The Domesticated Brain (25 page)

Children start out as fairly gullible creatures, trusting what they are told. Part of the fun of being an adult is our ability to easily trick children and they generally enjoy the deception. Fantasy, magic, jokes and unexpected surprises work particularly well with children because they trust adults are telling the truth. This makes a lot of sense because they are naïve. They are not in a position to check the truth of many of the claims they hear. Imagine trying to pass on information if everything you said was taken with a degree of scepticism. Schooling children would be impossible if they always doubted.

This bias to believe even shows up in our brain activity. Neuroscientist Sam Harris put adults in a scanner and asked them to decide whether statements were true or false.
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Irrespective of whether participants agreed with the statement, were not sure or rejected it, the PFC was activated. However, when participants rejected statements as false, this decision activated other regions of the brain, including the ACC and the caudate that are both involved with negative emotions. They also took significantly longer to reject statements. This finding supports an idea originally proposed by the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote that merely contemplating an idea leads to the assumption that it is correct and that rejecting it as untrue is more difficult. We want to believe what we are told. We prefer to trust.

We are both good and bad

Humans
are naturally inclined to be helpful. It is not in our nature to disagree, refuse help or harm others in our group. But we must also be guided by domestication as to what is appropriate. There may always be temptations to take advantage of others, but this is risky and we do so at our peril. When we lived in smaller groups, it would have been catastrophic for our survival if we were excluded from the group as a cheat or freeloader. The evolution of cooperation and collaboration that propelled early hominids into societies bound by rules was based on the principle of reciprocity – an eye for an eye. Even today, when it is possible to survive on our own because we no longer need to forage and hunt for survival, most of us still carry the burden of obligation deep in our brains as the emotional consequences of prosocial behaviour.

Of course, there are always a few that do not operate with these inclinations and this may come down to their biology, their childhood experiences or some combination of the two. Earlier, we learned how abusive experiences shape children’s brains and influence their behaviour. In one study comparing children raised in stable homes with those raised in abusive environments, only one toddler from an abusive household came to the aid of or comforted another distressed child in the playgroup. Most from the stable homes helped.
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Remember how securely attached children readily seek out and accept comfort from a caregiver. In contrast, insecurely attached children either do not seek out comforting or do not readily settle when it is offered. When they observed
the helper/hinderer movies we described earlier, insecurely attached infants were not surprised when the mother shape abandoned her child.
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This is why domestication is so important in moulding children’s expectations about what is right or wrong.

On the other hand, our biological propensity to be prosocial does not of course mean that we will indiscriminately help anyone. The modern world is still full of conflict between groups that fight over territory, resources and ideas. We may be prosocial animals but our kindness typically only extends to those we identify with – the groups to which we belong. This may be due to an evolutionary imperative to favour those with whom we share genes but the general rule of thumb is to be kind and assume that others will be kind back to you. Somehow that message seems to get lost when we think about the ills of our modern society. This need to belong to groups and the way it influences our attitudes and behaviour is extraordinarily strong – one of the most powerful incentives we can experience as a social animal. It may be no surprise that most people prefer social acceptance, but what is surprising are the lengths that some will go to to become members of a group – and the terrible retribution they can wreak when they are excluded.

Shane Bauer was one of three American hikers imprisoned in Iran in 2009. At the time of their arrest in the Middle East, Shane, his girlfriend Sarah Shourd and friend Josh Fattawere were hiking in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, looking for the Ahmed Awa waterfall, a tourist attraction near the Iraq–Iran border. After they visited the waterfall, the Iranian authorities claimed that they had entered Iran illegally and arrested the three on suspicion of spying. Shourd was released after fourteen months on humanitarian grounds, but Bauer and Fattawere were convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. They spent twenty-six months in captivity and were later released in September 2011 after bail of $500,000 was paid.

This experience in a foreign land would leave a profound effect on Bauer and his attitude towards imprisonment, especially when he discovered that prison conditions were sometimes more extreme in his own country. In an article in the magazine
Mother Jones
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Bauer wrote, ‘Solitary in Iran nearly broke me. I never thought I’d see worse in American prisons.’ He was determined to reveal the horrors of his homeland’s use of solitary confinement as a form of legalized torture. On
a visit to a Californian prison, an officer asked him about his time in Iran. Bauer explained

no part of my experience – not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners – was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated?

Loneliness is often only a temporary state as one adapts to new environments, but when that isolation is used as a punishment enforced over days, months and even years in solitary confinement, it can be the cruellest way to treat another human. Physical torture and starvation are dreadful, but according to those who have suffered imprisonment, it was the isolation that they found the worst. Of his time in prison on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote that ‘Nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship’, and he knew men in prison who preferred half a dozen lashes with a whip rather than being in solitary confinement.
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It is estimated that 25,000 US prisoners are currently locked in tiny cells, deprived of all meaningful human contact. Many of them spend a few days there. Some have been isolated for years. These are not always the most violent inmates. Prisoners have been ‘locked down’ for simply reading the wrong book. There are no international codes of conduct for this punishment and no other democratic country uses solitary confinement as much as the US. It is a shocking anomaly from a nation that claims to be so committed to human rights. In 2012, the New York Civil Liberties Union
published their findings about the use of solitary confinement in the state and concluded ‘These conditions cause serious emotional and psychological harm, including severe depression and uncontrollable rage.’
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Those who willingly volunteer for isolation can also experience psychological distress. Forty years ago, French scientist Michel Siffre conducted a series of studies to investigate the rhythms of the body when isolated from external measures of time such as natural sunlight. He spent months in caves without any clocks or calendars and discovered that the human body operates not on a twenty-four-hour cycle, but rather on a forty-eight-hour cycle when there are no daylight cues. Given enough time in isolation, people will revert to a cycle where they stay awake for thirty-six hours and then sleep for twelve.
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He also discovered the psychological pain of social isolation. Even though he was in constant communication with his assistants above ground, his mental health began to deteriorate. In his last study, conducted in a cave in Texas, he began to lose his sanity.
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He became so lonely that he tried to capture a mouse that he had named
Mus
that occasionally rummaged through his supplies. Siffre wrote in his diary,

My patience prevails. After much hesitation, Mus edges up to the jam. I admire his little shining eyes, his sleek coat. I slam down the dish. He is captured! At last I will have a companion in my solitude. My heart pounds with excitement. For the first time since entering the cave, I feel a surge of joy. Carefully I inch up the casserole. I hear small squeaks of distress. Mus lies on his side. The edge of the descending dish apparently caught him on the head. I stare at him with swelling grief. The whispers die away. He is still. Desolation overwhelms me.

Such is the need for companionship that the audience can fully understand why the shipwrecked FedEx employee Chuck Noland played by Tom Hanks in the movie
Cast Away
(2000) strikes up a relationship with a volleyball he calls Wilson (after the ball’s manufacturer). He even risks his own life to save Wilson when the ball falls into the ocean during an attempt by Chuck to escape the island on a makeshift raft. Chuck dives into the ocean after the ball, calling out desperately for Wilson, but eventually gives up, apologizing to the ball as it drifts off on the current. It is one of the most unusual ‘death’ scenes for an inanimate object and yet this emotional trauma immediately resonates with the audience because we understand what loneliness can do to someone.

Just like me

These tales of desperation for companionship reinforce a central point of this book: that the human brain evolved for social interaction and that we have become dependent on domestication for survival. Social animals do not fare well in isolation and we are the one species that spends the longest period being raised and living in groups.
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Our health deteriorates and life expectancy is shortened when we are on our own. The average person spends 80 per cent of their waking hours in the company of others and that social time is preferred to time spent alone.
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Even those who deliberately seek
out isolation, such as hermits, monks and some French scientists, are not exceptions that prove the rule.

It is not enough just to have people around; we need to belong. We need to make emotional connections in order to forge and maintain those social bonds that keep us together. We do things to make others like us and refrain from doing things that make them angry. This may seem trivially obvious, until you encounter those who have lost the capacity for appropriate emotional behaviour and you realize just how critical emotions are for enabling social interactions. Various brain disorders such as dementia can disrupt emotions, making them too extreme, too flat or too inappropriate. Even those without brain disorders vary in their capacity for emotional expression. Those lacking in or unwilling to share their emotions are cold and unapproachable, whereas others who willingly express their emotions, assuming they are positive, are warm and friendly.

Sometimes others’ emotions can be infectious. Emotional contagion describes the way that others’ expressions can trigger our emotions automatically. Many of us get teary when we see others crying at weddings and funerals. Or we may collapse into a fit of the giggles when a friend does, even though we should be keeping our composure in front of others. Actors call this ‘corpsing’, probably because the worst time to giggle is when playing a corpse on stage.

Laughter and tears are two social emotions that can transmit through a group like an involuntary spasm. When we are sharing these emotions we are having a common experience that makes us feel connected to each other. We know this is innate, rather than learned, because babies will also mimic
the emotions of others. They cry when they hear other babies cry or see others in distress. Charles Darwin described how his infant son William was emotionally fooled by his nurse: ‘When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth strongly depressed.’
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What could possibly be the benefit of emotional contagion and why do we mimic some expressions and not others? One suggestion is that expressions evolved as adaptations to threat. Fear changes the shape of our face and raises our eyebrows, so that can make us more receptive to potential information from the world. On the other hand, disgust, where we wrinkle up our noses and close our eyes, produces the opposite profile, making us less susceptible to potentially noxious stimuli.
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Seeing or hearing someone vomit makes us gag, possibly as a warning to expel the contents of our own stomach as we both may have eaten something that is not good for us.