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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The Psycho-biology of Violence

A young science offers insight and a potential of remedy for a worried society

A young man came into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston looking for help. "I am going to shoot my stepfather," he told the doctor. He was carrying a bulky bundle which, when unwrapped, turned out to be a disassembled rifle. "I know I shouldn't shoot him," he went on. "I know it's wrong, and I don't want to do it. But I know I'm going to, unless you help me. Can you help me?"

Luckily the young man had come to one of the few places where he could find help. He was sent instantly to a special clinic set up in the hospital for the study of violent behavior. It was organized last year by a team of medical scientists attached to Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston City Hospital. Their specialty is a new one: psychobiology. The field they are exploring is the psychobiology of violence.

The root of violence may be psychiatric - the result, for an instance, of upbringing or social environment; or they may be biological, perhaps caused by some disorder of the brain or nervous system; or they may most frequently be a combination of these and other factors. The psychobiological approach, new as it is, is gaining adherents so fast that it might almost be called a movement. It is an interdisciplinary, many-pronged assault that involves not only psychologists and biologists but also psychiatrists, sociologists, surgeons, neurologists, geneticists, pharmacologists, other biomedical specialists, and even students of animal behavior. The University of California campus at Irvine has even established an official department of psychobiology.

...

The group in Boston consists at the moment of half a dozen researchers, including two well-known neurosurgeons, Dr. William Sweet and Dor. Vernon H. Mark, and an outstanding psychiatrist Dr. Frank R. Ervin, who servers as full-time head of the group. There is an existing institute for the study of violence at Brandeis University which has so far concerned itself mainly with racial conflicts. Dr. Ervin's group gives its principal attention instead to individual acts of violence and to the possibility that the cause may often be found in some malfunction of the body or brain. In the 50-or-so cases they have so far had the opportunity to study in some depth, they have already found a startling frequency of correlation between deviant behavior, and brain damage.

I every classic concept of the violent personality, the impulses to rage and aggression have always been intimately linked with frustration. Yet frustration alone cannot account for them. In a family of brothers and sisters raised by the same parents under the same frustrating circumstances, some will be violent and some not. In a slum neighborhood, everyone may live under the same frustrating set of pressures and tensions, but only a small minority will engage in rioting, and even among the rioters only a handful will actually burn down a building or assault another person. Thus psychobiology proceeds on the premise that violent acts are carried out by violent individuals, even if the individuals are part of a mob.

Even when the study of violence is restricted to individuals, the causes are not simple to pinpoint. "A violent individual" says Dr. Ervin, "tends to come from a violent family. But what conclusion can we draw from that? We could conclude that his violent tendencies are inherited. But we could just as easily decide that he was influenced by the violent atmosphere in which he was raised - or that he was hit on the head so hard and so often as a child, that his brain must be damaged."

...

Dr. Sweet and Dr Mark, the two neurosurgeons on the Boston team, have had little difficulty tracking the trouble to brain damage in some of their violent patients. In rare cases, because of the ravages accompanying certain types of epilepsy or the presence of a tumor in the primitive brain, the brain damage is so extensive that patient is violent nearly all the time. The damage apparently scrambles the electrical circuitry of the brain so that the cells in the affected regions are discharging electricity almost constantly , evoking impulses of rage and violence. There is no way to turn them off, except through drug therapy or brain surgery.

So far there has been great reluctance to perform brain surgery, except in extreme cases - repeated attempts at murder, for instance. Sometimes even relatively simple surgery - if any brain surgery can be called simple - can help for a time. At the Indiana University Medical Center, Dr. Robert Heimberger has found that by touching the afflicted area of the brain with a delicate "cryosurgical" probe (an instrument with a frozen tip) he can destroy the diseased tissue. This operation, performed on institytionalized patients who are violently destructive, keeps them calm for weeks or months at a time.

In many of the cases handled by Dr. Sweet and Dr. Mark, the brain damage is not obvious. But examinations in depth usually turn up some abnormality in the brain tissue - damage that is perhaps congenital, perhaps the result of blows on the head or of some viral infection that reached the brain. There has lately been much interest in genetic causes of abnormalities too, especially since a recent case in France, where a violent criminal was found to possess an abnormal "XYY" chromosome. The Boston group has already incorporated a cell geneticist into the team to study these latest possibilities.

...

Seeking a cure in the brain of a frenzied girl

One of the patients undergoing treatment in Boston is a 20-year-old girl. Most of the time she is a sweet and charming person who enjoys playing the guitar. But in the fits of violence she has twice seriously stabbed people. To localize the cause of her violence doctors implanted electrodes in different areas of her brain and stimulated each in turn. When they stimulate the part of the brain called the amygdala, she rises, flails away at the wall as if it were a mortal enemy, and then slumps back down on her mattress. With the source of her trouble thus pinpointed, doctors just three weeks ago operated to excise the defective portion of her amygdala.

So I'm playing historian. Emphasis on "playing", since I'm just retracing the steps from other people's work. Still it's pretty fun to look up the primary sources, particularly when they're mysteriously missing from internet archives. A few weeks ago I posted a hypothetical about trying to explain the magnitude of current Culture War issues, to someone in the far future, here I'm going in the opposite direction. This article is a small sample of a larger episode of decently-sized Culture War. It happened recently enough, that it's pretty easy to find sources on it, but since it hasn't really been preserved in collective memory, it's hard to judge how big it was. Big enough for a cover article of Life magazine, I guess, but it has only a paragraph on Wikipedia (oh wait, here's a few more), and much like in my hypothetical I find the description oddly terse. At least someone on wiki seems to think Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin deserve to have their own pages, but for some reason no one got around to writing them.

It's pretty wild to read stuff from the 70's, it's like going into some sort of Mirror Universe. As someone very anti-woke, I'm tempted to see the half-postmodernist half-marxist ideas pushed by our elites as the root of all evil. If only we could move in a more rational direction, I often think, we could actually solve the problems that afflict our society. And then I look at how people used to talk about social problems 50 years ago, and the vibes I'm getting are basically rationalist, and I hate it. Yes, let's start solving social problems by dicking around in people's brains, what could possibly go wrong? All of this run by the same NYT-Informational Complex that promotes wokeness nowadays. I'm slowly starting to come to the conclusion that all these ideological fights are pointless. Some people talk about pendulums swinging, I'm starting to see it as evil always finding a way to twist any idea to it's ends.

Yes, let's start solving social problems by dicking around in people's brains, what could possibly go wrong?

Indeed, I found this bit particularly dystopian:

In a slum neighborhood, everyone may live under the same frustrating set of pressures and tensions, but only a small minority will engage in rioting

"Improve wages and equality so large sections of the underclass don't live in slums? Nah, just give the high agency ones psychosurgery, that'll stop the violent riots, which is the only problem we actually care about."

There was an ancient comment I still remember from the Old Place, about how with improving AI military drones, it will eventually be possible for the neo-feudal corporate-ocracy CEOs to personally oppress 400 million serfs in violent despotism, no coup-gestating delegation of power to the military needed when you're the man with the password. Moldbug's blockchain-keyed guns are slightly more plausible - there the regime needs to be more than literally one man but there can be no challenge from a military either when only the loyalist's guns work. Add to that anti-violence brain surgery on your chattel slaves, and the technology of oppression is looking less and less sci-fi by the day.

"Improve wages and equality so large sections of the underclass don't live in slums? Nah, just give the high agency ones psychosurgery, that'll stop the violent riots, which is the only problem we actually care about."

And just in case someone is tempted to think "come on, this is just a throwaway line from a journalist musing about the nature of violence", here's a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association from doctors Ervin, Mark, and Sweet where they elaborate on that line of thought, although they are also more careful to hedge with "we totally don't want to minimize the social factors".

That letter is actually perfectly reasonable. Half of it isn't even about riots, but about studies conducted on convicted murderers in other countries.

I'd be interested in finding out whether anything came out of that line of research.

Sweet! I had the feeling someone on the Motte might want to defend the whole thing.

It's written in a reasonable tone, but that doesn't make the idea itself reasonable. I'd say trying to solve the problem of violence by messing around in people's heads is one of the most horrifying things you could come up with.

I'd be interested in finding out whether anything came out of that line of research.

I'll be posting more about it in the future, as I make my way through the sources. The short answer is yes, and it's not very pretty. It hasn't struck you, that for some reason we are not routinely performing psychosurgery on violent criminals more than 50 years after the letter was published?

Was this the inspiration for Crichton's The Terminal Man? I think that novel was essentially a commentary on the ethics and consequences of trying to "fix" the psychotic with these kinds of techniques.

I think so. I don't have my notes right now, but there was a specific case of "Leonard K." who was a patient in the Boston clinic, and got screwed over pretty badly. I saw some comparisons between him and the Terminal Man, although reality was a lot less romantic, and possibly more horrifying, since in the end there was little evidence of him being psychotic or a danger to anyone.

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