Darren
Schreiber: But also, like I said, our
social connectedness. A bunch of
different things are tied in with the amygdala.
Also, I should be careful, but - you can get rid of the amygdala and you
can still have fear. There was a study
done in the last couple weeks that just got published. A few women that didn't have an amygdala, and
yet when they gave them CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) in a mask and made them feel like
they were suffocating, the women still had panic attacks, because they didn't
have an amygdala, but they did have other parts of the brain that allowed them
to feel an internalized sense of fear.
So again, it's an argument against the amygdala just being the fear
center of the brain. You can still have
fear even if you don't have an amygdala.
Rob Kall: Well, you talk in your book about the
incredible plasticity of the brain, how the brain has redundancy built over it
like an onion: over, and over, and over, and over again, so that you can lose
major parts of your brain, and still have function that gets be picked up by
something else.
Darren
Schreiber: Yeah. One of the classic ways that Psych professors
always talk about this with their undergraduates is the story of Phineas Gage,
an individual who, many, many years ago, I think over a hundred years ago, was
tamping down some gunpowder or some explosive as he was working building a
railroad, and as he tamped down this metal shaft, and tamped down the
explosive, it ignited it, a spark ignited and shot this rod through his
forehead. And nonetheless, even though
he didn't have a big chunk of his frontal lobe, he was able to continue
functioning. Like I mentioned: this
woman who doesn't have either of her amygdala is still living a pretty normal
life.
People can have a severe stroke.
My own grandmother had had a series of strokes over the course of the
latter part of her years of her life, and for a while lost sensation in half of
her body, but with great help from modern neuroscience and from therapists, she
was able to regain most of her independence and live just fine. What was funny was, she had to do some other
tricks; she had to do things like, when she put her keys away, she would say out
loud, "I'm putting my keys into my left pocket," so that she would would tell
herself, help her brain to remember, "Hey, my keys are going into my left
pocket." And ever since I heard her
talking about that, when I was a much younger college student, I would think to
myself "OK. Now I'm going to tell
myself, 'I'm putting my keys in my left pocket so I don't lose them.' I don't
have any brain damage, my brain is healthy, but there are these tricks that we
can use, because we have this multi-modular mind that has lots of different
pieces working together.
Rob Kall: . Let's get back to Phineas Gage for a
second. Now, when he had that railroad
rod go through his brain, he changed. He
was able to function, but he went from being an administrator to being a
scoundrel, a foul-mouthed, nasty guy.
So, when he lost frontal cortex, he was not quite the same person at
all.
Darren
Schreiber: That's true, and he did really
change his personality, although I'm just reading my way through Stephen
Pinker's new book; he's a psychologist at Harvard who has got a book titled The
Better Angels of Our Human Nature, and he mentions and discusses Phineas
Gage in one of the chapters, and says that the story of Phineas Gage has been a
little bit overblown. That, he wasn't
quite as bad in his reaction as the kind of re-re-re-re-re-tellings that have
come out, and that it looks like he also actually gained back a lot of his
function. So, again, even with Phineas
Gage we see that neuroplasticity coming back as he's able to remodulate, and
change, and re-adapt.
Also, certainly alike are the examples of modern wounded warriors who
are coming back and experiencing traumatic brain damage or PTSD; even if
they're having initially difficult reactions from the brain trauma or from the
psychological stress, the great news of neuroscience in the last 20 years is
that there is neuroplasticity, we can overcome the way that our brains
change. And if people are dealing with
addiction, they can go through recovery programs. People that have had traumatic brain injuries
can, like my grandmother having her stroke, can recover and work around
it.
We can learn new habits. You can
teach an old dog, if it's a human dog, you can teach an old dog new
tricks. And this makes sense in the context
of being a political animal, because if we couldn't rewire our brains, we
couldn't have that kind of neuroplasticity, we wouldn't be able to survive as
the political animals we are, we have to be able to change with the changing
times. That's an essential part of what
it means to be a human being in a political world.
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