The Trouble With Testosterone

And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predi

Robert M. Sapolsky

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439125052
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize From the man who Oliver Sacks hailed as "one of the best scientist/writers of our time, " a collection of sharply observed, uproariously funny essays on the biology of human culture and behavior. In the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks, Robert Sapolsky offers a sparkling and erudite collection of essays about science, the world, and our relation to both. "The Trouble with Testosterone" explores the influence of that notorious hormone on male aggression. "Curious George's Pharmacy" reexamines recent exciting claims that wild primates know how to medicate themselves with forest plants. "Junk Food Monkeys" relates the adventures of a troop of baboons who stumble upon a tourist garbage dump. And "Circling the Blanket for God" examines the neurobiological roots underlying religious belief.Drawing on his career as an evolutionary biologist and neurobiologist, Robert Sapolsky writes about the natural world vividly and insightfully. With candor, humor, and rich observations, these essays marry cutting-edge science with humanity, illuminating the interconnectedness of the world's inhabitants with skill and flair.

How Big Is Yours?

Alfredo Castañeda, When the Mirror Dreams with Another Image, 1988; courtesy Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art, New York

During my graduate school days in New York City I lived along the East River, and at times when I felt like indulging a simultaneous sense of adventure and melancholy I would visit Roosevelt Island. The island was a sliver of land in the river, two and a half miles long, accessible from Manhattan by a pleasing aerial tramway. Today most of Roosevelt Island is filled with high-rise apartment buildings. But in earlier times it was the dumping ground for various incorrigible or unmanageable members of society. At the very tip of the island are some remnants of those times—the rubble of a mental asylum abandoned in the first half of this century.

A decade ago it was still possible to climb around in those ruins. You could shin up the banister of a staircase whose steps had long since decayed away, push open creaking metal doors half off their hinges, and enter a room without a roof. You could then tiptoe through a third-floor hallway about to give way and hurtle you through the splinters into the basement (and, you were sure, into a nest of rats the size of pit bulls).

It was impossible to inch through the debris without being moved by the events that must have taken place in this ghost of Bedlam. There were doors marked INSULIN SHOCK ROOM, rusted gurneys with restraining straps teetering halfway through holes in the floor, and bloodstains on the walls. Even on a warm autumn day with the sun shining on the roofless building, the whole place still felt dank and shadowed, the walls humid with the screams of misery and sadness.

Contemplating the treatment of an insane person from a century ago is something of a Rorschach test for us. Do we focus on the vast progress that has been made in psychiatry? Or do we see no difference at all from our own miserably inadequate treatment of the mentally ill?

Some things remain depressingly the same across the centuries: In so many times and places, the mentally ill give the rest of us the willies, and they are carefully isolated and ostracized. Yet many other things have changed. When we discuss treatments now, we think of drugs to manipulate brain chemicals such as neurotransmitters, while in earlier times it was lobotomies and insulin-induced comas, and still earlier, restraint and ice baths. Our notions of causes have changed as well. Now we discuss receptor regulation and genes, while earlier we would have blamed mothers sending conflicting signals of love and hate to impressionable young children.

What has changed most palpably, however, is our attitude toward abnormal behavior. We have become far more subtle when we consider the thorny issues of blame. Centuries ago epileptics were persecuted for their presumed bewitchment. We no longer do that, nor would any rational person prosecute an epileptic for assault and battery should that epileptic injure someone while flailing during a seizure. We have been trained to have a strikingly compassionate thought that is one of the triumphs of our century: “It’s not him. It’s his disease.” We have been taught to draw a line between the essence of a person and the neuropsychiatric disorder that distorts and constrains that essence.

We are very good at drawing that line in rejecting the idea that an epileptic is violent because his arms move uncontrollably during a seizure. But we are not particularly good at drawing the line between a person and his disease in many other realms. Witness, for example, the Neanderthal bellowing in so many editorials about how John Hinckley was “getting away with it” when he was hospitalized as a schizophrenic rather than being jailed after shooting Reagan. Or contemplate the number of teachers and parents who are not very good at drawing the line between the essence of who a child is and the learning disabilities that impinge on that essence—and who instead let words like “lazy” or “stupid” creep in.

If many of us are not very good at drawing that line now, that problem is going to get worse. Some astonishing new trends in neuropsychiatry and behavioral biology indicate that the line will shift in directions we never would have guessed. This shift affects much more than our understanding of the biological imperatives that drive a small group of us to monstrous behavior. It also affects how we view the quirks and idiosyncrasies that make each of us a healthy individual.

To me, one of the most intriguing changes has occurred in the way we see “schizotypal” individuals. A few decades ago a team headed by psychiatrist Seymour Kety of Massachusetts General Hospital initiated studies that demonstrated a genetic component to the disordered jumble of thoughts known as schizophrenia. The scientists examined adoption records meticulously maintained in Denmark, reviewing the cases of children adopted from their biological parents very early in life. If a child of a schizophrenic parent was adopted by healthy parents, Kety wanted to know, was the child at greater than average risk for schizophrenia? Conversely, did any child of healthy biological parents raised in a household with a schizophrenic adoptive parent have an increased risk for the illness?

Kety’s work showed that genetics does in fact increase the likelihood of the disorder. But to get that answer, doctors had to conduct intensive psychiatric interviews with the various biological and adoptive parents. This involved thousands of people and years of work. No one had ever studied the relatives of schizophrenics in such numbers before. And along the way someone noticed something: a lot of these folks were quirky. These relatives were not themselves schizophrenic—just a bit socially detached and with a train of thought that was sometimes a little hard to follow when they spoke. It was something mild, and not the sort of thing you’d note in talking to the family members of a few schizophrenics, but it suddenly stuck out when you dealt with thousands of them. They believed in strange things and were often overly concerned with magical or fantasy thinking. Nothing certifiably crazy—maybe a heavy interest in science fiction and fantasy, or a firm belief in some New Age mumbo jumbo or astrology, or perhaps a very literal, fundamentalist belief in biblical miracles. None of these are illnesses. Many adults attend Star Trek conventions, presidents’ wives consult astrologers and are still taken seriously by the fashion industry, and others believe that the earth really was created in seven days. But today psychiatrists call the collection of traits seen by Kety “schizotypal personality disorder,” especially the emphasis on magical thinking and the loosely connected thoughts. Apparently, if you have a certain genetic makeup, you’re predisposed to schizophrenia. Have a milder version of this genetic makeup, and you may be predisposed to placing a strong faith in magical ideas that are not particularly based on fact. Is there a gene for believing in the Force and Obi-Wan Kenobi? Certainly not, but perhaps there’s something closer to it than we ever would have imagined.

Behavioral biology is also revealing the workings of our normal inhibitions. Over the course of an average day there must be a dozen times in which you have a thought—lustful or angry or petulant or self-pitying—that you would never ever say. Damage a certain part of your brain’s frontal cortex and you now say those things; the frontal cortex is the closest thing we have, neuroanatomically, to a superego. Phineas Gage, a nineteenth-century railroad worker, wound up a celebrated neurological patient and fairground exhibit after his left frontal cortex was destroyed in a freak accident. He was transformed from a taciturn man to a pugnacious loudmouth who told everyone just what he thought. “Frontal disinhibition,” involving aggressiveness, inappropriate frankness, and hypersexuality, is also often seen in individuals who have sustained stroke damage to that part of the brain. Remarkably, the same appears to happen in Huntington’s disease, a rare congenital neurological disorder. Scientists have long thought of the disease as a movement disorder—around age forty to forty-five, patients begin to demonstrate uncontrolled swinging of limbs as an inhibitory motor pathway in the brain degenerates. With time, the movement becomes all-encompassing, constant whole body writhing that incapacitates the person. A lesser-known feature of the disease is a social disinhibition, one that often even precedes the motoric aspects, and in recent years it has been shown that Huntington’s individuals also have damage to their frontal cortex.

Some neuroscientists even use the word “frontal” in a sardonic sense: A terrified student gives a quavering lecture to his elders, and some insensitive big shot rises and savages the kid over some minor point, taking the opportunity to toot his own horn while he’s at it. “Christ,” someone will mutter in the back of the lecture hall, “he’s getting more frontal all the time.”

Blow away that part of the brain and you can still remember the name of your kindergarten teacher, still do a polka, still feel what all of us feel. You just let other people know about it far more often than do most of us. Is it absurd to hypothesize that there is something a little bit wrong with the frontal cortex of the insensitive big shot in the lecture hall?

Another version of neuropsychiatric disinhibition is seen in Tourette’s syndrome, once a diagnostic backwater but fast threatening to become a fad. Tourette’s patients are famed for their scatology, their uncontrolled cursing. But this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. Tourette’s patients do indeed curse, but they also emit a stream of animal sounds—yips and barks and growls—along with facial tics, and violent or lewd body gestures. These are the first genetic and neurochemical hints as to what the disease is about, but it remains, for the most part, a mystery. What is striking, though, is how it differs from the disinhibition of a frontal patient. A frontal individual does or says what the rest of us think about but would never let out of our well-restrained minds. Tourette’s patients do not wish to bark like a dog or grab repeatedly at their crotch—these are simply emotive twitches, uncontrolled outbursts that are randomly tossed on top of the person struggling to maintain continuity. Like hiccups of the id.

Thus, a variety of these neuropsychiatric disorders result in marked and puzzling disinhibition. Some epileptics undergo a personality shift in the opposite direction. Roughly defined, an epileptic seizure is an abnormal electrical discharge in the brain. Neurologists have known for a long time that just before the onset of a seizure there will often be a strange sensation, or “aura,” and the location of the seizure in the brain can influence the type of aura—for example, epileptics will typically have a sensory aura, perhaps imagining a particular smell. The existence of auras demonstrates the not very surprising fact that sudden bursts of electrical activity in different parts of the brain will influence thought and sensation. Now neurologists are coming to recognize that different types of epilepsy also shape personalities, influencing the person all the time, not merely seconds before a seizure.

People with a type of temporal lobe epilepsy, for example, tend to be extraordinarily serious, humorless, and rigid in their ways. They tend to be phobic about doing new things, and instead perseverate on old behaviors and tastes, tending to walk to work the same way each day, usually wearing the same types of clothes, ordering the same meal in restaurants. Similarly, they rely upon a very small circle of friends, showing what neuropsychologists pungently call a “viscous” or “sticky” personality. Such people also tend to have an intense interest in religion or philosophy. And, most oddly, they not only think obsessively about their problems, they write about them—endlessly. Temporal lobe epileptics are renowned among neurologists for this “hypergraphia.” In a typical scenario, someone first seeing a new neurologist will present the doctor with a carefully handwritten eighty-page diary, insisting that reading it will give the doctor vital insight into the patient. At the next visit the epileptic will return with a new, fifty-page addendum. One might speculate that having a serious neurological illness like epilepsy would make anyone serious and cause people to focus on the philosophical things in life, narrow their horizons, and rely on comfortable, familiar patterns. But this personality change does not arise from other types of epilepsy of an equally serious nature, is not a function of the frequency or severity of seizures or the magnitude with which it disrupts a person’s life. Instead, have an uncontrolled and rhythmic outburst of electrical activity in the temporal lobe every now and then and, the rest of the time, you get very interested in philosophy and always order the same meal in a restaurant.

There is another version of a constrained life that is being defined biologically. At some time each of us has, to our irritation, left on a trip and felt such nagging doubt as to whether we locked the door that we returned home to check. Or after dropping a letter into a mailbox, we have peeked in a second or third time just to make sure it went down. Or, during a tough, anxious period in our lives, we find ourselves unable to concentrate because some ridiculous television jingle keeps running through our heads. This is normal and common. But among people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, these thoughts dominate and ruin their lives. They miss vacations because they return home repeatedly to check if the oven was turned off. They lose their jobs because they are late each day, spending hours each morning washing their hands. They torture themselves by obsessively counting numbers in their heads. For most of us, little rituals of thought or behavior can calm us and provide structure at an anxious time. For someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder—now thought to be caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals, possibly serotonin and dopamine—there are no limits, and the person becomes a creature of these rituals.

What does this tour of neuropsychiatric oddities mean? We are learning to draw that line in new places. Most of these disorders did not exist a few decades ago; we did not even have names for how biology could occasionally destroy the life of an individual. Now we have those names. We are beginning to learn what certain parts of the brain, what specific genes, or what our early development has to do with these tragedies. In the process we are extending our definition of illness. For some time we have generally accepted that people who rave and gibber are ill, that they cannot control these things, are made miserable by them, and deserve care, protection, and forgiveness. Slowly we are coming to recognize that you can also be made miserable by a ceaseless march of number counting in your head, or by paralyzing fears of anything new, and that these too can be uncontrollable illnesses that demand understanding and treatment.

This field continues to move forward, and we might even be able to cure some of these maladies. Another form of progress will be the recognition of increasing numbers of these disorders, the coining of more names to describe our behavioral oddities. What will happen when, eventually, we have a few of these labels?

I recognize facets of myself in these pages. At times when I am overworked and anxious, I develop a facial tic and I count stairs as I climb them. I usually wear flannel shirts. In Chinese restaurants I always order broccoli with garlic sauce. Invariably I think, “I’ll get broccoli and garlic sauce,” then I think, “Nah, order something different,” then I think, “Well, I enjoyed broccoli last time, why get something different?” and then I think, “Careful, I’m becoming a perseverating drudge,” and then the waiter is standing there and I become flustered and order broccoli with garlic sauce.

I do not have temporal lobe epilepsy, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or any of the other problems I have discussed. Yet it is reasonable to assume that there is some sort of continuum of underlying biology here—whatever it is about the temporal lobe of some epileptics that makes them perseverate may share some similarity with my own temporal lobe, at least when it is menaced with options like Buddha’s Delight or General Po’s Szechwan Chicken. Perhaps whatever neurochemical abnormality causes a schizophrenic to believe that voices are proclaiming her the empress of California is the same abnormality that, in a milder form, leads a schizotypal person to believe in mental telepathy. In an even milder form it may allow the rest of us to pass a few minutes daydreaming that we are close friends with some appealing movie character.

What if eventually we come to understand the genetics, the neurochemistry, and the hormonal bases of clothing preference, of who votes Democratic, of religiosity, or of why some worry too much about money and others too little? Some of these irritating traits that are, at worst, character weaknesses, but nothing more pathological. Slowly we will be leaving the realm of them and their disorders. We will be defining instead a biology of us and our strengths and weaknesses, of our potentials and constraints.

In 1992, the newspapers were teeming with stories about one such advance. For years scientists have searched for differences between heterosexual and homosexual men, and nothing very consistent had ever emerged. But in August 1992, the prestigious journal Science published a paper by neurobiologist Simon Levay demonstrating just such a difference. And it’s a whopper of an interesting one. It concerns the hypothalamus, a part of the brain central to sexual behavior. The size of one subregion at the front of the hypothalamus, known by the not terribly titillating title of the third interstitial nucleus, differs by sex; males have a larger one than do females. Levay reported that homosexual men have smaller nuclei than do heterosexual men—as small, in fact, as those found in women.¹

For some homophobes this is a bellwether observation: “You see, there is something wrong with their brains.” For some gays it is an affirmation: “You see, I’ve always told you I just felt gay. This is what I was meant to...