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| Edwin Booth’s Hamlet |
At the end of a Times
Op Ed article entitled “Learning How to Exert Self-Control,” (NYT, 9/13/14),
Pamela Druckerman quotes Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia
as saying, “Melancholy is not one of my emotions. Quite seriously, I don’t do
melancholy. It’s a miserable way to be.” Mischel was the author of the famous
“marshmallow test” in which children were asked to defer gratification (and has written a book called The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control). Those
who were able to defer gratification often did better in life.
Druckerman quotes Mischel to the effect that “We don’t need to be victims of
our emotions. We have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to evaluate whether or
not we like the emotions that are running us.” But there are others who might
disagree. Take the Noble prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman who has
written about the enormous role the irrational plays in human life and how
people are ruled by unconscious drives over which they have relatively little
control. Kahneman, for example, has demonstrated the role of “loss aversion” in
economic life. The work of the neuroscientists, Antoine Bechara, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio and Steven Anderson, whose Iowa Gambling Task deals with emotion based learning, also appear to confute Mischel’s
view. How easy or beneficial is it to discountenance melancholy? Sure there are
people who have an endlessly positive and productive worldview. But sometimes
this kind of behavior is known as denial. And those who embody it represent a
juggernaut of wishful thinking and rational constructs (products of their
prefrontal cortex no doubt) that denies the complexity and beauty of what it
means to be human. Was Hamlet’s problem simply that he didn’t control his
emotions?
by Daniel Carlat. The same issue of the NYRB featured a piece by Sue Halpern entitled “Mind Control and the Internet,” which dealt with the following books: World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity Machines and the Internet
by Michael Chorost; The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser; and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Angell’s essay deals with the controversy about antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Celexa, and antipsychotics like Zyprexa, addressing findings from double-blind placebo studies. The first in a two-part series, the essay is a thoughtful review of axons, dendrites and synapses, and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in bridging gaps between neurons. Psychotics were at one point thought to be suffering from a flood of serotonin, while those suffering from depression were thought to be experiencing a deficit. Thus, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor would prevent the secretion of serotonin by the synapse. One of the issues Angell brings up is how neurotransmitters are affected by the introduction of artificial substances into the brain, a process that becomes particularly important when a patient goes off of a medication. What is curious is how Angell’s essay on mental illness and the interior working of the brain and Halpern’s essay on computers and the mind are linked. A significant development of advanced computational theory is the increasing connection between computers and the brain—the brains of disabled people are now able to manipulate computer cursors and computers are able to access the brain. In discussing Lanier’s theories, Halpern remarks, “The ‘hive mind’ created through our electronic connections necessarily obviates the individual—indeed, that’s what makes it a collective consciousness.” On the other hand, computer programs of the future herald a world of utter subjectivity. “Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of 57 variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology and assumptions,” Halpern comments. The subject that unites the two pieces is really consciousness, a theme taken up by John Searle in his review of Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
in the previous issue of the NYRB. One thing that becomes clear in all of these pieces is that the human brain is inadvertently being fought over by both computers and drugs. It’s a struggle of Darwinian proportions, with the evolution of the brain ultimately mitigating the outcome.
