Category: Psychology

[This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of The Brain from Discover magazine.]

While a trilling ha-ha-ha or hearty chortle might seem like the simplest and most effortless thing in the world, but laughter is actually a multifaceted neurological process that recruits circuitry from all over the brain. And despite its tremendous familiarity, laughter has received little attention from science, at least until recently. Sophie Scott, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University College, London, and her colleagues are using brain scans and field studies to document the diversity of human laughing behavior. They find that laughter is both universal and deep-seated, playing a crucial role in the social bonds that have helped us survive as a species. Laughter makes us happy because it ties us together, she believes. When it comes to parsing its cognitive significance, she finds the old verse has it right: Laugh, and the world laughs with you.

Laughter seems pretty simple: Something funny happens, and we laugh. What is the deeper aspect you are studying?

If you ask people what makes them laugh, they’ll tell you that they laugh at jokes. But if you go out in the field and observe people laughing, you’ll see that most of this behavior occurs in conversation. When you laugh, you’re saying that not only do you find something amusing, but that you’re agreeing with somebody, that you’ve got something in common with them, or that you’re part of the same group. It’s a social emotion: You laugh more if you’re with other people than if you’re on your own.  You laugh more with people that you like, you laugh more if you’re with people you would like to like you. Most of the work of laughter is to help you form bonds with people, maintain those bonds, and demonstrate that the bonds exist. Continue reading Laughter’s Secret Purpose

[This piece ran in the December 9, 2012 edition of the New York Times.]

Late last month, the editor in chief of Vice magazine, Rocco Castoro, joined by a photographer, Robert King, managed to secure a plum exclusive: an invitation to travel along with the fugitive tech millionaire John McAfee.

Years earlier, Mr. McAfee had relocated to a Colonel Kurtz-like compound in the jungles of Belize, surrounding himself with armed guards and multiple young lovers. Then, with reports that he was a “person of interest” in the death of a neighbor, Mr. McAfee had gone on the lam. Last Monday, after several days of surreptitious travel, Mr. Castoro and Mr. King posted their first dispatch. It bore the smirking headline, “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers.”

The gloating was short-lived, however. Within minutes, a reader noticed that the photograph posted with the story still contained GPS location data embedded by the iPhone 4S that took it, and sent out a message via Twitter: “Check the metadata in the photo. Oooops …” Vice quickly replaced the image, but it was too late. “Oops! Did Vice Just Give Away John McAfee’s Location With Photo Metadata?” a Wired.com headline asked. The article included a Google Earth view of the exact spot the picture had been taken — poolside at the Hotel & Marina Nana Juana in Izabal, Guatemala.

Soon, the Guatemalan police were with John McAfee. This weekend, he is in their custody and is expected to be extradited to Belize, where he faces questioning in connection with the murder of Gregory Faull, a 52-year-old American who was his neighbor. Mr. McAfee’s lawyers are appealing his extradition.

The Vice debacle was just one colorful twist in the relationship between the press, which is always willing to indulge a colorful subject, and Mr. McAfee, who was always eager to bend news coverage to his often inscrutable ends. Continue reading In Pursuit of McAfee, Media Are Part of Story

[The following piece ran on Gizmodo.com on November 12, 2012]

Antivirus pioneer John McAfee is on the run from murder charges, Belize police say. According to Marco Vidal, head of the national police force’s Gang Suppression Unit, McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

Details remain sketchy so far, but residents say that Faull was a well-liked builder who hailed originally from California Florida. The two men had been at odds for some time. Last Wednesday, Faull filed a formal complaint against McAfee with the mayor’s office, asserting that McAfee had fired off guns and exhibited “roguish behavior.” Their final disagreement apparently involved dogs.

UPDATE: Here is the official police statement:

MURDER
On Sunday the 11th November, 2012 at 8:00am acting upon information received, San Pedro Police visited 5 ¾ miles North of San Pedro Town where they saw 52 year old U.S National Mr. GREGORY VIANT FAULL, of the said address, lying face up in a pool of blood with an apparent gunshot wound on the upper rear part of his head apparently dead. Initial investigation revealed that on the said date at 7:20am LUARA TUN, 39years, Belizean Housekeeper of Boca Del Rio Area, San Pedro Town went to the house of Mr. Faull to do her daily chores when she saw him laying inside of the hall motionless, Faull was last seen alive around 10:00pm on 10.11.12 and he lived alone. No signs of forced entry was seen, A (1) laptop computer brand and serial number unknown and (1) I-Phone was discovered missing. The body was found in the hall of the upper flat of the house. A single luger brand 9 mm expended shells was found at the first stairs leading up to the upper flat of the building. The body of Faull was taken to KHMH Morgue where it awaits a Post Mortem Examination. Police have not established a motive so far but are following several leads.

As we reported last week, McAfee has become increasingly estranged from his fellow expatriates in recent years. His behavior has become increasingly erratic, and by his own admission he had begun associating with some of the most notorious gangsters in Belize.

Since our piece ran on last week, several readers have come forward with additional information that sheds light on the change in McAfee’s behavior. Continue reading Exclusive: John McAfee Wanted for Murder (Updated)

[The following piece ran on Gizmodo.com on November 12, 2012]

As dawn broke over the interior of Belize on April 30, an elite team of 42 police and soldiers, including members of the country’s SWAT team and Special Forces, converged on a compound on the banks of a jungle river. Within, all was quiet. The police called out through a bullhorn that they were there looking for illegal firearms and narcotics, then stormed in, breaking open doors with sledgehammers, handcuffing four security guards, and shooting a guard dog dead. The compound’s owner, a 67-year-old white American man, emerged bleary-eyed from his bedroom with a 17-year-old Belizean girl. The police cuffed him and took him away, along with his guards.

Inside, the cops found $20,000 in cash, a lab stocked with chemistry equipment, and a small armory’s worth of firearms: seven pump-action shotguns, one single-action shotgun, two 9-mm. pistols, 270 shotgun cartridges, 30 9-mm. pistol rounds, and twenty .38 rounds. Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal. The guns were licensed and the lab appeared not to be manufacturing drugs but an herbal antibacterial compound.

After fourteen hours, the police let the man and his employees go, but remained convinced they had missed something. Why else would a wealthy American playboy hole himself up out here, far from the tourist zone on the coast, by a navigable river that happened to connect, twenty miles downstream, with a remote corner of the Mexican border? Why else would he hire, as head of security, a rogue cop who’d once plotted to steal guns from the police and sell them to drug traffickers?

It’s not too unusual for eccentric gringos to wind up in Central America and slowly turn stranger—”Rich white men who come to Belize and act strangely are kind of a type,” one local journalist told me. But this one’s story is more peculiar than most. John McAfee is a founding father of the anti-virus software industry, an inveterate self-promoter who built an improbable web security empire on the principles of trust and reliability, then poured his start-up fortune into a series of sprawling commune-like retreats, presenting himself in the public eye as a paragon of engaged, passionate living: “Success, for me,” he has said, “is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.” But down in Belize, McAfee the enlightened Peter Pan seems to have refashioned himself into a kind of final-reel Scarface. Continue reading Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

The word “psychopath” gets thrown around a lot, but in psychiatry it has a specific meaning. Psychopaths are aggressively narcissistic and impulsive and feel a relentless urge for sensation-seeking. They lack empathy and compulsively manipulate others through bullying or deceit. They believe that they are exempt from the rules and show a marked predilection for lying, even when it is not advantageous for them. Continue reading How Psychopaths Remain Invisible

About three years ago, Search and Rescue professionals started to notice a change in the kind of emergency calls that were coming in. Typically, a rescue mission would start when a hiker failed to report in by a designated time. But then, with increasing frequency, the calls started coming from the missing people themselves: “Hi, I can’t find my trail, I don’t know where I am, I don’t have anything to eat, and it’s getting dark. Can you come get me?” The reason for the change was simple: more people were getting cell phones. Today, of course, everyone does, and the majority of missing-person searches are now initiated by the missing.

This has turned out to be a mixed blessing for Search and Rescue. On the one hand, lost hikers with cell phones don’t have to wait for a day or two before a search gets underway. On the other hand, more people are getting into trouble, because they know that if worse comes to worse, they’re just a phone call away from help. You don’t really need to study a map before you go into the back country, or carry a first aid kit, or enough food and clothes to get you through the night. Just make sure your cell phone bill’s paid up. People head off into the wilderness without thinking about it very much, because they feel that they don’t have to.

The dumbing down of backcountry rescue is just one example of a trend that’s affecting almost every aspect of our cognitive life. I call in mental outsourcing. More and more we’re using technology, especially smartphones, as auxiliary brains, delegating to them mental functions—such as memory, sense of direction, and problem-solving—that we used to routinely do ourselves. Which is perfectly understandable: Why do things the hard way when the easy way is right there at your fingertips? But a growing body of research suggests that the more we offload mental effort, the more we lose the ability to perform those functions for ourselves, with measurable degradation of the corresponding brain regions. Our clever gadgets, in other words, are making us dumb. Continue reading What Your iPhone Does to Your Brain

Roger Tullgren had a problem. The heavily tattooed and multiply pierced 42-year-old Swedish dishwasher was having a tough time holding down a job. The problem was that Tullgren had very strong feelings out heavy metal, and about Black Sabbath in particular. He just couldn’t function without the sweet straits of death metal peeling the paint off his workplace walls. His employers and coworkers often felt differently, and as a result Tullgren kept finding himself out of work. Then, at last, psychologists came to the music lover’s aid. They declared that he had a full-blown disability in the form of a psychological dependence on Black Sabbath. That’s right, he was addicted to rock. And so his employer had to give Tullgren special dispensation to rock out while doing the dishes.

This is how addiction has come to be seen: no longer a hazard exclusively associated with drugs and alcohol, but one lurking in any pleasurable experience. Enjoy candy? According to Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, sugar is a habit-forming toxin. “It’s addictive,” he told the New Scientist.

Fancy a bit of pigskin? “For some people, watching football can become an obsession,” University of Alabama psychologist Josh Klapow told the college’s web site, UAB News, which noted that “a football addiction can endanger relationships and wreak havoc on the life of a super-fan.”

Hang out on Facebook? “Internet addiction” is one of the new mental illnesses being weighed for inclusion in the DSM-V, the latest revision of psychology’s diagnostic bible. And the American Society of Addiction Medicine thinks that the DSM is being too conservative. They would like to porn, gambling, and even eating to be categorized right alongside heroin and cocaine. “Addiction is addiction,” ASAM member Dr. Raju Haleja told the web site The Fix. “It doesn’t matter what cranks your brain in that direction.”

This profusion of addictions represents a cultural change in how we explain unacceptable behavior. Continue reading Can You Really Be Helplessly Addicted to Heavy Metal, Skittles, or Sunday Football?

Our society esteems doers over talkers. When we talk about education, we describe subjects like engineering and finance as practical and the humanities as soul-building but ultimately ornamental. We lavish megamillion salaries on corporate titans and pro athletes. But it’s the (relatively) starving novelists, the screenwriters, the poets, the lyricists—the storytellers—who serve the most essential role in society. They take the chaotic jumble of circumstance, the “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” and turn it into a collective reality.

While many of us would like to believe that we live in “the real world,” a world of concrete and stone and wood and metal, that’s only true in the strictly physical sense. Psychologically, we live in a different world, one that’s created for us inside our head, a world that’s infused with meaning at every level. Everything we see, touch, hear or smell is festooned, by invisible and irresistible psychological processes, with significance. We can’t help it. When we see a picture of a loved one, we don’t just see the contours of their nose, eyes and cheeks; we perceive their entire essence, in a way that not only imparts information to the visual cortex but causes a surge of hormones in the bloodstream. When we take a taste of a Coca-Cola, we don’t just taste the sugar and the fizz; we literally taste a whole lifetime’s worth of associations with the famous red-and-white logo.

Much of the meaning that infuses our world is obtained passively, as a result of everyday experience. But, uniquely among animals, we also have the ability to consciously craft meaning. This is the art of the storyteller. Continue reading Stories Create the World