TL;DR - Jumping Genes in the Brain

Scientific American, March 2012 -- "What Makes Each Brain Unique?", Fred Gage & Alysson Muotri

    Gage and Muotri describe mobile elements, or "jumping genes," short genetic segments that are able to be cut/copied and reinserted into DNA.  This can have several possible effects on the genetic code, introducing amino acid substitutions, repeats, or stops in coding regions, changing a given protein, or altering noncoding regulatory region, changing how much a given protein is expressed.
    Mobile elements are active only in reproducing cells, meaning their effects are often seen in the gonads, but they're also particularly active in the brain at sites of neurogenesis, such as the hippocampus.  Gage and Muotri (or the editors) play up this element to argue that these genetic differences are what contribute brain differences, even in identical twins.  I think this is a bit of an overstatement on their part, however.  The environment, or the unique experiences a person has, has direct and continuing effects on the development of the brain.  As such, mobile elements can help explain how this process occurs, and why the effects of even the same environment can differ among individuals (especially given the random nature of mobile elements), but it's only a part of the picture.

Blogging the Backlog

I'm currently sitting on a large stack of magazines and journals that I've been meaning to go through.  In the next few weeks I'll be making a concerted effort to get through them -- find what's interesting -- but I've also decided to take this as an opportunity to flex my writing muscles.  So I'll be writing up a series of blog posts focusing on the interesting info I pick up in my reading.  They'll be shorter than a usual writeup--more of an abstract than a full exploration--but often one of the best ways of figuring out (and remembering) an article is to focus on the big picture.

First up, the March issue of Scientific American.

Amazing Grace and Feeling Good

I recently attended a meeting of an Evangelical Christian church with a good friend.  This was something completely new for me; I'd grown up in a relatively conservative (personally, not politically) Methodist church, and while Evangelicalism is currently one of the dominant forces in American culture and politics, public perception is obviously different from private practice.  Of course I know Evangelicals (and I've been witnessed to probably a dozen times, poor kids) but lately I've been developing a more nuanced understanding of this denomination, thanks in part to the excellent Slacktivist blog, and I was interested to find out what worship means on a more personal level to someone with this belief system. 

I took away several things from that service, only a few of which I'm going to touch on here.  One thing I realized is that the hype is not necessarily untrue; the service was bombastic and professionally choreographed, with a full band and plenty of AV materials to put up on the huge monitors.  (I'm assuming our proximity to Hollywood plays a role in that.)

But when it came down to the actual sermon and the message it was conveying, things started to sound very familiar.  The principal theme was the classic redemption story: no matter what you've done or what you think, you can accept God into your heart and be forgiven.  You can go from a state of confusion and despondency to a state of confidence.  Don't let your brain hold you back; give your heart up to God...  And I started to realize that everything, from the goals to the language to the techniques, was remarkably similar to what is found in cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT.

In CBT, the focus is on solving immediate problems -- unhealthy relationships, lack of confidence, depression, etc. -- by identifying and challenging self-defeating beliefs and changing the associated emotional contexts.  The same basic ideas were outlined in the sermon, with some minor variations; where they talked about your "heart," CBT might talk about your emotional reactions; where they talked about your "brain," CBT might talk about self-defeating beliefs; where they talked about God's acceptance, CBT would focus on self-acceptance.  The basic religious structure that they were outlining essentially had the form of a therapeutic intervention.

Now, I am definitely not saying there are no differences between Evangelical worship and CBT, nor am I arguing that people subscribe to Evangelical beliefs for the same reason people seek out CBT.  I am sure there are those that do, but I am not arguing that they would necessarily achieve the same outcomes whether through the church or through CBT.  Instead, this got me thinking about the cultural connections between psychotherapy and religion.  Assuming that this parallel between contemporary worship and contemporary psychotherapy is valid, who influenced whom?  Is it that the Evangelical church is taking cues (consciously or unconsciously) from the self-help movement?  Or is it that this stream of person-focused religious thought influenced the development of CBT?  (Was Albert Ellis a religious man?  Even if not, religious belief likely permeated his cultural environment.)  These ideas are both rather simplistic ideas of causation, and neither is likely to be the whole story; it is far more likely that there has been some back-and-forth through history, both within religious and therapeutic ideas, and ideas external to both.

Psychologists and psychotherapists have long been interested in religion, both as a mental and social phenomenon, and in terms of its therapeutic implications.  Psychoanalysts seem to be particularly concerned about this.  In his book Psychoanalysis and Religion, Erich Fromm argued that religions can be essentially authoritative or essentially humanistic, and that beliefs stemming from these religions have implications, for good or ill, on human growth and development.  (The type of Evangelical Christianity described here would be considered more humanistic.)  And, of course, both Freud and Jung wrote extensively on religion and its effects on the human psyche, Freud from a relatively more Christian-centric (though atheistic) perspective, while Jung famously took inspiration from eastern religions.  Of course, both men were still raised in a cultural milieu where Christianity was the dominant religious ideology, so it would be interesting to compare therapeutic techniques that have been developed completely outside of this worldview, if any exist.

Truth

I've been reading Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, in which he charts the history of official punishment in the Western world. In a section on torture and execution, he attempts to enumerate the reasons why executions were treated as public spectacles, especially in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

One reason is to declare the truth of the crime. Prisoners were expected to make a public declaration of their crimes as part of the execution. This was seldom undertaken voluntarily; declarations were cajoled out of them, or were simply supplied by a sign the prisoner was made to wear around his or her neck on the way to the gallows. Even if the prisoner rebelled, making no declaration or a declaration of innocence, the official records would nevertheless state that a confession was given.

Reading about the legal systems that humans have used before makes me all the more glad that we've got the one we do now. Granted, we still have our problems to work out of the system, but think of a world where you can be accused and judged in secret, then arrested only to get a confirmatory confession. In a system with such little allowance for procedural justice, the illusion of infallibility, or at a minimum of correctness, becomes even more important to maintain. Therefore, the public declaration becomes a tool of asserting the truth of the finding, and the rectitude of the punishment.

Obviously, executions still take place today. In the US they are private, viewed only by those directly tied to the case. They are also relatively rare--very few criminal trials end in a death sentence. But on this anniversary of the tragic events ten years ago, it seems like we still find ways to maintain the illusion of truth. A case in point: Netflix just conspired to land me with the DVD of United 93, the 2006 dramatization of the events of September 11, 2001. It's primarily told through the eyes of the passengers of the titular flight. Of the three planes that were hijacked, this was the only one to not hit its target, through the heroic intervention of those passengers. The writer and director, Paul Greengrass, went to great lengths to make the movie as accurate as possible: the events depicted hew closely to the official report of the 9/11 Commission, and even the terrorists are humanized, showing a range of emotions that many might not want to ascribe to them.

But a movie is a movie; a movie is a staged production telling a particular story in a particular fashion. Nevertheless, once a movie is made, and especially if it is widely acclaimed, it takes on a certain patina of truth. The understanding that we have of the actual event begins to call back to the dramatization of the movie, and the events as portrayed in the movie start to represent, even if they are not strictly regarded as, the truth. In an event as complex and vast in scope as 9/11, this process is likely to be magnified; no one person, alive or dead, knows the full truth of the events of 9/11, and even after all the evidence was marshaled for an official investigation there are still unknowables.

What other ways do people have to create the appearance of truth? In other criminal justice systems - South Korea is one example - it is common to have a suspect reenact a crime--demonstrating how a murder transpired, for instance. Again, seeing the events imparts a certain level of truth to the matter, even though this is not the actual crime taking place, but just a staging of it. The legal systems that we develop leave us with official accounts and judgments of the truth of events, but we find other ways to satisfy our yearning for certainty.

What works with sex offenders?

Marnie Rice and Grant Harris have a review article in the May issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) and its use to control the sexual behaviors of sex offenders. The big conclusion from the article is, unfortunately, that there just isn't enough quality research (i.e., no randomized blind trials) to say whether ADT actually has any effect on sexual behavior, let alone things like health effects.
What was more interesting to me, however, was a brief history of eunuchs that the authors included. My understanding of eunuchs was apparently way off-base. For instance:

"Throughout the Greek and Roman empires, 'clearly eunuchs were widely perceived as neither chaste nor celibate, but highly sexual and sexed beings' and 'The reputation of eunuch sexual promiscuity extended to include giving sexual pleasure to their mistresses'...

And about the Italian perma-soprano Castrati, who had their testicles removed prior to puberty to preserve their high-pitched voices:

"Most could, and many apparently did, experience virtually normal sexual relations, being capable of erection and the emission of prostatic fluid(Barbier, 1996). Many Castrati were celebrities pursued as sexual partner by women (Aucoin & Wassersug, 2006)."

So simply cutting off a man's testicles (and even sometimes the penis, in part or in whole) is not necessarily enough to curtail sexual desire, nor sexual activity. Involuntary castrations are relatively rare in the US, while so-called "chemical castrations" are more widely used, but considering the history of eunuchs (as well as a few case studies described by the authors), any described dampening of libido linked to ADT may simply be expectation effects -- "knowing" what's going to happen can make it come true.

Marnie E. Rice, Grant T. Harris (2011). Is Androgen Deprivation Therapy effective in the treatment of sex offenders? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 17 (2), 315-332

Talking Theory -- Slide post

I recently gave an informal talk which focused on a recent special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science (Vol. 6(2), March 2011). In it, I summarize and discuss five papers that each raise issues with and make suggestions for the current processes of theory construction in psychology. I'm putting the slides here without much explanation, but I'll say that there's a significant amount of my own editorializing in the "Conclusion" sections.

Talking Theory

View more presentations from ctclark.

Fiedler, K. (2011). Voodoo Correlations Are Everywhere--Not Only in Neuroscience Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 (2), 163-171 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611400237

Meiser, T. (2011). Much Pain, Little Gain? Paradigm-Specific Models and Methods in Experimental Psychology Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 (2), 183-191 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611400241

Garcia-Marques, L., & Ferreira, M. (2011). Friends and Foes of Theory Construction in Psychological Science: Vague Dichotomies, Unified Theories of Cognition, and the New Experimentalism Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 (2), 192-201 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611400239

Houwer, J. (2011). Why the Cognitive Approach in Psychology Would Profit From a Functional Approach and Vice Versa Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 (2), 202-209 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611400238

Hahn, U. (2011). The Problem of Circularity in Evidence, Argument, and Explanation Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 (2), 172-182 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611400240

Strange, and not-so-strange, happenings on the justice front

The Supreme Court just handed down a 5-to-4 ruling stating that California needs to reduce its state prison rolls by more than 30,000 prisoners. The overcrowding in California prisons presents a violation of the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment, according to the court -- and if you've seen or heard anything about our prison system in recent history, it's hard to argue with that.

So where are all these prisoners going to go? Well, one option is local jails -- though that's hardly a step up in many places (looking at you, Los Angeles). What about release? This, to me, would make the most sense. Schwarzenegger took some steps to increase the number of parolees, which is a sensible, and much cheaper, option for low-risk offenders. Of course, it's hard to convince the public that it'd be a good thing putting 30,000 prisoners out on the street.

And in other news, the FBI released its crime statistics for last year, which found a drop in crime rates across the country. In Los Angeles, we're seeing decade-low murder rates. This is most definitely a good thing, but also somewhat confusing -- crime usually tracks pretty closely with the economic situation, so seeing an actual decrease in crime in the middle of the biggest recession in 80 years is... unexpected.

What's the deal? Have anti-crime measures and policies enacted during the boom times paid off dividends? Or is our current slump different in kind, somehow? I don't have an answer, unfortunately. I'm tending to lean away from the latter, though, considering that so far the "recovery" has passed over the average non-working stiff, making things most difficult for those most likely to fall into crime.