When a male vole repeatedly mates with a female, a hormone called vasopressin is released in his brain. The vasopressin binds to receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, and the binding mediates a pleasurable feeling that becomes associated with that female. This locks in the monogamy, which is known as pair-bonding. If you block this hormone, the pair-bonding goes away. Amazingly, when researchers crank up the levels of vasopressin with genetic techniques, they can shift polygamous species to monogamous behavior.38
Does vasopressin matter for human relationships? In 2008, a research team at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden examined the gene for the vasopressin receptor in 552 men in long-term heterosexual relationships.39 The researchers found that a section of the gene called RS3 334 can come in variable numbers: a man might carry no copies of this section, one copy, or two copies. The more copies, the weaker the effect that vasopressin in the bloodstream would have in the brain. The results were surprising in their simplicity. The number of copies correlated with the men’s pair-bonding behavior. Men with more copies of RS3 334 scored worse on measures of pair-bonding—including measures of the strength of their relationships, perceived marital problems, and marital quality as perceived by their spouses. Those with two copies were more likely to be unmarried, and if they were married, they were more likely to have marital troubles.
This is not to say that choices and environment don’t matter—they do. But it is to say that we come into the world with different dispositions. Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not. In the near future, young women who stay current with the scientific literature may demand genetic tests of their boyfriends to assess how likely they are to make faithful husbands.
Recently, evolutionary psychologists have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn’t take them long to notice that when people fall in love, there’s a period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak. The internal signals in the body and brain are literally a love drug. And then it begins to decline. From this perspective, we are preprogrammed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed—which is, on average, about four years.40 The psychologist Helen Fisher suggests that we are programmed the same way as foxes, who pair-bond for a breeding season, stick around just long enough to raise the offspring, and then split. By researching divorce in nearly sixty countries, Fisher has found that divorce peaks at about four years into a marriage, consistent with her hypothesis.41 In her view, the internally generated love drug is simply an efficient mechanism to get men and women to stick together long enough to increase the survival likelihood of their young. Two parents are better than one for survival purposes, and the way to provide that safety is to coax them into staying together.
In the same vein, the large eyes and round faces of babies look cute to us not because they possess a natural “cuteness” but because of the evolutionary importance of adults taking care of babies. Those genetic lines that did not find their infants cute no longer exist, because their young were not properly cared for. But survivors like us, whose mental umwelt cannot let us not find babies cute, successfully raise babies to compose the next generation.
* * *
We’ve seen in this chapter that our deepest instincts, as well as the kinds of thoughts we have and even can have, are burned into the machinery at a very low level. “This is great news,” you might think. “My brain is doing all the right things to survive, and I don’t even have to think about them!” True, that is great news. The unexpected part of the news is that the conscious you is the smallest bit-player in the brain. It is something like a young monarch who inherits the throne and takes credit for the glory of the country—without ever being aware of the millions of workers who keep the place running.
We’ll need some bravery to start considering the limitations of our mental landscape. Returning to the movie The Truman Show, at one point an anonymous woman on the telephone suggests to the producer that poor Truman, unwittingly on TV in front of an audience of millions, is less a performer than a prisoner. The producer calmly replies:
And can you tell me, caller, that you’re not a player on the stage of life—playing out your allotted role? He can leave at any time. If his was more than just a vague ambition, if he were absolutely determined to discover the truth, there’s no way we could prevent him. I think what really distresses you, caller, is that ultimately Truman prefers the comfort of his “cell,” as you call it.
As we begin to explore the stage we’re on, we find that there is quite a bit beyond our umwelt. The search is a slow, gradual one, but it engenders a deep sense of awe at the size of the wider production studio.
We’re now ready to move one level deeper into the brain, uncovering another layer of secrets about what we’ve been blithely referring to as you, as though you were a single entity.
The Brain Is a Team of Rivals
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
WILL THE TRUE MEL GIBSON PLEASE STAND UP?
On July 28, 2006, the actor Mel Gibson was pulled over for speeding at nearly twice the posted speed limit on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California. The police officer, James Mee, administered a breathalyzer test, which revealed Gibson’s blood alcohol level to be 0.12 percent, well over the legal limit. On the seat next to Gibson sat an open bottle of tequila. The officer announced to Gibson that he was under arrest and asked him to get into the squad car. What distinguished this arrest from other Hollywood inebriations was Gibson’s surprising and out-of-place inflammatory remarks. Gibson growled, “Fucking Jews.… Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” He then asked the officer, “Are you a Jew?” Mee was indeed Jewish. Gibson refused to get into the squad car and had to be handcuffed.
Less than nineteen hours later, the celebrity website TMZ.com obtained a leak of the handwritten arrest report and posted it immediately. On July 29, after a vigorous response from the media, Gibson offered a note of apology:
After drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed.… I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said and I apologize to anyone who I have offended.… I disgraced myself and my family with my behavior and for that I am truly sorry. I have battled the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse. I apologize for any behavior unbecoming of me in my inebriated state and have already taken necessary steps to ensure my return to health.
Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, expressed outrage that there was no reference in the apology to the anti-Semitic slurs. In response, Gibson extended a longer note of contrition specifically toward the Jewish community:
There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark. I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge.… The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God’s child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith.
Gibson offered to meet one-on-one with leaders of the Jewish community to “discern the appropriate path for healing.” He seemed genuinely contrite, and Abraham Foxman accepted his apology on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League.
Are Gibson’s true colors that of an anti-Semite? Or are his true colors those he showed afterward, in his eloquent and apparently heartfelt apologies?
br /> In a Washington Post article entitled “Mel Gibson: It Wasn’t Just the Tequila Talking,” Eugene Robinson wrote, “Well, I’m sorry about his relapse, but I just don’t buy the idea that a little tequila, or even a lot of tequila, can somehow turn an unbiased person into a raging anti-Semite—or a racist, or a homophobe, or a bigot of any kind, for that matter. Alcohol removes inhibitions, allowing all kinds of opinions to escape uncensored. But you can’t blame alcohol for forming and nurturing those opinions in the first place.”
Lending support to that outlook, Mike Yarvitz, the television producer of Scarborough Country, drank alcohol on the show until he raised his blood alcohol level to 0.12 percent, Gibson’s level that night. Yarvitz reported “not feeling anti-Semitic” after drinking.
Robinson and Yarvitz, like many others, suspected that the alcohol had loosened Gibson’s inhibitions and revealed his true self. And the nature of their suspicion has a long history: the Greek poet Alcaeus of Mytilene coined a popular phrase En oino álétheia (In wine there is the truth), which was repeated by the Roman Pliny the Elder as In vino veritas. The Babylonian Talmud contains a passage in the same spirit: “In came wine, out went a secret.” It later advises, “In three things is a man revealed: in his wine goblet, in his purse, and in his wrath.” The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying.
But not everyone agreed with the hypothesis that alcohol revealed the true Mel Gibson. The National Review writer John Derbyshire argued, “The guy was drunk, for heaven’s sake. We all say and do dumb things when we are drunk. If I were to be judged on my drunken escapades and follies, I should be utterly excluded from polite society, and so would you, unless you are some kind of saint.” The Jewish conservative activist David Horowitz commented on Fox News, “People deserve compassion when they’re in this kind of trouble. I think it would be very ungracious for people to deny it to him.” Addiction psychologist G. Alan Marlatt wrote in USA Today, “Alcohol is not a truth serum.… It may or may not indicate his true feelings.”
In fact, Gibson had spent the afternoon before the arrest at the house of a friend, Jewish film producer Dean Devlin. Devlin stated, “I have been with Mel when he has fallen off, and he becomes a completely different person. It is pretty horrifying.” He also stated, “If Mel is an anti-Semite, then he spends a lot of time with us [Devlin and his wife, who is also Jewish], which makes no sense.”
So which are Gibson’s “true” colors? Those in which he snarls anti-Semitic comments? Or those in which he feels remorse and shame and publicly says, “I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help”?
Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side—in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That’s intuitive, but it’s incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature. As we will see in this chapter, we are made of many neural subpopulations; as Whitman put it, we “contain multitudes.” Even though Gibson’s detractors will continue to insist that he is truly an anti-Semite, and his defenders will insist that he is not, both may be defending an incomplete story to support their own biases. Is there any reason to believe that it’s not possible to have both racist and nonracist parts of the brain?
I AM LARGE, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES
Throughout the 1960s, artificial intelligence pioneers worked late nights to try to build simple robotic programs that could manipulate small blocks of wood: find them, fetch them, stack them in patterns. This was one of those apparently simple problems that turn out to be exceptionally difficult. After all, finding a block of wood requires figuring out which camera pixels correspond to the block and which do not. Recognition of the block shape must be accomplished regardless of the angle and distance of the block. Grabbing it requires visual guidance of graspers that must clench at the correct time, from the correct direction, and with the correct force. Stacking requires an analysis of the rest of the blocks and adjustment to those details. And all these programs need to be coordinated so that they happen at the correct times in the correct sequence. As we have seen in the previous chapters, tasks that appear simple can require great computational complexity.
Confronting this difficult robotics problem a few decades ago, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky and his colleagues introduced a progressive idea: perhaps the robot could solve the problem by distributing the labor among specialized subagents—small computer programs that each bite off a small piece of the problem. One computer program could be in charge of the job find. Another could solve the fetch problem, and yet another program could take care of stack block. These mindless subagents could be connected in a hierarchy, just like a company, and they could report to one another and to their bosses. Because of the hierarchy, stack block would not try to start its job until find and fetch had finished theirs.
This idea of subagents did not solve the problem entirely—but it helped quite a bit. More importantly, it brought into focus a new idea about the working of biological brains. Minsky suggested that human minds may be collections of enormous numbers of machinelike, connected subagents that are themselves mindless.1 The key idea is that a great number of small, specialized workers can give rise to something like a society, with all its rich properties that no single subagent, alone, possesses. Minsky wrote, “Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies—in certain very special ways—this leads to intelligence.” In this framework, thousands of little minds are better than one large one.
To appreciate this approach, just consider how factories work: each person on the assembly line is specialized in a single aspect of production. No one knows how to do everything; nor would that equate to efficient production if they did. This is also how government ministries operate: each bureaucrat has one task or a few very specific tasks, and the government succeeds on its ability to distribute the work appropriately. On larger scales, civilizations operate in the same manner: they reach the next level of sophistication when they learn to divide labor, committing some experts to agriculture, some to art, some to warfare, and so on.2 The division of labor allows specialization and a deeper level of expertise.
The idea of dividing up problems into subroutines ignited the young field of artificial intelligence. Instead of trying to develop a single, all-purpose computer program or robot, computer scientists shifted their goal to equipping the system with smaller “local expert” networks that know how to do one thing, and how to do it well.3 In such a framework, the larger system needs only to switch which of the experts has control at any given time. The learning challenge now involves not so much how to do each little task but, instead, how to distribute who’s doing what when.4
As Minsky suggests in his book The Society of Mind, perhaps that’s all the human brain has to do as well. Echoing William James’ concept of instincts, Minsky notes that if brains indeed work this way—as collections of subagents—we would not have any reason to be aware of the specialized processes:
Thousands and, perhaps, millions of little processes must be involved in how we anticipate, imagine, plan, predict, and prevent—and yet all this proceeds so automatically that we regard it as “ordinary common sense.” … At first it may seem incredible that our minds could use such intricate machinery and yet be unaware of it.5
When scientists began to look into the brains of animals, this society-of-mind idea opened up new ways of looking at things. In the early 1970s, researchers realized that the frog, for example, has at least two separate mechanisms for detecting motion: one system directs the snapping of the frog’s tongue to small, darting objects, such as flies, while a second system commands the legs to jump in response to large, looming objects.6 Presumably, neither of these systems is conscious—instead, they are simple, automated programs burned down into the circuitry.
The society-of-mind framework was an important step forward. But despite the initial excitement about it, a collection of experts with divided labor has never proven sufficient to yield the properties of the human brain. It is still the case that our smartest robots are less intelligent than a three-year-old child.
So what went wrong? I suggest that a critical factor has been missing from the division-of-labor models, and we turn to that now.
THE DEMOCRACY OF MIND
The missing factor in Minsky’s theory was competition among experts who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem. Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
In an assembly line or government ministry, each worker is an expert in a small task. In contrast, parties in a democracy hold differing opinions about the same issues—and the important part of the process is the battle for steering the ship of state. Brains are like representative democracies.7 They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.
There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something—feats that modern computers simply do not do. When the hostess at a party offers chocolate cake, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar, and other parts care about the negative consequences, such as the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles. Part of you wants the cake and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it. The final vote of the parliament determines which party controls your action—that is, whether you put your hand out or up. In the end, you either eat the chocolate cake or you do not, but you cannot do both.