The Imprinted Brain

Chimps-R-Not-Us

Christopher Badcock, Ph.D. — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:44:36 +0000

Many people believe that they have seen evidence that chimpanzees can readily retrieve a banana hanging from a high point when provided with a few boxes which can be stacked to enable the chimp to climb up and reach the reward. Indeed, they may even be able to recall a famous photograph taken by Wolfgang Köhler in 1927 which definitely seems to illustrate this—along with another chimpanzee evidently thoughtfully standing by and watching (presumably ready to do the same if given the chance).

I for one certainly believed this, but when I thought about it more I noticed one or two odd things. First, I thought, if chimpanzees can do this so easily, why haven’t I seen film footage of chimpanzees doing it more recently? And again, why can I only recall ever having seen the one, single photo? Surely, if chimpanzees can solve the box-building problem so readily, the experiment must have been repeated numerous times and surely would be on every TV documentary about chimps!

The answer is that chimpanzees have no insight into the physical principles governing box-stacking whatsoever. On the contrary, Köhler reported that the chimpanzee “solves not by insight, but by trying around blindly.” In short, the box-building-to-retrieve-the-banana was a one-off fluke and is nothing like the clear-cut case of chimpanzee “insight” that it is usually taken to be. Consequently, films of chimps trying to solve the problem—rather than single photographs—would reveal the truth all too clearly, explaining why they are never seen.

But fortunately we no longer have to rely on such dated and anecdotic material. Much more recently, Daniel Povinelli and his colleagues have carried out a meticulous series of experiments ranging over many years and with many different chimpanzees designed to test the claims that these animals think like we do when using tools. What is outstanding about this work is the great care that was taken to design experiments which could unequivocally demonstrate thought as opposed to mere behaviour, or insight rather than conditioning. Povinelli’s wonderfully ingenious experiments prove that chimps are nowhere near 95 per cent human. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that our closest primate cousins have not evolved either what I would call mentalistic or mechanistic cognition—underlining the point that these are indeed the cognitive adaptations which are truly distinctive of our species.

More recently, the English science writer Jeremy Taylor has published Not A Chimp. Taylor focuses on the alleged close genetic similarity between humans and chimps and has a field-day disposing of the nonsense which claims that chimps are approximately 95 per cent human and humans just about 5 per cent shy of being chimps. Where DNA is concerned, the reason is simple: genes are not plans or blueprints, they are more like recipes. Consider a 20-instruction recipe for making a cake that substituted cement for flour or 20 hours cooking for 2. The recipe would only be 5 per cent different (1 item in 20), but would the resulting cake in either case be 95 per cent the same as the original?

Taylor’s book is a superb account of recent advances in genetics which have refuted once and for all the belief that humans have hardly evolved since we parted company with the common ancestor of ourselves and modern chimpanzees. And like Povinelli, Taylor reveals the fallacy in believing that similar behaviour to our own on the part of chimps necessarily means similar mentality. On the contrary, he shows that bird-brained crows and domesticated dogs can be markedly better than chimpanzees in some skills while being genetically much more remote from us. To put it another way, you could say that both Povinelli and Taylor reveal the extent to which human beings can all too easily project their own mentality onto other species: something I would call hyper-mentalizing and something that I would also claim is the core and essence of insanity. And let’s be honest about it: claiming human rights for chimps—or even 95 per cent rights—as some have indeed claimed is insane. Those in question—prominent politicians, primatologists, and philosophers are prime examples of hyper-mentalism and strikingly illustrate the worry about such people that I raised in a previous blog.

Product-withdrawal Notice: I was wrong about Freud

Christopher Badcock, Ph.D. — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:32:20 +0000

Psychoanalysis was never without its critics, but until a few years ago I was not one of them. On the contrary, with the single-mindedness and immunity to criticism that is characteristic of those with an autistic turn of mind, I ignored it all and went my own way believing that ultimately developments elsewhere in science would vindicate Freud—and wrote several books to prove it. This led to a private didactic analysis with Anna Freud terminated by her death in 1982. I worshipped at the shrine of the prophet with the high priestess four days a week forty weeks a year for almost three years. Inspired by faith, I became an evangelist—at least for Freud, if not for psychoanalysis—and from the mid-1970s until 2002 taught a very successful undergraduate course on Freud at the London School of Economics.

But that course is now extinct, and readers of my latest book, The Imprinted Brain; how genes set the balance between autism and psychosis (Jessica Kingsley May 2009) will find that a part of the last chapter reads a bit like those product-withdrawal notices you see in your supermarket. Certainly, this was an important aspect of the book for me: it gave me a chance to recant my Freudian faith and confess to the egregious errors I had made.

What had happened? You need to read the whole book to understand that, but a short answer is: I discovered autism, and more important still, I began to see that, far from being a cure for mental problems, psychoanalysis was a cultural embodiment of what I would now call hyper-mentalism.

According to the imprinted brain theory explained in the book, genes underlying autistic and psychotic disorders remain in the human genome because they underpin the two fundamental cognitive adaptations of our species. Mentalistic cognition—or mentalism (aka “theory of mind/empathizing/folk psychology/people thinking”)—evolved to facilitate social interaction and became the basis of mental culture: religion, politics, commerce, art, and literature. Mechanistic cognition (aka “systemizing/folk physics/things thinking”) evolved to facilitate physical interaction with the non-human, material world of objects and became the basis of science, technology, and material culture. The two systems of cognition are normally more or less balanced in any individual. However, thanks to the mechanisms of gene expression concerned, the balance can easily be disturbed. A deficit in mentalism (sometimes with an excess in mechanistic cognition in so-called autistic savantism) explains autistic spectrum disorders while the opposite—excessive mentalizing—explains most of the symptoms of psychotic spectrum disorders.

Looked at from this novel point of view, psychoanalysis was an institutional form of hyper-mentalism comparable to paranoid schizophrenia. Recovered schizophrenics comment that their psychosis is a disease of over-interpretation, of seeing meaning where there is none, and of intuiting intentions, thoughts, and emotions in others that simply do not exist. Psychoanalysis institutionalized this form of paranoia in its belief that analysts could interpret free-associations, dreams, and slips of the tongue or hand to reveal an infantile, repressed unconscious in the individual.

But of course, if this unconscious mind existed, precocious autistics would have revealed it long ago thanks to their inability to deceive themselves or others, immunity to convention and constraint, and perverse insistence on being themselves. Autistic savants in particular revealed that the un-socialized, pristine mind of the child was more like a thinking computer than the inferno of repressed drives and sleazy sexuality imagined by Freud. The passions of autistic savants are timetables, calendars, and machines, not incest, parricide, or primeval rage. Far from being the indiscriminate feeding machines the Freudian id might suggest, autistic children often have fastidious food avoidances. And contrary to Freudian dogma, savant-like preservation of infantile memories by some autistics reveals a fascination with things, not people.

So this is my product-recall notice. Readers who wish to find out more should read The Imprinted Brain with close attention—especially to the footnotes to the last chapter.

The Symmetry of Savantism

Christopher Badcock, Ph.D. — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:29:45 +0000

According to the imprinted brain theory, autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are the mirror image of psychotic spectrum disorders (PSDs) like paranoid schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. ASD is characterized by deficits in mentalism: our innate ability to relate to ourselves and others as mental beings, with feelings, motives, beliefs, knowledge, and conscious, sovereign selves. However, mentalism is only one of two modes of cognition distinctive to human beings. The other is mechanistic cognition: our parallel ability to relate to objects in the material world by means of manual, mechanical, mathematical and spatial skills. The former, mentalistic skills are basis of the so-called humanities and the latter, mechanistic ones, those of what today we could call STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering, and maths.

The two modes of cognition are often in conflict because one is proper to the world of mental meaning and the other to that of physical fact—for example Creationism versus Darwinism, free will versus determinism, or nurture versus nature. In each case the first term is mentalistic whereas the second is mechanistic. Furthermore, deficits in one can often go with compensations in the other. The most striking example is autistic savantism illustrated by people like Kim Peek, who has a computer-like mind which has word-for-word memory of 9000 books, note-for-note recall of classical music, along with encyclopaedic knowledge of US zip and radio station codes, roads in the US and Canada, Mormonism, history, the space program and much else.

However, the symmetry of ASD and PSD and the genes that underlie them suggests that if there are autistic savants, so there ought also to be psychotic savants. These should show the exact opposite cognitive configuration to their autistic counterparts: outstanding, if isolated, mentalistic skills with merely normal or even sub-normal mechanistic cognitive ability. Areas of psychotic savant expertise might be religious and political evangelism; literary and theatrical culture; litigation and the law; hypnosis, faith-healing, and psychotherapy; fashion, advertising, and public-relations; commerce, confidence-trickery, and fraud of all kinds. Such individuals would be expected to have superb social, political, and inter-personal skills which would explain why, despite their severely distorted cognitive profiles, they have escaped clinical attention and diagnosis. Autistic savants like Kim Peek stand out instantly thanks to their symptomatic mentalistic deficits and child-like, eccentric behaviour. Psychotic savants, by contrast, use their corresponding mentalistic skills to become central players in important social groups and are masters in the art of winning friends and influencing people as a result. Thanks to their supreme skills in managing and manipulating people they are seldom short of money, friends, or influence in high places, and they are probably to be found at the core of many critical social networks and at the heart of key social institutions. Psychotherapy is one area of obvious application of psychotic savantism, and Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and—and the more demented end of the range—Wilhelm Reich are certainly examples.

As yet, no one has begun to think about the consequences of applying the concept of psychotic savantism in other areas, but it is not hard to see that here may lie an astonishingly powerful weapon with which to unmask much of the mentalistic mayhem that passes for normality in the modern world and to mount a devastating attack on the collective psychoses and mass delusions that such savantism can sometimes foment. A particularly worrying detail is the prediction that psychotic savants can be expected to possess no more than average mechanistic cognitive skills, and might in many cases actually have sub-normal ones. If this impacted on their ability to understand and judge the significance of key scientific, technological and engineering issues, psychotic savants in high places with access to critical political and economic power might be as maladroit in handling such issues as autistic savants like Kim Peek are were mentalistic skills are concerned. The consequences for society could be significant and you only have to think back to Freud’s belief in telepathy, Life and Death Instincts, or the Jew’s racial inheritance of their guilt in murdering Moses—not to mention Jung’s religious delusions and Reich’s “orgone energy”—to see the point. Although such savants’ so-called expertise was limited to psychotherapy, it did enormous damage to psychiatry and society as a whole—for example setting back the understanding and treatment of autism for forty years thanks to career of another psychotic psychotherapeutic savant, Bruno Bettelheim, and his disastrous foray into the subject. In a world dominated by apocalyptic predictions of catastrophic climate change and with world-wide wars being waged against imagined global terrorist conspiracies the time for such a critique has certainly come.

Hyper-mentalism: an insight whose time has come

Christopher Badcock, Ph.D. — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:10:01 +0000

A common reaction to first encountering scientific insights such as evolution by natural selection is: "How obvious, why didn't I think of that?" A second characteristic of such ideas is that, thanks to their seemingly-obvious nature, they are usually much anticipated before being definitively defined. Finally--and perhaps explaining why despite appearing to be self-evident they nevertheless take real effort to establish as accepted truths--the idea in question is usually highly controversial.

An insight you could add to the list is hyper-mentalism. This grew out of the realization that autism features symptomatic "mind-blindness:" in other words, major deficits in our species' normal ability to understand other people's behaviour in mental terms such as intention, emotion, belief, etc. As such, mentalism can be broken down into its components, one of which is gaze-monitoring. Where people are looking and how they are looking can tell you a lot about what is going on in their minds, but autistics are symptomatically deficient here: they tend to ignore gaze and to be insensitive to its significance. This is why you could call it an instance of hypo-mentalism: too little mental inference. But paranoid psychotics often go to the opposite extreme of being so pathologically sensitive to gaze that they imagine they are being watched or spied on: an instance of what you could call hyper-mentalism.

Autistics tend not to be good at participating in groups, which demands understanding of shared attention, but paranoiacs exaggerate sensitivity to groups and shared attention into delusions of conspiracies. Other people's intentions towards you can be good or bad, and autistics are symptomatically poor at appreciating either. But paranoid psychotics pathologically over-interpret good intentions into erotomania (the belief that others are in love with you) or bad intentions into delusions of persecution (often noxiously allied with delusions of conspiracies). Whereas autistics are characteristically deficient in a sense of self and often have impoverished self-awareness, psychotics can inflate their sense of self into rampant megalomania fed by delusions of grandeur. Where autistics tend to be literal and candid thanks to their mentalistic limitations, psychotics' hyper-mentalism facilitates bizarre self-deception and elaborate, self-sustaining delusions. Whereas autism can be diagnosed in infancy, thanks to its hypo-mentalism, psychotics have to acquire normal mentalism before it can hyper-trophy and be diagnosed as a pathology in adulthood. And so the list goes on...

Once you see this pattern it seems self-evident, and a number of others have groped towards the concept of hyper-mentalism with terms like "hyper-theory of mind," "hyper-reflexivity," etc. But to fully develop insights like this, you need something extra. Darwin provided the extra natural selection needed by being the pre-eminent naturalist of his day, and today genetics provides the ultimate scientific foundation for natural selection. The same may be true of hyper-mentalism thanks to the fact that the remarkable antithesis between autistic and psychotic symptoms can also be founded in genetics and cell chemistry, and shown to reflect fundamental symmetries in gene expression, cell-surface receptors, brain physiology, cortical connectivity, and so on. In short, autism and psychosis can be shown to be opposites in many important and fundamental respects, but the key concepts where psychology is concerned are hypo- and hyper-mentalism.

However, there is a crucial difference. Hypo-mentalism-mentalistic deficit-is widely accepted as a key insight in autism research, even if it is often described in other terms. But hyper-mentalism is different, and again like natural selection seems set to encounter bitter resistance and to attract vituperative criticism. Furthermore, the reason why may not be so different. An unavoidable inference is that, if psychotics hyper-mentalize, then so do seemingly normal people. So-called magical ideation is a key component of psychotic hyper-mentalism, and measures of it correlate with incidence of psychosis years later. But magical thinking is canonized in society as common superstition, sanctified as established religion--and nowadays increasingly secularized as media manias, ethnic mythology, and political paranoia. The result is that, just as Darwin found, a seemingly obvious and much anticipated idea can become highly controversial when fully spelt out and rigorously elaborated. Nevertheless, as the history of Darwinism has also shown, this is the only way that science progresses, and so why-didn't-I-think-of-that insights eventually become self-evident truths, however much antagonism they may at first arouse.

Nature on genes and autism: nurture may not be so different!

Christopher Badcock, Ph.D. — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:40:35 +0000

A paper published in this week's Nature establishes that genes play a key role in autism (DOI: 10.1038/nature07999). But according to a new theory, the genes involved may explain much more. Indeed, genetics may explain the apparent environmental and social causes of both autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) along with psychotic spectrum disorders (PSDs) such as schizophrenia.*

According to the new theory, both ASD and PSD have a genetic origin in recently-discovered genetic phenomena such as imprinting. This describes the fact that some key genes are normally only expressed from one parent, rather than from both as is the norm. The theory proposes that a bias in favour of the expression of the father's and/or reduction in the expression of the mother's genes may predispose to ASD, with PSD being the other way round. Indeed, any kind of genetic glitch that affects expression in this way can have the same effect. For example, children who inherit both copies of chromosome 15 from the mother are invariably diagnosed with PSD in adult life.

The classic example of an imprinted gene is IGF2, which codes for a growth hormone. Its effect is to make a baby bigger--something that benefits the father's genes invested in it but is at a cost to the mother, who has to gestate and give birth to it. So perhaps not surprisingly, the mother's copy of IGF2 is normally imprinted, or silenced, and only the father's is expressed. IGF2 is up-regulated in ASD, and in Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (an over-growth disorder where both parents' IGF2 is expressed) incidence of ASD is seven times normal.

To the extent that rising living standards increase birth-weights and nutrition in childhood, they might be seen as environmental factors that mimic paternally-active growth-enhancing genes like IGF2. Furthermore, there is some evidence that maternal food-intake may affect the expression of such genes in the foetus. This in itself might explain quite a lot of the so-called "autism epidemic" of recent years. Growth-enhancement thanks to higher standards of living in developed countries could be predicted to predispose towards milder forms of ASD such as Asperger's syndrome. Indeed, birth-weights of new-born babies in Vienna rose an unprecedented amount during the 1920s, and perhaps this partly explains why Asperger was to discover the syndrome named after him during the next couple of decades. Again, critics of Kanner's original description of autism have pointed out that he portrayed it as an upper class disorder but that later research--particularly in Sweden--contradicted this and found no clear link to social class. However, it might simply be that during the 1940s the heavier-birth weight effect was mainly seen among upper class people in the USA, but that by the 1980s it had spread to just about everyone in welfare-state Sweden--and today to most people in modern Western societies, where obesity, rather than under-nourishment, has become the primary health problem related to food intake.

If this explanation is correct, it would be a case of nurture via nature rather than the conventional way of putting it: nature via nurture. Indeed, the new theory might also explain the parallel decline in PSD that has been reported. Studies of the Dutch wartime famine and of the Chinese famine of 1959-61 reported increased incidence of schizophrenia among children born just after the events. And a study of 2 million Swedish children born between 1963 and 1983 revealed a significant link between schizophrenia and poverty in childhood. According to the new theory, this is the contrary situation to the autism epidemic: maternal and childhood deprivation mimicking (and perhaps interacting with) maternally-active resource-limiting genes, explaining the link between PSD and poverty-but also the fall in PSD associated with rising standards of living.

Genes, in other words, may have more of a key role in all aspects of mental illness than previously suspected--not least in autism. The finding reported in Nature is likely to be just the tip of this genetic iceberg!

*Chistopher Badcock is the author of The Imprinted Brain.

The Book Bill Hamilton Should Have Written

Christopher Badcock, Ph.D. — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:46:28 +0000

History is not always what it ought to be. By rights, Galileo should have had Foucault's pendulum to prove that the Earth turns, and Darwin--not Mendel--should have discovered genetics. Instead of introducing an arbitrary term to avoid it, Einstein should have boldly predicted the expanding universe, and so on. No one knows what the future will say of our times, but if history were the way it should be rather than the way it is, some may look back and think that the late Bill Hamilton--had he lived--should have been the author of The Imprinted Brain, subtitled How Genes Set the Balance of the Mind between Autism and Psychosis, and due to be published by Jessica Kingsley at the end of May.

Hamilton was the originator of the so-called selfish gene view of modern Darwinism which Richard Dawkins famously popularized in the book of that title. The critical findings described in The Imprinted Brain only emerged after Hamilton's untimely death in 2000, and no one knows how differently things would have worked out had he lived. At the very least, Hamilton's own acknowledged autistic tendencies described in the book and his ground-breaking insights into genetic and mental conflict would surely have made the theory outlined in it of enormous interest to him, and--who knows?--he might even have been the first to formulate it, so naturally does it follow from the lead he gave. But history, alas, is not always as it should be, and men of genius like Hamilton do not always live to reap the harvest which should have been theirs. Nevertheless, he was the one who laid the foundations on which his heirs have built.

I say heirs because The Imprinted Brain is heavily indebted to a pupil of Hamilton's, Bernard Crespi, who is now Killam Research Fellow in the Department of Biosciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Prof Crespi emailed me in 2004 regarding a book which I had written, but which was never published, entitled The Maternal Brain and The Battle of the Sexes in the Mind. That manuscript was the culmination of a long, twenty-year struggle I had undertaken to reconcile classical Freudian psychoanalysis with modern evolutionary science. The final, definitive formulation of this idea was set out in a paper I published in 1999 arguing that the Freudian id might be seen as the psychological agent of paternally-active imprinted genes (that is those which are expressed only from the father's copy) and the ego as that of maternally-active genes. Such genes are in conflict because only the mammalian mother pays the costs of gestation, childbirth, and lactation, whereas the father gets all the benefit without any biologically-obligatory cost--beyond a single sperm!

However, by the time Prof Crespi contacted me in 2004 I was finally free of the Freudian delusion thanks to discovering autism research and its stunning insights into the mind. Now I realized that I had got the genetics right but the psychology wrong, and I replied to Crespi that I now thought that paternally-active genes might explain autism, whereas maternally-active and X chromosome genes (whose pattern of expression is also skewed in favour of the mother in certain respects) might explain paranoia. This was an extension of an idea about the antithetical pattern of the symptoms in autism and paranoia that I had just published in a chapter of a book on evolutionary psychology edited by another colleague at Simon Fraser, Prof Charles Crawford.

To my astonishment, Crespi took me seriously, and we began a collaboration which led to two major scientific papers, an essay piece in Nature, and finally to The Imprinted Brain. Prof Crespi took up the idea that imprinting might underlie autism and paranoia and both generalized it to include psychosis in general and did much to secure its factual foundations. Without his help, I would have proceeded much more slowly and uncertainly, and probably missed many important insights altogether-particularly where genetics and brain science are concerned. I am deeply indebted to him for the result, but neither of us could have done this without Hamilton and his fundamental insights into genetic conflict and the mind.

Chistopher Badcock is the author of The Imprinted Brain.