Not sure how it’s been in your corner of the world, but I can state with absolute certainty that the weather over the past four months has been causing a significant amount of grief to inhabitants of southeastern Canada.  We Canadians have developed the capacity to tolerate imprisonment in our igloos for eight months of the year, in large part because we expect to be paroled between May and August (and, assuming good behavior, maybe even September).  Moreover, we expect the meteorological authorities to sanction the sporting of Hawaiian shirts, tank tops, Bermuda shorts and open-toed sandals.  Well, not this year!  May, June and July have been witness to well-below average temperatures.  And the sun has been missing in action, a victim of the abundant precipitation we’ve experienced over this time.

Yup, most of my friends and colleagues claim to be more stressed after returning from their vacations then before they left.  But isn’t it a stretch to claim that inclement weather is stressful?  Actually, thinking whether the weather is a stressor helps to clarify some of the vagaries associated with the concept of stress.

First of all, let’s make one thing clear:  Stress is well defined, at least physiologically.  In the biological literature, the term was first used by the great Hans Selye, who borrowed it from the field of engineering.  In that discipline, stress is anything that compromises the integrity of a structure, as, for example, the force of gravity or of the wind on a building or a bridge.  Selye recognized that the very process of living can pose challenges for the well-being of a physiological organism, and these challenges were encompassed under the rubric of “stress”.  Stress on physical structures can often be handled structurally, for instance by insuring that the beams used to build a bridge are strong enough to resist the combined pressure of gravity and the vehicles that cross it.  In contrast, most life-stresses require energy expenditure for effective coping.  If you’re a pre-urban homo-sapiens, the stress of hunger means you have to get up off your derrière and do some serious hunting or gathering.  Same thing is true if you happen to stumble across a saber-toothed tiger in your pursuit of sustenance: without the necessary energy to run like hell, or fight like hell, you’re likely to end up as Tony the tiger’s afternoon snack.  And, assuming you successfully avoid Tony and find something to nibble on, you need to invest some energy to digest the fruits of your labor (pun intended).

Selye’s brilliance lies not only in his appropriation of the concept of stress, but also in identifying one of the primary systems that allows us to mobilize energy.  It’s called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and it works like this:  the challenges of life get recognized by the “higher” (i.e., thinking) parts of your brain, which informs the hypothalamus: “we’ve got a problem here, deal with it.”  So, the hypothalamus releases a substance called corticotrophin releasing hormone, which causes, among other things, the release of another hormone called andrenocorticotropin hormone (ACTH) from the pituitary.  Also among other things, ACTH travels to the adrenal glands, where it induces the release of cortisol, known in scientific circles as the mother of all stress hormones.  Cortisol is important in that it initiates the conversion of the body’s energy stores (i.e., sugars and fats) into actual energy, and this kinetic energy allows us to carry out the physical activities we need to in order to cope with the stress.

Selye defined stress as anything that will turn on the HPA axis.  It is a very clear, unambiguous and measurable definition of stress.  Moreover, defined in this way, stress is an essential part of life; indeed, without the HPA axis we wouldn?t be able to survive.  One way in which this is best illustrated is by appreciating that there is a natural rhythm to the HPA axis.  The cartoon below depicts normal cortisol levels as a function of the time of day.

Notice that cortisol levels rise as we wake up (to meet the challenges of the new day), reach a peak at lunch (digestion, again), fall in mid-afternoon (which explains the biological imperative responsible for the Siesta), rise again in anticipation of dinner, and then fall as we begin the descent into sleep. In short, cortisol levels recapulitulate the energy demands of living.

The intellectual quandaries one gets into when one talks about stress do not stem from Selye’s definition of stress, they originate when we start asking more questions about that definition. If stress is ultimately HPA activity, what turns on the HPA axis?  Clearly there are some physiological regulators of the axis:  as intimated above, hunger, is one, sex (the act, not the category) is another one, and infectious agents, such as the viruses that cause the flu, is a third.

There are many more that I could mention, but I think it’s time to get back to the main point.  Research over the past 70 years has demonstrated that we can turn on the HPA axis with entities that we consider to be more “psychological” then “physiological” in nature.  And it is this realization that explains why the weather can or cannot be a stressor.

Two of the four primary psychological activators of the HPA axis are:  being exposed to things we can’t predict, and being exposed to things we can’t control.  Actually, it’s even more subtle then this:  it is being exposed to things that we want to or feel we should be able to predict and control.  If your plans over your vacations are to spend two weeks catching up on all the DVDs you didn’t have time to watch, well, you could care less whether its rains cats and dogs 24/7.  If, on the other hand, you plan to spend a week hiking through the Adirondack Mountains, knowing what kind of weather to expect helps you to be make the contingency plans necessary to deal with it.  And notice that, for most people, being able to make plans imparts a modicum of control.

And herein lies the rub, at least for me.  What stressed me out the most about my holidays was not the amount of rain we experienced, but rather the unpredictability of when that rain would occur.  Most days were a chaotic blend of sun, rain, rain, sun.  We had very few days of total sun or of total rain.  So, you could never really plan for the day.  If you awoke to clouds and decided it was a perfect day for a Monopoly marathon, you started feeling guilty around 11 AM when the sun poked through and made the cottage a little too warm.  If you opened your eyes to sun first thing in the morning and decided it was the ideal day to paint the trim on the cottage or to take that 4 hour canoe trip, those 45 minutes of intense down pour that arrived around 1:15 were difficult to endure.

In retrospect, it turns out that we did most all of the things we wanted to do over the vacation, so it wasn’t the fact that we could not enjoy any of our planned activities.  Rather, it was the uncertainty about when to do them, and the prospect that the weather might rain on our parade right in the middle of the march.  It wasn’t just the bad weather, but the inability to predict when that bad weather would arrive.

That’s my take on whether the weather will make your life miserable.  But I could be wrong.  Two weeks ago, summer finally arrived.  After 5 consecutive days of hot, sunny and humid conditions ideal for outdoor activities, most everyone started bitching about it…

Now I must confess that I don’t paint much, because my Mona Lisas end up looking like stick women (and poor ones at that), nor do I pick up my guitar as often  as I used to (because after years of practice, all I have been able to master is a very approximate rendition of CCR’s Proud Mary).   And I have finally acquiesced to the protestations of those people around me who beg me to stop singing because it sounds more like finger nails on a blackboard then Van the Man.

Yup, it has taken me over 40 years to appreciate that I have about as much creative skill as a door knob.  On the other hand, I often reflect that my biology has given me the capacity to at least aspire to great heights of artistry.

In my last entry, I tried to make the point that our sensory cortex partly defines our humanity.  That lesson is impressed more forcefully when one considers the motor cortex.  Recall that the sensory cortex is the area of the brain that responds to sensory input from different areas of your body.  The motor cortex is responsible for getting different parts of your body to move or act.  As with the sensory cortex, Wilder Penfield was responsible for mapping the motor cortex (or homunculus), and this map is illustrated below:

When I look at this representation, there are two features that attract my attention.  The first is the amount of motor cortex that is devoted to the hands and fingers (highlighted in red and green, respectively).  This biological prioritization provides us with our manual dexterity.  It is what allows us to pick a guitar, to tinkle the ivory keys of a piano, to use a paint brush to capture the exquisite mystery of La Gioconda’s smile, to thread a needle, to type on a keyboard.  It is also for this reason that we are able to exploit the tools we have invented as skillfully as we do.  Our closest cousins, chimps and the great apes, are definitely capable of inventing and using tools for different purposes (using a twig to entice ants from their holes, for example), but they certainly can not use tools with the precision that we can.  All the training in the world will not allow a chimp to use a chisel as expertly as an accomplished woodworker.  Nor will it allow the most nimble-fingered ape to approximate Duane Allman’s guitar work on Layla.

The other expanse of motor cortex that garners my admiration is that devoted to control of the mouth, tongue and vocal cords (highlighted in blue).  It takes a lot of computing power to be able to entice your vocal cords, your tongue and your lips into just the right configuration to hit that perfect note, and that computing power is abundant in the motor cortex.  The extent to which the motor cortex is devoted to controlling the mouth and throat also explains why we communicate verbally.  Did you know that the initial attempts to train chimps to learn language involved trying to teach them to actually speak (i.e. vocalize words)?  Chimps also have a motor cortex, but the area of cortex devoted to vocal control is restricted relative to what you see in the human animal.  Their brains are just not built for the detailed vocalizations you need to in order to pronounce all the phonemes that comprise linguistic verbal communication.  Neurologists knew this, and had the chimp trainers consulted a neurologist before starting, they would have saved themselves years of wasted effort, and moved directly to the more realistic goal of seeing whether chimps could learn sign language (although chimps may not have the manual dexterity that we do, they can control their fingers and hands with sufficient agility to sign).

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I am not saying that tool use or language are uniquely human skills.  Primates (and other animals) use tools; there is no debate about this.  And although the scientific jury is still out on this question, there is accumulating evidence that chimps and apes have more developed communication skills then we originally thought.  So it’s not a black and white dichotomy, but rather a relative distinction.  My point is that humans have a more developed potential for tool and language use, and this potential arises in large part because our brains are assembled a little differently then those of our primate relatives.  Not better, just different.  So when I strum my guitar and it doesn’t sound anything like Leo Kottke, I don’t wallow in self-remorse, I thank my lucky stars that my brain has given me the capacity to at least aspire to that lofty goal.

I was browsing through the MSN news site the other day, and an item caught my eye: “Scientists uncover the chemistry of kissing”. A psychologist by the name of Wendy Hill from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania conducted a simple, but revealing, experiment. She recruited 15 couples, and measured levels of different hormones both prior to, and after, 15 minutes of kissing and 15 minutes of holding hands. Her main findings were that 15 minutes of serious smooching, but not 15 minutes of hand-holding, decrease the levels of a hormone called cortisol, and increased the levels of another hormone called oxytocin.

Cortisol might be familiar to some of you, this is the main hormone that is released in response to stress, so the finding that kissing decreases cortisol means that we scientists have just proven something that every one else already knows: Kissing is a very effective means of stress reduction (assuming both parties are agreeable to participating, of course).

Some of you (in particular, women who have given birth and the few men who have paid attention to the trials that their mates endure in giving birth) may also recognize oxytocin. Oxytocin has multiple functions; perhaps the best advertised is that it induces uterine contractions during labor. In fact obstetricians use oxytocin (under the brand name of Pitocin) to induce labor when induction is deemed appropriate. Another well-known function of oxytocin is its involvement in the “let down” reflex during breast feeding. When little Johnny or Mary suckles, oxytocin is released, and serves as the key that opens the door allowing breast milk to migrate from the storage area to the delivery platform.

Given these two “primary” functions of oxytocin, you might find it strange that this hormone has anything to do with kissing. Hormones can induce their effects in two ways, by acting on the brain and spinal cord, which as you will recall, constitutes the central nervous system. So effects mediated through the brain or spinal cord are referred to by us ” experts” as “central” effects. But hormones can also induce effects by acting on other organs or systems, these effects are referred to, collectively, as “peripheral”. Oxytocin’s ability to induce labor and to stimulate lactation are both peripheral effects; for instance, give oxytocin to an unconscious pregnant woman, and voila, instant contractions!

The association between kissing and oxytocin becomes apparent when you start looking at what this hormons does centrally. Over the past 15 or 20 years, we have accumulated a fair bit of evidence implicating oxytocin’s central effects in “monogamous pair bonding” or mating for life. For instance, administer oxytocin into the brain of a female prairie vole just prior to introducing her to a male, and you’ve created a marriage made in heaven. So it’s not so surprising that oxytocin gets released during one of the principle acts that humans use to express affection.

But this raises another question: Why is kissing a principle act of affection? Look across human cultures and you’ll find that expressing affection by exchanging “the big wet one” is almost universal. Why is the lip-lock so powerful? Why don’t we get the same thrill out of holding hands, or rubbing bums, or any kind of tactile contact? One answer, it seems to me, comes from the finding that our brain has been built to prioritize tactile sensation from the oral area. And we have known this for quite some time…

In 1870, two German physiologists by the names of Eduard Hitzig and Gustav Fritsch discovered what is now known as the motor cortex. The motor cortex is a specialized area of the outer layer of the brain (known as the cortex) that controls movement. Take your index finger, place it just in front of your ear, and then run it over your skull across to your other ear, and you have traced the motor cortex. Using dogs, Fritz and Hitzig found that you can induce different movements in different parts of the body by stimulating different parts of the motor cortex. Four years later, the famed Scottish neurologist David Ferrier found the same thing in monkeys. Equally, if not more important, Ferrier also discovered what has become known as the “sensory cortex”. This strip of the cortex, located right behind the motor cortex, is where the brain monitors the state of the entire body. This is the area that receives input about touch, pain and temperature from all the different parts of the body.

And now, for the “piece de résistance” that brings the story to its end: Let’s jump ahead to the 1930s, when Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute was developing a safer and more reliable surgical intervention for the treatment of epilepsy. Epilepsy is just an electrical storm that spreads throughout your brain (for reasons that remain unclear to this day). The storm always has a starting point (known as the focus) and the storm just spreads out from there, affecting the entire brain. Neurologists felt that if they could surgically remove the area where the storm originates, then you have solved the problem. But there is a catch: You can’t remove a part of your brain that is responsible for a very important function. For example, you don’t want to remove the area of the brain that is responsible for language, because if you do you may have a patient that is free of seizures but can’t communicate anymore.

But how do you know what area of the brain serves what purpose? Here is where Penfield’s genius shines through: The brain itself does not have pain receptors, so all you need to do is to anesthetize the scalp and skull (to block the pain receptors located there) and you can operate on a fully conscious, and more or less very comfortable, patient. If you then stimulate different parts of the brain, the patient is able to tell you what he is feeling, thinking and experiencing, and you can also view whether or not different parts of the body move in response to stimulation. If there does not seem to be much going on following stimulation, then that part of the brain is relatively safe to remove. If it stimulates speech, then you know this is an area that is involved in language, and you better leave it alone.

By performing this procedure on hundreds of epileptic patients over the years, Penfield was able to “map” both the sensory and the motor cortices. And in so doing, Penfield found the reason why a kiss is such a powerful means of non verbal communication.

Have a look at the picture below, which is the sensory cortex (or, in the language of us neuroscientists, the somatosensory homunculus). Note that the picture portrays, graphically, how much of the sensory cortex is devoted to receiving sensory input from different parts of our bodies. Take a gander at the amount of cortex that is devoted to sensation from the lips (which I have highlighted in red). I’ve also taken the liberty of highlighting, in yellow, the sensory representation for the tongue (for those of you who prefer to express your intimacy in French). Take each one individually, and its easy to see that the lip and tongue are two of the biggest areas; put the two of them together and… well, let’s just say it is easy to see why we express affection orally. The brain is built precisely for this reason.

Also take a moment to contrast the lip and tongue representation with the amount of cortex that is devoted to the genitalia (which I have highlighted in green). I think most reasonable observers would conclude there is no neurological support for the claim (made mostly by men, of course) that the genitals are THE MOST SENSITIVE part of their bodies. And whereas I am definitely over-interpreting, I also like to think that this is one way in which the brain prioritizes the importance of affection and sex. In the long haul, we feel more human by sharing a big wet one, then engaging in the horizontal mambo.

All this so that on one special night, he can load up his sleigh and deliver the products of his Herculean efforts to a bunch of kids he doesn’t even know. He does so despite great risk to himself. I’ve always wondered how he is able to convince the flight-safety inspector that it’s perfectly innocent and reasonable to allow a trans global flight in an overburdened sleigh led by an animal with a red nose (was Rudolph’s illuminant proboscis truly a gift from birth, or might it be an acquired trait? If the latter, would you let someone like this drive?).

The prospects don’t get any brighter following take-off: most of the roof tops are coated with a slick white cover not especially conducive to maintaining balance, he has to slide that not so trim body of his down a thin, dark, soot-lined crevice that may or may not contain a flaming heat source at its bottom.

And what thanks does he get? The occasional plate of cookies and milk? Messages from kids requesting more gifts for next year, rather then thanks for the presents from past years? No matter how you look at it, personally, psychologically or economically, there is a heavy tilt to one side of the cost-benefit scale.

Yup, Santa really is the prototypical symbol of altruism. And altruism is a tough cookie to digest scientifically. We just don’t know how to deal with it. Neurobiologists like to think it has something to do with a system in the brain known as the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. This is the system that, when it is turned on, seems to give us pleasure. We know that pleasurable things, good food, fine wine, good sex (however one defines it), and all drugs of abuse, turn on the mesolimbic system. So, maybe there is something wrong with Santa’s system. Maybe it’s not enough for Santa to have a good steak with a vintage Chardonnay, and the subsequent post-prandial frolic with Mrs. Claus. Maybe he needs more then this to get his reward system going. But does this hypothesis solve our problem?

Take a moment to reconsider the things that scientists have shown will activate mesolimbic dopamine: they all involve some form of biological stimulation. If so, how do we account for a non-biological entity being able to turn on the reward system? One possibility is to consider that signals of impending reward can acquire the ability to activate mesolimbic dopamine; sort of like Pavlov’s dogs, who salivated to a bell previously associated with food delivery. Indeed, neuroscientists have found that signals of good things can activate the reward pathway almost as well as the good things themselves. And this goes a long way towards explaining such things as why we get excited and happy by finding a stray $20 bill on the ground. But the existence of such conditioned or secondary rewards doesn’t advance our goal of finding a rich and satisfying explanation for Santa’s altruism. How is giving pleasure to children you don’t even know in anyway associated with a primary reward? Maybe giving itself is “hard-wired” into our brains; we’re born with the capacity to experience pleasure through our generosity. In short, maybe the act of giving is as much a primary reward as the taste of a good steak, the bouquet of a good wine, or the sight of an attractive conspecific.

This may be, but then that runs us right into a problem for those scientists who are more evolutionarily oriented. According to some schools of evolutionary thought, natural selection is biased towards prioritizing only those innate traits that increase the likelihood that your genes will get passed on to the next generation, and the members of the next generation who possess your genes have the highest possibility of surviving at least to the age where they will be able to create your grandchildren. This may explain why you do nice things for your kids, but it certainly doesn’t explain the heroic feat of the stranger running into a flaming house to save a group of children that she has never met. Or, as my good friend and colleague Simon Young has pointed out, it doesn’t even explain why we would volunteer a pint of our own blood so that it can be given to someone you will never meet face to face, and who will never have the opportunity for acknowledging your precious gift of life.

One solution that the evolutionists have advanced is the suggestion that altruism makes evolutionary sense if you consider who you are altruistic to. For example, since your brothers and sisters share, on average, 50% of your genes, if you save two of your siblings, then that is roughly equivalent (genetically speaking) to saving yourself. Saving 4 of your first cousins does the same thing, as would saving 8 of your second cousins. If you assume that people within the same geographic region will share some common genes (because it is difficult to procreate with someone living across the ocean), then saving enough members of your country, as opposed to a completely different geographic region, maintains the likelihood that your genes will see the light of day in the next generation as well as producing children of your own.

This may help to explain nationalism, but back to Santa Claus. If altruism extends beyond race, gender, class, country, and culture, then it becomes scientifically meaningless to wrap altruism in a genetic blanket. And it is essential to remember, as Charles Darwin himself always reminded us, that evolution does not select perfect organisms, it builds organisms with imperfections and flaws; but organisms that work pretty well. And sometimes the organisms that are built may possess properties that don’t really have a good explanation, but should never be taken for granted. Just like Santa…

Here’s wishing you all a happy, healthy, and altruistic holiday season. And we’ll see you again in 2009.

Halloween also offer reminders to those of us who like to study how humans act that the process is not always as logical, rational and deliberate as we sometimes think. Superstition poses a challenge to anyone who adheres to the theory that humans detect cause and effect relationships with perfect acumen. So where does superstition live and how does it breed? It may come as a surprise to some that these are questions that have, and still do, occupy the concerns of some very eminent scientists.

Take the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner, for example. In 1948, Skinner published the results of a very simple, and yet elegant, experiment. He put hungry pigeons into a chamber and presented food to them every 12 seconds. The pigeons did not have to do anything in particular for the food, this was manna from the heavens delivered on a consistent and regular basis. Despite this, what Skinner found is that most of the pigeons developed ritual and repetitive behaviors. Some flapped their wings, some would peck at the floor, others did head-jerks, and others would turn around in circles (and always in the same direction). Skinner called this phenomenon superstition, and argued that it occurs because this was the behavior that the animal was engaging in at the time of the first food presentation. Thus, the animal associated the behavior with food-delivery, and the frequency of this behavior increased.

When you think about it, one of the underlying assumptions to this explanation is that pigeons cannot tell the difference between events that they cause, and events that occur outside of the animals’ control. According to this explanation, it doesn’t mater to the pigeon whether or not turning in circles is the real cause of food delivery, it only matters that there is a close temporal connection between turning in circles and the delivery of food. But is this actually true? Let’s jump ahead 30 years, when an investigator named Peter Killeen actually took the time to test this assumption. The experiment here is a little more complicated, but even more elegant then Skinner’s.

Killeen first trained pigeons to peck a lighted disc. For each peck, there was a 5% chance that the peck would cause the lit disc to turn off, and at the same time two other discs, one located on the left, the other on the right, would be illuminated. At the same time Killeen had programmed a computer to generate “fake-pecks’” at the same rate as the pigeon was pecking. These fake pecks also had a 5% chance of turning off the center disc and turning on the two side discs. The pigeons task was to determine whether or not its own peck turned off the disc, or whether the computer did so. If the pigeon thought that it was responsible for turning off the center disc, it had to peck the left-hand disc. If the pigeon thought the computer was not responsible for turning off the center disc, then it had to peck the right-hand disc. Correct responses were rewarded with food. So, if the pigeon pecked left when in fact it was responsible for turning off the center disc, it got food. If the pigeon pecked the right disc when the computer turned off the center, it also got food. If the pigeon made a mistake, it got no food.

What Killeen found was that the pigeons were pretty good at deciding whether or not their behavior turned off the center disc. And the pigeons’ decision was based on a good criterion, in fact the same one that people use: the amount of time that elapsed between the pigeons’ response and when the light turned off. So, for example, if the pigeon pecked, and 2 seconds elapsed before the disc turned off, it concluded that the computer was responsible for the outcome. If the disc went out immediately after the pigeon pecked it, the pigeon concluded that it was responsible. If there was a brief belay between the peck and the event (day a quarter of a second), that’s when the pigeons made the most errors, because the time delay was so short.

So Killeen showed that pigeons can tell the difference between events they are responsible for and those that occur independently of their behavior. What, then could be used to explain the superstition that Skinner first observed? What Killeen then did was something simple: he simply doubled the amount of food he gave the pigeon whenever the pigeon correctly decided that it was responsible for the center disc to go out. And what he found when he did this is that the animal was much more willing to make an “I caused this event” response. In short, what Killeen showed is that the decision is significantly influenced by a simple cost-benefit analysis: if it doesn’t cost you much to engage in superstitious behavior, but there is potentially a very big pay-off for doing it, you’ll take that bet.

And when you think about it, this makes sense. Throwing salt over your shoulder, not walking under a ladder, or wearing the same “lucky” shirt prior to a hockey game doesn’t really cost us much. But what about sacrificing a human being to appease the Gods and end a drought? The cost here is more significant (especially if you are the sacrificial lamb), but the potential pay-off is higher. This is especially germane if you are living in a community that depends heavily on agricultural production for survival. Thought of in this way, you should be able to see that superstitious behavior has little to do with logic or reason, but has a heck of a lot to do about motivation.

Some of you are probably thinking right now that this may be applicable for organisms with bird brains, but clearly this isn’t the case for us humans, at least those of us humans who have been able to evolve supra-avian brains. My answer to those who are thinking this way is the following: Stop being such a species-supremacist! The importance for motivation in determining superstition, even in humans, was highlighted very recently by a paper that appeared in the prestigious journal Science, and authored by Jennifer Whitson, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Adam Galinsky, from Northwestern University.

If you want to stress a colleague or an enemy, one of the best ways to do it is to put him in a situation that he cannot predict or control. Simple proof of this?: We nasty and evil scientists have discovered that the best way to drive the levels of stress hormones through the roof in our test subjects is to put them into unpredictable and uncontrollable situations. This explains why, for example, job interviews are so stressful, we are not exactly sure which questions will be asked (we can guess, but there will always be those 2-3 questions that come out of the blue). In addition, it is the people on the other side of the desk, the ones posing the questions and making the final hiring decision, who are in control. Most of us hate unpredictability and uncontrollability, and so the motivation to try to gain control is a very potent one.

Given this fact, Whitson and Galinski asked a very simple question: Does uncertainty influence pattern perception? What they found was that putting people in uncontrollable situations made them more likely to see objects in ambiguous figures, to see patterns in stock market information that aren’t real (a particularly poignant finding given the current financial crisis), to form and believe in conspiracy theories, and to develop new superstitions.

How can uncontrollability promote all of these diverse illusionary phenomena? As Whitson and Galinski suggest, all of these phenomena reflect our attempts to build “a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli.” In short, it brings some degree of meaning to a senseless world, structure to a shapeless cluster of information; it affords order out of chaos, conviction out of hopelessness, and power out of helplessness. And the benefits of certainty are that it increases our self-worth and reduces our anxieties…

And so, tonight when the doorbell rings, if you haven’t committed yourself to an evening of squeezing your honey in your dark, damp subterranean vault, open the door, and revel in the fact that those little brains standing in front of you are not condemned to a lifetime of unfounded and irrational beliefs. They know what they are doing, and they know that it’s a little silly. They’re just trying to make a little sense of their world, and that’s an inherently perfect thing to do.

For those of you who might want to access the articles cited in this post, you can use the information below tofind them:

B.F. Skinner (1948). “Superstition” in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Volume 38, pp. 168-172.

P.R. Killeen (1978). Superstition: A Matter of Bias, not Detectability. Science, Volume 199, pp. 88-90.

J.A. Whitsoon and A.G. Galinsky (2008). Lacking Control Increases illusory Pattern Perception. Science, Volume 322, pp. 115-117.

I hate Cam because I could never phrase a good answer to this question. But I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I think I have a good answer. So the rest of this entry is dedicated towards this end.

I know that my teachers always informed me that one should never answer a question with another question, but in this case it’s appropriate, so here goes:
Cam, is light a wave or a particular?

For those of you who may not be so well versed in physics, the question addresses a long-running paradox in physics that remains to be solved. It addresses as simple question: Does light travel like electrons (i.e., particles) through a wire, or is it like a wave that travels through water? It turns out that when you decompose light in one way, it behaves just like a wave, if you decompose it another way, it looks like a particle. Physicists like to see the world in absolutes (despite Einstein’s theory of Relativity), and so they have devoted a lot of time and effort to trying to explain how light can be both a wave and a particle.

In a somewhat similar way, mental health investigators have been arguing over a similar kind of paradox: is mental illness a disorder of the brain or is it a problem in living? Why is this “paradox” so important? There are a whole lot of reasons for this, but one of the more important ones has to do with what sorts of interventions we should be offering people who have psychological and behavioral disorders.

Most people believe that if mental illness is a disorder of the brain, it will take some form of a “biological” intervention in order to make it better. So, we have drugs for most mental illnesses, contemporary neuroscientists are actively investigating the efficacy of different types of neurosurgical interventions, and the deciphering of the human genome has brought us that much closer to the possibility of employing gene therapy, not just for mental illness, but for many types of “physical” disorders. The idea here is that “only” a “biological” intervention can correct the physical defect or impairment in the brain that is causing the problem.

If you see mental illness more as a life-coping problem, the imperative for a biological intervention seems less compelling. Most of us think it is exaggerated to give drugs to 6 year old kids simply because they may be shy or introverted. Rather, we will try to teach our children how to overcome their shyness, and expose them to situations in which they can use these new tactics in these situations.

Seen in this way, an effective “cure” for mental illness, is nothing more then teaching a young dog a new trick. It’s learning, learning that might be different in content from teaching them how to add or multiply, read or write, but the PROCESS is the same.

Psychotherapy is, in my view, an attempt to instill new learning in individuals, so that they see the world in a different light, and learn to adjust to this new world vision in a behaviorally appropriate manner. Freudian psychotherapy has, as its ultimate goal, the revelation of the so called “unconscious” conflicts that promote maladaptive behavior. The theory is that once the person learns what these conflicts are, he/she can deal with them more effectively. Sort of like correcting a bad golf swing: once you know your slice is due to pulling your eyes off the ball too early, you can practice keeping your head down (Neither Cam or I are ardent Freudians, but Cam is an avid golfer, so I think he will appreciate the example). More contemporary psychotherapies are even more closely associated with education, basing their foundation on the wealth of animal and human studies addressing the general issue of how living organisms assimilate information.

If we see psychotherapy as a type of learning, then we have a possible resolution to the “Zacchia” paradox: Who is to say that learning is not a “biological” process? One of the primary differences between a computer and the brain is that the brain has a remarkable ability to redefine itself. Neuroscientists refer to this ability as “plasticity” meaning that the brain remains, to varying degrees throughout its life, malleable, changeable, modifiable; able to change either its structure or its function in a way that allows it to assimilate new information and experience, and to use this information to alter behavior.

We have known for a long time that the brain is able to modify itself as a function of experience. In 1964, Diamond, Krech and Rozenweig demonstrated that rats raised in a stimulating environment had larger cortical volumes (the cortex is the outer layer of the brain that stores information) then those that were not (M.C. Diamond MC, et al. (1964) Journal of Comparative Neurolology, Volume 123, p.p. 111-119). More importantly, recent evidence has shown that we can see the same structural changes in the brain following successful pharmaco- or psychotherapy. There are many illustrations of this, but let me focus on one of the earliest, demonstrated by an acquaintance named Lew Baxter (L.R. Baxter Jr. et al. (1992) Archives of General Psychiatry, Volume 49, p.p. 681-689).

Lew first scanned the brains of a group of people suffering from Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). For those of you who don’t know, OCD is a debilitating disorder defined by a thought that you can’t get out of your head (e.g., I left the stove on at home) that is so pervasive that it controls your entire life (I go back repetitively and consistently check to see whether the stove has been left on). The classic illustration of OCD involves those poor individuals who continually wash their hands because of a fear of germs. Excessive hoarding is another good illustration of OCD.

These initial scans indicated that the patients appeared to have abnormally high levels of activity in an area of the brain known as the caudate nucleus. This was interesting, because we know that the caudate is very much involved in intitiating voluntary and complex motor behavior, and is an ideal candidate for explaining the repetitive and pervasive nature of compulsive behavior.

Lew then assigned different people to either pharmacotherapy alone or psychotherapy alone. Some people in both groups got better, some did not. Lew scanned all these people a second time, and lo and behold, he found that caudate activity decreased in those people who got better, but did not change in those who remained ill. More importantly, the caudate changes were the same for those people who responded successfully to either pharmaco- or psychotherapy.

Have a gander at the top two brain scans in the picture below (you’ll have to click on it first to enlarge it), and pay attention to the area pointed to by the white arrows. That’s the caudate (more specifically, the head of the caudate). Red means that the caudate is very active, yellow means it is less active. You can see that in both cases, there’s a lot of red in the caudate. And that’s not too surprising, since these are the scans that were taken before any treatment.

Now look at the scan in the lower left of the picture, that’s the scan of a person who responded successfully to pharmacotherapy. compare this with the scan right a bove it, which is the scan of the same person prior to pharmacotherapy. In the bottom picture, the area is yellow, showing that drug intervention reduced activity in the caudate. But now the piece de résistance: Look at the scan in the bottom right of the picture. This is the scan of someone who responded successfully to psychotherapy. Compare that to the scan above, which is the same person prior to psychotherapy. Note that the arrow in the bottom scan points to a predominantly yellow (not red) area, meaning that psychotherapy was also able to reduce caudate activity. So, psychotherapy induced the same brain change in successful responders, independent of whether they were given pharmaco- or psychotherapy.

You may be wondering why some people did not respond to either form of intervention, and that is an important, albeit unanswered, question. But I think that the point has been illustrated: you can, at least in some cases, improve the lot of some people suffering from mental illness by giving them pills, or by talking to them and teaching them new things. And, if that’s the case, what kind of intervention should we be asking for from our mental health providers? Well, I’m not a betting man, but it makes sense to me that if two different interventions do the same thing, then we are doubling our chances of a successful treatment by combining psychotherapy with pharmacotherapy, particularly for those disorders that are defined by more intractable and severe symptoms and behaviors; in brains that may have lost some of their ability to remain plastic. If you’re not comfortable with hunches, rest assured that the scientific evidence has demonstrated that the highest chance of successfully treating any mental illness stems from a combined thrust of pharmaco- and psychotherapy.

Even Cam would agree with that!

Two days after the blog was published, I ran into Hélène Laberge, who skillfully manages multiple roles here at the Douglas, not the least of which is the head of our occupational therapy department. Following a heart-felt exchange of pleasantries, she looked at me with her special, inquisitive look of disbelief and asked: “Would you really marry someone with a mental illness?”

I must confess that my initial, reflexive response to both questions was “No!”. I wasn’t at all pleased with this knee-jerk response; it seemed like I was guilty of nurturing the same “holier-then-thou” attitude that I chastised others for holding. On further reflections, however, I realized that my true answer was: “It depends.” For those of you thinking this is the ultimate in fence-sitting, allow me to expand.

If I met someone who was doing nothing to try to improve their condition, then I wouldn’t commit myself to a fully intimate relationship. If I met someone who was currently taking medication for their problem, was committed to taking the medication AND (note the emphasis here) was currently an active participant in psychotherapy or a support group, then I would use the same criteria for compatibility that I would use with any one else, common interests, likes, dislikes, and yes, physical attraction. Why? Because the research shows overwhelmingly that a combination of pharmaco- and psychotherapy is the best form of intervention. And if someone is doing their best to overcome the demons that we all have (to varying degrees, of course), then I am open to a deeper exploration of future possibilities.

There is one interpretive problem with the Canadian Medical Association survey on attitudes towards mental health: it does not permit us to compare our attitudes towards the mentally ill with our attitudes towards people with other kinds of illness. How many Canadians (or other nationalities for that matter) would consider a relationship with someone suffering from HIV-AIDS? What about diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, chronic back-ache, Chron’s disease or asthma?

Would I run away from someone suffering from AIDS? Not necessarily. I’d want to know whether that person was currently taking medication for their problem, was committed to taking the medication AND was currently an active participant in psychotherapy or a support group (Sound familiar?). Then I’d want to know more about the person.
Why would I want to know if a potential mate suffers from arthritis? Because it could, in theory, limit the things we are able to do together. No, not just the horizontal Mambo, but bikes rides, walks in the forest on a frosty winter’s day, floating among the clouds in a hot-air balloon. I’d like the information so that I could compare these restrictions with the distinctive benefits and advantages that the individual has to offer.

And if we decide not to commit to a relationship (be it romantic or friendly) because we feel there is no compatibility, that’s not prejudicial. Nor would it classify as stigmatization. Stigma and prejudice are born of ignorance and misinformation; if you make the effort to acquire the necessary knowledge to be able to judge the person AS A PERSON, if your choice is educated, then it’s not stigma.

Same is true for our reactions to the mentally ill: If we ostracize someone simply on the basis of a diagnosis, well that’s stigma. If we take the time to learn exactly what bipolar disorder is, what can be done about it, how the disorder manifests itself in the individual, and whether or not the person is doing something about it, well, that’s just being wise.

The source of my disaffection? The results of a survey commissioned by the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) addressing Canadian attitudes towards the mentally ill. I’d like to comment on two of the more prominent highlights:

Highlight #1: 25% of Canadians claim they are afraid of being around the mentally ill

That’s interesting. I can sort of understand this reaction; after all, we are “inundated” by reports of decapitations on public busses, mass killings by deranged gun men, and “familial” suicides. Really, the surprise here is that ONLY 25% of people are fearful of an encounter!

Well, folks, let me put your minds at ease. Research has shown that the mentally ill are more likely to be the victims of violence then they are to be the perpetrators. Why? Regrettably, the mentally ill are socially-disenfranchised, disempowered, and lacking appropriate social support. They may not have a lot of possessions, but the cost-benefit ratio of attacking someone with a mental illness to steal a watch can be enticing to the street-wise riff-raff looking for a quick and easy score!

Now, don’t make another common error: don’t confuse the mentally ill with the riff-raff! Riff-raff are just nasty people, who don’t care one way or another about who they hurt, as long as the end result brings some reward. No, riff-raff are not mentally ill. They definitely are not nice human beings; being incapable of empathy, sympathy and compassion, but the last I checked none of these “symptoms” constitute any current mental illness. Maybe they should be symptoms, but they aren’t. And they aren’t because including these criteria as candidates for inclusion into the mentally-ill alumni would be an insult to the millions (that right, millions) of people afflicted with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety-disorder and attention deficit disorder. The great majority of these people have the same (if not greater) degree of empathy, sympathy and compassion as do you or I.

Some of you are probably thinking right about now: I’ll take Rochford on his word, and accept the idea that the mentally ill are more likely to be victims rather then perpetrators. You may also be thinking that this is unfair and unjust. But you may also be thinking that the mentally-ill do commit acts of violence. Yes, they do. But what are the risks? As I state to people who are shocked when I tell them I work in a psychiatric organization: I am less concerned about being attacked at the hospital or the environs then when I am alone on the corner of Peel and St. Catherine Street at 3:00 AM on a Saturday morning. This kind of reminds me of the fear that surrounds flying. Many folk will readily admit to at least some degree of apprehension over the possibility of an airplane crash. But the statistical facts do not lie: we are far more at risk driving our cars then we are flying in an airplane.

So, why the concern? Like airplane crashes, the violence perpetrated by the mentally ill is generally more likely to catch our attention. It often has more bizarre components, it may be less explicable. People don’t like to hear about a home invasion where the robber terrorizes a family of four and runs off with the family fortune, but at least they have an inkling of why someone would perform such an act. It is not as easy (even for those of us who work in the field) to encapsulate the reasons that lead to a decapitation or a father taking the lives of his four children prior to taking his own life. But then again, most of us don’t know what it is like trying to control the voices inside our heads, the ones that try to convince us that the person sitting next to us on the park bench is really an alien whose intentions for you are less then honorable. Most of us have never plunged to the depths of despondency that can lead to the false impression that taking the lives of your loved ones along with your own is an act of kindness.

Highlight #2: 50% state they avoid socializing with or marrying someone with a mental illness

Here’s a revelation for you 50%: You probably already have socialized with a mentally ill person! Did you know that one in four people will suffer at least one major depressive episode in their lifetime? So, if the average person has 25 relatives and close friends, the likelihood is that at least one of them was (or will soon become) depressed. And the news on this front is not at all good: the World Health Organization published a recent report predicting that by the year 2010 major depressive disorder will be the second most common illness in the world (after cardiovascular disease). The incidence of anxiety- and attention-disorders has also risen over the course of recorded history. Fortunately, rates for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have remained relatively constant.

So, why don’t you know that you have socialized with this already? Because we’ve kept it a secret from you. That’s right, we. The happy, devil-may care grin on the mug that first greets you when the page loads conceals the fact that two years ago I was a stone’s throw away from ending it all. Woke up one day, looked at the ceiling, and concluded that I just would not be able to rise to the challenges that faced me.

Two things saved me: The first was my son leaving for school with his comforting daily adieu: “See you tonight, Dad, have a good one. By the way what’s for supper?” That small comment gave me the glimmer of light that I was not worthless and useless. The second was a dedicated circle of family, friends, colleagues and coworkers who supported me with Herculean effort and dedication.

And that’s the key. I was fortunate to have had that circle of support. Unfortunately, many others are not so blessed. Again, look at the numbers. If 50% of you don’t want anything to do with most of us, then the support we get is about as good as that provided by an old jock strap. . And just because we try to keep our little secret to ourselves, don’t think it’s our fault. One other “highlight” of the CMA survey is that about 50% of people polled believe that mental illness is often an excuse for personal weakness. So it’s not surprising that we are reticent to open the door to ridicule and belittlement. When I opened the door, I tried to do so carefully, to people who I thought would not be critical; family, friends who I knew or suspected had similar difficulties, colleagues gifted in providing support and care. I did make a few miscalculations: suffice it to say that those people with this holier than thou attitude have now been regulated to the “past acquaintances” category.

There is one other thing that kind of got me a little upset about the survey. Why would the CMA spend money on a survey that told us what we already know? Well, those of us who work with or have suffered from mental illness may already be aware that “In some ways, mental illness is the final frontier of socially acceptable discrimination” to quote CMA president, Dr. Brian Day. But many in Canada do not, and I would not be surprised to learn that stigmatization of the mentally ill is an exclusively Canadian phenomenon.

As a colleague of mine once mentioned to me “defining a problem means you are half way towards solving it”, and the CMA survey has clearly defined the problem. So now that we have defined the problem, what’s next? Well, here’s a suggestion: the next time you hear of a colleague who is off on sick leave for burn out, try giving him a call and ask if there is anything you can do to help. Or, ask him “What’s for supper?”

The definitive answer to that question, according to the latest scientific literature is: it depends. Some of us age according to the scenario alluded to above, but I am sure that all of us know of at least one or two folk in their 70s, 80s or 90s who are sharp as a 20 year old. So, what determines whether we will age “successfully” or whether we won’t?

When I first arrived at the Douglas research center in 1991 two of my colleagues, Michael Meaney and Remi Quirion, showed me some intriguing results they had obtained: the cognitive abilities of the rat, like the human, age at different rates. Remi and Michael allowed animals to age to about 24 months (which is roughly the equivalent of a 75-80 year old human) and then assessed their performance in a standard rodent test of memory, the Morris water maze.

Rats are great at spatial navigation, this explains why they can adapt so successfully to the complex maze that defines all modern urban sewer systems. If rats were people, they’d make great taxi drivers (« resist completing the analogy, and shame on those of you who don’t»). The fact that rats are also proficient (albeit reluctant) swimmers also helps getting around in the sewer. So, in the water maze test, a rat is placed into a swimming pool where there is a platform hidden underneath the water. The animals’task is to locate the platform as quickly as possible within a maximum specified time period (usually 60 or 120 seconds). The rat solves this puzzle by developing a “cognitive map” of the location of the platform relative to spatial cues distributed both in the pool and the room in which the pool is located. As you might imagine the first couple of times the animal is placed in the pool, it swims around randomly, exploring, and stumbles onto the platform more or less by accident. However, after as few a 3-4 trials, most young rats will locate the platform within 10 seconds. Older rats fall into three categories: impaired animals never learn the location of the platform, their search strategies remain random. A second category of rat is slightly impaired, this brand of old rat finds the platform, but it may take him about 30-40 seconds to do so. Finally, we have the “successful” agers, those animals that find the platform as quickly as young rats do.

Before proceeding, let me respond first to those of you thinking it is unfair to compare the performance of old and young animals due to possible movement problems or weight differences. Old rats (whether impaired or not) can swim just as well as young rats. The difference is that successful agers know where to swim to, impaired animals do not.

Remi and Michael were interested in seeing if they could identify any biological differences between the successful agers and the impaired rats. When they invited me to collaborate on this project, I tackled a different question: Is the problem you see in the impaired rat restricted to spatial learning and memory, or might it be more extensive? Maybe the rats just don’t like new challenges, and this might explain why they never learn. So, we did something very simple: we exposed impaired rats, successful agers, and young rats to a variety of new life experiences: we challenged them with new objects, new environments, even new (and tasty) foods.

What we found was that like the young animals, successful agers showed an initial (and appropriate) disinclination for novel stuff; this reluctance rapidly dissipated, however, and the animals completely engaged their new found toys and treats. Impaired animals, however, did not adapt or habituate; they avoided novelty like the plague. As the data accumulated, and I saw the pervasive pattern emerging, I couldn’t help but think that these animals are living their lives with a psychological “veil” around them, preventing the outside world from looking in, and impeding the inside world from fully engaging and accommodating the changes that define life.

But what accounts for this veil of impenetrability, what is its source? We’re not completely sure of the answer to this question; one thing we do know is that it is not likely the consequence of anxiety in the face of originality. Rather, it seems to stem from a simple disinterest in change. There may be comfort in the “status quo”, in routine, but too much of it imposes a significant psychological cost. Your mind shrinks, and that shrinkage may ultimately deprive you of the motivation to expose yourself to things that might bring you some joy.

The media bombard us with exhortations to remain physically active, and that is a good thing because physical exercise does attenuate the rate of growth in our midriffs. And narrow midriffs have been shown to help ward off a whole variety of physical ailments. Narrow waists are good things, but narrow minds are not. Your high-school teachers were actually paying you a complement they called you a “fat head”. Modern neuroscience has indicated to us that we should aspire to doing what it takes to maintain “fat heads” for as long as we can. Paradoxically, perhaps, the way to maintain a fat head is to exercise it, and the way to exercise your fat head is by maintaining an active interest in innovation, inventiveness and unfamiliarity.

If you haven’t already tried it, selling shrunken heads may not just make you rich, it may also protect your own head from atrophy.

You arrive at work at the normal time, but you are on edge. Your right cerebral cortex (the mathematical, logical part of your brain) is having a significant debate with your left cerebral cortex (which is more intuitive and emotional). Your right side has computed that the likelihood of the Bruins completing a comeback from being down 3 games to 1 is exceptionally remote. Yes, they have played like champions, but they have been playing above their heads for too many games, probability dictates that they can’t do it again. Your left cortex is screaming obscenities at the right; and points out that the Habs did it to the Bruins a mere three years ago, and so what goes around can come around. The debate is intense, the message from the right finds its way down to the hypothalamus, and is telling this structure to stay calm. The message from your left hemisphere, however, is louder and more powerful. It wins the debate, and so excites the hypothalamus. The excited hypothalamus activates the pituitary gland, which in turn excites the adrenal glands, causing the release of cortisol. The free-flowing cortisol energizes your body, preparing it for the battle to come, sugars get converted into energy, and fat stores get converted to sugars (hence doubling your energy reserves). The cortisol that reaches the brain inhibits your serotonergic systems, thereby making you more anxious and quarrelsome. When your boss asks if you have finished the quarterly reports, you comment tersely on the unfairness of it all: Why is it that some members of the Canadiens are paid millions of dollars for NOT scoring goals, and yet you are expected to produce reports every 3 months or so, playoffs or no playoffs, for significantly less then a 6-figure (never mind a 7-figure) salary? Your right hemisphere tries to comment on how illogical this belief is, but to no avail. The boss is an asshole, plain and simple. This latest event is simply the smoking gun providing the final bit of evidence.

The hypothalamus has also aroused your brainstem and your locus coeruleus. The excited brainstem activates your sympathetic nervous system, which further prepares you for the battle to come. Your heart rate and blood-pressure increase, you begin to sweat more profusely, and your digestive tract is turned off. You have no need for food (the circulating sugars in your blood are providing more then enough energy). The activated locus coeruleus augments (in part) your level of vigilance. It is making you anxious, looking for potential threats. You need some social support, so you tune your radio to the Team 990, and are pleased when Elliot, Dennis, Shawn, Tony and Mitch, all fellow Montrealers, make a strong case for a Habs victory. You avoid PJ, he might be a native Montrealer, but in reality is a turn-coat Beantown admirer who will have nothing good to say about the outcome of the game. In fact, if it comes to a choice of listening to your boss or to PJ, you’d pick the boss. Your hippocampus reminds you that Picard’s show will only be aired after the game; another small mercy, given that he is a native Bostonian, and will no doubt be decidedly biased for the Bruins. Your right hemisphere begins to question whether logic and reason will show its face at all during the day.

Because you are so vigilant and focused, the day passes slowly. On the bus-ride home you become frustrated when the driver stops and waits for an elderly gentleman to board. Your GABA-ergic systems are doing their best to keep you from getting overly frustrated, but you are pleased when your stop finally comes into view.

You burst into the house, announce authoritatively to your wife that you are not hungry, aggressively to your children that they had better be quiet as of 7:00 PM, and try to make yourself as comfortable as possible in front of the basement TV. At 7:03 you turn on the TV, only to be welcomed by the dulcet tones of Bob Cole. Your parietal cortex has already associated Mr. Cole’s vocals with everything that is Torontonian, and it has also created a second-order association between everything Torontonian and an uncontrollable sense of revulsion. So, you flip the TV over to the Reseau des Sports; Pierre Houde and Yvon Pednault may use some words that your Wernicke’s area (which recognizes language) may not be able to decipher, but at least you can pick up the hidden meanings in their emotional expressions.

The national anthems are sung (as your impatience grows). Your prefrontal cortex, the seat of executive function that allows you to plan your next moves, execute them, and attend to the outcomes, is in optimum drive. Catherine Zeta-Jones could be lying naked in front of your plasma TV, and your single response would be to tell her to not to block the screen, because it is imperative to know whether Tomas Plekanec is going to win that crucial face-off in the defensive zone.

Two hundred and one seconds into the game, Mike Komisaruk throws a softie towards the Bruins net; it gets deflected and eludes a very good Tim Thomas. Your meso-limbic dopamine system goes into high gear, this is accompanied by a massive release of endogenous opiates; the combination of dopamine and endorphins puts you into a state of elation and joy normally experienced only in the bedroom. The joy is short-lived, however, as those pesky Bruins mount a concerted counter-offensive, and take the play to the Habs. Again, your right cerebral cortex tries to unwind the mystery of how a 20 year old rookie goaltender can appear to be so calm and composed in the face of the onslaught. Your left hemisphere tells you to stop over-analyzing the situation, and just be happy that the Gods have looked kindly upon “nos glorieux”. Your right hemisphere concludes that the situation is hopeless, logic is not welcome in the realm of the sports fanatic, and decides to take the rest of the night off.

The first period ends, your prefrontal cortex relaxes enough for your brain-stem to send the message that it might be a good idea to head up to the washroom before you have an accident that you haven’t had since you were 4 years old. As you exit, your wife dares to ask if you remembered to pay the Hydro bill that was due. For a brief moment you wonder if you are becoming delusional, you never before noticed the physical and character similarities shared by your wife and your boss. Your prefrontal cortex kick back in, you need to get refocused on the hockey game. You tersely inform your wife that “Hydro Quebec would not dare to shut down electrical services in Quebec during a hockey game, in the same way that it won’t shut down the heating in the dead of winter. So, the bill can wait till tomorrow…” Your right cortex immediately identifies the logical inconsistencies in this statement, and is grateful that it already made the decision to take the rest of the night off.

The second period is less tense then the first. The rapidity of your eye movements across your TV screen are sent to your visual cortex, this information is passed back through your thalamus and to the temporal cortex, which interprets thus: faster eye movements mean the Habs are (finally) skating. Although it takes 10 minutes and 45 seconds before Mark Streit pots a beauty that gives the Habs a two-goal advantage, you knew all along that it was coming. Andrei Kostitsyn adds another less then 5 minutes later. Bathed in the sea of dopamine and endorphins, your brain sends out signals to begin the process of shutting down the stress response: Your cortisol levels slowly begin to fall, heart rate and blood pressure fall, and you can now put down that towel you were using to wipe your forehead.

But there is one final complication. The majority of the first 10 minutes of the third period is defined by a least one Habs player sitting in the penalty box. Your amygdala, which responds to threat, jumps into action, and you begin to think seriously about conspiracy: The refs are mere peons of the Toronto elite, which is conspiring to do everything in its power to prevent Montreal from attaining the silver anniversary Stanley Cup. Fortunately, Bryan and Steve, Tom and Maxime, and the entire defensive crew do an impeccable job of responding to the threat, and you relax. Two more late period goals are simply icing on the cake.

After the post-game debriefing you head up to bed. You body is exhausted, your muscles are fatigued and cramped; but your mind is still racing, fueled by the residual dopamine, noradrenalin and cortisol that you have not had sufficient time to metabolize. And it is only 10 o’clock. You look at your wife and wonder how you could have ever thought she looks anything like your boss; instead you marvel at the resemblance to Catherine Zeta-Jones. You tap her on the shoulder, smile, and wink romantically. The non-verbal message from her facial expression informs your left hemisphere that you have about as good a chance for an amorous ending to the evening as you do winning the 6/49 lottery without buying a ticket. You don’t even need the right hemisphere to come to that conclusion!

So, you peck her on the cheek, wish her good-night, roll over and start anticipating round 2. Rangers or Flyers? Who cares? Your brain may have difficulty fully assimilating the concepts of destiny and dynasty, but your heart doesn’t.