Genes and Behaviour

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there’s a lot to criticise.

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When giving a lecture, there’s an important rule to follow: Know your audience. It’s important to know who they are, what they believe, what levels of study they have reached in which fields, otherwise the talk is likely to be at the wrong level. When writing a column, that’s not possible so I try to avoid technical jargon that non-medical people may not have heard. It’s easy to leave the readers behind and certain highly visible psychiatrists do this deliberately, to make sure nobody questions them. Most people have a fairly good if intuitive idea of what mental disorder means but its relationship to personality and personality disorder is all too often a closed book. But that’s also true of the great majority of psychiatrists who, when asked what personality means, reach for the nearest dictionary:

Personality: n. 1. Psychol: the sum total of all the behavioural and mental characteristics by means of which an individual is recognised as being unique.

Straight away, we see this is purely a descriptive definition: it is the WHAT of personality, but it has no explanatory value as it doesn’t say WHY. Anybody walking down the street can look at different people and say “Yes, he’s a very orderly personality, even boring, while she’s more outgoing and would be more interesting.” That says only what they are. In order to explain “Why personality?”, meaning why their lives take that particular form, we have to jump to a different level of knowledge. We have to get inside their heads, and this is where it gets sticky. As I mention over and over, the compelling tradition in science known as positivism says that we can’t talk about things we can’t see or measure. The mind is unseen and immeasurable; therefore we can’t talk about it.

“Don’t worry,” said the psychologists (even though worrying is wholly a mental concept), “we can see and measure behaviour, so we’ll just talk about that.” But that leaves us stuck at the descriptive level: sure, we can see that man is excessively tidy, humourless, pedantic and rule-driven while the woman is flamboyant, impulsive and demands to be the centre of attention, we just want to know why. At that, the early behaviourists (we’re talking of the 1910s and 20s) went into a huddle but emerged fairly quickly with what looked like a brain in a bottle: “We have the answer,” they exulted. “It's here, the brain will tell us all we need to know about personality. Give us a few years and a barrel of money and we’ll sell you the secret.”

The question they didn’t answer is this: Why should the physical brain explain everything about the individual’s unique mental characteristics? Well, that came with positivism, specifically the scientific research program it dictated. Since there is nothing magical or unseen in the positivist universe, everything that exists must be the product of the elements that comprise it. That is, the behaviour and properties of a higher order entity (such as mousetrap or a human being) will be fully explained as a product of the behaviour and properties of the lower order entities of which it is composed. If you want to know why your mousetrap doesn’t work, take it apart and check each piece until you find the fault.

With humans, most of whom are somewhat more complicated than a mousetrap, it was first thought that studying different bits of the brain would give the answer: this bit does rules, that bit does flamboyance and so on. That simplistic notion quickly went nowhere, so attention shifted to the neuronal level. That failed as the technology wasn’t up to it and the brain is immeasurably complex, anyway (the most complex thing in the known universe, in fact). By this stage, the chemistry of neuronal transmission was becoming clear but psychiatry had grabbed that already, so the next step down was genes. We’ve got it, they whooped, personality is genetic. That led to a huge amount of research. From about 1950, one of the main movers was Hans Eysenck (1916-1997), professor of psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London. Eysenck was born in Germany but, at 18, arrived in the UK with his family as refugees from the Nazis. He wanted to study physics but the British government wouldn’t allow a German anywhere near their physics research programs (radar, nuclear, etc), so he settled for psychology. As it emerged, it was definitely a case of “You can get the man out of physics but you can’t get the physics out of the man.”

Eysenck studied for his PhD under Prof. (later Sir) Cyril Burt but they were never on good terms. Burt was a devout geneticist and, as with all geneticists (and most of the “elite”) of his time, was very involved in eugenics. For them, there was no distinction. Genetics was a tool to achieve their eugenic goals. Burt had close relationships with some of the German eugenicists who later developed the program to eliminate mental disorder (Aktion T4), which led to the Final Solution. After his death in 1971, it was found that, in his attempts to prove a genetic basis to intelligence, Burt had falsified a considerable amount of his research over many years. Eysenck was determined to prove that personality is genetic but he was a combative contrarian and, despite his vast output, his ideas on psychology quickly faded following his death. One incident did enormous harm to his cause: in about 1977, he accepted a contract from the tobacco industry of £500,000 (now about $10million) to “prove” that tobacco addiction was personality-based and not due to nicotine. After his death in 1997, it was found that, in his attempts to prove a genetic basis to personality, Eysenck had falsified a considerable amount of his research over many years. Does that sound familiar? It should. There are two rules that must always be kept in mind when reading anything about the genetics of mental matters:

Rule 1: Geneticists always find what they’re looking for.

Rule 2: Nothing ever changes.

However, let’s not be misled by the dirt but focus on whether personality has a basis in genetics and if so, what does it consist of? Before we can answer that, we need a definition of personality, and here we run into three problems. The first is that nobody has ever defined it. Until that’s done, the other two don’t matter. Let’s look at one definition which should carry a bit of weight, the Dictionary of the American Psychological Association (APA):

Personality: n. the enduring configuration of characteristics and behaviour that comprises an individual’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns. Personality is generally viewed as a complex, dynamic integration or totality shaped by many forces, including hereditary and constitutional tendencies; physical maturation; early training; identification with significant individuals and groups; culturally conditioned values and roles; and critical experiences and relationships. Various theories explain the structure and development of personality in different ways, but all agree that personality helps determine behaviour.

In one word, this is drivel, clearly written by a committee of squabbling academics. For example, what is the difference between a characteristic and the behaviour on which it is based? None. And what do they mean, a “complex, dynamic integration or totality shaped by many forces”? Integration of what? In what setting? What sort of force, a punch in the head? The last sentence gives it away: If they have “various theories,” then they don’t have a science of personality, only a boxing ring where “various academics” slug it out for the prize. And there can only be one personality structure which develops in one way, not different ways. Imagine physiologists saying this: “Various theories explain the structure and development of the heart in different ways … “ But at least they agree on one point (wait for it…): “… personality helps determine behaviour.” No shit, Sherlock? You mean a couple of million psychologists have spent the last century (on the taxpayer’s dollar) and all the bloody APA can say is “Personality has something to do with behaviour”? Jesus wept.

For the record, the other two problems for “personality theorists” are (a) the mechanism by which personality emerges from the brain, and the medium in which is expressed, and the means by which genes influence behaviour. That immediately gives it away, except positivists are blinded by their ideology and can’t see it. Since they aren’t allowed to talk of the mind as a functional entity, only what it does, they can’t say anything interesting about its origin or its workings except “it’s all brain.” Trouble is, they don’t know their history. In about 1868, an Irish-born mathematician, John Tyndall (1820-1893), published his pioneering studies on optical isomers, the property of molecules to exist in two forms as their mirror-image (same as a car can be right-hand drive or left, just by reversing the plans). Tyndall was very forward for his time, actually a heroic figure but hardly anybody has heard of him. He was a strong advocate of Darwinism and also argued for the superiority of reason over faith. He believed science and religion must be kept separate, which infuriated the Pope. In 1861, at age 41, he was in the first team to climb the Weisshorn in the Alps. Tyndall was one of the first to outline the concept of the greenhouse effect on the atmosphere, and he believed there was more to the human than just blood and bones:

If love were found to be associated with a right-handed turn of a given molecule and hate associated with its left-handed turn, then the question ‘why we have these feelings’ would remain unanswerable [1].

That is a very clear challenge to the concept of reductionism, on which positivism and thence modern psychology are built. They haven’t answered Tyndall’s challenge and, like psychiatrists, won’t even try. This leads many people (including psychologists and psychiatrists) to believe that the problem of the existence of the human mind has been solved, when it hasn’t. Positivism is accepted as an article of faith, not of reason. For example, one reader of this file doesn’t like the idea that mind and body constitute different orders of being, i.e. that we live in a dualist universe. He believes personality and various attributes are “hard-wired into the brain” by evolutionary pressures:

…my belief in innate personalities came to me as a young boy. My mother bred dogs and naturally I loved to pet and observe many litters of pups and it was abundantly clear that as soon as their eyes opened they had different personalities. I was delighted to read in the book The Story of St Michael by Axl Munth a late nineteenth century Swedish doctor that he, an animal lover, came to the same conclusion observing newborn pups.

Later, he sent a link to an article in the Guardian which confidently announced: “Optimists share similar brain patterns when thinking about the future, scans show … (The researcher) said the results could shed light on previous findings that showed optimists tended to be more socially successful.”

There are a heap of reasons why basing your scientific concept of the mind on an idea formed as a child is not epistemically sound, starting with the basic principle that human personality is deemed “unfinished” before age 18. We can’t diagnose personality disorder before that age (although we may have a pretty good idea), which suggests it is still being formed. That is, personality is not preformed by genetics. Second point here is what has been called “Skinner’s error,” after the very influential radical behaviorist, Burrhus F Skinner (1904-1990). Skinner was hostile to the concept of mind and wanted to show that all behaviour is under environmental control; we are, in effect, marionettes jerked this way and that by what goes on around us. Beside Eysenck, he was the other half of last century’s (very successful) plot to lead psychology into the intellectual wilderness. I’ve set out my reasons why his project failed in my recent work on theories in psychiatry [2, Chap.4].

Skinner’s error lies in thinking that animal behaviour and human behaviour are homologues, that there is nothing significant in the human head which animals don’t have. Now that begs the question, i.e. it assumes the truth of the point that must be proven. Do humans have any significant activity in their heads? I say they do. Do animals? I say they do but we can’t prove it. As Tyndall outlined 160 years ago, the problem isn’t whether it exists but how to deal with it on a non-religious basis. Anyway, the mistake in looking at puppies is confusing personality, which is learned, with psychobiology, which isn’t. Behaviour shown by small animals (including small H. sapiens) is almost totally dominated by innate factors which are manifest as emotion. We can easily tell the difference between an insecure puppy and an outgoing one in the same litter. Many years ago, I ordered a female Doberman pup, the biggest in the litter. When I arrived to collect her, the owners picked up a scrawny little pup, the runt, and said they couldn’t get a home for her, could I take her to keep the other one company? So I got two, one bold and outgoing, the other timid and insecure, or field-dependent, as psychologists say. That never changed. But… this is emotion, and personality isn’t emotion. Personality is the learned material that, in an ideal world, controls emotion, the suit of armour we develop so that we don’t keep exploding.

Premature children show the same effect of lasting exaggerated threat responses, or anxiety. We can easily make up a story for it being biological, but personality it isn’t. Personality is the set of rules we learn about the world and ourselves that set us apart as distinctive individuals. It’s how we learn to cope with our emotional responses to whatever life throws at us. It’s the set of techniques or rules of attitude and conduct we acquire to avoid drowning in emotion. We have a cluster of rules regarding tidiness and order, punctuality, obeying the law and so on, but there isn’t a gene for obsessionality, although obsessionality is often the surface manifestation of a deep-seated insecurity. The actual experience of the threat response or insecurity is biological, the means by which we cope (or fail to cope) are all learned.

Some people learn that they can control their sense of insecurity by sticking rigidly to the rules. Later, they learn they can control other people by insisting they follow the rules too. They eventually get a job in the government or a big corporation. The bosses like them because they will always do the job and not argue over it but they drive their subordinates mad by micromanaging them. However, they suppress their imagination and creativity (too risky, it could go wrong) so they soon reach their limit and can’t get promoted, which fills them with rage and they often become depressed (and paranoid). Even more commonly, insecure people learn they can control their anxiety by aggression, by alcohol, by religiosity, or by withdrawing into stamp-collecting (nowadays computer games), or by lying and big-noting themselves (yes, Donald, they’re talking about you again, except now he’s learned to use aggression as well). That doesn’t mean there is an obsessional gene, or a religious gene, or genes for aggression that only bad people have. It means they have learned the wrong social rule to control their biological selves. The argument applies to any idea of genetic control of behaviour that anybody can dream up. The search for the genetic basis of personality (aka search for the holy grail of psychology) is based in a faulty understanding of biology and how we control it.

There are levels of complexity in the human animal. The first and most basic is our physiology which, of course, is anything but simple. As Descartes said 400 years ago, our body is a machine just like the bodies of animals, the only difference being our capacity to reason. They experience pain and hunger and warmth just as we do, the bodily machinery doesn’t need a mind to keep it going but we can understand it as a machine. The correct method of understanding any machine is to reduce it to its elements. A living body, animal or human, is immensely complicated but reductionist technology is winning the battle. Eventually, we will have a complete description of every neuron in the brain and will be able to run computer simulations of it in action but, of course, that won’t tell us what it’s like to have that brain. That’s a different order of being.

Next level up is the level of emotions and how they interact with behaviour. This is the minimal level at which animals function and can be studied by scans and genetic analysis but, as Tyndall said, “the question ‘why we have these feelings’ would remain unanswerable.” Do animals have emotions, do they have inner experiences similar to our inner experiences of emotion? I can’t see why not. The full spectrum of our emotions didn’t spring into existence when Homo sapiens arrived, a few hundred thousand years ago, they developed from what was there before, but emotions have to be controlled. All animals have to learn how to behave in their groups. If we had no control over our emotions, they simply exploded and controlled us, there would be no human society. Personality is learning how to deal with the world, a set of rules we acquire to control our emotions so we can fit in and achieve what we want. Some of these are learned explicitly but a lot are implicit, even preverbal, although they still exert an effect.

When our set of rules is internally consistent and meshes smoothly with the rules of the larger society, we call that a normal or ordered personality. When the set of rules is either internally inconsistent or clashes with society’s rules, it will generate internal distress or external conflict, or both. This we call personality disorder. But each person’s set of rules is wholly acquired, it is not innate. Like the set of rules governing the languages we speak, or the rules governing the games we play, or religion, or finance, or any other set of rules, it is learned in the formal sense. They are wholly the product of what Descartes and Tyndall called “reason,” not of genes, not least because there aren’t enough genes. Unlike our genes, we can change those rules if we choose, although most people don’t as they have too much invested in it. Life can decide otherwise, though: plenty of people have terrible experiences which force a new rule on them: “I used to be happy but now I see that this world is a cruel, punishing place and I have no control over my life.”

So back to the energetic researchers who think they have found something significant in the brain: “Optimists share similar brain patterns when thinking about the future, scans show … “ Of course they do. They also show similar brain patterns when lifting their right arms or speaking. All they’ve found is that if we make a particular decision, it causes activity in different parts of the brain. If I think of the future in one way, it will have one effect but if I choose to think in another way, it will have a different effect. They are confusing cause and effect. If I stand with a brick held in my outstretched hand, a certain part of my brain will be activated. That doesn’t mean the brain activation caused my arm to grab a brick and hold it up; something caused the brain activation, and that something is Me. My decision. Moreover, before long, my arm will start to hurt. Detailed analysis of the blood coming from my arm, etc. will show certain unusual chemicals. If we then inject the same chemicals in your arm, it too will hurt, but that doesn’t prove the chemicals have said it all. The formal cause of my pain is my decision to hold a brick, and that doesn’t show on scans. As for their finding that “optimists tended to be more socially successful,” of course they are. That’s what optimism is, the belief that the world is a kindly place and I can get what I need by following the rules, that the world will reward me for following the rules. If optimists weren’t socially successful, if the world failed to follow their expectations, they’d become gloomy pessimists. That’s how life experiences feed back into self-esteem.

The mind is a real thing, just a different sort of real. It arises from the brain but it isn’t the brain itself: the properties of the mind are not the properties of the brain as they are two different things occupying different realms of the natural universe. This is the same phenomenon as a message written on a page. The informational content of the message is not reducible to the properties of paper and ink. The informational content of the mental rule “Always hang up the towel” is not reducible to the properties of the neurons and molecules in which it is coded. Two entirely distinct orders of being but, after a century of being told that the message and the medium are the same thing, people struggle with that notion.

Without a mechanism outlining the emergence of mind from brain and the medium in which it is expressed, all psychology, and psychiatry, and philosophy of mind, is restricted to the level of description with no explanatory value. We can say “This man shows personality disorder but her reaction to him is normal for a woman of her age in that culture,” but that’s all. No advance on common knowledge. Again, none of this is rocket science. Above all, talking of the mind is not mystical, so what’s the point for a critical psychiatry? Just this: If you don’t have a formal theory of personality nested in your larger theory of mind, you can’t formulate a model of personality disorder. If you don’t have a model of personality disorder, you will not be able to say where normal personality stops and personality disorder takes over or, more importantly, draw a line separating personality disorder from mental disorder. It will all be a huge blurred mess but if you believe that all abnormal mental matters reduce to brain matters, you will want to put everybody on drugs. Much as happens now.

References:

1. Tyndall J (1868). Sect VI: Scientific materialism (President's Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at Norwich). In: Fragments of science. Vol. II https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24527/24527-h/24527-h.htm

2. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

1. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

2. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

3. McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

4. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

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