More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 6 - January 29, 2018
the emotional energies behind the analysis and evaluation are disordered so that the everyday world is interpreted in a way that leads to depressive conclusions—it’s awful, getting worse, and this is what I deserve.
For example, serotonin is thought to have something to do with incessant ideation in depression, the uncontrollable wallowing in those dark thoughts.
increasing their baseline level of activation, lowering their threshold for responding to outside signals. Thus, a shortage of norepinephrine in this pathway might begin to explain the psychomotor retardation. Dopamine, meanwhile, has something to do with pleasure,
Chronic illness that involves overactivation of the immune system (for example, chronic infections, or an autoimmune disease where the immune system has accidentally activated and is attacking some part of your body) is more likely to cause depression than other equally severe and prolonged illnesses that don’t involve the immune system.
Seligman argues persuasively that animals suffering from learned helplessness share many psychological features with depressed humans. Such animals have a motivational problem—one of the reasons that they are helpless is that they often do not even attempt a coping response when they are in a new situation. This is quite similar to the depressed person who doesn’t even try the simplest task that would improve her life. “I’m too tired, it seems overwhelming to take on something like that, it’s not going to work anyway….”
As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how the world works.
A major depression, these findings suggest, can be the outcome of particularly severe lessons in uncontrollability for those of us who are already vulnerable.
Among males who were in the higher-ranking half of the hierarchy, we observed a cluster of behavioral traits associated with low resting glucocorticoid levels independent of their specific ranks.
The first trait was whether a male could tell the difference between a threatening and a neutral interaction with a rival.
Next variable: if the situation really is threatening (the rival’s a foot away and making menacing moves), does our male sit there passively and wait for the fight, or does he take control of the situation and strike first?
A third variable: after a fight, can the baboon tell whether he won or lost?
Final variable: if a male has lost a fight, what does he do next? Does he sulk by himself, groom someone, or beat someone up? Discouragingly, it turns out that the males who are most likely to go beat on someone—thus displaying displaced aggression—have lower glucocorticoid levels,
that also predict low basal glucocorticoid levels. These traits have nothing to do with how males compete with one another. Instead, they are related to patterns of social affiliation.
A theme in the previous section on some troubled nonhuman primates is that there is a discrepancy between the sorts of stressors they are exposed to and the coping responses they come up with. Learned helplessness, which we saw to be an underpinning of depression, appears to be another example of such discrepancy. A challenge occurs, and what is the response of a depressive individual? “I can’t, it’s too much, why bother doing anything, it isn’t going to work anyway, nothing I do ever works….” The discrepancy here is that in the face of stressful challenges, depressives don’t even attempt to
...more
However, glucocorticoid excess is not the usual response. Instead, it’s too much sympathetic activation, an overabundance of circulating catecholamines (epinephrine and norepinephrine).
When it comes to psychiatric disorders, it seems that increases in the catecholamines have something to do with still trying to cope and the effort that involves, where overabundance of glucocorticoids seems more of a signal of having given up on attempting to cope. You can show this with a lab
Suppose a major traumatic stressor occurs, of a sufficient magnitude to disrupt hippocampal function while enhancing amygdaloid function. At some later point, in a similar setting, you have an anxious, autonomic state, agitated and fearful, and you haven’t a clue why—this is because you never consolidated memories of the event via your hippocampus while your amygdala-mediated autonomic pathways sure as hell remember. This is a version of free-floating anxiety.
The rest should have been history: up-swelling of music as the upholsterer is seized by the arms and held in a penetrating gaze—“Good heavens, man, do you realize what you’ve just said?”
A lesson of repressive personality types and their invisible burdens is that, sometimes, it can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors.
Lookup!
The pleasure is in the anticipation of a reward; from the standpoint of dopamine, the reward is almost an afterthought.
This is how gratification postponement works—the core of goal-directed behavior is expectation. Soon we’re forgoing immediate pleasure in order to get good grades in order to get into a good college in order to get a good job in order to get into the nursing home of our choice.
This must be based on personality types. Some people are more used to getting dopamine this way
In other words, within a generally benevolent context (that is, the outcome is still likely to be good), there’s an element of surprise. Under those conditions, there is even greater release of dopamine.
The key seems to be whether the uncertainty occurs in a benign or malevolent context.
Part of what makes the Las Vegas world of gambling so addictive is the brilliant ways in which people are manipulated into thinking that the environment is a benign, rather than malevolent, one—the belief that the outcome is likely to be a good one, especially for someone as lucky and special as you…so long as you keep putting in those coins and pressing that lever.
But with moderate and transient glucocorticoid elevation you release dopamine. And transient activation of the amygdala releases dopamine as well. Couple the glucocorticoid rise with the accompanying activation of the sympathetic nervous system, and you’re also enhancing glucose and oxygen delivery to the brain. You feel focused, alert, alive, motivated, anticipatory. You feel great. We have a name for such transient stress. We call it “stimulation.”
This is the phenomenon of context-dependent relapse—the itch is stronger in some places than others, specifically in places that you associate with prior drug use.
This process of associating drug use with a particular setting is a type of learning, and a lot of current addiction research explores the neurobiology of such learning. This work focuses not so much on those dopamine neurons, but on the neurons that project to them. Many of them come from cortical and hippocampal regions that carry information about setting. If you repeatedly use a drug in the same setting, those projections onto those dopamine neurons are repeatedly activated and eventually become potentiated, strengthened, in the same ways as the hippocampal synapses
Importantly, stress increases the addictive potential of a drug only if the stressor comes right before the drug exposure. In other words, short-term stress. The type that boosts dopamine levels transiently.
Remember those apples and pears in chapter 5? Who are the individuals who are more prone toward putting on fat around their gut, becoming apples, the less healthy version of fat deposition? We saw that they are likely to be people with more of a tendency to secrete glucocorticoids in response to stressors, and to have a slower recovery from such a stress-response. Same thing here.
They secrete glucocorticoids longer than the other rats in response to a stressor, causing them to pour out more dopamine when they are first exposed to the drug. So if you’re the kind of rat who is particularly thrown out of kilter by stress, you’re atypically likely to try something that temporarily promises to make things right.
Peter Sterling, of allostasis fame, has written brilliantly about how our sources of pleasure have become so narrowed and artificially strong.
So rank means different things in different species. It turns out that rank can also mean different things in different social groups within the same species. Primatologists these days talk about primate “culture,” and this is not an anthropomorphic term. For example, chimps in one part of the rain forest can have a very different culture from the folks four valleys over—different frequencies of social behaviors, use of similar vocalizations but with different meanings (in other words, something approaching the concept of a “dialect”), different types of tool use. And intergroup differences
...more
Another reason for my skepticism is that for 99 percent of human history, societies were most probably strikingly unhierarchical. This is based on the fact that contemporary hunter-gatherer bands are remarkably egalitarian.
So it’s not about being poor. It’s about feeling poor. What’s the difference? Adler shows that subjective SES is built around education, income, and occupational position (in other words, the building blocks of subjective SES), plus satisfaction with standard of living and feeling of financial security about the future. Those last two measures are critical. Income may tell you something (but certainly not everything) about SES;
He draws heavily upon a concept in sociology called “social capital.” While “financial capital” says something about the depth and range of financial resources you can draw on in troubled times, social capital refers to the same in the social realm. By definition, social capital occurs at the level of a community, rather than at the level of individuals or individual social networks.
In contrast, hierarchy is about domination, not symmetry and equality. By definition, you can’t have a society with both dramatic income inequality and lots of social capital.
However, as will be touched on in the next chapter, this isn’t always a great thing. Sometimes, communities get tremendous amounts of social capital by having all of their members goose-step to the same thoughts and beliefs and behaviors, and don’t cotton much to anyone different.
And just as we saw in chapter 13 when we looked at the prevalence of displacement aggression, poverty amid plenty predicts more crime—but not against the wealthy. The have-nots turn upon the have-nots.
The bigger the income inequality is in a society, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average. The bigger the distance between the wealthy and the average, the less benefit the wealthy will feel from expenditures on the public good. Instead, they would derive much more benefit by spending the same (taxed) money on their private good—a better chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance.
So we’ve got income inequality, low social cohesion and social capital, class tensions, and lots of crime all forming an unhealthy cluster.
Our American credo is that people are willing to tolerate a society with miserably low levels of social capital, so long as there can be massive income inequality…with the hope that they will soon be sitting at the top of this steep pyramid.
One important variable was the ability of parents to displace a major worry onto something less threatening.
A second variable had to do with denial.
A final variable was whether the parent had a structure of religious rationalization to explain the illness.
Reinstitute control and predictability, give the patient the knowledge that the medication is there for the instant that the pain becomes too severe, and the pain often becomes far more manageable.
These studies generate some simple answers to coping with stress that are far from simple to implement in everyday life. They emphasize the importance of manipulating feelings of control, predictability, outlets for frustration, social connectedness, and the perception of whether things are worsening or improving.
For him, what was the predictor of health in a person? Coping responses built around fixed rules and flexible strategies. This requires that we fight a reflex common to most of us. If something bad is happening and our attempts to cope are not working, one of our most common responses is to, well, go back in there and just try twice as hard to cope in the usual way. Although that sometimes does the trick, that’s rare. During times of stress, finding the resources to try something new is really hard and is often just what’s needed.
Some of these ideas are encompassed in Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Have the wisdom to pick your battles. And once you have, the flexibility and resiliency of strategies to use in those battles is summarized in something I once heard in a Quaker meeting: In the face of strong winds, let me be a blade of grass. In the face of strong walls, let me be a gale of wind.
So it can be bad news to frequently boost LDL levels because of frequent stressors. But, independent from that, it is also not a good sign if, for any given stressor, you have a particularly large LDL increase. Studies have shown that the offspring of people with heart disease tend to have atypically large LDL responses to stress, suggesting a vulnerability factor that has been passed on to them.
Great factoids: the pain receptors that respond to heat contain receptors for something called capsaicin. What is capsaicin? A compound found in red chilies. That’s why spicy food tastes hot. And what other type of receptor is found in those same neurons? One that responds to the key component of horseradish, wasabi, and mustard.
