech and flight of ideas.
- Introverted anhedonia: A tendency to introverted, emotionally flat and asocial behavior, associated with a deficiency in the ability to feel pleasure from social and physical stimulation. This manifests clinically as the negative symptoms of flattened affect,alogia and avolition.
- Impulsive nonconformity: The disposition to unstable mood and behavior particularly with regard to rules and social conventions. Manifests clinically as disorganized and socially inappropriate behavior like dressing inappropriately.
To summarize the key findings of the first Nettle paper:
- Unusual Experiences dimension (in general population) correlated positively with number of partners and mating success. This relationship was mediated by creative activity. Thus, unusual experiences are hypothesized to lead to creative activities, which in turn increase reproductive fitness.
- Impulsive Nonconformity had a direct positive correlation with number of partners and mating success. It independently led to increase in reproductive fitness and the effect was not mediated via creative activity.
- Introvertive Anhedonia decreases creative activity, and also has a direct negative effect on mating success.
- Cognitive Disorganization seemed to had no significant effect on mating success.
- Thus, while part of the reason for continuing prevalence of schizophrenia/schizotypy may be explained by the direct effect of Impulsive Non-conformity on Mating Success, the other part can only be explained by the benefits of creative activity that are conferred by Unusual Experiences.
As Introverted Anhedonia has a negative effect on both creative activity and mating success, it seems reasonable to posit, that while schizophrenia patients may suffer from the negative interaction between Unusual Experiences and Introverted Anhedonia; some of their relatives may benefit from the unusual experiences, while being spared from the effects of Introverted Anhedonia, and thus be specially selected for mating success that is mediated by creative activity. This creative advantage that the relatives of schizophrenia have, may have led to the fixation of this disorder in humans.
The second nettle paper explores the relationship between schizotypy and artistic creativity. the key finding here are:
1. Poetic creativity:
- Unusual Experiences score increase in a significant manner from non-poets, to hobbyists to serious poets. It slightly decreases with professional poets.
- The same trend is shown by Impulsive Nonconformity and Cognitive Disorganization.
- Introverted Anhedonia, on the other hand, shows a non-significant trend to decrease with increasing creative activity.
2. Visual art creativity:
- The trends for Unusual Experiences, Impulsive Nonconformity and Cognitive Disorganization are the same as in case of poetry, the only difference being that Cognitive Disorganization trend is not significant.
- Introverted Anhedonia, on the other hand, shows a significant trend to decrease with increasing creative activity.
3. Mathematical creativity:
- The trends are opposite to that of poetic and visual arts creativity in this case.
- The scores for Unusual Experiences, Impulsive Nonconformity and Cognitive Disorganization decrease with mathematics engagements level.
- The scores for Introverted Anhedonia, increase and correlate with mathematical activity.
4. The conclusion is that schizotypal traits like Unusual Experiences, Impulsive Nonconformity and Cognitive Disorganization are instrumental in creative thinking and thus have beneficial effects of stimulating creativity. Though the effect size of Unusual Experiences is the strongest, other traits also have significant effects. Increasingly serious creative engagement is associated with a decrease in introvertive anhedonia and this negative trait is thus a liability.
The authors thus conclude:
The findings provide some support for the two-factor model of Barron (1972). Creative groups are as high as patients on unusual experiences and cognitive disorganization, but lower than controls on introvertive anhedonia. Thus, artistic groups and psychiatric patients share divergent thought, but they differ in that the latter are troubled with negative symptoms such as avolition and anhedonia, whilst the former are unusually free of these traits. This is also congruent with Schuldberg’s findings that creativity scores are positively correlated with scales of positive psychotic or hypomanic symptoms, and negatively.
This, the author had hypothesized earlier in the paper, might be an alternative to an inverted-U model of benefits provided by Schizotypal traits.:
An alternative possibility comes from the two-factor approach of Frank Barron. Barron (1972) argued that successful creativity combines deviant and psychopathological traits with high scores on measures of ‘Ego strength’. Ego strength includes resilience, ability to cope with stress, self-control and high levels of experienced well-being. Ego strength is thus a mediating factor that determines whether schizotypy is translated into damaging symptoms or healthy creative output. Schuldberg’s(1990) work is relevant to this model, finding as it does that scales based on positive symptoms correlate positively with creativity scores, whereas scales based on negative symptoms correlate negatively. Thus, a lack of negative symptoms would appear to be equivalent to high ‘Ego strength’ in Barron’s terms. The prediction in terms of the O-LIFE dimensions would therefore be that creativity would be associated positively with unusual experiences but negatively with introvertive anhedonia.
He further tries to correlate this with the ‘systemising’ theory of autism:
This profile supports the picture of the mathematical mind as having opposite features to the artistic one, with a narrow range of associations (low unusual experiences), an interest in order (low cognitive disorganization), and in routine (low impulsive nonconformity). These findings are consonant with Baron-Cohen’s work on systemising as a core feature of autistic spectrum disorders. Systemising is a cognitive style characterized by a drive for order and regularity, which is elevated in high-functioning autism and in mathematics and engineering (Baron-Cohen et al., 2003; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). The constellation of autism, systemising and science appears to be in many respects the opposite tail of the distribution to the constellation of arts, unusual experiences and affective and psychotic disorders explored in the present study.
The authors, also present the following theory of autism:
Autistic traits are in many ways the converse of the unusual experiences component of schizotypy. Whereas schizotypal thought is characterized by often metaphorical leaps from domain to domain, remote associations, and broad attentional set, autism is characterized by narrow interests and liberality, with occasionally highly developed abilities in tasks requiring systematic and convergent thinking.
I believe they have stumbled on a very important conceptualization. I myself had been contemplating the Schizophrenia- Autism linkages for quite some time. In my view, the contention that Schizophrenia reflects aspects of artistic creativity, while Autism may reflect aspects of mathematical creativity is a positive diversion form the usual male/female systematizing/empathizing spin on Autism. It is instructive to note, that while Autism is a predominantly male illness, prevalence of Schizophrenia too, is greater in Males compared to females. thus, a simple Male- Female dichotomy does not work.
I do believe that there are theory-of-mind deficits in Autism and these are responsible for their social difficulties, and this may be the opposite of the empathetic brain, but that deficit in empathy should not be construed as equivalent to a positive endowment with systematic thinking. In my view, the empathy defect is independent of the other defects like communicative and repetitive and stereotyped behavior defects. The empathy defect has to do with emotions and feelings, while the other defects might be cognitive and behavioral in nature.
Both Schizophrenia and Autism are spectrum disorders, and hence we will consider differences between the spectrum.
Let me now address the differences in Autism and Schizophrenia spectrum :
- Literal vs Metaphorical thinking. One of this blog’s reader, Mrs Mc Ewen, had recently left a comment on this site and I discovered that she is a mother of two autistic kids and maintains a blog related to that. I found one of the entries related to Literal interpretation in autism both humorous, informative and sad at the same time. On the other hand, I am well acquainted with the metaphorical thinking indulged in by schizophrenics (I’ve written a sort of Novella that revolves round that theme), and as I find the Conceptual Metaphor Theory for linguistic semantics full of promise, I have no trouble understanding the language developmental delay in Autism, or the literary/ artistic creativity of Schizotypal pro band. After all, much of art is using symbolism, metaphor etc and involves non-literal interpretation. This difference alone can account for the communication deficits faced by Autistic children. This is related to the schizotypy dimension Unusual Experiences.
- Convergent Vs Divergent thinking: Schizophrenia spectrum is marked by cognitive disorganization, flights of ideas and looses associations. It is also marked by including too much of context and in pathological cases characterized by an effort to relate each and every happening to some preexisting context (if the context is of Paronia- every event is a conspiracy; if the context is of grandeur, every event is significant and referring to self). Autistic spectrum, is not only marked by the absence of these and a low score on the corresponding schizotypal trait; but by an opposite tendency of Central Coherence. there is some research that indicates, that Autistic children show both perceptual and conceptual central coherence: i.e. a tendency to only focus on one piece at a time and an inability to use gestalt perception or conceptualization whereby one could indulge in a top-down ‘imaginary’ assembly of fragments to identify an object. thus, they take , too little of context, in my view and make lesses association than desired. One can also hypothesize, that would yield lesser scores than controls and definitely lesser scores than schizophrenics on the unusual/ novel object uses task. This may also partially explain symptoms like circumscribed and specialized interests in autism. This is related to Schizotypy dimension Disorganized Thinking.
- Reality vs. Fantasy (imagination) orientation: This relates to whether one has an ability to indulge in make-believe or in activities like pretend play. I believe that this propensity to use imagination may be linked to the unusual experiences like hallucinations that are found in schizophrenics. Magical thinking, involving endowing inanimate objects like Voodoo dolls or lucky charms, with causative powers may be converse of the autistic inability to differentiate between animals and inanimate objects, or to easily learn to distinguish between self-intended motion of a human/ animal and a pushed or caused motion of an inanimate object. It is instructive to pause here, and reflect, that much of human Agreeableness and Empathy also has to do on make-believe. One may not always love one’s friend, but out of respect and social courtesy, one would always pretend to do so. The reality orientation of autistic children, (apart form any empathy/ mirror neuron defects) may also underlie their social difficulties like inability to make friends and impaired social play. This is related to the schizotypy dimension Unusual experience.
- Routine and order Vs. Novelty preference: Autistic children are characterized by repetitive and stereotyped behavior. Schizophrenia spectrum on the other hand is high on Openness to Experience and usually display preferences for reckless, novel, socially inappropriate and sensation seeking behavior. This difference may underlie the stereotyped behavior like rigidity exhibited by autistic children. This is related to schizotypy dimension Impulsive, Nonconformity.
Overall, one possible mechanism underlying these differences can be a sensori-motor and conceptual gating defect in both the disorders- with schizophrenia signifying a very broad sensori-motor and conceptual gate with consequent broad attentional span, loose associations and too much of context; and Autism representing a very narrow spatial and temporal gate with consequent specialized interests and focus, few associations, literal and convergent thinking.
If one couples this with the phenomenon of pre-pulse inhibition (defect of schizophrenia) , then it may be theorized that as a schizophrenic would interpret all stimuli in a novel way (presentations of a stimuli earlier, does not lead to its memory or the suppression of the startle response), hence it would also develop preference for, or at least not be intimidated by, a novel item. On the other hand, due to the smaller sensory gate, and normal PPI, the autistic children would mostly be exposed to the smae stimuli over and over gaian and may develop a preference for it over any new stimuli which, when gated through its small gate, would cause it to get startled. I am even tempted to theorize that autistic children may have a high PPI than normals, but a quick Google search didn’t corroborate my speculations.
Lastly, a discussion of Anhedonia, and how that interacts with positive schizotypy and autism will need some more thinking and conceptualization. For now, I am tempted to posit that Anhedonia may be one of the dimensions of the female counterpart of Schizotypy-Autism thinking styles. Females, I believe, are more prone to depression (the primary correlate of Anhedonia) and maybe just like a Schizotypy-Autism spectrum that is along cognitive thinking styles; there might exist a Depersonlization-Bipolarity spectrum that runs along the emotion-motivation feeling styles and may reflect the two fundamental styles of emotional processing- one involving use of too much emotion and motivation (bipolarity) and the other characterized by lack of emotion and motivation (depersonalization).
While creativity (thinking) of both types (scizotypal-autistic or artistic-scientific), might have been selected by sexual selection in males; the corresponding traits that would be under sexual selection for females might be virtue/aesthetics (feeling) of both types: one subjective and based on personal constructs of emotions and motivations and the other objective and based on utilitarian concerns and needing one to put aside one’s own feelings and emotions.
Just a speculation. Do let me know, your views and opinions (or any supporting researches)!
Tags:
Insanity in Films: A Rendezvous with Madness
5 years ago
Insanity has been typically depicted in a very stereotyped manner in both Bollywood as well as Hollywood. Moreover, the depiction is often insensitive and hackneyed, with the consequent stigmatization of all mental health issues.
While some recent Bollywood films like “Black” have drawn attention to some oft ignored neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s; it is the depiction of schizophrenia and mental wards/asylums that has remained problematic.
While an occasional flick like “A beautiful mind” or”15 park Avenue” may end up portraying the schizophrenic condition sensitively and realistically, for each such film there are countless other films that associate the disorder with violence, bad intrusive thoughts and character defects of the protagonist. Thus, in my view, the need for films that provide a positive spin to the disease and counter the negative stereotype.
“Lago Raho Munnabhai” is one such film and it does so in a very subtle manner. While the film has been getting rave reviews for reviving Gandhian values and for making them trendy and cool for the Generation X by reincarnating those values as Gandhigiri, it has also been successful in making people sympathize with the Schizophrenic condition and do away with their prejudices that the auditory/visual hallucination accompanying Schizophrenia have to be negative/disturbing in nature. In this movie, Gandhi appears as a hallucination and guides Munna as per Gasndhian values , to resolve everyday problems.
The trigger of the illness in Munna, following some sleepless,no-nutrition, stressful days and nights, reading Gandhian Literature to the exclusion of everything else, is quite realistic and highlights some of the things that those vulnerable to schizophrenia need to avoid, to prevent relapse or triggering of the illness. The implied assertion that the ‘split personality’ may be due to a split between the Gandhian values that Munna has recently learned, and his old Bhai style violence-driven personality, though not technically correct as per current views, provides an antidote to the psychodynamic theories that posited that the disorder is a result of suppressing negative personality and thoughts: it is refreshing to consider the possibility that the negativity has so much shadowed our normal selves and become so common place, that if anything needs to be suppressed it would be positive and tender emotions and values.
The high point of the film is when Lucky Singh , the nemesis of Munna, launches an Ad Hominem attack on Munna and discredits all the good work he had done in spreading Gandhian values, by ‘exposing’ his insanity and by making him a laughing stock. Quite predictably, the general public in the movie leaves the side of Munna to let him fight his own devils (this time the devil is Gandhi:-), but surprisingly, the general public, that is the audience of the movie, stays with him and empathizes with him and laments not on his disease or his condition, but more so on the disease that is plaguing the Lucky Singhs of this world- that of corruption/ evil and on their own prejudices, insensitive and immature reaction to the ‘insane’. If not for anything else, this alone should have ensured that this movie represented India in the Oscars rather than “Rang De Basanti”.
Also heartening to note is, that though the film ends on a positive note, it doesn’t offer any magical cure for Schizophrenia and makes it clear that Gandhi is there to stay with Munna. What it does manage to do is, that it rechristens the ‘Furies’ that tormented Orestes as ‘Eumenides’ or ‘The Kindly ones’ and by doing this ‘cures’ the real underlying disease- our prejudiced view of hallucinations as evil/tormenting/disturbing.
On a related note, the one conclusion that stands out in the Stephen Fry documentary “The Secret Life of the Manic-Depressive” is the strong reluctance of many suffering from the disease to pull the genetic switch (if there was one) that would have prevented them from their illness and all the resultant experiences. In the words of one of the people interviewed there, ‘it is enough to have walked with angles, and everything else is a small price to play” (paraphrasing). While glamorization of mental illness is not exactly the right antidote to the pervasive stigmatization, yet an occasional association of positive affect, experiences and values with mental illness would go a long way in making us more sensitive and open about mental health issues.
There is a film festival being organized in Toronto, Rendezvous with Madness, showcasing some of the international films dealing with the mental health and stigmatization issues and hopefully its selection of movies is good. I find the section “Where there is Love there is Life” particularly interesting as the blurb contains reference to Gandhi.
Where There Is Love There Is Life: A Family Program
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)Where There Is Love There Is Life celebrates the resilience of children who struggle with loss and mental illness. This program of three Canadian shorts and a foreign feature presentation offers a hopeful portrait of such serious subjects as children caring for a mentally ill parent and also experiencing extreme anxiety. Themes like the power of forgiveness, the imagination, and of self-knowledge are introduced as tools for personal growth and survival in this mix of narrative drama and animation, which children and parents alike will find educational and entertaining. Rated PG.
It’s sad that “Lage Raho Munnabhai” is not part of this festival, but I’m sure as an independent entry in the Oscars, it would be able to reach more audiences and destigmatize the issues surrounding mental health
More From TheMouseTrap
- The Altruistic Mice: how they help a conspecific in a trap.
- The Mouse is dreaming that it is in a Trap!!
- A gene implicated in operant learning finally discovered
TheMouseTrap Recommends
Mouse research: Genetic footprints of anxiety?
5 years ago
A recent study, has determined that a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) in the BDNF (Brain deriver neurotopic factor) gene in humans, that substitutes a Met allele for Val, may be a predictor for increased susceptibility to anxiety/ depression. The study involved experiments with mouse homozygous for the Met allele and placing them in stressful situations. These mice exhibited considerable increase in anxiety over normal mouse when facing similar situations. Thus, a potential locus and mechanism for anxiety/ depression has become available.
It is interesting to note that a similar SNP that involves Met/Val substitution in the COMT gene has been implicated in schizophrenia and affects cognitive performance in frontal regions. In the COMT case though, those who have the Met allele are more fortunate, in the sense that the Val allele causes increased metabolism of dopamine and other catecholamines.
While a Met allele is good in a Schizophrenia gene, it has the reverse effect in a depression/anxiety gene! What exactly does the Met / Val difference mean for a gene?
Hat Tip: The Mind Blog
More From TheMouseTrap
TheMouseTrap Recommends
- The Power of the “F” Word (DanielleMMiller)
- Do You Know Your Essential Ingredients? (DanielleMMiller)
The ghost spot within the brain
5 years ago
While the recent experiments with the Carmelite nuns have been unable to identify a definitive GOD spot in the brain, it seems that the pre-surgery electrical stimulation of the brain of an epileptic patient has shed light on a potential ghost spot.
When the Temporo-pareital junction (TPJ) was stimulated, the woman felt the presence of a shadow behind her that was taking the same posture as herself.
The woman described the shadow person as young, silent, and mirroring her position as she lay on her back. “He is behind me, almost at my body, but I do not feel it,” she said, according to the doctors.
Next, the researchers stimulated the same spot in the woman’s brain as she sat up with her arms wrapped around her knees.
Again, the woman sensed the shadow presence. This time she said the man was sitting behind her and had his arms around her.
Lastly, the woman sat up, holding a card in her right hand, for another brain test that involved stimulating the same brain area. She once more sensed the shadow person.
“He wants to take the card. He doesn’t want me to read,” the woman reportedly said.
This has interesting implications for Schizophrenia research and the Nature article does hint at that. Specifically, abnormal brain activity in the TPJ may give rise to a feeling of a shadowy person following the schizophrenic subject always. This sense of being watched may give rise to a host of related syndromes. This may give rise to a sense of paranoia, delusions of persecution , delusions of alien control (when hugging your knee it may seem the shadow was using its hand to force yours or the prior act of bending forward by the shadow may be implicated as causing oneself to bend forward) and other delusions like the alien hand syndrome. Interesting to note that the epileptic woman in question assigns bad motives to the shadow. (“he doesn’t want me to take the card”)
It would be interesting to investigate, what abnormalities, if any, in the TPJ are present in the Schizophrenics subjects.
Hat tip: Omni Brain
More From TheMouseTrap
- The importance of being Earnest
- The right brain/ left brain asymmetry debate
- Effect of enriched environments on the brain
TheMouseTrap Recommends
- The Power of the “F” Word (DanielleMMiller)
- The brain-addiction connection : Neurons and neurotransmitters (adijaffe)
How to maximise your bets : become a schizophrenic or damage your amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, or the right insular cortex!
5 years ago
A couple of recent news articles on neuroeconomics, lead to some surprising insights regarding how addictions like Gambling could be self-addictive and how some specific neurological malfunctioning may lead to people fairing better in games of chances and making more ‘rational’ gambles.
The first article in the New Scientist refers to a recent research by Chris Frith et al at University College London, UK in which the authors found that people who had been given dopamine agonists (like L-DOPA) were able to determine the winning strategy involved in a gambling game early then those who were given placebo. The study contained choosing symbols – some of whom were associated with large chances of winning, while others were associated with average chances and still others were associated with financial penalties and should ideally be learned as avoidable symbols.
What they found was that dopamine facilitated the early learning of the symbols that were associated with (monetary) winning outcomes or rewards as compared to controls, but had no effect on the learning of the avoiding or punishment symbols. This, they hypothesize is due to the fact that people get a Dopamine surge whenever ‘rewarded’ and when base dopamine levels are high (it has already been administered prior to the betting game) this leads to greater strength of dopamine reward signal , thus leading to faster learning of the winning strategy. The fact that dopamine does not affect the learning of negative outcomes, confirms that the effect selective and due to the ‘rewarding’ nature of dopamine as opposed to a general improvement in learning due to dopamine administration.
The participants played a computer game in which they were repeatedly shown pairs of unmatched symbols, and had to choose one or the other without being told anything about them beforehand.
Unknown to the participants, one symbol gave them an 80% higher chance of winning £1, whereas another symbol gave them only a 20% higher chance of winning. Other symbols incurred financial penalties.
The volunteers on dopamine prospered because they identified the winning symbols faster than the haloperidol treated patients. And the winning effect was more pronounced if they actually received money in the study.
The dopamine recipients only noticed winning symbols, however. The chemical did not appear to alert recipients to “losing” symbols.
Learning from losing is controlled by other chemicals in the brain, the most dominant probably being serotonin, a chemical linked with depression, Frith concludes.
This brings up some interesting scenarios. If one has started gambling somehow, then as one keeps gambling further, the successive wins would generate more and more dopamine surges (as baseline dopamine increases after a few wins), the gambler would start identifying the winning patterns, and the strength of winning patterns and rewards associated with them would continue to get stronger in the gambler’s mind; there would be no corresponding effect on the learning of negative or losing strategies by him and consequently his learning would be skewed in such a way that winning outcomes would be disproportionately perceived as being rewarding as compared to the losing outcomes – thus in the gamblers mind loses are processed in a ‘normal’ way ; but wins or winning strategies are perceived differently in the sense that they would be learned more strongly, earlier and more persistently – as each win would result in more and more dopamine surge and thus skew the learning in favor of the winning strategy more and more. this is a vicious circle- the gambler is getting more and more dopamine surge and is also becoming better and better at identifying the winning strategies- thus its difficult to convince him otherwise that he is gambling in vain- what he doesn’t realize that he is not attaching a corresponding increased negative outcome to losses or is learning the losing strategies also at the same rate.
The other article is a good review of the field of neuroeconomics in the New Yorker. It touches on many current issues in neuroeconomics, but what is most relevant to us here is the concept of loss aversion, whereby people perceive losses of what they already have as more aversive than a wasted chance of making an equivalent or more gain. To paraphrase from the article:
If you present people with an even chance of winning a hundred and fifty dollars or losing a hundred dollars, most refuse the gamble, even though it is to their advantage to accept it: if you multiply the odds of winning—fifty per cent—times a hundred and fifty dollars, minus the odds of losing—also fifty per cent—times a hundred dollars, you end up with a gain of twenty-five dollars. If you accepted this bet ten times in a row, you could expect to gain two hundred and fifty dollars. But, when people are presented with it once, a prospective return of a hundred and fifty dollars isn’t enough to compensate them for a possible loss of a hundred dollars. In fact, most people won’t accept the gamble unless the winning stake is raised to two hundred dollars.
Further, the article notes that this loss aversion is due to the fact that under ambiguous situations (or situations that involve probabilistic estimates in face of incomplete information to make the probabilistic judgments), our ‘emotional’ brain takes precedence over the ‘rational’ brain and prevents us from making ‘rational’ decisions.
In one study, Camerer and several colleagues performed brain scans on a group of volunteers while they placed bets on whether the next card drawn from a deck would be red or black. In an initial set of trials, the players were told how many red cards and black cards were in the deck, so that they could calculate the probability of the next card’s being a certain color. Then a second set of trials was held, in which the participants were told only the total number of cards in the deck.
The first scenario corresponds to the theoretical ideal: investors facing a set of known risks. The second setup was more like the real world: the players knew something about what might happen, but not very much. As the researchers expected, the players’ brains reacted to the two scenarios differently. With less information to go on, the players exhibited substantially more activity in the amygdala and in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is believed to modulate activity in the amygdala. “The brain doesn’t like ambiguous situations,” Camerer said to me. “When it can’t figure out what is happening, the amygdala transmits fear to the orbitofrontal cortex.”
The results of the experiment suggested that when people are confronted with ambiguity their emotions can overpower their reasoning, leading them to reject risky propositions. This raises the intriguing possibility that people who are less fearful than others might make better investors, which is precisely what George Loewenstein and four other researchers found when they carried out a series of experiments with a group of patients who had suffered brain damage.
Further, the article notes that people with orbitofrontal, right insular or amygdala damage, are less fearful or are less able to integrate the fearful or ‘emotional’ response of the brain and are thus able to make decisions that are more risky then their normal counterparts. Thus, the counterintuitive conclusion that damages to these areas may make one a better investor/ gambler etc.
Each of the patients had a lesion in one of three regions of the brain that are central to the processing of emotions: the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, or the right insular cortex. The researchers presented the patients with a series of fifty-fifty gambles, in which they stood to win a dollar-fifty or lose a dollar. This is the type of gamble that people often reject, owing to loss aversion, but the patients with lesions accepted the bets more than eighty per cent of the time, and they ended up making significantly more money than a control group made up of people who had no brain damage. “Clearly, having frontal damage undermines the over-all quality of decision-making,” Loewenstein, Camerer, and Drazen Prelec, a psychologist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, wrote in the March, 2005, issue of the Journal of Economic Literature. “But there are situations in which frontal damage can result in superior decisions.”
If we club the two studies together, one may come to a surprising conclusion that to become a good speculative investor or gambler you may need to temporarily knock out your parts of the brain involved in emotional decision making (one may use TMS here) and also additionally take a dopamine does to learn the rewarding strategies and actions early on. This may be the only way for us to counter the tyranny of loss aversion that nature has imposed on us and move towards that ideal of Homo Economicus.
More From TheMouseTrap
- The Rat Park: Addiction and Environmental factors
- The courage of a mouse to say ‘No’: A case of metacognition or risk-aversion?
- The Altruistic Mice: how they help a conspecific in a trap.
Recent Comments