Waxing lyrical on hair

There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. From The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, English anthropologist

God protect us from hairy women and beardless men. Arab saying

I am Armenian, so of course I am obsessed with laser hair removal! Arms, bikini, legs, underarms… my entire body is hairless. Kim Kardashian, reality TV star

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Today I am going to be putting hair under the microscope. In “On the Generation of Animals” Aristotle argued that hairiness was a sign of abundance of residual matter. Hairy men had greater libidos than smooth men and produced more semen. Some of Aristotle’s ideas may now appear eccentric to us, but our hair or lack thereof is a fundamental part of our identity. We spend billions on it We cut, trim, shear, snip, shave, laser, condition, dye, spray, curl, and straighten it to our hearts’ content. Wikipedia has a list of hairstyles including cornrows, bangs, psychobilly wedge, mullet, bob, bouffant, comb over, dreadlocks and a Croydon facelift. English has many words and idioms connected to hair. When someone is annoying us we ask them to get out of out hair. If things are going all wrong we are having a bad hair day. Pedants are accused of splitting hairs. I hope you find this topic as interesting as I do.

Desmond Morris’s description of humans as naked apes is not strictly accurate. We actually have just as many hair follicles as you would expect for an ape of our body size. For example we have the same number of hair follicles, 5 million, as a chimpanzee. But our hair has evolved to be finer and more transparent than in other primates.

Why are we so different to our cousins? Scientists do not agree when or why the “great denudation” happened. There are a number of competing theories. In the beginning was the foot. Many experts see a link with bipedalism. When we began to walk on our feet, we became more exposed to the sun. Our small hair doesn’t get in the way of the cooling process; we are able to sweat.

Now I’m going to look at the depiction of hair in art. Greek sculpture has had an enormous influence on western art and how we think about our own bodies. This is exemplified in a statue of Aphrodite made by Praxiteles in 360BC. In the work we see a naked Aphrodite, without genitals nor indeed any body hair whatsoever. This became a template for the ideal female body in Western art. When we look at a Renaissance Venus we can clearly see this Greek inheritance.

This stylised view of the female body has sometimes led to unfortunate consequences. The most famous case is that of John Ruskin, an art critic, poet, artist, social thinker conservationist and philanthropist of the Victorian era. And his ill fated wedding night has become the stuff of legend. Such was his sense of horror when he saw his wife Effie Gray in the flesh, that he was shocked into impotence. Amid great scandal the marriage was annulled after six years because of non-consummation. Effie then married John Everett Millais, an artist friend of her husband, for whom she had previously modelled in The Order of Release. Ruskin biographer, Mary Lutyens, suggested that Ruskin’s rejection of Effie was because he was horrified by the sight of her pubic hair. Lutyens argued that Ruskin must have known the female form only through Greek statues and paintings of the nude lacking pubic hair and that he just couldn’t handle the truth.

Had the Brazilian wax been available, then Ruskin might have reacted differently. In fact the waxing of the genital areas is not new. There is evidence of pubic hair removal in ancient India dating back to 4000 to 3000 BC. In ancient Egypt women waxed with a sticky emulsion made of oil and honey, and in Greece it was done with resin or pitch. With modern lingerie and bathing costumes the removal of pubic hair has once again became fashionable.  It was in 1994 that seven Brazilian sisters – Jocely, Jonice, Joyce, Janea, Jussara, Juracy and Judseia, the Padilhas – brought the Brazil wax to Manhattan, where they opened a salon called the Jay Sisters. They certainly have an impressive roster of celebrity endorsements: Naomi Campbell, Cameron Diaz, Lindsay Lohan, Sarah Jessica Parker and Gwyneth Paltrow. Ms. Paltrow is positively gushing: “You’ve changed my life!”

Another contemporary influence on the desire to remove all traces of hair from our bodies is the influence of pornography, which has become more mainstream in recent years. As Australian feminist Anne Manne pointed out, feminism has not colonised porn; porn has colonised feminism. The sexual practices and the intimate bodily details of the porn star, like the Brazilian wax, have entered popular culture, and are now as commonplace as a manicure at the local beauty salon. And for the man who doesn’t want to look like a furry caveman in his nether regions we have the “boyzilian”.  David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Frank Lampard are all said to be fans of this form of torture.

As we can see pubic hair is disappearing faster than the Amazon rain forest. Al Gore, where are you? This behaviour does seem rather peculiar. You just can’t imagine a chimpanzee pulling out the hair on its genital regions. Perhaps it’s just one of those fads, like tattooing and body piercing, which began with sailors and prostitutes, and have now gained wider currency. Of course these are fashions and maybe in a few years body hair will make a comeback. Or we could be witnessing another stage in humanity’s evolution towards near nakedness.

While some people invest huge amounts of time and money getting rid of unwanted hair, others have the opposite problem. By the age of fifty, half of all men have started to shed their locks. These statistics are for Caucasian males. Race plays a role in male hair loss; in China the figure is one in four.

There is no consensus regarding the details of the evolution of male pattern baldness. Bald heads are nature’s ways of telling men that their skirt-chasing days are over, according to zoologist Petter Bøckman. What is certain is that baldness is not confined to humans. Chimpanzees and Tsavo lions also lose their hair. Another monkey, the adult stump-tailed macaque, is commonly used in laboratories for the testing of hair-regrowth treatments.

Do such treatments work? Cures include drugs and transplants. Cures for male baldness always seem to be, like the philosopher’s stone, just around the corner. It’s one of those funny paradoxes that we have successfully transplanted hearts, kidneys and livers, but not hair. Judging by the results obtained by Wayne Rooney, they still have a long way to go. Whoever invents the definitive solution is going to become exceptionally rich..

Our hairstyles have important social and cultural implications. At most times in most cultures, men have worn their hair in styles that are different from women’s. Cutting off or growing one’s hair is often associated with religious faith: Catholic nuns tend to have their hair cut very short. And the men who became Catholic monks from the seventh century onwards adopted what was known as the tonsure, which involved shaving the tops of their heads and leaving a ring of hair around the bald crown. In Buddhism most monks and nuns have their heads shaved upon entering their orders. Many Islamic women cover their hair in public, and will only display it to their family and close friends. Sikhs are not allowed to shave, trim or pluck hair from any part of their body.  Men cover the hair with a turban and women may wear a turban or choose instead to don a traditional headscarf. Rastafarians associate dreadlocks with a spiritual journey that one takes in the process of growing them. Rastafarians grow their hair and twirl it into dreadlocks, representing a lion’s mane. They are taught that patience is the key to growing dreadlocks, a journey of the mind, soul and spirituality.

So there you have my brief tour of the fascinating world of hair. I would continue but I have an appointment at my local salon for a boyzilian. It isn’t easy to look as good I do without enduring a little pain.

To boldly go: some thoughts on space travel

We have been observing the stars since before recorded history. In 1865 Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon a tale of a lunar expedition. In Verne’s novel the Baltimore Gun Club decide to build an enormous cannon, large enough to fire a projectile at the moon. This appeared to an extravagant flight of fancy by the French author. But with the development of large and relatively efficient rockets during the first half of the 20th century space exploration became a reality. But before humans could go into space we would require the help of other animals.

Contrary to popular belief the first animal in space was not a dog, but a fruit fly. The Americans define space as beginning at an altitude of 80 km. The diminutive astronauts were loaded on to an American V2 rocket along with some corn seeds, and blasted into space in July 1946. They were used to test the effects of exposure to radiation at high altitudes. Albert II, the first monkey in space, went up in 1949. he was known as Albert II because there had been an Albert I, who had suffocated to death in 1948 before reaching the 100 km barrier. Albert II also had an unfortunate end when the parachute on his capsule failed on landing. In 1951 Albert VI managed to get back from space, only to die two hours later. There was one exception to all this death. Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, lived for another 25 years after she spent 16 minutes in space 1959 mission. Baker died of kidney failure after breaking the record for oldest living squirrel monkey. Her gravestone frequently has one or more bananas on top.

The first animal in orbit was indeed a dog, Laika, who was sent up by the Russians in 1957. She died of heat stress during the flight. And a further ten dogs were launched into space before Yuri Gagarin, made it up there in 1961. Six of the dogs survived. The Russians also sent the first animal into deep space in 1968 – a tortoise. Guinea pigs, frogs, rats, cats, scorpions, wasps, worms, beetles, cockroaches and spiders have all been into space. In 1973 the mummichog became the first fish in space when carried on Skylab 3 to use for biological. The first Japanese animals in space were ten newts in 1985.

The Soviet launch of a Sputnik in October 1957 was a traumatic moment for the United States. The satellite, which was the size of a basketball, orbited the Earth nearly 1,550 times. It was a stunning propaganda victory for the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower immediately declared the “Sputnik crisis” – there were important military implications – a country able to launch a satellite into space could also effectively deliver nuclear missiles to American soil. In 1958 The National Aeronautics and Space Act created NASA. But the effects were more far-reaching. There was a massive boost given to science in general.

The Space Race was won by the Americans in 1969 with the first moon landing. Of course you could argue that the Russians had already won after Gagarin went up. The Americans simply invented a new race. It was President Kennedy who set the challenge of reaching the moon by the end of the sixties. The Americans were spending 5% of GDP on the space program. 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, a total of four million man hours. Kennedy would not see his dreams fulfilled, but the Americans were able to set foot on the moon just before the decade ended. Between July 1969 and December 1972 they would land on the moon six times and twelve astronauts would walk on the moon. And then it all stopped.

The next challenge appears to be Mars. But any manned mission would present serious difficulties. The journey would be long and extremely boring. The astronauts would be living in cramped conditions with no privacy. And the food would be awful too. It would take six months each way. They would then have between 30 days and a year and a half on the red planet. If the astronauts stayed the latter time it would be 1,000 days in Space twice the previous record.

Space can have very negative effects on humans Astronauts spend most of the first 24-48 hours feeling or being sick. You remove gravity, which has been a constant as life on this planet has evolved over billions of years.  Bones and muscles waste. The heart atrophies. You come back less than you were; it has been estimated that on a Mars mission, astronauts would lose one-third to one-half of their bone mass. There are problems of hand-eye coordination.

There are also the psychological effects of being cooped up in confined spaces for extended periods of time. Last year saw the finalisation of a record-breaking simulated mission to Mars. Six male volunteers, from Russia, Italy, France and China, travelled 100m kilometres without moving a centimetre. The experiment, known as Mars500, had the six brave guinea pigs living in a “spacecraft” for 520 days. The simulation took place at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The crew managed to survive without killing each other, even if nerves were a bit frayed at times. It was a challenge for the men: one of them claimed that what he most missed was the randomness of life.

What does the future hold for space travel? A manned Mars mission seems decades away. There is much less optimism around. Space exploration now represents just 0.5% of American GDP, although the U.S.still spends more than the rest of the world put together. There are still some possibilities. Perhaps we could send robots. Other nations, especially China, will surely play an increasing role. Given the complicated economic situation and the prohibitive costs, greater international cooperation could be another solution. Finally I imagine there will be more commercial activity in space. However I do rather miss the visionary rhetoric of the last century. I will finish with just such an inspiring quote.  It comes from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan:

Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It’s time to hit the road again.

Space quotes

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why he wanted to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.” Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. President Kennedy

Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards. Sir Fred Hoyle

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. Captain James T. Kirk,’s introduction at the beginning of every episode of the original Star Trek TV series

The impact of space activities is nothing less than the galvanizing of hope and imagination for human life continuum into a future of infinite possibility.  Vanna Bonta

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.  Neil Armstrong

As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize there’s a fundamental truth to our nature, Man must explore . . . and this is exploration at its greatest. Dave Scott, Commander Apollo XV,

It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven. Wernher von Braun, a leading German scientist for Hitler, who after WWII would become a leading figure n the United States’ space program.

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that man set foot on the Moon but that they set eye on the earth. Norman Cousins, journalist and author

I have a hunch the most important reason we’re going to space is not known now. Burt Rutan

As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man. James B. Irwin, Apollo XV

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Five famous psychological experiments #2

Last year I did a post about five famous psychology experiments. Here is another selection:

Blind to the unexpected

In 1999 cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris came up with the so-called “invisible gorilla” test. Their volunteers had to watch a one-minute video where two groups of people — half dressed in white, the other half in black — are passing basketballs around. The volunteers were told to count the passes among players dressed in white shirts while ignoring the passes of those in black. During the video, a woman in a gorilla suit walked into the centre of the frame, pounded her chest and then walked off.  It would seem to be the most obvious thing in the world. However, about half the people missed it. This effect is known as inattentional blindness. When you are focussing on one activity you can become blind to the unexpected. Last year they repeated the study; they wanted to see if the people who had heard about experiment would notice other unexpected events in a new video. Like the first time those who hadn’t seen it had a 50% success rate. As you would expect, all 23 of the experimentees who knew about the original experiment saw the gorilla but only 17% saw one or both of the new unexpected events – the curtain changing colour and one player on the black team leaving the game. You may find this experiment trivial, but one done by NASA using commercial pilots with thousands of hours of flying experience in a state-of-the art flight simulator is more worrying. During a simulated landing in foggy conditions some of the pilots failed to notice a jet parked on the runway!

Clairvoyant rats and pigeons

Last week I wrote about the unreliability of expert predictions. There are experiments that show that animals can do better than humans some times. I’m not referring to Paul the Octopus, who was able to correctly predict the winner of each ofGermany’s seven matches in the 2010 World Cup, as well as the result of the final. In this case it was rats and pigeons. The experiment involved researchers flashing two lights, one green and one red, onto a screen. However, the exact sequence was kept random. The rats and pigeons were quick to discover that the optimum strategy was to always go for green, guaranteeing an 80 percent hit rate. Humans, on the other hand, tried to see a pattern where there was none and only achieved 68% success. What’s more they would persist in the erroneous strategy even after they had been told that the flashing lights were random. Another study with Yale students produced similar results; they couldn’t accept 40% error, so they ended up with almost 50%.

Frightening Little Albert

Behaviourist John Watson believed, following the principles of classical conditioning, that he could condition a child to fear a stimulus which normally would not be frightening. The subject of the study was a nine–month old baby called Albert. At the beginning of the experiment Little Albert was exposed, to a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair and burning newspapers among other things. During this phase Little Albert showed no fear toward any of these items. In later trials, Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner made loud sounds behind Albert’s back by striking a long steel pipe with a hammer when the baby touched one of the chosen items. Not surprisingly on these occasions, Little Albert cried and showed fear when he heard the noise. The final stage of the experiment was to present Albert with only the stimuli. He became very upset as the rat appeared in the room. He cried, turned away from the rodent, and tried to move away. Watson had show that emotional responses could be conditioned, or learned. Indeed, Little Albert seemed to generalize his fear to other furry objects so that when Watson sent a non-white rabbit into the room seventeen days after the original experiment, Albert also became distressed. He showed similar reactions when presented with a furry dog, a seal-skin coat, and even when Watson appeared in front of him wearing a Santa Claus mask with a white cotton beard. The story has a sad ending. Albert, whose real name appears to have been Douglas Merritte, was the son of one Arvilla Merritte, then an unmarried woman who was a wet nurse at the Harriet  Lane Home. Nothing is known about the long-term effects of Watson’s experiment on the child. Tragically he died at the age of six on May 10, 1925 and is buried in a cemetery in Maryland.

Make me straight

Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath, founder and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, did research, partially financed by the CIA and the US military, which involved stimulation of the brains using surgically implanted electrodes. His subjects were institutionalized psychiatric patients, often African Americans. He wanted to use this brain stimulation relieve the symptoms of major psychiatric disorders such as severe depression and schizophrenia. However despite this laudable desire, his methods left a lot to be desired. One of his collaborators was the Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey, who later recalled that they had used African Americans as subjects because “they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals“  His most infamous  experiment was on Patient B-19, a 24-year-old gay man who wanted Heath to make him straight. Heath implanted electrodes in his head, showed him straight porn movies, and then activated the pleasure centres of the brain via the electrodes. A prostitute was hired to see if his treatment had worked. Did patient B-19 actually become heterosexual?  Following discharge from the hospital, he had a sexual relationship with a married woman for almost 10 months. His homosexual activity was reduced during this period, but did not stop completely.  I couldn’t find any long-term follow-up information. Heath seemed excited about the prospects for this therapy, but fortunately homosexual conversion therapy with brain surgery and pleasure centre stimulation did not catch on.

The monster study

Most of us are familiar with the film The King’s Speech. At the beginning of the film a therapist has the future king put seven pebbles in his mouth to get him to take his mind off stuttering. This goes back to ancient Greece where the famous orator Demosthenes is said to have used the same treatment. Anyway it didn’t work out; George spat them out and the hapless therapist was promptly sent packing. On the other side of the Atlantic, at more or less the same time, an infamous experiment was taking place. The year was 1939 and the place,  Davenport,Iowa. The aim of the experiment was to make kids stutter. The intentions were noble; Dr. Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist believed that stutterers were not born and the stigma of being labelled a stutterer d actually make them worse, and in some cases caused ‘normal’ children to start stuttering. To prove his point, he ran an experiment which has since become known as the ‘Monster Study’. The 22 youngsters from a veterans’ orphanage who were recruited to participate in the experiment were divided into two groups. The first were labelled ‘normal speakers’ and the second ‘stutterers’. In reality only half of the group labelled stutterers had actually shown signs of stuttering. During the course of the experiment, the normal speakers were given positive encouragement. But what made the study so notorious was what happened to the stutterers’ group. They received negative reinforcement – they were lectured about stuttering and constantly reminded not to repeat words. And the rest of the teachers and staff at the orphanage were told them the whole group were stutterers.  Although none of the test subjects actually became stutterers they became very embittered when they discovered in 2001 what had been done to them.  The quality of their schoolwork fell off and they would suffer a number of psychological and emotional scars later in their lives. The university issued an apology after the study was made public in news reports. On 17 August 2007, six of the orphan children were awarded $925,000 by the State of Iowa.

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So there you are. These are some of the things psychologists got up to. One would assume that they don’t do some of the more ethically questionable things that I have described above. They were different times. I could have mentioned Pavlov, who experimented on humans as well as dogs. Watching the videos can be quite painful. The uncomfortable fact is that we did learn a lot from these experiments and others carried out in those years. There were some pretty terrible experiments going on in other fields. One of the most shocking must surely be Tuskegee syphilis study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee,  Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service on poor, rural black men. They received free health care, but they were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. The aim was to see what would happen if the disease went untreated. I hope in 2050 a future blogger will not have to write about what we were doing in the 21^st century.

A few rabbits can’t do any harm

The action in TC Boyle’s latest novel, When The Killing’s Done takes place on the Channel Islands – not Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark et al, but a chain of eight islands located in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California. The islands host some 2,000 animal and plant species, including many that can only be found there. Five of the islands are part of the Channel Islands National Park. In Boyle’s tale the islands are the battleground for a conservationist, Alma Takesue, whose mission is to protect endangered biotic communities and Dave LaJoy, an animal rights fanatic, who violently opposes the idea that humans have the right to choose which animals will live or die. They come into conflict over the best way to protect the natural environment of two Channel Islands – Anacapa and Santa Cruz. The title comes from a quote by LaJoy: “I’ll be civil when the killing’s done.” The killing refers to the eradication of invasive species by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy, which aim to return the ecosystems of the islands to their original state,

The history of human-animal interaction is one that features prominently in Boyle’s oeuvre. He has a short story, A Bird in the Hand, about Eugene Schiefflin, who planned to introduce every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare into the New World.* The part about Shakespeare may not actually be true, but whatever his motivation his plan  was to have far-reaching effects. Schieffelin belonged to the American Acclimatization Society, which sought to promote the exchange of plants and animals from one part of the world to another. These societies were very prevalent in the 19th century. With what we know now Schieffelin’s actions seem naïve and even foolish. But at the time it was seen as good practice.  

In March 1890 he released 60 starlings into New York City’s Central Park; the following year he turned loose another 60. Schieffelin had imported the birds from England. Scientists estimate that the United Statesis home to more than 200 million of their descendants. They are now considered an invasive species in the USA, and they have wrought havoc on public buildings as well as agriculture. Fortunately, his attempts to introduce bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks were less successful. On the 100^th anniversary the New York Times had this to say about Schieffelin:

Skylarks and song thrushes failed to thrive, but the enormity of his success with starlings continues to haunt us. This centennial year is worth observing as an object lesson in how even noble intentions can lead to disaster when humanity meddles with nature. Today the starling is ubiquitous, with its purple and green iridescent plumage and its rasping, insistent call. It has distinguished itself as one of the costliest and most noxious birds on our continent. Roosting in hordes of up to a million, starlings can devour vast stores of seed and fruit, offsetting whatever benefit they confer by eating insects. In a single day, a cloud of omnivorous starlings can gobble up 20 tons of potatoes.

If there is one country that has suffered from acclimatization, that must surely be Australia. In Down Under Bill Bryson tells this story. Thomas Austin brought 24 rabbits to Australia in 1859. He was upbeat about the experiment:

“The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.” Rarely has a human prediction proved more so wrong. Less than a hundred years later there were more than one billion rabbits, the fastest spread of mammals ever recorded. Only with the introduction in 1950 of myxomatosis were they able to control the rabbit population. .Harmless to humans and other animals, it had a mortality rate of 99.9%.  However, the small number of rabbits that survived then bred a genetic resistance to the disease. So the cycle started once again. Scientists don’t know the precise numbers, but there are now hundreds of millions of rabbits

Now, you would think that people might have learned a lesson from Austin’s blunder, but alas no. Just as the rabbits were doing their thing, other species of animals were being introduced in great numbers. They were introduced for different reasons – for sport, by accident, and sometimes just to spice things up a little, as Australia was seen as biologically deficient. And why stop with British or European animals? They could create an African veldt in Australia, with giraffes, springboks, and buffaloes. They wanted herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain. In 1862 Sir Henry Barkly, governor ofVictoria, called for the introduction of monkeys into the colony’s forests “for the amusement of wayfarers, whom their gambols would delight.” Barkly’s replacement as governor, Sir Charles Darling, rejected that idea – only to suggest boa constrictors instead. Neither of these madcap schemes came to fruition but scores of others did. Foxes, camels, donkeys, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, foxes and cats have changed Australia for ever. There are so many introduced species, that the red kangaroo is now only the thirteenth largest animal in the country. About 130 mammals in Australia are threatened. Sixteen have gone extinct—more than in any other continent. And I haven’t even mentioned the effects on flora.

Islands’ closed ecosystems are especially interesting because any animals arriving or introduced will have unforeseen consequences. Island fauna has some particular characteristics. The first of these is known as island tameness, a tendency of such animals to lose their wariness of potential predators. They lose those defensive behaviours and adaptions that allow them to deal with new predators. Zebras, on the other hand, have to be extremely wary to have a chance of surviving on the savannah. Island animals can be extremely vulnerable when humans introduce predators, such as pigs, dogs, rats or cats, intentionally or otherwise. The second one is Island gigantism. This is a biological phenomenon in which the size of animals isolated on an island increases dramatically in comparison to their mainland relatives. Large mammalian carnivores are not present, allowing their ecological niches to be filled by birds or reptiles, which can then grow to larger-than-normal size. Being small can be invaluable for herbivores to escape or hide from predators. In the absence of such predators, these birds and reptiles tend to grow larger

Dodos are a paradigmatic example of what happens when these animals are exposed to new dangers. This large flightless bird, related to the pigeon, was living happily on the island of Mauritius. We need to remember that flight is very expensive; flying uses up a lot of calories. Birds fly to escape enemies. But the dodo didn’t have any enemies and had lost the ability to fly. That left it defenceless when humans first set foot on the island. You have to put yourself in the shoes of those sailors. They had been on navy rations for months and suddenly they saw these huge, fat, delicious pigeons. They were just asking to be roasted. The naïve dodo didn’t stand a chance and now they have become fodder for idiomatic expressions.

In When The Killing’s Done Boyle also tells us about the invasion of Guam by the brown tree snake. They are believed to have arrived around the time of World War II. They arrived on the undercarriages of planes. InIndonesia they had lived in relative equilibrium with other species. In Guam this balance did not exist and now they have taken over the island, wiping out most of the native forest vertebrate species. They have also affected human life. They cause thousands of power cuts and have been found biting and/or coiled around infants and small children in their beds. Guam is a major Pacific transportation hub and there is a very real danger that these snakes could be introduced inadvertently to other Pacific islands. To counter this risk, trained dogs are used to search, locate, and remove brown tree snakes before military and commercial cargo and transportation vessels leave the island.  

In When The Killing’s Done Takesue and Dave LaJoy represent two starkly contrasting visions of we deal with nature. The islands are vital to Alma. Indeed, she wouldn’t be alive without them; they’re what saved her grandmother from drowning at sea when she was shipwrecked in 1946. She plans to exterminate the two animals that threaten “her” islands – rats and feral pigs. The former arrived on Anacapa after a shipwreck; the latter were originally imported to Santa Cruz as domestic farm animals in the 1850s. The pigs cannot be returned to the mainland because their long isolation would make them potential carriers of disease. Dave LaJoy is a successful businessman who leads the FPA, an animal-rights activist group which thinks that the animals have to be saved from people like Alma, who he accuses of playing God. But he also tries to manipulate nature introducing animals to the islands.

Boyle’s book doesn’t offer any easy solutions – the problem isn’t black and white. In fact I may have been more confused by the end. Are we responsible for re-balancing these eco systems? Or, are we doing more harm when we try to manipulate the fragile balance of the natural world? Nature is not a paradise but a highly complex terrain in which animals struggle for survival in an ecosystem radically altered by our impact. One of the characters in the books has a question: What if we just left everything alone like the world was before us—like God made it. Wouldn’t that be easier?”

However, we can’t go back. It’s just not possible to return the earth to its previous pristine state. It was said that a squirrel could cross Englandwithout touching the ground. But with nearly six billion people on our planet nature has been transformed forever. I detect a certain misanthropy in many environmentalists. They seem to want to portray civilisation itself as a force for ecological destruction. Humans are seen as an invasive species or even a virus. Ty Tierwater, protagonist of one of Boyle’s earlier novels, A Friend of the Earth, proclaims: “To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.”

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*Those of you interested in which birds appeared in Shakespeare should try The Birds of Shakespeare, published in 1916 by the Scottish geologist Sir Archibald Geikie. They are, in alphabetical order: Blackbird, Bunting, Buzzard, Chough, Cock, Cormorant, Crow, Cuckoo, Dive-dapper, Dove and Pigeon, Duck, Eagle, Falcon and Sparrowhawk, Finch, Goose, Hedge Sparrow, House Martin, Jackdaw, Jay, Kite, Lapwing, Lark, Loon, Magpie, Nightingale, Osprey, Ostrich, Owl, Parrot, Partridge, Peacock, Pelican, Pheasant, Quail, Raven, Robin, Snipe, Sparrow, Starling, Swallow, Swan, Thrush, Turkey, Vulture, Wagtail, Woodcock and the Wren.

The psychopaths have taken over the asylum

The other day one teacher took issue with me for using the term sociopath in my post about Bernie Madoff, The sociopath with his name on the door. In the article I did try to reflect how we struggle to find the right words to describe such people. This theme came to my mind again after reading Jon Ronson’s latest book The Psychopath Test. The journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author has carved out a niche for himself as a chronicler of eccentricity. He has written four books, of which his previous one, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is the most famous. His latest book gets its title from a diagnostic tool, used to identify psychopaths created by the psychologist Robert Hare – the Hare Checklist. The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is a clinical rating scale of 20 items, which has to be administered by a suitably qualified and experienced clinician under controlled conditions.

Defining what a psychopath is can prove difficult. Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by an inability to form human attachment and an abnormal lack of empathy, which can be hidden behind an apparently normal outward appearance. The current definitions seem to be more concerned with the emotional rather than behavioural elements. These are people who don’t do regret, remorse or responsibility; they have different emotional responses to the rest of us. Somebody may be a psychopath, but that doesn’t mean they are going to eat somebody’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Is there really a cure for psychopaths? How do you instil empathy? Talk therapy may actually be counterproductive, making them more skilled at manipulating others.

The difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is somewhat blurred. They are often used interchangeably; both are listed together in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV under the heading of Antisocial Personalities because they share many common traits. It is a complicated dispute for an outsider like me to grasp. Not only do experts dispute if the two terms are different, but those who believe that there is a difference argue over what those differences are.

The problems of diagnosis of mental illnesses came sharply into focus in a famous experiment from the 1970s. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven other normal people, none of whom had ever had any psychiatric problems, got themselves admitted to various psychiatric hospitals in the USA. The only serious problem they had was getting out. Only by accepting that they were mentally ill and then pretending that they were getting better were they able to get released. The hospital staff had been unable to detect a single pseudopatient. And it got worse. Rosenhan was challenged to repeat the experiment. Only this time he didn’t send any fake patients. Nevertheless, the staff still detected large numbers of patients as impostors when they were genuinely ill. On Being Sane in Insane Places was considered a landmark study of psychiatric diagnosis. But it also took a lot of flak from the psychiatric profession. One doctor, Robert Spitzer, lambasted Rosenhan in a speech:

“If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labelled and treated me as having a bleeding peptic ulcer, I doubt that I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.”

Robert L. Spitzer is another of the key figures in Ronson’s tale. This retired professor of psychiatry was a major architect of the modern classification of mental disorders, and was undoubtedly one of the most influential psychiatrists of the 20th century. He was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed as a mental disorder.

In the early 1970s psychiatry was in a state of flux. What Spitzer wanted was to make it as objective as possible. In 1974 he was put in charge of the APA task force preparing the third edition of the DSM. Spitzer wanted to get rid of all the Freudian nonsense about the subconscious and create a common worldwide language for all. Patients for the first time could enter a clinician’s office with the reasonable expectation of an accurate diagnosis and the appropriate treatment. The key tool would be the checklist – Spitzer had been inspired by pioneers like Bob Hare.  Any psychiatrist could pick up the DSM-III—and if the patient’s overt symptoms coincided with the checklist – they would be to provide a precise diagnosis-

The DSM-III became a worldwide success, helping to shape our culture and society profoundly. The idea was to make it objective. But maybe that goal was just too ambitious. Is this really science or is it the mere pretence of knowledge? Robert Spitzer’s successor, Allen Frances, continued the tradition of welcoming new mental disorders, with their corresponding checklists, into the manual. The first edition of DSM, which first came out in 1953, had had sixty-five pages. DSM-IV has 886 pages.  DSM-V is in the pipeline for 2013. I just wonder if the Amazon will be able to survive. You can actually consult it online here.

Ronson consulted the list and found that “I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones. … I was much crazier than I had imagined.”  They seem to want to label life itself a mental disorder. Reviewing the DSM-IV for Harper’s in 1997, writer L.J. Davis was sceptical

Has there ever been a task more futile than the attempt to encompass, in the work of a single lifetime, let alone in a single work, the whole of human experience? For roughly five thousand years, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and cranks have incinerated untold quantities of olive oil, beeswax, and fossil fuel in pursuit of this maddeningly elusive goal; all have failed, sometimes heroically. Not even Shakespeare could manage it; closer to our own times, Dickens, a sentimental Englishman, the son of a clerk, perhaps came closest, though he believed in spontaneous human combustion and managed to miss the entirety of the twentieth century. Despite the best efforts of minds great, small, and sometimes insane, the riddle of the human condition has remained utterly impervious to solution. Until now. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (popularly known as the DSM-IV), human life is a form of mental illness.

Here are a few of 374 known mental disorders listed in DSM IV: Disorder of Written Expression, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Selective Mutism and Arithmetic Learning Disorder. After studying the Hare checklist, Ronson began to see psychopaths lurking in every corner of society—from maximum-security prisons to the corridors of power.

One fascinating part of the book is where he deals with capitalism and psychopathy. This is not a new theme in popular culture. In Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 film, The Parallax View, the evil Parallax Corporation uses a questionnaire to recruit potential assassins. Joel Balkan’s The Corporation linked the way corporations behave to the DSM-IV’s symptoms of psychopathy. The ruthless competitiveness of modern capitalism with constant downsizing and hostile takeovers provides a perfect environment for a psychopath. Individuals who ignore the rules and are good at conning and manipulating people can thrive here. Hare expressed it like this:

”If I couldn’t study psychopaths in prison, I would go down to the Stock Exchange.”

Ronson introduces us to Al Dunlap, a retired corporate executive, best known as a turnaround specialist and downsizer. His nicknames, Chainsaw Al and Rambo in Pinstripes, will give you an idea of his fearsome reputation. A massive accounting scandal at Sunbeam-Oster led to his retirement under a cloud of suspicion.

Ronson goes down to Dunlap’sFloridamansion to do the psychopath test on him. His description is very revealing:

The first obviously strange thing about Al Dunlap’s grand Florida mansion and lavish, manicured lawns was the unusually large number of ferocious sculptures there were of predatory animals. They were everywhere: stone lions and panthers with teeth bared, eagles soaring downward, hawks with fish in their talons, and on and on, across the grounds, around the lake, in the swimming pool/health club complex, in the many rooms. There were crystal lions and onyx lions and iron lions and iron panthers and paintings of lions and sculptures of human skulls.

Dunlap’s score on the test, in the low 20s, was below the score of 30 or more which experts consider symptomatic of psychopathy. Of course here we are in the terrain of emotive conjugations. I am a leader; you are authoritarian; he is a psychopath. Ronson shows how Dunlap spins the negative traits; he turns the psychopath checklist into Who Moved My Cheese?

Of course I wouldn’t limit my analysis to capitalism. We don’t have to look too hard to find communist psychopaths. Maybe psychopathy should be seen as an evolutionary adaptation, a complex survival mechanism.  I will close with a graffito at a Liberal Party conference many years ago:

“Power corrupts and absolute power is even more fun“

The Hare Checklist

Are you a psycho? Now you can try this fun test at home. These items cover the affective, interpersonal, and behavioural features of psychopathy. Each item is rated on a score from zero to two. The sum total determines the extent your psychopathy.

1. GLIB and SUPERFICIAL CHARM — the tendency to be smooth, engaging, charming, slick, and verbally facile. Psychopathic charm is not in the least shy, self-conscious, or afraid to say anything. A psychopath never gets tongue-tied. They have freed themselves from the social conventions about taking turns in talking, for example.

2. GRANDIOSE SELF-WORTH — a grossly inflated view of one’s abilities and self-worth, self-assured, opinionated, cocky, a braggart. Psychopaths are arrogant people who believe they are superior human beings.

3. NEED FOR STIMULATION or PRONENESS TO BOREDOM — an excessive need for novel, thrilling, and exciting stimulation; taking chances and doing things that are risky. Psychopaths often have a low self-discipline in carrying tasks through to completion because they get bored easily. They fail to work at the same job for any length of time, for example, or to finish tasks that they consider dull or routine.

4. PATHOLOGICAL LYING – can be moderate or high; in moderate form, they will be shrewd, crafty, cunning, sly, and clever; in extreme form, they will be deceptive, deceitful, underhanded, unscrupulous, manipulative, and dishonest.

5. CONNING AND MANIPULATIVENESS- the use of deceit and deception to cheat, con, or defraud others for personal gain; distinguished from Item #4 in the degree to which exploitation and callous ruthlessness is present, as reflected in a lack of concern for the feelings and suffering of one’s victims.

6. LACK OF REMORSE OR GUILT — a lack of feelings or concern for the losses, pain, and suffering of victims; a tendency to be unconcerned, dispassionate, cold-hearted, and unempathic. This item is usually demonstrated by a disdain for one’s victims.

7. SHALLOW AFFECT — emotional poverty or a limited range or depth of feelings; interpersonal coldness in spite of signs of open gregariousness.

8. CALLOUSNESS and LACK OF EMPATHY — a lack of feelings toward people in general; cold, contemptuous, inconsiderate, and tactless.

9. PARASITIC LIFESTYLE – an intentional, manipulative, selfish, and exploitative financial dependence on others as reflected in a lack of motivation, low self-discipline, and inability to begin or complete responsibilities.

10. POOR BEHAVIORAL CONTROLS — expressions of irritability, annoyance, impatience, threats, aggression, and verbal abuse; inadequate control of anger and temper; acting hastily.

11. PROMISCUOUS SEXUAL BEHAVIOR – a variety of brief, superficial relations, numerous affairs, and an indiscriminate selection of sexual partners; the maintenance of several relationships at the same time; a history of attempts to sexually coerce others into sexual activity or taking great pride at discussing sexual exploits or conquests.

12. EARLY BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS — a variety of behaviours prior to age 13, including lying, theft, cheating, vandalism, bullying, sexual activity, fire-setting, glue-sniffing, alcohol use, and running away from home.

13. LACK OF REALISTIC, LONG-TERM GOALS — an inability or persistent failure to develop and execute long-term plans and goals; a nomadic existence, aimless, lacking direction in life.

14. IMPULSIVITY — the occurrence of behaviors that are unpremeditated and lack reflection or planning; inability to resist temptation, frustrations, and urges; a lack of deliberation without considering the consequences; foolhardy, rash, unpredictable, erratic, and reckless.

15. IRRESPONSIBILITY — repeated failure to fulfil or honour obligations and commitments; such as not paying bills, defaulting on loans, performing sloppy work, being absent or late to work, and failing to honour contractual agreements.

16. FAILURE TO ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR OWN ACTIONS — a failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions reflected in low conscientiousness, an absence of dutifulness, antagonistic manipulation, denial of responsibility, and an effort to manipulate others through this denial.

17. MANY SHORT-TERM MARITAL RELATIONSHIPS — a lack of commitment to a long-term relationship reflected in inconsistent, undependable, and unreliable commitments in life, including marital.

18. JUVENILE DELINQUENCY — behaviour problems between the ages of 13-18; mostly behaviors that are crimes or clearly involve aspects of antagonism, exploitation, aggression, manipulation, or a callous, ruthless tough-mindedness.

19. REVOCATION OF CONDITION RELEASE — a revocation of probation or other conditional release due to technical violations, such as carelessness, low deliberation, or failing to appear.

20. CRIMINAL VERSATILITY — a diversity of types of criminal offenses, regardless if the person has been arrested or convicted for them; taking great pride at getting away with crimes.

The fascinating world of V.S. Ramachandran

Ramachandran is a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the silk road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind. He returns laden with phenomenological treasures…which, in his subtle and expert telling, yield more satisfying riches of scientific understanding. Richard Dawkins

V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego was lecturing at a hospital in India, when a young man with a strange problem approached him:

I am a corpse—I can smell the stench of rotting flesh.

Are you saying you are dead?

Yes. I don’t exist.

His diagnosis was that the young man was suffering from Cotard syndrome or walking corpse syndrome, a rare mental disorder in which people believe that they are dead. Welcome to the world of V.S. Ramachandran.  Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran was born into the Brahmin caste in Tamil Nadu, Indiain 1951. The Indians like the Chinese put the surname first and so Vilyanur is actually the family name. Ramachandran is the name his parents gave him, but I will refer to him by this name for convenience. Ramachandran’s father was a diplomat, so he spent a lot of time between Bangkokand Madras. He obtained a medical degree from StanleyMedicalCollegein Madras, India, and subsequently obtained a Ph.D. from TrinityCollegeat the Universityof Cambridge. Although his early work on visual perception he is best known for his work in behavioural neurology. I first became aware of Ramachandran when he gave the BBC Reith Lectures in 2003, The Emerging Mind. He is a captivating speaker who is able to bring the science of the brain alive.

This year Ramachandran has a new book, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, which explores what makes humans unique and illustrates how brain disorders can help us better understand how our brain actually works. He skilfully builds a picture of the specialized areas of the brain and the pathways between them.  The rationale behind the neuroscientist’s methodology is that if damage to one area causes disruption of a particular brain function, then it is highly probable this is where the function is located. A recurring theme is the way in which many delusions appear to result from the brain trying to make sense of signals that have gone haywire. I have been following Ramachandran since I was blown away by those 2003 Reith lectures. I really enjoyed his latest book and I thought it would be interesting to share a few of his insights with you. Prepare to be dazzled.

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached to the body. Sufferers still feel pain even though there is nothing there. This apparently occurs in more than 90% of cases. Such limbs often arrange themselves into painful positions. Ramachandran believes that phantom limb sensations are due to crosswiring in the brain. He relates how by touching a patient’s face, you can actually alleviate the pain in a phantom hand. This can be explained by the fact that the areas which deal with nerve inputs from the hand and face happen to be next to each other. Facial inputs spill over to the area that maps the phantom hand.

Ramachandran has a reputation for low-tech solutions, such as boxes and mirrors. His revolutionary technique was shown in one episode of House. The acerbic doctor is having problems with one ofWilson’s neighbours, Murphy, a decorated war hero who lost an arm in combat. House breaks into the neighbour’s home, where he drugs him, ties him up and gags him. He then gets Murphy to put his stump and his normal hand into a cardboard box, whose top and front surfaces have been removed There is a mirror inside and it now appears that Murphy has both arms. House tells him to clench his real and phantom hand and then to let them both go. For the first time in 36 years Murphy realizes he no longer feels pain in the phantom limb and he sobs in relief.

In the chapter on vision we hear about the Capgras delusion, in which friends or relatives are seen as impostors. This can happen when sufferers see their mothers. Their eyes are working perfectly; they have no trouble with facial recognition. The problem is with the connection with the amygdala, the part of the brain which deals with emotional response. As they feel no affective response, their brain tells them they are dealing with an imposter. Blindsight is a condition in which a person who is effectively blind because of damage to the visual cortex, can make correct visual judgements. The most incredible of case of this was TN, a man left blind by a stroke. Despite this, he was capable of negotiating a maze, walking around chairs and boxes without bumping into them. The explanation is that visual information travels along two pathways: the old pathway and the new pathway. If only the latter is damaged, a patient may lose the ability to see an object but still be aware of its location and orientation.

Ramachandran looks at synaesthesia, a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second cognitive pathway. The most well known form makes people see numbers as colours. This is not some kind of vague association, but is very intense feeling. Ramachandran ponders the connection between synaesthesia and creativity, especially metaphor. It is eight times more common in artists, poets, and novelists, than among the general population. Curiously, blind people can also have this condition – Stevie Wonder is one famous example

One thing I learned from the book was about mirror neurons, which were discovered in the 1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti. For over 50 years scientists had known about the ordinary motor command neurons at the front of the brain. When you to reach out and grab something, they orchestrate a specific sequence of muscle twitches. What Rizzolatti discovered was that around 20% these neurons, will also fire when you see somebody else performing the same action. This neuron is adopting the other person’s point of view; it’s like a virtual reality simulation of the other person’s action.

Ramachandran boldly describes them as the neurons that shaped civilization.  Culture is the accumulation of complex skills and knowledge which are transferred from person to person through language and imitation. Ramachandran believes that these mirror neurons are vital for imitation and emulation. The emergence of such a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed us to copy other people’s actions, was essential for the diffusion of human culture. Without our incredible savant-like ability to imitate others, human behaviours and discoveries could not have spread so rapidly. This diffusion occurs within societies and quickly spreads to other areas. Moreover, these skills can be passed onto future generations.

Ramachandran also wants to find a science of art. This kind of work is always going to be a bit controversial always open to the charge of reductionism.  He is interested in the evolution of our aesthetic sense. He lists nine artistic universals. He believes our taste is heavily influenced by our evolutionary ancestry on the African savanna. We like similarly coloured things to go together, and we are entranced by certain kinds of exaggeration of ordinary reality or other unrealistic images, like the Venus of Wiltdorf.

I do recommend that get to know more about Dr Ramachandran. You can do this with his books. You can still listen to his 2003 Reith lecture a couple of his talks are still available at the TED website. Neuroscience is still in its infancy. Ramachandran believes that we are now at the same stage that chemistry was in the nineteenth century: discovering the basic elements, grouping them into categories, and studying their interactions. We are still grouping our way toward the equivalent of the periodic table but are not anywhere near atomic theory. The brain is such a complicated organ. Some of what he says is necessarily speculation and other things may ne shown to be false. That is the way science works. And I actually like it when scientists look at phenomena that are outside their traditional purview. We have the testimony of novelists, poets and philosophers who have tried to pin down what it means to be human. We should give the scientists a chance.

Mental health glossary

The Tell-Tale Brain has an excellent glossary at the back. Here are a few of the terms he defines:

AGNOSIA A rare disorder characterized by an inability to recognize and identify objects and people even though the specific sensory modality (such as vision or hearing) is not defective nor is there any significant loss of memory or intellect.

ALIEN-HAND SYNDROME The feeling that one’s hand is possessed by an uncontrollable outside force resulting in its actual movement. The syndrome usually stems from an injury to the corpus collosum or anterior cingulate.

AMNESIA A condition in which memory is impaired or lost. Two of the most common forms are anterograde amnesia (the inability to acquire new memories) and retrograde amnesia (the loss of preexisting memories).

ANOSOGNOSIA A syndrome in which a person who suffers a disability seems unaware of, or denies the existence of, the disability. (Anosognosia is Greek for “denial of illness.”)

APHASIA A disturbance in language comprehension or production, often as a result of a stroke. There are three main kinds of aphasia: anomia (difficulty finding words), Broca’s aphasia (difficulty with grammar, more specifically the deep structure of language), and Wernicke’s aphasia (difficulty with comprehension and expression of meaning).

APOTEMNOPHILIA A neurological disorder in which an otherwise mentally competent person desires to have a healthy limb amputated in order to “feel whole.” The old Freudian explanation was that the patient wants a large amputation stump resembling a penis. Also called body integrity identity disorder.

APRAXIA A neurological condition characterized by an inability to carry out learned purposeful movements despite knowing what is expected and having the physical ability and desire to do so.

ASPERGER SYNDROME A type of autism in which people have normal language skills and cognitive development but have significant problems with social interaction.

AUTISM One of a group of serious developmental problems called autism spectrum disorders that appear early in life, usually before age three. While symptoms and severity vary, autistic children have problems communicating and interacting with others. The disorder may be related to defects in the mirror-neuron system or the circuits it projects to, although this has yet to be clearly established.

BIPOLAR DISORDER A psychiatric disorder characterized by wild mood swings. Individuals experience manic periods of high energy and creativity and depressed periods of low energy and sadness. Also called manic depressive disorder.

BLINDSIGHT A condition in some patients who are effectively blind because of damage to the visual cortex but can carry out tasks which would ordinarily appear to be impossible unless they can see the objects. For instance they can point out an object and accurately describe whether a stick is vertical or horizontal, even though they can’t consciously perceive the object. The explanation appears to be that visual information travels along two pathways in the brain: the old pathway and the new pathway. If only the new pathway is damaged, a patient may lose the ability to see an object but still be aware of its location and orientation.

CAPGRAS SYNDROME A rare syndrome in which the person is convinced that close relatives—usually parents, spouse, children or siblings—are imposters. It may be caused by damage to connections between areas of the brain dealing with face recognition and those handling emotional responses. Someone with Capgras syndrome might recognize the faces of loved ones but not feel the emotional reaction normally associated with that person. Also called Capgras delusion.

COTARD SYNDROME A disorder in which a patient asserts that he or she is dead, even claiming to smell rotting flesh or worms crawling over the skin (or some other equally absurd delusion). It may be an exaggerated form of the Capgras syndrome, in which not just one sensory area (such as face recognition) but all sensory areas are cut off from the limbic system, leading to a complete lack of emotional contact with the world and with oneself.

KORO A disorder that purportedly afflicts young Asian men who develop the delusion that their penises are shrinking and may eventually drop off. The converse of this syndrome—aging Caucasian men who develop the delusion that their penises are expanding—is much more common (as noted by our colleague Stuart Anstis). But it has not been officially given a name.

PHANTOM LIMB The perceived existence of a limb lost through accident or amputation.

SYNESTHESIA A condition in which a person literally perceives something in a sense besides the sense being stimulated, such as tasting shapes or seeing colors in sounds or numbers. Synesthesia is not just a way of describing experiences as a writer might use metaphors; some synesthetes actually experience the sensations.

TEMPORAL LOBE EPILEPSY (TLE) Seizures confined mainly to the temporal lobes and sometimes the anterior cingulate. TLE may produce a heightened sense of self and has been linked to religious or spiritual experiences. The person may undergo striking personality changes and/or become obsessed with abstract thoughts. People with TLE have a tendency to ascribe deep significance to everything around them, including themselves. One explanation is that repeated seizures may strengthen the connections between two areas of the brain: the temporal cortex and the amygdala. Interestingly, people with TLE tend to be humorless, a characteristic also seen in seizure-free religious people.

Muesli, the rise of chemophobia and the fetishisation of the natural

Natural – now there is a loaded word if ever there was one. My favourite use must surely be Natural American Spirit: “Taste nature. And nothing else.” Sounds enticing? Well, Natural American Spirit is actually a cigarette brand manufactured in theUnited States by the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, a subsidiary of Reynolds American. The ad continued:

“You’ll never find any additives in our tobacco. What you see is what you get. Simply 100% whole-leaf natural tobacco. True authentic tobacco taste. It’s only natural.”        

I have deliberately chosen an absurd example, but what I want to point out is that the meaning of natural is very problematic. There are two points I wish to raise. Firstly the line between natural and artificial is very blurred. Agriculture is a human invention;Orangesare unknown in the wild. In medicine there is a false dichotomy between natural and artificial remedies. Modern medicine does not reject nature; many modern drugs are plant components. But modern medicine doesn’t restrict itself to plant derived substances. And anyone with a knowledge of chemistry will know the line between natural and unnatural chemicals is a fuzzy one. What about a molecule that is manufactured or synthesized but is identical to a molecule that occurs in nature? Is the synthetic molecule natural because there are absolutely no detectable differences between purified natural products and their synthesised counterparts?  Is its origin important? The bottom line is that there is no real clear demarcation line between something that is entirely natural and something that is completely artificial.

Over the last half century, synthetic chemicals increasingly have made our existence easier, safer and better. They help keep our homes clean, kill pests, and make agriculture more productive, enabling us to feed more people using less land. But these chemicals have not been universally welcomed. They have been accompanied by the rise of chemophobia, an irrational fear of chemicals. These prejudices are very real. The language around chemicals is unambiguously bad. Greenpeace talks about “chemicals out of control.” Hazardous, toxic and dangerous are usually the adjectives of choice. The mass media has had a particularly nefarious role in the vilification of chemicals. The media are frequently more interested in sensationalist headlines than reporting the underlying science, while environmentalists frequently resort to scare tactics. There is an absurd quest to lead a chemical-free life. Foods or products are advertised as “chemical free.” However, everything is made of chemicals and nothing can be ‘chemical free’. There are no alternatives to chemicals, just choices about which chemicals to use and how they are manufactured. I love this quote by research chemist Derek Lohmann at the website of sense about science:

“If someone came into your house and offered you a cocktail of butanol, iso amyl alcohol, hexanol, phenyl ethanol, tannin, benzyl alcohol, caffeine, geraniol, quercetin, 3-galloyl epicatchin, 3-galloyl epigallocatchin and inorganic salts, would you take it? It sounds pretty ghastly. If instead you were offered a cup of tea, you would probably take it. Tea is a complex mixture containing the above chemicals in concentrations that vary depending on where it is grown.”

 But for the sake let’s assume that we can agree that some things are natural and some are not. What does that tell us? Nothing. This is well-known intellectual fallacy known as the appeal to nature. It goes like this:

N is natural. Therefore, N is right or good. U is unnatural. Therefore, U is wrong or bad. As Julian Baggini has pointed out there is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse). Alas, being natural is no guarantee that a substance is safe. There are many poisons in nature, including hemlock, cyanide, arsenic, and animal and insect venoms. The carcinogens in cigarettes that cause cancer are natural components of tobacco. Henna tattoos can cause allergic reactions. Untreated water can kill, and rotting fruit contains some toxins that can make people very ill. In the late 1990s Bruce Ames, head of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at theUniversityofCalifornia,Berkeleyproved that cabbage has forty-nine natural pesticides in it, more than half of which are carcinogens. Nature has not been designed for our benefit. What’s more poisons are a typical evolutionary strategy used by flora and fauna.

Food is an area where these questions of natural and artificial are often debated. I tend to be a bit sceptical about organic. A 2010 review, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which did a meta-study of the last 50 years of research, showed that there were no significant differences in nutritional value and no health benefits from eating organic food. And organic food has a significant downside that was pointed out byAmes:

“The effort to eliminate synthetic pesticides … will make fruits and vegetables more expensive, decrease consumption, and thus increase cancer rates.”

Then we come to the raw food movement. I prefer the tem crudivore, but you have to be careful how you pronounce this word as you may unwittingly imply that they eat crud. Raw foods as a dietary health treatment was first developed in Switzerlandby medical doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner. During a bout of illness he couldn’t eat any cooked food, so he began eating apples and nothing else every day. After he got over the jaundice he conducted experiments into the effects on human health of raw vegetables. In November 1897, he opened a sanatorium in Zurichcalled Vital Force. Bircher-Benner also invented muesli which was a way of encouraging people to eat raw food, as the main ingredient was raw apple, rather than the cereal or yoghurt of today. Naturally this movement has attracted its fair share of Hollywoodtypes such as Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson Ben Vereen (he played Chicken George in Roots. some of the claims of this movement are hilarious. It is especially popular in the UK, Germanyand of course California. Restaurants catering to a raw food diet have opened in large cities, and numerous all-raw cookbooks have been published. The proponents of raw food argue that uncooked food is “living” and that pasteurization “kills” food. There is little scientific evidence to back up their claims; there are only minimal differences in the nutritional value of food that is raw versus lightly or even moderately cooked. Even if they were right about the evidence, I would still disagree with crudivores. For me cooking is one our greatest human inventions.

For Prince Charles the price of prosperity has been “a progressive loss of harmony with the flow and rhythm of the natural world”. I have tried to show that this mythical world never existed. As this New Yorker cartoon showed, we may have had cleaner air purer water, exercised more and eaten lots of free-range stuff but most people didn’t live past 30. The invention of synthetic chemicals has been on the whole positive for humanity. They are monuments to mankind’s progress. I am not saying that chemicals cannot be dangerous.Bhopal and asbestos are two relevant examples.  But we need to take a more mature attitude – we need to forget about this mythical world without chemicals.

Labelling a chemical toxic or a contaminant is meaningless. It always depends on the size of the dose. Moreover, chemicals do not have the same effects on everybody; people can react differently to the same dose. We are now able to detect chemicals in parts per billion. But this does not mean that these miniscule doses are dangerous. This is why the safe exposure levels that are published for chemicals tend to be well below the levels likely to cause harm.

Since the 1960s we have been hearing stories of how the use of synthetic chemicals, was going to cause a massive cancer epidemic. I don’t see evidence of this being caused by synthetic chemicals. Outside the workplace, very few cases of cancer are believed to be caused by exposure to chemicals in the environment. The more relevant fact is lifestyle and the fact that we are living much longer. Establishing correlation is extremely tricky. Just because a chemical was present when an effect occurred does not demonstrate causation. Cancer clusters may just prove to be random variations.

We cannot avoid trade-offs. Even where chemicals are potentially harmful, we have to balance the potential risks of any chemical against the benefits they bring. For example, when insects attack African farms, threatening rural survival, it may be better if farmers spray pesticide even if this means they might inhale some of it themselves. In the nineteenth century there was anxiety about using powdered chlorine bleach to disinfect water it reduced the bacteria count spectacularly and helped to eradicate typhoid.

The blanket demonization of the chemical industry is illogical and dangerous. We are going to need chemists who can find new ways of making fertilisers or plastics. We face new problems and we will need a new greener chemical industry to help us meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.