1 00:00:00 --> 00:00:01 2 00:00:01 --> 00:00:02 The following content is provided by MIT OpenCourseWare 3 00:00:02 --> 00:00:04 under a Creative Commons license. 4 00:00:04 --> 00:00:09 Additional information about our license at MIT 5 00:00:09 --> 00:00:15 OpenCourseWare in general is available at ocw.mit.edu. 6 00:00:15 --> 00:00:16 PROFESSOR: Good afternoon. 7 00:00:16 --> 00:00:22 8 00:00:22 --> 00:00:28 I decided to go for a little amplification today because I'm 9 00:00:28 --> 00:00:34 feeling a little underpowered and I think that if I do my 10 00:00:34 --> 00:00:42 usual unamplified version that sometime around 3 o'clock I'll 11 00:00:42 --> 00:00:47 fall over and somebody will have to haul me away. 12 00:00:47 --> 00:00:50 Actually, a lot of the experiments I'm going to talk 13 00:00:50 --> 00:00:55 about today suggest that you wouldn't do it. 14 00:00:55 --> 00:00:59 You'd just leave me in a little heap there and slowly file out 15 00:00:59 --> 00:01:08 and I could try that as like a demo. 16 00:01:08 --> 00:01:09 But that would be sad. 17 00:01:09 --> 00:01:13 So I don't think I'll do that, but I will amplify myself in 18 00:01:13 --> 00:01:22 the effort not to run out of steam here. 19 00:01:22 --> 00:01:30 When last we met I had setup the Asch experiment-- that's 20 00:01:30 --> 00:01:36 the 3 line thing, the Milgram experiment where it turned out 21 00:01:36 --> 00:01:44 that people would shock another apparently innocent individual 22 00:01:44 --> 00:01:48 to a pretty severe degree without what looked like an 23 00:01:48 --> 00:01:50 awful lot of provocation. 24 00:01:50 --> 00:01:55 And then the manufacturers, whatever it was, consultation-- 25 00:01:55 --> 00:02:00 whatever it says on the handout, that experiment 26 00:02:00 --> 00:02:03 suggested that under other circumstances people wouldn't 27 00:02:03 --> 00:02:09 be so willing to comply with a suggestion that would 28 00:02:09 --> 00:02:11 run against what they would normally do. 29 00:02:11 --> 00:02:16 And I left it there to say that we'll come back today and 30 00:02:16 --> 00:02:18 talk about why that must be. 31 00:02:18 --> 00:02:19 Why that might be the case. 32 00:02:19 --> 00:02:25 And the context in which I want to talk about that is the 33 00:02:25 --> 00:02:27 social impact theory. 34 00:02:27 --> 00:02:30 35 00:02:30 --> 00:02:33 The source I put on the handout out is-- the guy's got a great 36 00:02:33 --> 00:02:35 name-- his name is Bibb Latane. 37 00:02:35 --> 00:02:38 It looks like Latane, but you pronounce it Latane 38 00:02:38 --> 00:02:40 and the B stands for Bibb. 39 00:02:40 --> 00:02:45 I don't know who names their kid Bibb, but maybe that's how 40 00:02:45 --> 00:02:47 you grow up to be a famous social psychologist. 41 00:02:47 --> 00:02:51 42 00:02:51 --> 00:02:57 So when you're studying for the final you can remind yourself 43 00:02:57 --> 00:03:02 that social impact is a function of SIN, but 44 00:03:02 --> 00:03:04 that's just the acronym. 45 00:03:04 --> 00:03:07 I don't know that Latane every particularly noticed this, but 46 00:03:07 --> 00:03:09 that's the acronym for his 3 big factors in this theory of 47 00:03:09 --> 00:03:14 strength, immediacy, and number. 48 00:03:14 --> 00:03:17 And what I want to do is try to explain those in the context, 49 00:03:17 --> 00:03:19 particularly at the Milgram experiment. 50 00:03:19 --> 00:03:26 See how those speak to the question of when it is that you 51 00:03:26 --> 00:03:33 will give into the social pressures from the outside. 52 00:03:33 --> 00:03:38 So strength in this case refers to-- well, in the Milgram case 53 00:03:38 --> 00:03:42 really, it would be the authority of the guy giving 54 00:03:42 --> 00:03:43 you the instructions. 55 00:03:43 --> 00:03:47 Remember that all the subjects in Milgram's experiment were 56 00:03:47 --> 00:03:51 upset by the notion that they should be shocking somebody. 57 00:03:51 --> 00:03:53 And shocking them apparently, severely. 58 00:03:53 --> 00:03:59 And Milgram had trained himself to say, please continue. 59 00:03:59 --> 00:04:00 The experiment must go on. 60 00:04:00 --> 00:04:01 And not more than that. 61 00:04:01 --> 00:04:03 He wasn't going to get into an argument with them, he was 62 00:04:03 --> 00:04:06 just going to say that. 63 00:04:06 --> 00:04:08 If the guy's saying, please continue. 64 00:04:08 --> 00:04:14 The experiment must go on is Stanley Milgram, white-jacketed 65 00:04:14 --> 00:04:19 scientist professor from Yale, you got 63% of people going 66 00:04:19 --> 00:04:23 through all the way to 450 volts in that experiment. 67 00:04:23 --> 00:04:27 But if you made a small change in the experiment 68 00:04:27 --> 00:04:34 and the person running it was just some guy. 69 00:04:34 --> 00:04:36 You know, Kristen [UNINTELLIGIBLE] 70 00:04:36 --> 00:04:39 well-intentioned research assistant in the lab or 71 00:04:39 --> 00:04:43 something like that, compliance dropped to 20%. 72 00:04:43 --> 00:04:44 I don't know. 73 00:04:44 --> 00:04:45 I'm sure actually if Kristen was doing it, compliance 74 00:04:45 --> 00:04:47 would be like 100%. 75 00:04:47 --> 00:04:51 Because she'd smack them around and stuff like that, but if it 76 00:04:51 --> 00:04:57 was not an authority figure, if the person giving you the 77 00:04:57 --> 00:05:02 instruction was a person with less authority compliance 78 00:05:02 --> 00:05:03 dropped way down. 79 00:05:03 --> 00:05:05 That is the sort of thing that the military knows, right? 80 00:05:05 --> 00:05:07 Who gives you the order makes a difference. 81 00:05:07 --> 00:05:09 82 00:05:09 --> 00:05:17 Immediacy refers to the vividness of the factors. 83 00:05:17 --> 00:05:19 Sort of the salience of the factors here. 84 00:05:19 --> 00:05:22 So I already talked about one immediacy manipulation. 85 00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 Remember, in the original version of the experiment 100% 86 00:05:25 --> 00:05:28 of the people went all the way through to 450 volts. 87 00:05:28 --> 00:05:30 Milgram figured, oh my goodness. 88 00:05:30 --> 00:05:33 That's because they didn't buy the story at all and he brought 89 00:05:33 --> 00:05:40 the learner slash victim into sight and into the range of 90 00:05:40 --> 00:05:45 hearing and that change in the immediacy-- increasing the 91 00:05:45 --> 00:05:47 vividness of the impact you were having on this other 92 00:05:47 --> 00:05:53 person decreased compliance from 100 to about 2/3 93 00:05:53 --> 00:05:57 of the population. 94 00:05:57 --> 00:06:04 If you manipulate the vividness of the pressure on the subject, 95 00:06:04 --> 00:06:06 compliance can change. 96 00:06:06 --> 00:06:09 So if Milgram is right there saying, please continue. 97 00:06:09 --> 00:06:11 The experiment must go on. 98 00:06:11 --> 00:06:12 You went on. 99 00:06:12 --> 00:06:15 But if you said, look, I got a rinse a few things out. 100 00:06:15 --> 00:06:19 I'll be down in my office, if you got any questions about 101 00:06:19 --> 00:06:21 the experiment call me. 102 00:06:21 --> 00:06:23 So you know, I have a heart attack. 103 00:06:23 --> 00:06:28 You know, the learner is busy making all of its bad noises. 104 00:06:28 --> 00:06:29 The subject is getting antsy. 105 00:06:29 --> 00:06:30 He picks up the phone. 106 00:06:30 --> 00:06:31 Please continue. 107 00:06:31 --> 00:06:34 The experiment must go on. 108 00:06:34 --> 00:06:35 Yeah, right. 109 00:06:35 --> 00:06:38 Compliance dropped again to 20%. 110 00:06:38 --> 00:06:42 So big drop in compliance if the source of the authority 111 00:06:42 --> 00:06:47 was not right there to help you out. 112 00:06:47 --> 00:06:50 And if you make the consequences even more vivid, 113 00:06:50 --> 00:06:52 you can again drop compliance in this experiment. 114 00:06:52 --> 00:06:56 So in one particularly vivid version of Milgram's 115 00:06:56 --> 00:07:00 experiment, Milgram didn't have the learner off 116 00:07:00 --> 00:07:01 in another booth. 117 00:07:01 --> 00:07:07 He had the learner right next to you making his noises. 118 00:07:07 --> 00:07:09 And at a critical time in the experiment the electrode is 119 00:07:09 --> 00:07:13 slipping off the guy's hand and Milgram says, hold 120 00:07:13 --> 00:07:16 the electrode on him. 121 00:07:16 --> 00:07:18 And he's still doing the same thing, right? 122 00:07:18 --> 00:07:19 [UNINTELLIGIBLE] 123 00:07:19 --> 00:07:20 I'm not going to respond anymore. 124 00:07:20 --> 00:07:21 I quit. 125 00:07:21 --> 00:07:23 [UNINTELLIGIBLE] 126 00:07:23 --> 00:07:26 Compliance drops, you'll be glad to know. 127 00:07:26 --> 00:07:28 What you may be a little distressed to know is 128 00:07:28 --> 00:07:30 it drops only to 30%. 129 00:07:30 --> 00:07:35 30% of the people were still willing to deliver these 130 00:07:35 --> 00:07:38 punitive shocks all the way through to the end even when 131 00:07:38 --> 00:07:45 they're holding the guy's hands down on the electrode. 132 00:07:45 --> 00:07:50 It's this immediacy factor that makes it psychologically easier 133 00:07:50 --> 00:07:55 to shoot a missile over the horizon and kill somebody than 134 00:07:55 --> 00:07:58 to actually look somebody in the eye and kill them. 135 00:07:58 --> 00:08:01 They're dead the same way in either case, you may know 136 00:08:01 --> 00:08:03 objectively that they're dead. 137 00:08:03 --> 00:08:07 This is a real issue for the military. 138 00:08:07 --> 00:08:12 The military knows that it is in the unfortunate business of 139 00:08:12 --> 00:08:16 killing other people and it also knows that in a way, much 140 00:08:16 --> 00:08:18 more profound of course than the Milgram experiment that 141 00:08:18 --> 00:08:23 this is very upsetting to its own soldiers. 142 00:08:23 --> 00:08:28 To say nothing of the people who get killed, but people 143 00:08:28 --> 00:08:31 don't like killing other people, typically. 144 00:08:31 --> 00:08:34 It takes work to get somebody to kill other people and it's 145 00:08:34 --> 00:08:40 psychologically less damaging if it's over the horizon 146 00:08:40 --> 00:08:41 than if it's face-to-face. 147 00:08:41 --> 00:08:48 Though, all you need to do is watch the latest video of some 148 00:08:48 --> 00:08:52 charming person slitting somebody's throat-- some 149 00:08:52 --> 00:08:54 hostages throat in Iraq-- to realize that it is also 150 00:08:54 --> 00:08:58 perfectly possible to kill somebody right there. 151 00:08:58 --> 00:09:02 But there is an immediacy effect, a real world 152 00:09:02 --> 00:09:04 immediacy effect. 153 00:09:04 --> 00:09:09 Well, that's perhaps a gruesome one then and you might think 154 00:09:09 --> 00:09:12 this is only stuff that works in the realm of the 155 00:09:12 --> 00:09:13 truly horrible. 156 00:09:13 --> 00:09:15 That's not true either. 157 00:09:15 --> 00:09:21 158 00:09:21 --> 00:09:23 Suppose I get curious this evening and I send a note 159 00:09:23 --> 00:09:26 around saying, what do you think of the Milgram 160 00:09:26 --> 00:09:29 experiment? 161 00:09:29 --> 00:09:31 I might get an e-mail back. 162 00:09:31 --> 00:09:33 I wouldn't bet on it. 163 00:09:33 --> 00:09:34 Maybe a couple. 164 00:09:34 --> 00:09:36 I know who would be sending them too by 165 00:09:36 --> 00:09:39 this point in the term. 166 00:09:39 --> 00:09:42 If I ask right now, well, what do you think about 167 00:09:42 --> 00:09:42 the Milgram experiment? 168 00:09:42 --> 00:09:45 Is that a disturbing experiment? 169 00:09:45 --> 00:09:48 Few people will nod their heads. 170 00:09:48 --> 00:09:52 The eastern bloc might raise its hand. 171 00:09:52 --> 00:09:59 But you know, most of you will successfully sit on your 172 00:09:59 --> 00:10:00 hands and not do anything. 173 00:10:00 --> 00:10:04 But you know, if I was to wander over here somewhere-- 174 00:10:04 --> 00:10:06 she's getting very nervous here. 175 00:10:06 --> 00:10:08 You can see the experiment really works. 176 00:10:08 --> 00:10:11 And if I was to ask, what do you think of the 177 00:10:11 --> 00:10:12 Milgram experiment? 178 00:10:12 --> 00:10:16 I won't actually make her respond, but I could, right? 179 00:10:16 --> 00:10:18 There's no doubt. 180 00:10:18 --> 00:10:21 The only person capable of not responding under those 181 00:10:21 --> 00:10:25 circumstances would be my 15 year-old son, right? 182 00:10:25 --> 00:10:27 You have perfected this within the realm of your own family, 183 00:10:27 --> 00:10:29 why did you get that grade? 184 00:10:29 --> 00:10:32 185 00:10:32 --> 00:10:35 But under other circumstances the social impact, the social 186 00:10:35 --> 00:10:41 pressure there is so strong by the time it's all directed at 187 00:10:41 --> 00:10:44 you that you got to respond. 188 00:10:44 --> 00:10:46 You can feel that social pressure. 189 00:10:46 --> 00:10:47 Actually, it was a great experiment. 190 00:10:47 --> 00:10:51 This was a great experiment because several people thought 191 00:10:51 --> 00:10:53 I might be headed their way. 192 00:10:53 --> 00:10:58 And I caught these great fleeting looks of relief from 193 00:10:58 --> 00:11:00 that side of the aisle when they realized, he's 194 00:11:00 --> 00:11:01 going that way. 195 00:11:01 --> 00:11:05 196 00:11:05 --> 00:11:06 That's immediacy. 197 00:11:06 --> 00:11:09 That's also actually, an illustration of the effect 198 00:11:09 --> 00:11:16 of this third factor, which is number. 199 00:11:16 --> 00:11:18 In the Milgram experiment this was not manipulated. 200 00:11:18 --> 00:11:22 Milgram experiment is a one-on-one experiment. 201 00:11:22 --> 00:11:25 There's Milgram or his surrogate exerting pressure 202 00:11:25 --> 00:11:27 on you, the subject. 203 00:11:27 --> 00:11:31 In that manufacturers consultants' study or in the 204 00:11:31 --> 00:11:34 Asch experiment, it is manipulated and you find that 205 00:11:34 --> 00:11:39 the more people that the authority is trying to spread 206 00:11:39 --> 00:11:44 his impact over, the less the impact on any given individual. 207 00:11:44 --> 00:11:51 Similarly here, if I ask you, 300 of you, what do you think? 208 00:11:51 --> 00:11:54 Each of you gets-- I don't know if this is actually a linear 209 00:11:54 --> 00:12:02 operation-- but roughly, 1/300 of my impact. 210 00:12:02 --> 00:12:06 But if I go and find her she gets all the impact and 211 00:12:06 --> 00:12:08 she has to say something. 212 00:12:08 --> 00:12:10 Actually, I think, that we could probably work out the 213 00:12:10 --> 00:12:14 equations here because there's also probably a distance 214 00:12:14 --> 00:12:15 equation, right? 215 00:12:15 --> 00:12:19 You know there are people, you out there in the cheap seats 216 00:12:19 --> 00:12:23 know there are people who sit out in the back because the 217 00:12:23 --> 00:12:26 possibilities of social impact are less out there. 218 00:12:26 --> 00:12:29 I can do what I want out there in the cheap seats. 219 00:12:29 --> 00:12:31 He can't see anything anyway. 220 00:12:31 --> 00:12:33 Look at all those computers up there, they're all 221 00:12:33 --> 00:12:34 surfing the web anyway. 222 00:12:34 --> 00:12:41 223 00:12:41 --> 00:12:44 But I don't know that anybody's ever looked at the distance 224 00:12:44 --> 00:12:50 effects in any sort of a direct way. 225 00:12:50 --> 00:12:56 There's a very nice study done at Ohio State some years 226 00:12:56 --> 00:12:59 ago during Greek Week. 227 00:12:59 --> 00:13:03 What the experimenters did was they hung out backstage because 228 00:13:03 --> 00:13:07 at Greek Week at Ohio State what you had to do was your 229 00:13:07 --> 00:13:11 fraternity had to get up in front of all these people, 230 00:13:11 --> 00:13:13 like a big stadium full of people and do something. 231 00:13:13 --> 00:13:17 Typically, something kind of embarrassing to show how cool 232 00:13:17 --> 00:13:19 you were and why everybody should join your fraternity. 233 00:13:19 --> 00:13:23 And what the experimenters noticed was that the number 234 00:13:23 --> 00:13:29 of guys in the group varied. 235 00:13:29 --> 00:13:32 You know, you sent out your one guy or you sent out this troop 236 00:13:32 --> 00:13:34 of 10 guys to do something. 237 00:13:34 --> 00:13:36 And so what they did was they simply asked people 238 00:13:36 --> 00:13:40 before they got on stage, how nervous are you? 239 00:13:40 --> 00:13:45 And the answer was, it was monotonically related to 240 00:13:45 --> 00:13:46 the number of people. 241 00:13:46 --> 00:13:50 If it was just you, you felt much more nervous than if there 242 00:13:50 --> 00:13:52 were 10 guys going out there. 243 00:13:52 --> 00:13:57 Now there's no real rational basis for that. 244 00:13:57 --> 00:14:00 You're not going to get hurt out there, but if you imagine 245 00:14:00 --> 00:14:03 that everybody in that stadium had a tomato you can kind 246 00:14:03 --> 00:14:07 of understand the social impact version of this. 247 00:14:07 --> 00:14:10 How many tomatoes are going to hit you if there's just 248 00:14:10 --> 00:14:11 one of you verses if there's 10 of you. 249 00:14:11 --> 00:14:16 It's going to diffuse in this case, very literal 250 00:14:16 --> 00:14:18 sort of impact. 251 00:14:18 --> 00:14:22 252 00:14:22 --> 00:14:31 Social impact theory has one of its roots actually in a 253 00:14:31 --> 00:14:40 lurid and media- circus murder from the 60's. 254 00:14:40 --> 00:14:43 In fact, a murder that I remember because it happened 255 00:14:43 --> 00:14:47 in New York City when I was growing up in the New Jersey 256 00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 suburbs and so it got a lot of coverage. 257 00:14:50 --> 00:14:53 This was the murder of a woman named Kitty Genovese, who was 258 00:14:53 --> 00:14:56 murdered in the courtyard of her fairly large 259 00:14:56 --> 00:14:58 apartment block. 260 00:14:58 --> 00:15:01 And it wasn't a quick business. 261 00:15:01 --> 00:15:05 The guy stabbed her and she sort of crawled off into the 262 00:15:05 --> 00:15:11 bushes and she didn't die and he came back and he finished. 263 00:15:11 --> 00:15:12 It was gross. 264 00:15:12 --> 00:15:15 You know, just disgusting murder. 265 00:15:15 --> 00:15:19 And the reason gross disgusting murders I mean, there are whole 266 00:15:19 --> 00:15:21 New York radio stations devoted to that. 267 00:15:21 --> 00:15:24 The reason this was a particularly salient one was it 268 00:15:24 --> 00:15:29 was clear afterwards that there were at least 40 or so people 269 00:15:29 --> 00:15:33 who had heard this and nobody had called the police, let 270 00:15:33 --> 00:15:35 alone intervene directly. 271 00:15:35 --> 00:15:39 Nobody had called and this generated a whole lot of sort 272 00:15:39 --> 00:15:45 of media brow beating and stuff about, was it the case that New 273 00:15:45 --> 00:15:50 Yorkers were just cold, heartless individuals? 274 00:15:50 --> 00:15:51 Or what? 275 00:15:51 --> 00:15:56 And rather like the Milgram experiment being motivated by 276 00:15:56 --> 00:16:04 the question of, were the Nazis special in some evil sense? 277 00:16:04 --> 00:16:09 Some of this work on social impact theory was based on the 278 00:16:09 --> 00:16:14 hypothesis that no, that this didn't illustrate the cruel, 279 00:16:14 --> 00:16:16 heartless nature of New Yorkers. 280 00:16:16 --> 00:16:18 What it illustrated was what happens when you're on the 281 00:16:18 --> 00:16:21 losing end up of what boils down to a social 282 00:16:21 --> 00:16:23 impact experiment. 283 00:16:23 --> 00:16:30 The problem was that she was diffusing her impact across 284 00:16:30 --> 00:16:32 this whole apartment building and when you interviewed 285 00:16:32 --> 00:16:35 people, people said over and over again, I thought somebody 286 00:16:35 --> 00:16:36 else would have called. 287 00:16:36 --> 00:16:39 I wasn't quite sure what was happening. 288 00:16:39 --> 00:16:42 Somebody else would have had a better look. 289 00:16:42 --> 00:16:47 They figured that somebody else would have taken care of it. 290 00:16:47 --> 00:16:49 291 00:16:49 --> 00:16:56 The notion is that had this been taking place in the front 292 00:16:56 --> 00:17:00 yard of your isolated farmstead on the Great Plains or 293 00:17:00 --> 00:17:03 something like that, you would've done something. 294 00:17:03 --> 00:17:05 Because you would have known nobody else could have. 295 00:17:05 --> 00:17:07 Is there any evidence for this? 296 00:17:07 --> 00:17:09 Well, yes actually. 297 00:17:09 --> 00:17:12 John Darley, who was one of my professors at Princeton, and 298 00:17:12 --> 00:17:16 Latane, who worked with him, did a series of beautiful 299 00:17:16 --> 00:17:19 experiments on this. 300 00:17:19 --> 00:17:21 Obviously they didn't go around murdering people in courtyards, 301 00:17:21 --> 00:17:28 but what they did was you'd come into the lab and lab had a 302 00:17:28 --> 00:17:30 whole bunch of isolation booths in it. 303 00:17:30 --> 00:17:32 Because except if you're in a weird experiment 304 00:17:32 --> 00:17:34 like that Asch three 305 00:17:34 --> 00:17:40 line experiment you want to have people doing 306 00:17:40 --> 00:17:41 the experiment alone. 307 00:17:41 --> 00:17:48 So a lot of labs are setup this way and so, you, the subject, 308 00:17:48 --> 00:17:51 would go into this little booth to do the experiment. 309 00:17:51 --> 00:17:53 And then something would happen. 310 00:17:53 --> 00:18:00 For instance, you'd hear crash and help. 311 00:18:00 --> 00:18:02 And the question was, who cares what you're doing in the booth? 312 00:18:02 --> 00:18:05 The only interesting question in this experiment is, 313 00:18:05 --> 00:18:08 how fast do you come out of the booth to help? 314 00:18:08 --> 00:18:12 The answer is it depends on how many other booths 315 00:18:12 --> 00:18:14 you think are occupied. 316 00:18:14 --> 00:18:16 And of course, Darley and Latane made very sure that 317 00:18:16 --> 00:18:18 you knew exactly how many booths were occupied. 318 00:18:18 --> 00:18:22 So if it was the case that you knew that you were all alone 319 00:18:22 --> 00:18:28 you were out there fast because the impact was on you. 320 00:18:28 --> 00:18:30 If there was going to be any help around it 321 00:18:30 --> 00:18:31 was going to be you. 322 00:18:31 --> 00:18:35 323 00:18:35 --> 00:18:38 If the booth was full-- if you knew that there were six other 324 00:18:38 --> 00:18:41 people in the experiment you were slower to come out 325 00:18:41 --> 00:18:44 because well, I'm not the biggest, strongest guy. 326 00:18:44 --> 00:18:47 Somebody else will help and I didn't take that Red 327 00:18:47 --> 00:18:50 Cross course or whatever. 328 00:18:50 --> 00:18:54 The responsibility gets diffused across 329 00:18:54 --> 00:18:55 multiple people. 330 00:18:55 --> 00:18:58 It's not just for helping. 331 00:18:58 --> 00:19:00 In another one of their entertaining versions, 332 00:19:00 --> 00:19:03 smoke comes into the lab. 333 00:19:03 --> 00:19:05 How fast do you get out of there? 334 00:19:05 --> 00:19:08 If you're alone, you're moving. 335 00:19:08 --> 00:19:15 If you're not alone, you're thinking, he's not moving. 336 00:19:15 --> 00:19:18 He must know something I don't know. 337 00:19:18 --> 00:19:20 And if he's not moving it's going to be 338 00:19:20 --> 00:19:21 embarrassing, right? 339 00:19:21 --> 00:19:24 If I go, fire! 340 00:19:24 --> 00:19:24 Fire! 341 00:19:24 --> 00:19:24 And I go running around. 342 00:19:24 --> 00:19:27 Everybody's going to think I'm a complete doofus. 343 00:19:27 --> 00:19:31 Now the downside, this is a beautiful experiment showing 344 00:19:31 --> 00:19:34 beautiful social impact effect-- the downside of this 345 00:19:34 --> 00:19:38 was this was done at Princeton where I eventually showed up as 346 00:19:38 --> 00:19:43 an undergraduate to do my nice boring research on 347 00:19:43 --> 00:19:45 visual perception. 348 00:19:45 --> 00:19:49 None of my subjects ever believed that I was doing a 349 00:19:49 --> 00:19:51 visual perception experiment. 350 00:19:51 --> 00:19:53 It didn't help that the room I had was one of these rooms with 351 00:19:53 --> 00:19:56 a half silvered mirror in it. 352 00:19:56 --> 00:19:58 So that I could look in and they couldn't look out. 353 00:19:58 --> 00:20:01 I didn't care I was planning to look in, it was left over 354 00:20:01 --> 00:20:03 from the social psych guys. 355 00:20:03 --> 00:20:05 But nobody ever believed I was there to do a regular just 356 00:20:05 --> 00:20:08 straight up and down-- I just want to know what color it 357 00:20:08 --> 00:20:10 looks like experiment. 358 00:20:10 --> 00:20:13 They all figured, you're watching me, right? 359 00:20:13 --> 00:20:17 Something weird's going to happen here. 360 00:20:17 --> 00:20:21 Oh, along those lines, didn't happen to me, but a word to the 361 00:20:21 --> 00:20:30 wise should you ever find yourself in an experiment in 362 00:20:30 --> 00:20:34 one of these rooms that looks like one wall is mirrored. 363 00:20:34 --> 00:20:36 If you're in a psych lab it's probably a half 364 00:20:36 --> 00:20:38 silvered mirror. 365 00:20:38 --> 00:20:41 The implication of a half silvered mirror is that that's 366 00:20:41 --> 00:20:44 not a mirror that you want to use to readjust large 367 00:20:44 --> 00:20:47 parts of your anatomy. 368 00:20:47 --> 00:20:49 369 00:20:49 --> 00:20:51 It was a great story. 370 00:20:51 --> 00:20:57 The poor grad student was embarrassed for life. 371 00:20:57 --> 00:21:01 He was a very, kind of straight up and down squarish kind of 372 00:21:01 --> 00:21:06 guy and anyway, it was very embarrassing. 373 00:21:06 --> 00:21:09 The grad student was the observer here and it 374 00:21:09 --> 00:21:10 was embarrassing. 375 00:21:10 --> 00:21:11 So don't do that. 376 00:21:11 --> 00:21:12 You don't want to embarrass people. 377 00:21:12 --> 00:21:15 378 00:21:15 --> 00:21:21 Oh, one last example, closer to a real world example of this, 379 00:21:21 --> 00:21:25 the great I think, it's another Darley and Latane, liquor 380 00:21:25 --> 00:21:25 store experiment. 381 00:21:25 --> 00:21:27 You go into a liquor store. 382 00:21:27 --> 00:21:28 You're hanging out in the liquor store. 383 00:21:28 --> 00:21:31 These two guys come in, they ask the guy in the liquor 384 00:21:31 --> 00:21:35 store, do you have any [UNINTELLIGIBLE] 385 00:21:35 --> 00:21:37 weird beer, some weird beer. 386 00:21:37 --> 00:21:41 The liquor store guy says, I don't have it up here. 387 00:21:41 --> 00:21:43 I might have some in the basement and he takes 388 00:21:43 --> 00:21:44 off for the basement. 389 00:21:44 --> 00:21:50 As soon as he's gone the two guys look at the case of Bud, 390 00:21:50 --> 00:21:53 say, haha, he'll never miss this. 391 00:21:53 --> 00:21:56 Pick up the case of Bud and leave. 392 00:21:56 --> 00:21:59 The guy comes up from the basement and asks, 393 00:21:59 --> 00:22:00 where are those guys? 394 00:22:00 --> 00:22:03 And the question is, everybody's a stooge 395 00:22:03 --> 00:22:06 in this experiment of course except you. 396 00:22:06 --> 00:22:08 The question is, what do you say? 397 00:22:08 --> 00:22:15 The answer is, if you are all alone 2/3 of you say, the 398 00:22:15 --> 00:22:19 guys-- they like stole the beer. 399 00:22:19 --> 00:22:25 But if you're with even one other person that drops to 1/3. 400 00:22:25 --> 00:22:28 Again, because of this diffusion of responsibility, 401 00:22:28 --> 00:22:31 you say to yourself, unconsciously, implicitly, or 402 00:22:31 --> 00:22:35 whatever-- if he's not saying anything, why should 403 00:22:35 --> 00:22:36 I say something? 404 00:22:36 --> 00:22:39 And so you're less likely to say something. 405 00:22:39 --> 00:22:42 Now the one good side of this, this is all sort 406 00:22:42 --> 00:22:43 of depressing, right? 407 00:22:43 --> 00:22:45 It sort of suggests that if we're going to hang out in 408 00:22:45 --> 00:22:48 large social groups, one of the downsides of this is that 409 00:22:48 --> 00:22:50 we're not going to look after each other terribly well. 410 00:22:50 --> 00:22:54 There's a useful inoculation effect here and I've 411 00:22:54 --> 00:22:55 just inoculated you. 412 00:22:55 --> 00:22:58 The fact that you know about this, there are experiments 413 00:22:58 --> 00:23:01 suggesting that the fact that you know about this makes you 414 00:23:01 --> 00:23:06 more likely, the next time the occasion arrives to discount 415 00:23:06 --> 00:23:08 the number of other people there. 416 00:23:08 --> 00:23:16 So now it is probably the case that if I do keel over somebody 417 00:23:16 --> 00:23:20 will rescue me, even though the responsibility for this 418 00:23:20 --> 00:23:21 has been diffused across. 419 00:23:21 --> 00:23:23 Of course, the reason is because somebody's going 420 00:23:23 --> 00:23:25 to think it's a fake. 421 00:23:25 --> 00:23:27 And they think, I'm going to win the prize if I 422 00:23:27 --> 00:23:31 collect him or something. 423 00:23:31 --> 00:23:33 But I'll try not to do the experiment at all. 424 00:23:33 --> 00:23:36 But in any case, there is evidence that once you know 425 00:23:36 --> 00:23:44 about these things you're less vulnerable to those effects 426 00:23:44 --> 00:23:48 and less likely to find yourself complying with an 427 00:23:48 --> 00:23:51 instruction that's wrong. 428 00:23:51 --> 00:23:56 I mean, look, you probably have a good intuitive feeling and I 429 00:23:56 --> 00:24:02 hope you're right that all over Iraq now, if you're holding 430 00:24:02 --> 00:24:06 prisoners you've now been inoculated against doing a 431 00:24:06 --> 00:24:08 whole round of stupid things. 432 00:24:08 --> 00:24:12 When the Abu Ghraib broke every social psychologist in the 433 00:24:12 --> 00:24:17 country was on some talking heads show on national public 434 00:24:17 --> 00:24:19 radio saying, we knew about this. 435 00:24:19 --> 00:24:21 We can explain this because that's exactly the sort of 436 00:24:21 --> 00:24:25 thing that's understandable in the context of these 437 00:24:25 --> 00:24:26 sorts of experiments. 438 00:24:26 --> 00:24:29 People doing things that they would never-- you know, what's 439 00:24:29 --> 00:24:32 the chance that you were back home before going off to Iraq 440 00:24:32 --> 00:24:33 saying, I'm going to go to Iraq. 441 00:24:33 --> 00:24:35 I'm going to get me some prisoners, put them in 442 00:24:35 --> 00:24:39 compromising sexual positions and get photos sent back home. 443 00:24:39 --> 00:24:44 No, nobody thinks about doing that, but the social situation 444 00:24:44 --> 00:24:47 that you find yourself in with perhaps an implicit command 445 00:24:47 --> 00:24:52 from somebody that loosens things up a bit 446 00:24:52 --> 00:24:54 produced the effect. 447 00:24:54 --> 00:24:58 The fact that this was a disaster has presumably now 448 00:24:58 --> 00:25:01 inoculated the system at least in the short-term against 449 00:25:01 --> 00:25:04 it happening again, at least we may hope so. 450 00:25:04 --> 00:25:10 451 00:25:10 --> 00:25:12 The practical sort of questions, like what do you do 452 00:25:12 --> 00:25:17 about prisoner abuse are one interesting line that grows 453 00:25:17 --> 00:25:19 from this sort of work. 454 00:25:19 --> 00:25:24 Another question, returning perhaps to this sort of more 455 00:25:24 --> 00:25:27 basic, psychological side of things is what I think I 456 00:25:27 --> 00:25:31 labeled on that handout as-- oh yes, the fundamental question. 457 00:25:31 --> 00:25:34 I decided if you could have the fundamental attribution error 458 00:25:34 --> 00:25:37 that I would invent for today's purposes, the 459 00:25:37 --> 00:25:40 fundamental question. 460 00:25:40 --> 00:25:43 But understand that that's my invented jargon and I won't put 461 00:25:43 --> 00:25:47 a question on the exam saying, what's the fundamental 462 00:25:47 --> 00:25:49 question? 463 00:25:49 --> 00:25:52 The question here is, who is this-- I keep talking about 464 00:25:52 --> 00:25:55 you-- you know, you can be pushed around by these laws 465 00:25:55 --> 00:25:56 of social impact and stuff like that. 466 00:25:56 --> 00:26:06 Who is this you, or I that can be so readily manipulated? 467 00:26:06 --> 00:26:11 There's a lot of folk psychology about it. 468 00:26:11 --> 00:26:13 469 00:26:13 --> 00:26:19 Well, look, we understand for instance, it is possible to 470 00:26:19 --> 00:26:26 control a car in such a way that the car kills somebody. 471 00:26:26 --> 00:26:31 It is also possible to train a dog in such a way that the dog 472 00:26:31 --> 00:26:35 kills somebody, and history tells us, it is possible to 473 00:26:35 --> 00:26:41 train human beings in such a way that a human being 474 00:26:41 --> 00:26:42 kills another human being. 475 00:26:42 --> 00:26:45 There's something fundamentally different, folk psychology 476 00:26:45 --> 00:26:47 understands that there's something fundamentally 477 00:26:47 --> 00:26:52 different about the responsibility involved here on 478 00:26:52 --> 00:26:58 the part of the car, the dog, and the human. 479 00:26:58 --> 00:27:03 And that seems to have to do with this sense of self. 480 00:27:03 --> 00:27:07 The sense of you as a self-aware, psychologically 481 00:27:07 --> 00:27:10 continuous overtime kind of entity. 482 00:27:10 --> 00:27:15 Is there anything useful that we can say about that? 483 00:27:15 --> 00:27:22 About that sense of you as a psychological self? 484 00:27:22 --> 00:27:24 All right, let's back into this a little bit. 485 00:27:24 --> 00:27:29 If you look at me, you know who I am, right? 486 00:27:29 --> 00:27:31 Pretty much, those of you who don't, it's getting a 487 00:27:31 --> 00:27:33 little late in the term. 488 00:27:33 --> 00:27:35 But you know, you recognize me. 489 00:27:35 --> 00:27:35 That's fine. 490 00:27:35 --> 00:27:40 Could I be a cunningly disguised actor who's 491 00:27:40 --> 00:27:43 impersonating Wolfe today? 492 00:27:43 --> 00:27:45 Yeah, that's possible. 493 00:27:45 --> 00:27:46 Be mildly interesting. 494 00:27:46 --> 00:27:48 OK fine. 495 00:27:48 --> 00:27:49 Switch. 496 00:27:49 --> 00:27:53 All right, let's suppose this is your mother or somebody else 497 00:27:53 --> 00:27:57 who you feel strongly about. 498 00:27:57 --> 00:27:59 You look at that person and the recognition 499 00:27:59 --> 00:28:02 has two pieces to it. 500 00:28:02 --> 00:28:07 More than presumably looking at just some person you know. 501 00:28:07 --> 00:28:12 There's a fairly strong affective component. 502 00:28:12 --> 00:28:14 Let's take the best case scenario here. 503 00:28:14 --> 00:28:17 You see your mother you recognize, that's my mother 504 00:28:17 --> 00:28:18 and I love my mother. 505 00:28:18 --> 00:28:20 OK, good. 506 00:28:20 --> 00:28:26 Let's suppose that something goes wrong with the 507 00:28:26 --> 00:28:28 affect piece of that. 508 00:28:28 --> 00:28:30 You know, there's some hunk of brain that's 509 00:28:30 --> 00:28:30 doing that for you. 510 00:28:30 --> 00:28:33 Something goes wrong with that little hunk of brain and you 511 00:28:33 --> 00:28:37 look at your mother and you say, I recognize my 512 00:28:37 --> 00:28:41 mother and I hate that. 513 00:28:41 --> 00:28:44 Or I don't feel anything would be another possibility. 514 00:28:44 --> 00:28:48 That doesn't make sense. 515 00:28:48 --> 00:28:50 This again, happening-- you're not sitting there with a little 516 00:28:50 --> 00:28:52 checklist saying, does this makes sense? 517 00:28:52 --> 00:28:56 You're toting up your current experience and asking 518 00:28:56 --> 00:28:58 implicitly, does this make sense? 519 00:28:58 --> 00:28:59 The answer is no. 520 00:28:59 --> 00:29:00 How could that be? 521 00:29:00 --> 00:29:04 Well, one possibility-- it sounds a little odd-- but 522 00:29:04 --> 00:29:08 one possibility is that's not really my mother. 523 00:29:08 --> 00:29:12 It looks like my mother, but actually she's been cunningly 524 00:29:12 --> 00:29:17 replaced by a fake. 525 00:29:17 --> 00:29:18 Why would that be? 526 00:29:18 --> 00:29:21 Well, you know, if it was my real mother, I love my mother. 527 00:29:21 --> 00:29:24 I don't love this, therefore it's a fake. 528 00:29:24 --> 00:29:27 Now that sounds weird, but it's a real neurological condition. 529 00:29:27 --> 00:29:28 It's called Capgras syndrome. 530 00:29:28 --> 00:29:32 I put a definition of it, I think, on the handout. 531 00:29:32 --> 00:29:40 532 00:29:40 --> 00:29:43 I always think of it as crab grass syndrome, but the 533 00:29:43 --> 00:29:49 Capgras is correct and it's the name of somebody. 534 00:29:49 --> 00:29:55 The disorder seems to be an effort to reconcile 535 00:29:55 --> 00:30:00 an unreconcilable pair of thoughts. 536 00:30:00 --> 00:30:04 537 00:30:04 --> 00:30:08 It sometimes travels with schizophrenia as a diagnosis. 538 00:30:08 --> 00:30:12 It may be the result of a brain injury. 539 00:30:12 --> 00:30:14 Typically, when there's a brain injury involved it looks like 540 00:30:14 --> 00:30:16 it's frontal lobe in some fashion. 541 00:30:16 --> 00:30:21 542 00:30:21 --> 00:30:24 It's relevant to the current discussion because you can 543 00:30:24 --> 00:30:28 have the same phenomenon for yourself. 544 00:30:28 --> 00:30:32 You look in the mirror, you say, that's not me. 545 00:30:32 --> 00:30:40 And you have a denial that you are you. 546 00:30:40 --> 00:30:47 It points out that even something as self- evident as-- 547 00:30:47 --> 00:30:52 is it a Dr. Seuss book-- I am I, where's that from? 548 00:30:52 --> 00:30:54 I can almost hear it. 549 00:30:54 --> 00:30:57 You haven't been reading your kid lit recently enough. 550 00:30:57 --> 00:30:59 AUDIENCE: Sam I Am. 551 00:30:59 --> 00:31:01 PROFESSOR: No, Sam I Am, but I don't think Sam 552 00:31:01 --> 00:31:05 has Capgras issues. 553 00:31:05 --> 00:31:08 I am I, and I can't remember what comes next. 554 00:31:08 --> 00:31:09 Oh well, doesn't matter. 555 00:31:09 --> 00:31:13 In any case, one might ask whether there is some little 556 00:31:13 --> 00:31:19 piece of neural tissue that is you in this sense. 557 00:31:19 --> 00:31:22 That if we were to go in and take out this one little bit 558 00:31:22 --> 00:31:25 of tissue that what we would discover is that you 559 00:31:25 --> 00:31:26 weren't you anymore. 560 00:31:26 --> 00:31:29 That you'd be-- yeah, you'd still have a memory, you'd 561 00:31:29 --> 00:31:30 still have this, you'd still have that, but you just 562 00:31:30 --> 00:31:35 wouldn't have this sense of being you. 563 00:31:35 --> 00:31:37 The short answer to that is there doesn't seem to be any 564 00:31:37 --> 00:31:40 specific lesion that does that. 565 00:31:40 --> 00:31:42 That used to be sort of the end of this part of the lecture. 566 00:31:42 --> 00:31:47 However, particularly with the advent of fMRI it's becoming 567 00:31:47 --> 00:31:54 increasingly clear that aspects of this sense of the self do 568 00:31:54 --> 00:31:58 have homes in the brain that can be localized to some 569 00:31:58 --> 00:32:05 extent, damaged in various odd neurological disorders, and 570 00:32:05 --> 00:32:09 give us some idea about how it is that this sense of 571 00:32:09 --> 00:32:11 self is assembled. 572 00:32:11 --> 00:32:15 So what I've done is I've actually modified a list from a 573 00:32:15 --> 00:32:19 recent article in Trends in Cognitive Science to come up 574 00:32:19 --> 00:32:22 with six aspects of the self. 575 00:32:22 --> 00:32:24 To give you some notion about how you could take this problem 576 00:32:24 --> 00:32:31 apart the first of these-- I must have just listed them 577 00:32:31 --> 00:32:32 on the handout, right? 578 00:32:32 --> 00:32:35 The first of these is representation. 579 00:32:35 --> 00:32:39 580 00:32:39 --> 00:32:42 Nobody, when asked about themselves, what kind 581 00:32:42 --> 00:32:45 of person are you? 582 00:32:45 --> 00:32:50 Nobody says, Oh, I am just a collection of reflexes 583 00:32:50 --> 00:32:53 responding to the current situation in the environment. 584 00:32:53 --> 00:32:56 Everybody has a list of you know, I'm an honest, 585 00:32:56 --> 00:32:57 loving individual. 586 00:32:57 --> 00:33:02 You may have some sort of trait or situational theory about how 587 00:33:02 --> 00:33:03 you came to be honest and loving and all that, but you've 588 00:33:03 --> 00:33:07 got a set of traits that you believe to be fundamental 589 00:33:07 --> 00:33:10 to you, at least at the present time. 590 00:33:10 --> 00:33:13 And that's your representation of yourself. 591 00:33:13 --> 00:33:19 That's your theory of you. 592 00:33:19 --> 00:33:23 You also, as part of that theory you have this 593 00:33:23 --> 00:33:24 notion of agency. 594 00:33:24 --> 00:33:30 That you are responsible and in fact, you are the cause 595 00:33:30 --> 00:33:34 of at least a reasonable number of your actions. 596 00:33:34 --> 00:33:39 You feel that you own those actions. 597 00:33:39 --> 00:33:44 That's part of what makes the Milgram experiment disturbing. 598 00:33:44 --> 00:33:50 It's not disturbing that a machine can produce 450 volt 599 00:33:50 --> 00:33:52 shocks of some schnook. 600 00:33:52 --> 00:33:56 It's disturbing that you can because you figured that you 601 00:33:56 --> 00:34:01 own that action and that if you did it that says 602 00:34:01 --> 00:34:03 something about you. 603 00:34:03 --> 00:34:07 That's this question of agency. 604 00:34:07 --> 00:34:13 Now not only do you own actions, you own your body. 605 00:34:13 --> 00:34:15 That's the aspect of ownership that I'm talking about 606 00:34:15 --> 00:34:18 in number 3 there. 607 00:34:18 --> 00:34:19 You own your body. 608 00:34:19 --> 00:34:22 Look, you also own your laptop. 609 00:34:22 --> 00:34:28 But you own your body in ways that are more profound than the 610 00:34:28 --> 00:34:30 way that you own your laptop. 611 00:34:30 --> 00:34:34 There's something fundamentally different about that. 612 00:34:34 --> 00:34:39 You're able to use this information that you've got 613 00:34:39 --> 00:34:42 about what kind of you you are. 614 00:34:42 --> 00:34:47 You're able to use that to perform new calculations, 615 00:34:47 --> 00:34:47 if you like. 616 00:34:47 --> 00:34:54 Like, do I like-- I don't know-- I need a new fruit. 617 00:34:54 --> 00:34:55 Durian. 618 00:34:55 --> 00:34:57 Do I like durian? 619 00:34:57 --> 00:34:59 Well, it's a fruit. 620 00:34:59 --> 00:35:00 I like fruits. 621 00:35:00 --> 00:35:03 It's supposed to smell like fermented garlic. 622 00:35:03 --> 00:35:04 Sounds [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. 623 00:35:04 --> 00:35:11 I can ask myself questions about my self based on 624 00:35:11 --> 00:35:12 my knowledge of myself. 625 00:35:12 --> 00:35:15 That's this evaluation aspect. 626 00:35:15 --> 00:35:19 Monitoring is sort of a sub-- well, I don't know if I would 627 00:35:19 --> 00:35:20 consider it to be a subset of that. 628 00:35:20 --> 00:35:26 Monitoring is keeping track of what you are doing and asking 629 00:35:26 --> 00:35:29 yourself how it's going. 630 00:35:29 --> 00:35:33 All right, so I'm self- monitoring here saying, 631 00:35:33 --> 00:35:35 am I really going to fall over today? 632 00:35:35 --> 00:35:36 No, I don't think so. 633 00:35:36 --> 00:35:38 I'm feeling pretty good just at the moment. 634 00:35:38 --> 00:35:40 That's monitoring. 635 00:35:40 --> 00:35:43 You're asking yourself, am I still awake? 636 00:35:43 --> 00:35:45 If you're answering yes, the answer is probably yes. 637 00:35:45 --> 00:35:50 If you answer no, that's a little weird. 638 00:35:50 --> 00:35:52 Or it's lucid dreaming or something. 639 00:35:52 --> 00:35:55 That's nice, too. 640 00:35:55 --> 00:35:58 And finally there's this sense of integration where the whole 641 00:35:58 --> 00:36:02 thing is tied together into a single self. 642 00:36:02 --> 00:36:06 There's been plenty of evidence that we've been accumulating 643 00:36:06 --> 00:36:08 during the course of the term that you are in some 644 00:36:08 --> 00:36:10 sense a committee. 645 00:36:10 --> 00:36:13 That you've got lots of semi-autonomous bits and pieces 646 00:36:13 --> 00:36:17 doing their thing and giving rise to you, but an important 647 00:36:17 --> 00:36:21 sense of you is that it doesn't feel that way to you. 648 00:36:21 --> 00:36:26 You don't think of yourself as a committee or a collective or 649 00:36:26 --> 00:36:30 what's that thing-- is Star Wars where the colonial 650 00:36:30 --> 00:36:34 organism-- is that the Borg? 651 00:36:34 --> 00:36:35 The Borg, right? 652 00:36:35 --> 00:36:36 You don't think you're the Borg. 653 00:36:36 --> 00:36:39 654 00:36:39 --> 00:36:46 You've got this sense that you are a unitary thing. 655 00:36:46 --> 00:36:50 Now each of these bits, while it's not the case that we can 656 00:36:50 --> 00:36:54 go in and somehow pull out the thing that is you, at least 657 00:36:54 --> 00:36:58 nobody's figured out what piece of brain that might be. 658 00:36:58 --> 00:37:07 Each of these aspects of you is subject to attack and to some 659 00:37:07 --> 00:37:12 degree at this point of localization in the brain. 660 00:37:12 --> 00:37:16 A clear example would be the question of ownership. 661 00:37:16 --> 00:37:19 I think I actually talked about some of this earlier when we 662 00:37:19 --> 00:37:20 were talking about perception. 663 00:37:20 --> 00:37:25 If you get a lesion in your right parietal lobe you will 664 00:37:25 --> 00:37:27 typically show symptoms of what's known as 665 00:37:27 --> 00:37:29 contralateral neglect. 666 00:37:29 --> 00:37:33 Contralateral meaning on the other side and what I think I 667 00:37:33 --> 00:37:36 talked about when I was talking about perception is the fact 668 00:37:36 --> 00:37:40 that you will ignore the left side of visual space and I 669 00:37:40 --> 00:37:42 think at that point I also mentioned that people ignore 670 00:37:42 --> 00:37:45 the left side of their body. 671 00:37:45 --> 00:37:47 You can have all sorts of varieties of neglect, but it 672 00:37:47 --> 00:37:51 can include ignoring the left side of your body to the point 673 00:37:51 --> 00:37:54 of denying-- I mean, you can see it, but you might 674 00:37:54 --> 00:37:57 deny that it's you. 675 00:37:57 --> 00:37:58 That's neglect. 676 00:37:58 --> 00:38:02 Interestingly, if you lesion the left parietal lobe you do 677 00:38:02 --> 00:38:08 not typically get neglect of the right side of the body. 678 00:38:08 --> 00:38:10 At least not in right-handed individuals. 679 00:38:10 --> 00:38:14 The best understanding I've ever come up with for that is 680 00:38:14 --> 00:38:17 that it may be that in right-handed individuals the 681 00:38:17 --> 00:38:20 right side of the body is represented more robustly or 682 00:38:20 --> 00:38:24 redundantly than the left side of the body and so a typical 683 00:38:24 --> 00:38:28 lesion that leaves you alive, at least, doesn't take out the 684 00:38:28 --> 00:38:32 entire sense that you own that side of the body. 685 00:38:32 --> 00:38:38 Whereas, a lesion of the less dominant, right hemisphere, 686 00:38:38 --> 00:38:41 left side of the body takes out this sense-- leaves you with 687 00:38:41 --> 00:38:44 the sense that you don't own the left side of 688 00:38:44 --> 00:38:45 your body at all. 689 00:38:45 --> 00:38:51 Now the flip side of this is our phantom limb phenomena. 690 00:38:51 --> 00:38:56 So suppose you lose the limb rather than the piece of brain 691 00:38:56 --> 00:38:58 that represents the limb. 692 00:38:58 --> 00:39:05 So if you lose a limb very typically-- well, the hunk 693 00:39:05 --> 00:39:07 of brain is still there. 694 00:39:07 --> 00:39:09 And the brain is a kind of a noisy place. 695 00:39:09 --> 00:39:13 What's going to happen if you've got activity that goes 696 00:39:13 --> 00:39:17 above some sort of threshold in the chunk of brain that 697 00:39:17 --> 00:39:19 used to represent this arm? 698 00:39:19 --> 00:39:24 The answer is, you're going to think you've still got an arm. 699 00:39:24 --> 00:39:27 And you may know at some nice cognitive or depressing 700 00:39:27 --> 00:39:30 cognitive level that you don't have that arm anymore, but it's 701 00:39:30 --> 00:39:33 going to feel like it's there. 702 00:39:33 --> 00:39:37 And it can be really annoying. 703 00:39:37 --> 00:39:39 Because phantom limbs do things like they get 704 00:39:39 --> 00:39:43 stuck in a position. 705 00:39:43 --> 00:39:44 Why's that annoying? 706 00:39:44 --> 00:39:47 Well, that's annoying because somebody with a phantom limb 707 00:39:47 --> 00:39:55 stuck like this walking out the door does things like this. 708 00:39:55 --> 00:39:57 Which is exactly what you would do of course if your arm was 709 00:39:57 --> 00:39:59 like in a sling out there because you don't want 710 00:39:59 --> 00:40:02 to bash into the door. 711 00:40:02 --> 00:40:06 But you know, you feel a bit of a fool if you're doing that 712 00:40:06 --> 00:40:10 with a limb that you know perfectly well isn't there. 713 00:40:10 --> 00:40:15 What do you do if you've got an itch in your phantom limb? 714 00:40:15 --> 00:40:19 Or actually pain in phantom limbs is an even more 715 00:40:19 --> 00:40:20 serious problem. 716 00:40:20 --> 00:40:22 Perfectly possible to have pain in your phantom limb. 717 00:40:22 --> 00:40:27 718 00:40:27 --> 00:40:30 It's not particularly easy to treat that. 719 00:40:30 --> 00:40:37 Now it turns that the brain, the brain, like nature, 720 00:40:37 --> 00:40:39 abhors a vacuum. 721 00:40:39 --> 00:40:45 And if you lose a limb the chunks of the brain surrounding 722 00:40:45 --> 00:40:50 the arm representation start to say, there's open 723 00:40:50 --> 00:40:52 territory here. 724 00:40:52 --> 00:40:54 We could take that. 725 00:40:54 --> 00:41:00 And over time the brain reorganizes and you get 726 00:41:00 --> 00:41:03 very curious reports about the limb changing. 727 00:41:03 --> 00:41:06 So the limb may shrivel up. 728 00:41:06 --> 00:41:10 There are reports where the guy comes back to the doctor 729 00:41:10 --> 00:41:11 and says, how you doing? 730 00:41:11 --> 00:41:12 I'm doing much better. 731 00:41:12 --> 00:41:16 Now instead of this stupid limb out here I just have fingers 732 00:41:16 --> 00:41:18 hanging off my shoulder. 733 00:41:18 --> 00:41:21 Which it's kind of weird, but since they're invisible 734 00:41:21 --> 00:41:22 it's not that weird. 735 00:41:22 --> 00:41:26 736 00:41:26 --> 00:41:30 What seems to happen is that neighboring stuff takes over 737 00:41:30 --> 00:41:37 what's near to the arm and the hand in the sensory 738 00:41:37 --> 00:41:41 homunculus, for example, are things like the face. 739 00:41:41 --> 00:41:46 And I put a reference to Ramachandran's entertaining, as 740 00:41:46 --> 00:41:51 I said, a book on the handout. 741 00:41:51 --> 00:41:57 Blakesley is a science writer, Ramachandran or Rama as he is 742 00:41:57 --> 00:42:00 usually called is-- well, I think of him as a vision 743 00:42:00 --> 00:42:02 researcher though, mostly these days he's gone off more into 744 00:42:02 --> 00:42:05 the sort of neurological work. 745 00:42:05 --> 00:42:13 But what he did was he was testing phantom limb patients. 746 00:42:13 --> 00:42:18 He would touch them on their face and ask, what do you feel? 747 00:42:18 --> 00:42:21 And the patient-- he's got interesting video actually of 748 00:42:21 --> 00:42:23 the patient saying, well, look of course, I can feel you 749 00:42:23 --> 00:42:26 touching my face, but the interesting thing is it also 750 00:42:26 --> 00:42:29 feels like you're touching my phantom thumb. 751 00:42:29 --> 00:42:31 You move over a little bit and now it feels like you're 752 00:42:31 --> 00:42:36 touching this phantom finger and so on. 753 00:42:36 --> 00:42:43 And you could actually map out for hand and arm across the 754 00:42:43 --> 00:42:46 surface of this guy's face. 755 00:42:46 --> 00:42:47 He loved it, by the way. 756 00:42:47 --> 00:42:51 Why did he think this was good? 757 00:42:51 --> 00:42:51 Yeah? 758 00:42:51 --> 00:42:52 AUDIENCE: He could itch it? 759 00:42:52 --> 00:42:54 PROFESSOR: Yeah, he knew where to scratch if it itched. 760 00:42:54 --> 00:42:55 And it worked. 761 00:42:55 --> 00:42:58 You get an itch on your phantom arm, he's now learned that he 762 00:42:58 --> 00:43:05 can scratch there and you get a degree of relief. 763 00:43:05 --> 00:43:09 764 00:43:09 --> 00:43:16 So the sense of ownership of the body can be localized in 765 00:43:16 --> 00:43:22 the brain to the things like these parietal structures. 766 00:43:22 --> 00:43:27 The degree to which the brain is plastic even in adulthood is 767 00:43:27 --> 00:43:32 a growing story where you find that the chunks of-- oh there 768 00:43:32 --> 00:43:35 was an fMRI study showing for instance, that if you look at 769 00:43:35 --> 00:43:40 violinists, the representation of the fingering hand in the 770 00:43:40 --> 00:43:42 brain is larger than the representation of 771 00:43:42 --> 00:43:44 the bowing hand. 772 00:43:44 --> 00:43:46 The fingering hand is learning a whole lot of stuff that the 773 00:43:46 --> 00:43:49 bowing hand doesn't need to and it ends up using more 774 00:43:49 --> 00:43:51 brain, apparently. 775 00:43:51 --> 00:43:55 All right, lets go back to this notion of the self as a bundle 776 00:43:55 --> 00:43:58 of personality attributes. 777 00:43:58 --> 00:44:01 And of your understanding of the implications 778 00:44:01 --> 00:44:02 of that knowledge. 779 00:44:02 --> 00:44:04 So these are the ideas of representation and evaluation 780 00:44:04 --> 00:44:07 from that earlier list. 781 00:44:07 --> 00:44:11 Does this have a home? 782 00:44:11 --> 00:44:14 Maybe is a reasonable answer. 783 00:44:14 --> 00:44:20 There is evidence from neuropathology that suggests 784 00:44:20 --> 00:44:25 disorders that specifically attack that aspect of the self. 785 00:44:25 --> 00:44:29 The disorder I'm thinking of is known as Pick's disease, 786 00:44:29 --> 00:44:32 which I probably labeled on the handout as a 787 00:44:32 --> 00:44:35 fronto-temporal dementia. 788 00:44:35 --> 00:44:37 Oh, it says that on the handout also. 789 00:44:37 --> 00:44:39 The way to think about it is sort of like an Alzheimer's 790 00:44:39 --> 00:44:40 of the personality. 791 00:44:40 --> 00:44:43 It's an Alzheimer's like disorder, it's a terrible 792 00:44:43 --> 00:44:49 diagnosis by the way because it typically is a very 793 00:44:49 --> 00:44:54 progressive-- quite rapidly progressive dementia that 794 00:44:54 --> 00:44:58 leaves you witless fairly quickly and dead fairly 795 00:44:58 --> 00:45:00 shortly thereafter. 796 00:45:00 --> 00:45:01 Very bad news. 797 00:45:01 --> 00:45:06 But it is of psychological interest because while the 798 00:45:06 --> 00:45:08 initial manifestations of Alzheimer's are often this 799 00:45:08 --> 00:45:12 sort of forgetfulness, the manifestations-- what gets your 800 00:45:12 --> 00:45:16 family to bring you to the doctor if you've got Pick's 801 00:45:16 --> 00:45:19 is a change in personality. 802 00:45:19 --> 00:45:21 I'll tell you a couple of anecdotes here. 803 00:45:21 --> 00:45:24 Here's a patient, 54 year-old woman described as a charming, 804 00:45:24 --> 00:45:28 dynamic real estate agent who goes from wearing expensive 805 00:45:28 --> 00:45:31 designer apparel to choosing cheap clothing and gaudy beads 806 00:45:31 --> 00:45:34 and asking strangers how much their clothes cost. 807 00:45:34 --> 00:45:38 Once a lover of French cuisine, she adopted a love of fast 808 00:45:38 --> 00:45:40 food, particularly, Taco Bell. 809 00:45:40 --> 00:45:43 Now look, if you like Taco Bell that doesn't mean you're going 810 00:45:43 --> 00:45:46 to die of dementia next week. 811 00:45:46 --> 00:45:51 The point is that what people notice, what your family 812 00:45:51 --> 00:45:55 typically notices is an unexplained change in that 813 00:45:55 --> 00:46:00 sort of list of attributes that makes you you. 814 00:46:00 --> 00:46:05 Or a patient, 63 year-old woman described as a well- dressed-- 815 00:46:05 --> 00:46:07 I don't know why they're all well- dressed-- well- dressed, 816 00:46:07 --> 00:46:10 lifelong political conservative who became an animal rights 817 00:46:10 --> 00:46:12 activist who hated conservatives, dressed in 818 00:46:12 --> 00:46:15 T-shirts and baggy pants and liked to say Republicans should 819 00:46:15 --> 00:46:19 be taken off the earth. 820 00:46:19 --> 00:46:24 So again, you can imagine somebody whose political 821 00:46:24 --> 00:46:30 opinions evolve, but you could also imagine that if your rock- 822 00:46:30 --> 00:46:36 ribbed Republican grandma was suddenly doing a kind of a 823 00:46:36 --> 00:46:40 late hippie thing and people might worry. 824 00:46:40 --> 00:46:43 825 00:46:43 --> 00:46:47 The lesions here seem to be typically at this stage in the 826 00:46:47 --> 00:46:56 right frontal lobe when you get these people into a scanner. 827 00:46:56 --> 00:47:08 828 00:47:08 --> 00:47:09 That was a mistake. 829 00:47:09 --> 00:47:11 Shouldn't try lecturing while you're drinking. 830 00:47:11 --> 00:47:15 831 00:47:15 --> 00:47:16 But no, you don't have to rescue me. 832 00:47:16 --> 00:47:19 833 00:47:19 --> 00:47:23 I think I'll be able to rescue myself. 834 00:47:23 --> 00:47:28 Anyway, so the loci that seem to be particularly important, 835 00:47:28 --> 00:47:31 but if I've been eating you should come up and 836 00:47:31 --> 00:47:34 then Heimlich me and stuff like that. 837 00:47:34 --> 00:47:37 I don't think the Heimlich maneuver works well for water. 838 00:47:37 --> 00:47:42 Anyway, the particular chunks of brain that seem, at least 839 00:47:42 --> 00:47:47 one recent study suggests are important here, are chunks of 840 00:47:47 --> 00:47:50 the frontal lobe lying on the midline, so your 841 00:47:50 --> 00:47:51 brain's like this. 842 00:47:51 --> 00:47:57 If you open it up that's the medial surface of the 843 00:47:57 --> 00:48:00 cerebral hemispheres. 844 00:48:00 --> 00:48:05 And there's evidence that locations sort of in there 845 00:48:05 --> 00:48:07 are what's important. 846 00:48:07 --> 00:48:10 What may be very important for putting together 847 00:48:10 --> 00:48:12 this sense of the self. 848 00:48:12 --> 00:48:18 I think I did-- oh yes, I put on the handout the notion that 849 00:48:18 --> 00:48:21 orbital medial prefrontal cortex might be a possible 850 00:48:21 --> 00:48:22 home for representation. 851 00:48:22 --> 00:48:26 I put that there just because it's got to be so much fun to 852 00:48:26 --> 00:48:30 go off and be able to talk about the OMPFC and to 853 00:48:30 --> 00:48:33 distinguish it from the DMPFC. 854 00:48:33 --> 00:48:37 I promise not to ask exactly that-- is representation 855 00:48:37 --> 00:48:42 localized in the OMPFC or DMPFC? 856 00:48:42 --> 00:48:46 This is for the subset of you who are dying to go off to med 857 00:48:46 --> 00:48:50 school and stuff like that and want practice using jargon that 858 00:48:50 --> 00:48:51 nobody else will understand. 859 00:48:51 --> 00:48:54 860 00:48:54 --> 00:48:55 Don't get me wrong, this is useful stuff. 861 00:48:55 --> 00:48:58 If you're interested in the topic the reference on the 862 00:48:58 --> 00:49:02 handout to-- did I put the reference on the handout? 863 00:49:02 --> 00:49:07 Yes, this comes from this Northoff and Bermpohl article 864 00:49:07 --> 00:49:09 way up at the top of page 2. 865 00:49:09 --> 00:49:11 By all means, go check it out. 866 00:49:11 --> 00:49:14 I just realized when I was thinking about lecturing about 867 00:49:14 --> 00:49:17 this that I knew that a whole bunch of people are going to go 868 00:49:17 --> 00:49:21 get deeply obsessive about worrying about whether they've 869 00:49:21 --> 00:49:24 got the OM versus the DM straight and I don't want 870 00:49:24 --> 00:49:26 people to spend a lot of time worrying about that. 871 00:49:26 --> 00:49:29 What I want you to come away with is the notion that there 872 00:49:29 --> 00:49:33 are a set of localizable bits of particularly frontal 873 00:49:33 --> 00:49:40 structures in the brain where you can make a case for each 874 00:49:40 --> 00:49:45 little bit being responsible for a little bit of this 875 00:49:45 --> 00:49:52 overall sense of the self. 876 00:49:52 --> 00:49:58 Well, one of the ones actually where the little chunk of 877 00:49:58 --> 00:50:00 brain-- again, I probably won't ask a question, but where 878 00:50:00 --> 00:50:03 little chunk of brain is quite clearly doing something 879 00:50:03 --> 00:50:06 specific for you is the anterior cingulate. 880 00:50:06 --> 00:50:11 Again, and the midline of the brain or the medial surface of 881 00:50:11 --> 00:50:16 the cerebral hemispheres are wrapped around the corpus 882 00:50:16 --> 00:50:18 callosum, that big bundle of fibers that connects the 883 00:50:18 --> 00:50:19 two halves of the brain. 884 00:50:19 --> 00:50:23 The cool thing about that is that it really looks like it's 885 00:50:23 --> 00:50:26 serving a monitoring role. 886 00:50:26 --> 00:50:29 What it does is it's the thing that's siting there checking, 887 00:50:29 --> 00:50:31 am I making a mistake here? 888 00:50:31 --> 00:50:34 889 00:50:34 --> 00:50:40 If you're in our lab I can feel my anterior cingulate light up 890 00:50:40 --> 00:50:43 because if you're in the lab and you're doing a whole bunch 891 00:50:43 --> 00:50:48 of visual search experiments and you hit the no key just as 892 00:50:48 --> 00:50:54 you see the target-- that "Oh dear" phenomenon. 893 00:50:54 --> 00:50:56 Where you can just feel yourself saying a word you 894 00:50:56 --> 00:50:59 shouldn't say, that's your anterior cingulate 895 00:50:59 --> 00:51:01 error monitoring. 896 00:51:01 --> 00:51:01 How do we know that? 897 00:51:01 --> 00:51:04 Because if you do these experiments in a scanner 898 00:51:04 --> 00:51:07 when people make errors that lights up. 899 00:51:07 --> 00:51:10 It's really quite lovely. 900 00:51:10 --> 00:51:18 It's also, in the practical advice side of the course, it 901 00:51:18 --> 00:51:21 turns out at least from a couple of things that I 902 00:51:21 --> 00:51:25 read that the anterior cingulate is particularly 903 00:51:25 --> 00:51:28 vulnerable to alcohol. 904 00:51:28 --> 00:51:29 What's that mean? 905 00:51:29 --> 00:51:33 Well, it means have a few drinks and the chunk of your 906 00:51:33 --> 00:51:40 brain that's saying, "Is this a mistake?" takes a vacation. 907 00:51:40 --> 00:51:44 So have a few drinks, go down to Kenmore Square to celebrate 908 00:51:44 --> 00:51:47 the Red Sox-- look, there's a car. 909 00:51:47 --> 00:51:50 Could we flip that over? 910 00:51:50 --> 00:51:51 Yeah, we could do that. 911 00:51:51 --> 00:51:53 Would that be a mistake? 912 00:51:53 --> 00:51:58 I don't know, the guys asleep so don't wake him up. 913 00:51:58 --> 00:52:01 Or you know, go and drink a few things and should I 914 00:52:01 --> 00:52:04 sleep with that person? 915 00:52:04 --> 00:52:08 I don't know, we'll ask in the morning. 916 00:52:08 --> 00:52:11 Well, I guess the answer was no, I shouldn't have. 917 00:52:11 --> 00:52:19 But anyways, next time you are inclined to imbibe something 918 00:52:19 --> 00:52:23 stronger than Poland Spring Water just think of your little 919 00:52:23 --> 00:52:32 anterior cingulate that's bathing in alcohol and then you 920 00:52:32 --> 00:52:36 can go drive down the highway and say, "Would it be a mistake 921 00:52:36 --> 00:52:40 to pass this semi on a wet road tonight? 922 00:52:40 --> 00:52:44 Well, I don't know, let's find out." So you want to keep that 923 00:52:44 --> 00:52:45 piece of your brain and you want to keep it more 924 00:52:45 --> 00:52:46 or less functional. 925 00:52:46 --> 00:52:50 926 00:52:50 --> 00:52:56 The conscious you, this notion of integration 927 00:52:56 --> 00:53:00 seems to have something to do with the notion. 928 00:53:00 --> 00:53:02 What's it mean that it's all one thing? 929 00:53:02 --> 00:53:06 In some way this is all tied into the fact that you feel 930 00:53:06 --> 00:53:15 like a single, self-reflective, conscious entity. 931 00:53:15 --> 00:53:19 Well, one interesting question is, are you conscious? 932 00:53:19 --> 00:53:20 Well, sure. 933 00:53:20 --> 00:53:23 Now that I asked you. 934 00:53:23 --> 00:53:27 Were you conscious before I asked you? 935 00:53:27 --> 00:53:30 Oh maybe. 936 00:53:30 --> 00:53:33 This is what's known in the philosophical literature as the 937 00:53:33 --> 00:53:36 refrigerator light problem. 938 00:53:36 --> 00:53:38 Is the refrigerator light on when the 939 00:53:38 --> 00:53:40 refrigerator is closed? 940 00:53:40 --> 00:53:41 AUDIENCE: No. 941 00:53:41 --> 00:53:45 PROFESSOR: Well you know that the answer is really no 942 00:53:45 --> 00:53:49 and look-- even most philosophers know that. 943 00:53:49 --> 00:53:55 But that's because you have some sort of a deeper 944 00:53:55 --> 00:53:59 understanding of refrigerators. 945 00:53:59 --> 00:54:01 But if you're just faced with this thing and the question 946 00:54:01 --> 00:54:04 is, is the light on when the door is closed? 947 00:54:04 --> 00:54:05 How would you know? 948 00:54:05 --> 00:54:07 Open the door, light's on. 949 00:54:07 --> 00:54:09 It's always on. 950 00:54:09 --> 00:54:12 Every time I open it up the light is on, it's cool. 951 00:54:12 --> 00:54:16 952 00:54:16 --> 00:54:18 People seriously entertain the possibility that 953 00:54:18 --> 00:54:19 consciousness is like that. 954 00:54:19 --> 00:54:22 It feels continuous because every time you ask yourself in 955 00:54:22 --> 00:54:24 any fashion about whether or not you're conscious, not 956 00:54:24 --> 00:54:28 counting the guys who were out cold and well, they can't ask 957 00:54:28 --> 00:54:31 themselves anyway, you feel conscious, right? 958 00:54:31 --> 00:54:35 959 00:54:35 --> 00:54:40 The closest you can get to a sort of a feeling that there 960 00:54:40 --> 00:54:46 might be an issue here is there's a phenomenon known to 961 00:54:46 --> 00:54:50 long haul drivers where you're driving down the interstate, 962 00:54:50 --> 00:54:54 you get from point A to point B and you have no recollection 963 00:54:54 --> 00:54:56 of having done that. 964 00:54:56 --> 00:54:57 The good thing is if you're doing that while you're asleep. 965 00:54:57 --> 00:55:00 Asleep is a different problem. 966 00:55:00 --> 00:55:08 It's a very serious problem, but the greatest number of car 967 00:55:08 --> 00:55:12 accidents per mile is not like in downtown Boston where you 968 00:55:12 --> 00:55:13 would think it ought to be. 969 00:55:13 --> 00:55:19 But it's like way out West because 600 miles, the 970 00:55:19 --> 00:55:22 road doesn't even turn. 971 00:55:22 --> 00:55:27 The problem is the 601 mile it makes a 10 degrees slant off to 972 00:55:27 --> 00:55:29 one side and you're semi doesn't. 973 00:55:29 --> 00:55:32 And you're straight into the sage brush or something like 974 00:55:32 --> 00:55:33 that because you've gone to sleep. 975 00:55:33 --> 00:55:36 But the less dire version of this is you can get into a sort 976 00:55:36 --> 00:55:39 of a "nnnnn" kind of state driving down the interstate 977 00:55:39 --> 00:55:43 where you really seem to lose a chunk of time and you 978 00:55:43 --> 00:55:44 ask yourself, was I conscious during that? 979 00:55:44 --> 00:55:47 I must have been awake because I didn't crash the car, 980 00:55:47 --> 00:55:50 but there's nothing there. 981 00:55:50 --> 00:55:52 Whether or not you were conscious or not I can't 982 00:55:52 --> 00:55:54 speak to because of this refrigerator light problem. 983 00:55:54 --> 00:55:57 If we asked you while you were in the midst of the 984 00:55:57 --> 00:55:59 state, are you conscious? 985 00:55:59 --> 00:56:00 You'd say, "Of course I'm conscious. 986 00:56:00 --> 00:56:04 That's a stupid question." 987 00:56:04 --> 00:56:10 If you're interested, one of the projects-- one of the more 988 00:56:10 --> 00:56:12 interesting neuroscience projects out there is to decide 989 00:56:12 --> 00:56:15 which bits of brain are important for consciousness. 990 00:56:15 --> 00:56:19 Christof Koch at Caltech has done a lot of work on this, 991 00:56:19 --> 00:56:23 wrote an interesting new book, which I would've put on the 992 00:56:23 --> 00:56:25 handout if I could have quickly found the reference, but if you 993 00:56:25 --> 00:56:30 go to my website you can find my one page review of the 994 00:56:30 --> 00:56:32 book-- which tells you what the books about without you 995 00:56:32 --> 00:56:34 actually having to read it, but it would also give you the 996 00:56:34 --> 00:56:37 reference to the book. 997 00:56:37 --> 00:56:40 But Christof refers to the neural correlate 998 00:56:40 --> 00:56:41 of consciousness. 999 00:56:41 --> 00:56:43 The question is, which bits of brain do you 1000 00:56:43 --> 00:56:45 need to be conscious? 1001 00:56:45 --> 00:56:49 And then you can go on from there to ask, what that 1002 00:56:49 --> 00:56:52 consciousness might actually be for? 1003 00:56:52 --> 00:56:55 It's very clear that we can do an awful lot of stuff 1004 00:56:55 --> 00:56:58 without being conscious. 1005 00:56:58 --> 00:57:01 This is an important wrinkle on this issue of agency. 1006 00:57:01 --> 00:57:03 There's an interesting body of research that suggests that 1007 00:57:03 --> 00:57:07 when you feel like you are making a decision-- which one 1008 00:57:07 --> 00:57:12 of these things do you want-- the brain, we can pick up a 1009 00:57:12 --> 00:57:14 lecture of physiological indications that you have made 1010 00:57:14 --> 00:57:17 the decision before you, the owner of the brain, know that 1011 00:57:17 --> 00:57:18 you've made the decision. 1012 00:57:18 --> 00:57:22 1013 00:57:22 --> 00:57:25 One can wrap oneself in philosophical knots trying to 1014 00:57:25 --> 00:57:29 ask yourself what that means about the agency of your acts, 1015 00:57:29 --> 00:57:33 are you-- the conscious you-- committing those acts or are 1016 00:57:33 --> 00:57:34 you merely reporting on them afterwards? 1017 00:57:34 --> 00:57:37 But there is this interesting data that suggests that you 1018 00:57:37 --> 00:57:39 have made the decision before you know that you've 1019 00:57:39 --> 00:57:42 made the decision. 1020 00:57:42 --> 00:57:52 In any case, what we can't find is clear evidence of a single, 1021 00:57:52 --> 00:57:56 little piece of neural tissue that is you. 1022 00:57:56 --> 00:57:59 No single lesion seems to leave everything else 1023 00:57:59 --> 00:58:01 intact, but take you out. 1024 00:58:01 --> 00:58:04 So what I want to do now is to switch from neuropathology 1025 00:58:04 --> 00:58:05 to psychopathology. 1026 00:58:05 --> 00:58:08 1027 00:58:08 --> 00:58:14 But I will do that after you take a brief stretch here 1028 00:58:14 --> 00:58:17 and then we'll talk about that a bit. 1029 00:58:17 --> 00:58:41 [INTERPOSING VOICES] 1030 00:58:41 --> 00:58:44 AUDIENCE: I had a question about the syndrome that you 1031 00:58:44 --> 00:58:46 talked about where you can't recognize who you are. 1032 00:58:46 --> 00:58:50 Is it visual? 1033 00:58:50 --> 00:58:52 Like so if you look in the mirror-- 1034 00:58:52 --> 00:58:52 PROFESSOR: Oh, no. 1035 00:58:52 --> 00:58:56 You know perfectly well looking in the mirror that that 1036 00:58:56 --> 00:58:58 looks exactly like me. 1037 00:58:58 --> 00:59:04 The weird thing is it just isn't me. 1038 00:59:04 --> 00:59:08 If I had a photograph of you, you would know that was you 1039 00:59:08 --> 00:59:10 and you would also know that it wasn't you. 1040 00:59:10 --> 00:59:15 I mean, it's not you, you're this person right here. 1041 00:59:15 --> 00:59:17 Now if I had a photograph of your mother you would know that 1042 00:59:17 --> 00:59:22 this was a representation of your mother, but wasn't 1043 00:59:22 --> 00:59:24 necessarily your mother, per se. 1044 00:59:24 --> 00:59:27 The weird thing about Capgras is if I had your mother here 1045 00:59:27 --> 00:59:31 you would have the same sort of sense of it being it looks like 1046 00:59:31 --> 00:59:35 mother, but it just isn't. 1047 00:59:35 --> 00:59:39 It's one of those things where it'd be cool if you could have 1048 00:59:39 --> 00:59:42 this reversibly just to know what it felt like. 1049 00:59:42 --> 00:59:45 It'd be very hard to wrap you brain around what 1050 00:59:45 --> 00:59:49 that particular delusion must feel like. 1051 00:59:49 --> 00:59:52 There are visual disorders where you don't recognize 1052 00:59:52 --> 00:59:54 faces, that's prosopagnosia. 1053 00:59:54 --> 00:59:55 I think I talked about earlier. 1054 00:59:55 --> 00:59:59 Where I look at you, I say, two eyes, nose, mouth, it's a face. 1055 00:59:59 --> 01:00:00 Whose is it? 1056 01:00:00 --> 01:00:02 I don't know. 1057 01:00:02 --> 01:00:06 This is in some sense the opposite, a complement of that. 1058 01:00:06 --> 01:00:09 I know exactly who it is, I just don't believe 1059 01:00:09 --> 01:00:12 it in some sense. 1060 01:00:12 --> 01:00:16 AUDIENCE: Well I mean, if I have that disorder and 1061 01:00:16 --> 01:00:17 [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]. 1062 01:00:17 --> 01:00:20 PROFESSOR: Your hand. 1063 01:00:20 --> 01:00:20 That's interesting. 1064 01:00:20 --> 01:00:24 I'm not sure I've ever read anything about whether people 1065 01:00:24 --> 01:00:29 deny their own-- in neglect you would deny it was your own 1066 01:00:29 --> 01:00:32 hand, but in neglect typically the hand would be paralyzed. 1067 01:00:32 --> 01:00:34 You wouldn't be doing anything with it because of the 1068 01:00:34 --> 01:00:36 nature of the stroke. 1069 01:00:36 --> 01:00:39 1070 01:00:39 --> 01:00:40 I don't know. 1071 01:00:40 --> 01:00:44 I thought you were going to ask whether I could look at that 1072 01:00:44 --> 01:00:47 water bottle and deny it was my water bottle and it doesn't 1073 01:00:47 --> 01:00:49 seem to extend to objects. 1074 01:00:49 --> 01:00:54 It seems to be a very person specific kind of delusion. 1075 01:00:54 --> 01:00:58 That it's about people and about people with whom you have 1076 01:00:58 --> 01:01:01 strong affective relations. 1077 01:01:01 --> 01:01:05 Very sad kind of thing because you read these anecdotes about 1078 01:01:05 --> 01:01:08 how would you feel because typically somebody is in tough 1079 01:01:08 --> 01:01:12 shape for one reason or another when they've got this disorder. 1080 01:01:12 --> 01:01:15 So you're visiting your kid in hospital said he's busy 1081 01:01:15 --> 01:01:19 declaring you're an evil agent who's disguised as Daddy. 1082 01:01:19 --> 01:01:23 You know, that must be heartbreaking. 1083 01:01:23 --> 01:01:27 And I remember reading one account where Daddy, in an 1084 01:01:27 --> 01:01:31 effort to cure the kid, comes back and declares. 1085 01:01:31 --> 01:01:35 I did it, I killed him. 1086 01:01:35 --> 01:01:38 And I think the story was it provided some temporary relief 1087 01:01:38 --> 01:01:41 and then it didn't stick. 1088 01:01:41 --> 01:01:44 But very weird stuff and very, small, it's rare stuff; 1089 01:01:44 --> 01:01:45 small literature. 1090 01:01:45 --> 01:01:52 1091 01:01:52 --> 01:01:56 I just realized I suppose it didn't matter, but I just 1092 01:01:56 --> 01:02:00 realized that if I'm going to mike myself having discussions 1093 01:02:00 --> 01:02:03 during the break could be a little risky. 1094 01:02:03 --> 01:02:05 I got to make sure that I'm just talking about the details 1095 01:02:05 --> 01:02:08 of Capgras syndrome, which we were as opposed to having a 1096 01:02:08 --> 01:02:14 discussion about-- I hate my TA. 1097 01:02:14 --> 01:02:16 Oh yeah, what's the name of your TA? 1098 01:02:16 --> 01:02:20 1099 01:02:20 --> 01:02:20 That wouldn't work. 1100 01:02:20 --> 01:02:25 Or I love my TA, and nevermind. 1101 01:02:25 --> 01:02:29 Let's get onto psychopathology-- 1102 01:02:29 --> 01:02:32 my own and others. 1103 01:02:32 --> 01:02:35 The first thing to do is to say something about the distinction 1104 01:02:35 --> 01:02:37 between a neuropathology and a psychopathology, which might 1105 01:02:37 --> 01:02:42 seem a little weird in a course that began by asserting the 1106 01:02:42 --> 01:02:44 mind is what the brain does. 1107 01:02:44 --> 01:02:49 I mean, in what sense can you talk about neuropathology on 1108 01:02:49 --> 01:02:52 one side and a psychopathology on the other? 1109 01:02:52 --> 01:02:56 I decided today and I'll see if I still think tomorrow that 1110 01:02:56 --> 01:03:00 it's a useful distinction to think of it sort of like a 1111 01:03:00 --> 01:03:03 hardware bugs versus software bugs. 1112 01:03:03 --> 01:03:09 Same computer not working in some interesting fashion or 1113 01:03:09 --> 01:03:12 other, but you can have a problem because some piece 1114 01:03:12 --> 01:03:15 of the equipment is broken. 1115 01:03:15 --> 01:03:19 And you can have a problem because the program running 1116 01:03:19 --> 01:03:23 over that equipment is not working properly. 1117 01:03:23 --> 01:03:26 Now I realize as I'm saying that that there is one problem 1118 01:03:26 --> 01:03:31 with that analogy, which is that if I have a hardware bug 1119 01:03:31 --> 01:03:33 I'm going to be inclined to fix the hardware and if I have a 1120 01:03:33 --> 01:03:37 software bug I'm going to be inclined to fix the software. 1121 01:03:37 --> 01:03:40 That distinction is by no means as clear in psychopathology 1122 01:03:40 --> 01:03:42 versus neuropathology. 1123 01:03:42 --> 01:03:48 So you can have a brain lesion where the treatment is 1124 01:03:48 --> 01:03:52 essentially behavioral because you want to do some sort of 1125 01:03:52 --> 01:03:55 retraining of the brain that you've got left and you can 1126 01:03:55 --> 01:03:58 have a psychopathology, a problem if you like with the 1127 01:03:58 --> 01:04:00 way that the software is running where the intervention 1128 01:04:00 --> 01:04:04 is to give somebody a drug that's doing its work 1129 01:04:04 --> 01:04:05 essentially on the hardware. 1130 01:04:05 --> 01:04:13 So the metaphor is not perfect, but it gets at something. 1131 01:04:13 --> 01:04:13 Psychopathologies are... 1132 01:04:13 --> 01:04:17 1133 01:04:17 --> 01:04:19 it's worth thinking of as problems with the way that the 1134 01:04:19 --> 01:04:24 program is using the brain. 1135 01:04:24 --> 01:04:26 Are there psychopathologies that specifically 1136 01:04:26 --> 01:04:29 attack the self? 1137 01:04:29 --> 01:04:30 The answer is yes. 1138 01:04:30 --> 01:04:32 Those are what's known in the trade as 1139 01:04:32 --> 01:04:34 dissociative disorders. 1140 01:04:34 --> 01:04:42 Much beloved of various and sundry literary outlets, so the 1141 01:04:42 --> 01:04:47 cleanest one if you like is psychogenic amnesia or 1142 01:04:47 --> 01:04:47 depersonalization. 1143 01:04:47 --> 01:04:51 1144 01:04:51 --> 01:04:56 Occasionally resorted to by soap opera writers who have 1145 01:04:56 --> 01:04:59 backed themselves into a corner. 1146 01:04:59 --> 01:05:02 That's the get a knock on the head and I don't know who I 1147 01:05:02 --> 01:05:05 am, I don't know where I am. 1148 01:05:05 --> 01:05:08 And that allows you to do a certain amount of plot 1149 01:05:08 --> 01:05:11 twiddling as needed. 1150 01:05:11 --> 01:05:14 Oh, let me say a word about-- now that we're talking about 1151 01:05:14 --> 01:05:18 psychopathology-- I need to say something about psychiatric 1152 01:05:18 --> 01:05:26 hypochondria, which is psychogenic amnesia. 1153 01:05:26 --> 01:05:30 Very rare, it's not going to happen to you. 1154 01:05:30 --> 01:05:32 It's not even going to happen to you after I tell you we 1155 01:05:32 --> 01:05:34 don't really know what the cause is, but the best we know 1156 01:05:34 --> 01:05:38 about it is that it's a response to severe stress. 1157 01:05:38 --> 01:05:43 The problem is, you say that and people say "huhh!". 1158 01:05:43 --> 01:05:45 I'm under more stress than I've ever been all my life. 1159 01:05:45 --> 01:05:49 I'm going to wake up tomorrow and not going to know who I am. 1160 01:05:49 --> 01:05:51 Not going to happen, very rare stuff. 1161 01:05:51 --> 01:05:57 But this is a close kin, this is the intro psych kin, to med 1162 01:05:57 --> 01:06:01 student hypochondria which is a very real known phenomenon. 1163 01:06:01 --> 01:06:04 Med students are always coming down with spectacularly 1164 01:06:04 --> 01:06:07 rare diseases, at least in their own minds. 1165 01:06:07 --> 01:06:11 You hear about some new set of symptoms of some weird tropical 1166 01:06:11 --> 01:06:16 disorder and you can kind of-- is that like a tape worm 1167 01:06:16 --> 01:06:17 right about there? 1168 01:06:17 --> 01:06:20 They worry about these things a lot. 1169 01:06:20 --> 01:06:23 And in the same way that they probably don't have that tape 1170 01:06:23 --> 01:06:26 worm because you just don't pick them up at 1171 01:06:26 --> 01:06:28 Harvard Med, mostly. 1172 01:06:28 --> 01:06:31 You shouldn't worry about whether tomorrow you're 1173 01:06:31 --> 01:06:34 going to wake up without knowing who you are. 1174 01:06:34 --> 01:06:37 Even though you may be under a certain degree of stress. 1175 01:06:37 --> 01:06:41 That said, so let me tell you one case. 1176 01:06:41 --> 01:06:46 A woman wakes up-- a woman is found, actually in a bad state 1177 01:06:46 --> 01:06:50 under the bushes in Florida somewhere back in 1980. 1178 01:06:50 --> 01:06:53 Doesn't know who she is. 1179 01:06:53 --> 01:06:57 Can't remember anything about her past. 1180 01:06:57 --> 01:07:02 And eventually, in an effort to figure out who she is and they 1181 01:07:02 --> 01:07:07 call her Jane Doe of course, and then take her on morning TV 1182 01:07:07 --> 01:07:11 and ask basically, does anybody know who I am? 1183 01:07:11 --> 01:07:15 And immediately got a string of phone calls that suggested that 1184 01:07:15 --> 01:07:16 they knew exactly who she was. 1185 01:07:16 --> 01:07:23 She had apparently left Ohio a few years earlier and moved to 1186 01:07:23 --> 01:07:24 Florida and then disappeared. 1187 01:07:24 --> 01:07:27 Her parents hadn't heard from her for several years. 1188 01:07:27 --> 01:07:30 And unclear what happened in this particular case, 1189 01:07:30 --> 01:07:32 atypically she did not recover her memory. 1190 01:07:32 --> 01:07:37 Typically, these global amnesias are transient. 1191 01:07:37 --> 01:07:39 In her case, at least at the time of the report I was 1192 01:07:39 --> 01:07:43 reading, she had not recovered her memory. 1193 01:07:43 --> 01:07:45 That's the most global, if you like, of these 1194 01:07:45 --> 01:07:47 dissociative disorders. 1195 01:07:47 --> 01:07:50 1196 01:07:50 --> 01:07:58 Fugue states, from the Latin word "to fly" are related. 1197 01:07:58 --> 01:08:02 Again, it's presumed to be a response to severe stress. 1198 01:08:02 --> 01:08:05 There's a very nice case described by William James 1199 01:08:05 --> 01:08:09 in his great Principles of Psychology-- the best intro 1200 01:08:09 --> 01:08:14 text ever written in 1890, so we can't still use it. 1201 01:08:14 --> 01:08:18 But he talks about the Reverend Ansel Bourne who took some 1202 01:08:18 --> 01:08:19 money out of the bank in Providence, Rhode 1203 01:08:19 --> 01:08:22 Island and vanished. 1204 01:08:22 --> 01:08:28 He reappeared-- well, he woke up one morning in, I think, 1205 01:08:28 --> 01:08:33 Norristown, Pennsylvania and discovered that for the past 1206 01:08:33 --> 01:08:37 two months he had been running a store in the name of A.J. 1207 01:08:37 --> 01:08:39 Brown. 1208 01:08:39 --> 01:08:44 He had no recollection of the preceding two months. 1209 01:08:44 --> 01:08:48 Hypnosis turns out to be a useful, if somewhat mysterious 1210 01:08:48 --> 01:08:49 tool in such cases. 1211 01:08:49 --> 01:08:52 And James, who was very interested in hypnosis found 1212 01:08:52 --> 01:08:55 that under hypnosis he could sort of call up either 1213 01:08:55 --> 01:08:56 Brown or Bourne. 1214 01:08:56 --> 01:09:01 They didn't seem to know each other, but what seems to have 1215 01:09:01 --> 01:09:04 happened was-- that the characteristic of a fugue state 1216 01:09:04 --> 01:09:07 is that you disappear to another location and pick 1217 01:09:07 --> 01:09:08 up another identity. 1218 01:09:08 --> 01:09:10 Now one of the interesting things about this and it's 1219 01:09:10 --> 01:09:15 actually a theme that will recur through a lot of 1220 01:09:15 --> 01:09:17 discussions of psychopathology. 1221 01:09:17 --> 01:09:22 Is that a fugue state is in a sense an abnormal version 1222 01:09:22 --> 01:09:28 of something that we all understand as a normal story. 1223 01:09:28 --> 01:09:33 In fact, most of us in our family histories somewhere have 1224 01:09:33 --> 01:09:40 somebody back in Germany or Poland or China or Russia or 1225 01:09:40 --> 01:09:43 Korea or somewhere who was under a lot of stress in the 1226 01:09:43 --> 01:09:48 Old Country, picked up, and developed a whole new identity 1227 01:09:48 --> 01:09:53 in the U.S. The major difference of course, is that 1228 01:09:53 --> 01:09:56 grandpa remembered the old country. 1229 01:09:56 --> 01:09:59 Grandpa hadn't suddenly just gone poof and hey, now I'm 1230 01:09:59 --> 01:10:02 running a store in Brooklyn. 1231 01:10:02 --> 01:10:03 Nothing like that. 1232 01:10:03 --> 01:10:07 But the notion that a response to an intolerable situation 1233 01:10:07 --> 01:10:11 here might be to move here is sort of like the 1234 01:10:11 --> 01:10:12 American story. 1235 01:10:12 --> 01:10:18 The pathological aspect is if you don't remember 1236 01:10:18 --> 01:10:20 what had happened before. 1237 01:10:20 --> 01:10:26 Now by the time you've got a couple of different characters, 1238 01:10:26 --> 01:10:29 particularly, who can be called in and out of awareness under 1239 01:10:29 --> 01:10:32 hypnosis, you are very close to everybody's favorite 1240 01:10:32 --> 01:10:35 dissociative disorder, long known as multiple 1241 01:10:35 --> 01:10:36 personality disorder. 1242 01:10:36 --> 01:10:40 Now more officially known as dissociative identity disorder, 1243 01:10:40 --> 01:10:43 but I will continue to refer to it as multiple personality 1244 01:10:43 --> 01:10:47 disorder because if I think multiple personality disorder I 1245 01:10:47 --> 01:10:49 know what I mean immediately. 1246 01:10:49 --> 01:10:51 If I say dissociative identity disorder I 1247 01:10:51 --> 01:10:53 have to think about it. 1248 01:10:53 --> 01:10:56 They are essentially the same thing. 1249 01:10:56 --> 01:11:02 This is the situation in which two or more personalities 1250 01:11:02 --> 01:11:08 appear to occupy the same individual. 1251 01:11:08 --> 01:11:17 Popular with popular supermarket psych books. 1252 01:11:17 --> 01:11:20 The great movie of my youth was a movie called 1253 01:11:20 --> 01:11:21 Three Faces of Eve. 1254 01:11:21 --> 01:11:23 Has anybody ever seen it? 1255 01:11:23 --> 01:11:27 Oh good, must still be playing in reruns on some old-- scared 1256 01:11:27 --> 01:11:29 the wits out of me when I was little. 1257 01:11:29 --> 01:11:33 Can't remember anything about it except that I mean, she 1258 01:11:33 --> 01:11:34 didn't have really three faces, she did have 1259 01:11:34 --> 01:11:35 three personalities. 1260 01:11:35 --> 01:11:38 Let me tell you instead about Billy Milligan, 1261 01:11:38 --> 01:11:39 a convicted rapist. 1262 01:11:39 --> 01:11:42 Not a nice person. 1263 01:11:42 --> 01:11:49 But one who attempted to get off his conviction by claiming 1264 01:11:49 --> 01:11:51 a lack of responsibility due to a multiple 1265 01:11:51 --> 01:11:53 personality disorder. 1266 01:11:53 --> 01:11:55 Depending on which of the multiple accounts you read of 1267 01:11:55 --> 01:11:59 this he had anywhere between 10 and 24 personalities including 1268 01:11:59 --> 01:12:03 Arthur, a sort of master personality who knew all 1269 01:12:03 --> 01:12:06 the others rattling around inside him. 1270 01:12:06 --> 01:12:09 Arthur is reputed to know Arabic and to be self- taught 1271 01:12:09 --> 01:12:11 in physics and chemistry. 1272 01:12:11 --> 01:12:17 Regen was aggressive, fluent in Serbo-Croatian, spoke with a 1273 01:12:17 --> 01:12:21 thick accent and was reported to be the initiator of 1274 01:12:21 --> 01:12:22 the sexual assaults. 1275 01:12:22 --> 01:12:28 Adalana is a shy, introverted lesbian with a spontaneous 1276 01:12:28 --> 01:12:32 nystagmus, reported to be the actual rapist. 1277 01:12:32 --> 01:12:36 Now there's a whole collection of weird stuff there. 1278 01:12:36 --> 01:12:39 One point is that there's no guarantee that all 1279 01:12:39 --> 01:12:41 the personalities are the same gender. 1280 01:12:41 --> 01:12:43 1281 01:12:43 --> 01:12:46 A perhaps more salient point here is this spontaneous 1282 01:12:46 --> 01:12:49 nystagmus thing. 1283 01:12:49 --> 01:12:52 And nystagmus is a beating movement of the eyes. 1284 01:12:52 --> 01:12:55 It's hard to fake. 1285 01:12:55 --> 01:12:57 There's an argument about whether multiple personality 1286 01:12:57 --> 01:13:00 disorder is for real. 1287 01:13:00 --> 01:13:02 And even if it is for real there's always an argument in a 1288 01:13:02 --> 01:13:04 court case for whether or not somebody's just trying to get 1289 01:13:04 --> 01:13:07 off the hook by faking it. 1290 01:13:07 --> 01:13:09 This spontaneous nystagmus is important because 1291 01:13:09 --> 01:13:11 it's hard to fake. 1292 01:13:11 --> 01:13:13 If you sit there and try to vibrate your eyes continuously 1293 01:13:13 --> 01:13:17 that's not easy. 1294 01:13:17 --> 01:13:20 So as Allen he's a con man, Tommy knows electronics and 1295 01:13:20 --> 01:13:23 plays the sax, Samuel is an Orthodox Jew and a woodcarver 1296 01:13:23 --> 01:13:26 and so on and so on and so on. 1297 01:13:26 --> 01:13:28 So it's very odd business. 1298 01:13:28 --> 01:13:35 On the face of it it's a fragmentation of the self. 1299 01:13:35 --> 01:13:38 If you think of the self as a kingdom this is like a bunch of 1300 01:13:38 --> 01:13:43 the provinces have rebelled and they have complicated 1301 01:13:43 --> 01:13:44 diplomatic relationships with each other. 1302 01:13:44 --> 01:13:45 Who knows who? 1303 01:13:45 --> 01:13:46 Who's talking to who? 1304 01:13:46 --> 01:13:47 Who likes who? 1305 01:13:47 --> 01:13:50 Very complicated construct here. 1306 01:13:50 --> 01:13:54 Oh, one important way to distinguish a psychopathology, 1307 01:13:54 --> 01:13:57 which if it's for real-- it clearly is-- from a 1308 01:13:57 --> 01:14:03 neuropathology is nobody would expect to put this guy in a 1309 01:14:03 --> 01:14:10 scanner and call up-- I don't know-- Regen, the 1310 01:14:10 --> 01:14:13 Serbo-Croatian rapist and find, there he is. 1311 01:14:13 --> 01:14:15 That piece of brain and now the other guy's over here 1312 01:14:15 --> 01:14:17 and this guy's over here. 1313 01:14:17 --> 01:14:22 Look, they're all making use of the same brain. 1314 01:14:22 --> 01:14:27 They're all forming memories, for instance, and using 1315 01:14:27 --> 01:14:29 presumably the same hippocampus to do it. 1316 01:14:29 --> 01:14:33 This is a case of very odd software running 1317 01:14:33 --> 01:14:37 over the hardware. 1318 01:14:37 --> 01:14:39 So it's a troubling pathology. 1319 01:14:39 --> 01:14:40 Yep, there's a question? 1320 01:14:40 --> 01:14:42 AUDIENCE: What's the deal with the eye beating and 1321 01:14:42 --> 01:14:43 why is that hard to fake? 1322 01:14:43 --> 01:14:44 PROFESSOR: Why is it hard to fake? 1323 01:14:44 --> 01:14:47 Well, just sit yourself in front-- well, you can't look at 1324 01:14:47 --> 01:14:49 your own eyes moving in the mirror, so you can't 1325 01:14:49 --> 01:14:50 try it that way. 1326 01:14:50 --> 01:14:53 Pick a friend, look at a friend, try to keep your eyes 1327 01:14:53 --> 01:14:58 beating rhythmically for five minutes by an act of will. 1328 01:14:58 --> 01:15:00 Make sure you have aspirin handy. 1329 01:15:00 --> 01:15:02 It's just very hard to do. 1330 01:15:02 --> 01:15:05 1331 01:15:05 --> 01:15:07 I can do all sorts of really weird things with my eyes 1332 01:15:07 --> 01:15:09 actually, but that's not a nystagmus. 1333 01:15:09 --> 01:15:13 That's some sort of weird, spastic movement. 1334 01:15:13 --> 01:15:19 Even if you could produce a movement any competent 1335 01:15:19 --> 01:15:23 opthamologist can look at a nystagmus or you can record it 1336 01:15:23 --> 01:15:29 and know whether this is a plausible neurological sign or 1337 01:15:29 --> 01:15:33 something weird that the guy's doing. 1338 01:15:33 --> 01:15:33 Who knows? 1339 01:15:33 --> 01:15:38 You know, maybe he's a genius at this sort of thing, but it 1340 01:15:38 --> 01:15:39 would be a hard thing to fake. 1341 01:15:39 --> 01:15:41 1342 01:15:41 --> 01:15:45 I don't think there's much more to be said about it than that. 1343 01:15:45 --> 01:15:48 But this issue of whether it's fake or not-- one of the other 1344 01:15:48 --> 01:15:51 arguments in favor of the notion that there is a real 1345 01:15:51 --> 01:15:58 disorder is imagine you've got 24 personalities or imagine 1346 01:15:58 --> 01:16:03 your parents tell you-- how many parents when you were 1347 01:16:03 --> 01:16:06 little made up some sort of long-running story 1348 01:16:06 --> 01:16:08 that they told you? 1349 01:16:08 --> 01:16:10 No? 1350 01:16:10 --> 01:16:11 Oh good. 1351 01:16:11 --> 01:16:14 The rest of you was deprived. 1352 01:16:14 --> 01:16:16 They were just reading out of the books. 1353 01:16:16 --> 01:16:18 Anyway, I used to have a nice long-running 1354 01:16:18 --> 01:16:20 story about bunnies. 1355 01:16:20 --> 01:16:22 Very complicated stuff. 1356 01:16:22 --> 01:16:26 The problem is once there were like 24 bunnies or whatever, I 1357 01:16:26 --> 01:16:29 don't remember how many there were-- the kids would keep 1358 01:16:29 --> 01:16:32 calling me on errors. 1359 01:16:32 --> 01:16:34 No, no, he lives over there. 1360 01:16:34 --> 01:16:37 It's very difficult to keep all this stuff straight. 1361 01:16:37 --> 01:16:42 If you have a story with 24 characters in it that you're 1362 01:16:42 --> 01:16:44 making up as a fake in your own head you've got 1363 01:16:44 --> 01:16:46 to keep that lie. 1364 01:16:46 --> 01:16:48 Well, you don't have to do stories. 1365 01:16:48 --> 01:16:50 Think of a good lie. 1366 01:16:50 --> 01:16:52 How many times when you were a kid did you get stuck because 1367 01:16:52 --> 01:16:56 the lie fell apart because you told it wrong? 1368 01:16:56 --> 01:16:57 You changed the story. 1369 01:16:57 --> 01:17:00 If it's a truth it's easy enough because you just go back 1370 01:17:00 --> 01:17:03 and refer to the Truth and it's just kind of there. 1371 01:17:03 --> 01:17:06 But the lie you have to remember the details of and 1372 01:17:06 --> 01:17:08 there's an argument that the same thing is going on here. 1373 01:17:08 --> 01:17:11 If you really had twenty-four different personalities it'd be 1374 01:17:11 --> 01:17:14 just very difficult to keep them straight unless you were 1375 01:17:14 --> 01:17:18 just reporting on-- so here's Chuck, the personality, 1376 01:17:18 --> 01:17:19 who do you know? 1377 01:17:19 --> 01:17:20 I know boom, boom and boom. 1378 01:17:20 --> 01:17:24 If you're faking it-- you-- the owner of this whole story have 1379 01:17:24 --> 01:17:27 to think, Chuck, Chuck-- oh God. 1380 01:17:27 --> 01:17:30 I don't remember who Chuck knows and so on. 1381 01:17:30 --> 01:17:35 Now a more troubling fact perhaps, is that multiple 1382 01:17:35 --> 01:17:39 personality disorder was practically not on the radar 1383 01:17:39 --> 01:17:40 screen twenty years ago. 1384 01:17:40 --> 01:17:42 When I first started talking about multiple personality 1385 01:17:42 --> 01:17:45 disorder I could like read the whole literature on this-- 1386 01:17:45 --> 01:17:49 handful of cases from a handful-- a handful of patients 1387 01:17:49 --> 01:17:51 from a handful of therapists. 1388 01:17:51 --> 01:17:53 In twenty years it's skyrocketed. 1389 01:17:53 --> 01:17:56 It became sort of flavor of the month, everybody had a multiple 1390 01:17:56 --> 01:17:59 personality disorder for a while. 1391 01:17:59 --> 01:18:03 That's faded off a bit since then, but that's odd. 1392 01:18:03 --> 01:18:04 Why should that be? 1393 01:18:04 --> 01:18:12 One theory is that is that it's a well- intentioned delusion, 1394 01:18:12 --> 01:18:15 cooked up between a therapist and a patient. 1395 01:18:15 --> 01:18:18 Patient's got some real problem, the therapist believes 1396 01:18:18 --> 01:18:22 in multiple personality disorder, and through the use 1397 01:18:22 --> 01:18:26 of hypnosis, which is a common tool for therapists who treat 1398 01:18:26 --> 01:18:30 multiple personality disorder you come to the conclusion-- 1399 01:18:30 --> 01:18:34 you and the therapist come to the conclusion that you have 1400 01:18:34 --> 01:18:37 more than one character rattling around in there. 1401 01:18:37 --> 01:18:40 And that it wasn't real before you came into 1402 01:18:40 --> 01:18:42 the therapist's office. 1403 01:18:42 --> 01:18:46 The counter argument to that is that what brings people in 1404 01:18:46 --> 01:18:54 often is that they're missing chunks of their lives. 1405 01:18:54 --> 01:18:56 You come to the therapist's office. 1406 01:18:56 --> 01:19:00 You say look, I have no idea what I did Tuesday afternoon, 1407 01:19:00 --> 01:19:05 but there's a new dress in my closet and there's a charge 1408 01:19:05 --> 01:19:10 on my Visa card and this is disturbing. 1409 01:19:10 --> 01:19:12 If things were happening to you, you just didn't remember 1410 01:19:12 --> 01:19:14 it might eventually get you into therapy. 1411 01:19:14 --> 01:19:19 1412 01:19:19 --> 01:19:22 AUDIENCE: Well, couldn't multiple personality disorder 1413 01:19:22 --> 01:19:25 popularity skyrocket after that movie came out 1414 01:19:25 --> 01:19:26 and everyone saw it? 1415 01:19:26 --> 01:19:28 PROFESSOR: Oh yes. 1416 01:19:28 --> 01:19:32 To anticipate what I will actually end up getting to do 1417 01:19:32 --> 01:19:36 in next Tuesday's-- since there's no class on Thursday-- 1418 01:19:36 --> 01:19:42 there is a sense in which you get to choose how to go insane. 1419 01:19:42 --> 01:19:48 The culture around you enables certain forms of certain 1420 01:19:48 --> 01:19:51 patterns of mental disorder and not others. 1421 01:19:51 --> 01:19:57 And sure, there's a lot of this sort of copycat 1422 01:19:57 --> 01:19:59 cracking up, if you'd like. 1423 01:19:59 --> 01:20:01 Let me say one last thing about this issue of what 1424 01:20:01 --> 01:20:03 gets people into therapy. 1425 01:20:03 --> 01:20:06 1426 01:20:06 --> 01:20:10 It's one thing to find a dress in your closet. 1427 01:20:10 --> 01:20:12 The sort of thing that drives you to the therapist really 1428 01:20:12 --> 01:20:18 quickly is you wake up in the morning, there's a guy in bed 1429 01:20:18 --> 01:20:23 with you, it's pretty clear that he's been there for awhile 1430 01:20:23 --> 01:20:27 and the suggestion is that you've been doing stuff of some 1431 01:20:27 --> 01:20:32 sort and you don't know who he is. 1432 01:20:32 --> 01:20:36 There's a lovely-- well, lovely-- scary anecdote by one 1433 01:20:36 --> 01:20:41 patient where sort of a case where bad girl/good 1434 01:20:41 --> 01:20:42 girl personalities. 1435 01:20:42 --> 01:20:45 The good girl didn't know the bad girl personality, but the 1436 01:20:45 --> 01:20:48 bad girl knew the good girl and the bad girl in therapy 1437 01:20:48 --> 01:20:50 said, oh, this is great. 1438 01:20:50 --> 01:20:52 She's such a prig. 1439 01:20:52 --> 01:20:56 So I take over and we go out to a bar and pick up a guy. 1440 01:20:56 --> 01:21:00 I bring him home and you know, we do stuff, and then I just 1441 01:21:00 --> 01:21:04 withdraw back into her and watch the next morning. 1442 01:21:04 --> 01:21:08 It was great, man, she'd wake up and she'd freak every time. 1443 01:21:08 --> 01:21:11 Well, you've got to imagine the guy's point of view, too. 1444 01:21:11 --> 01:21:15 You know, guy comes home with somebody, the next morning 1445 01:21:15 --> 01:21:17 she's ranting and raving that she's never seen him before 1446 01:21:17 --> 01:21:18 and kicking him out the door. 1447 01:21:18 --> 01:21:21 It must be very strange for all concerned, but is certainly the 1448 01:21:21 --> 01:21:24 sort of thing that would land you wanting to talk to somebody 1449 01:21:24 --> 01:21:25 in the mental health field. 1450 01:21:25 --> 01:21:28 All right, we'll pick up next week.