Archive of the Category 'Drive to Bond'

Justice in the Brain: Equity and Efficiency Are Encoded Differently

Posted: June 10, 2008

A fascinating article with the title above appeared in a May 10, 2008 report in ScienceDaily. Researchers at the University of Illinois and CalTech led by Ming Hsu asked their subjects inside a fMRI brain scanning machine, “Which is better, giving more food to a few hungry people or letting some food go to waste so that everyone gets a share?” The answers they got clearly bear on RD Theory.

The subjects were asked to make a series of tough decisions about how to allocate food donations to children in a Ugandan orphanage. The subjects were told that each child would start out with a monetary equivalent of 24 meals, an actual gift from the research team to the orphanage. Some meals would, however, have to be cut, that is ‘wasted’, from some children’s allotments. The number of meals wasted and the individual children who would be affected depended on how the subjects selected from trade-off options the researchers presented to them. Every decision option pitted efficiency (the total number of meals given as a proportion of the number originally available) against equity (how equally the burden of ‘wasted’ meals was shared among the children) and ranged from high efficiency with the burden of loss inequitably falling on only a few children, to high equity among children at the cost of more wastage. In RD terms this choice poses trade offs between the ‘waste not’ aspect of thedrive to acquire (dA) resources and the ‘ be fair’ code that goes with the drive to bond (dB). Photographs of the affected children accompanied each option. [This was an essential part of the experiment from our RD standpoint, since dB may well not really go into effect without a face-to-face view of the ‘other’]

The experimental results tend to confirm RD expectations by showing a balance in the subjects’ choices between the two polar opposites with a tilt toward equity. To cite the report, “In these trails, subjects overwhelmingly chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency,” Hsu said. “They were all quite inequity averse.”

Hsu further reported that the animation, in conjunction with the fMRI, allowed the researchers to view activity in the brain at critical moments in the decision-making process. After analyzing the data, they found that different brain regions — the insula, putamen and caudate — were activated differently, and at different points in the process. Initially they saw signals in the insula and the putamen. The putamen was responding only to the chosen efficiency, which was how many meals got wasted. The insula, however, responded to how equitably the burden of ‘wasted’ meals was distributed. At the end they saw the activation of the caudate. “The caudate appeared to integrate both equity and efficiency once a decision was made,” he commented.

Hsu explained that the involvement of the insula appears to support the notion that emotion plays a role in a person’s attitude towards inequity since the insula is implicated in the “the awareness of emotions” and the “mediation of fairness.” In terms of RD theory this sounds like the locus of skills that support the drive to bond (dB). While it is by no means clear, the involvement of the putamen regarding efficiency at least raises the question of whether the putamen (in the limbic area) is involved as a skill supporting the drive to acquire (dA). Finally, the activation of the caudate is frequently cited in neuroscience findings as the brain’s way of rewarding the execution of desired or ‘wanted’ behaviors, in this case perhaps the ‘wants’ of both dA and dB.

This fascinating experiment demonstrates how the ingenious experimental designs of cutting-edge neuroscientists and psychologists, using the latest in brain scanning equipment, can throw light on integrative theories, such as the Renewed Darwinian Theory of Behavior!

Tags: Drive to Acquire, Drive to Bond, Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior | 0 Comments »

Book Review: Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began

Posted: January 21, 2008

Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began by Ellen Dissanayake was published in 2000, and, like Constant Battles reviewed below, I can only wish I had come across it earlier. It is an amazing and wondrous book. It is repetitious but the points it makes are so important and difficult for our modern minds to grasp that I, for one, am thankful for its redundancies.

If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the human drive to bond (dB) in mutually caring relationships, they only have to read the first two chapters, Mutuality and Belonging. She makes the process of bonding come alive in her descriptions and pictures of the emotion-laden exchanges between mothers and their infants throughout the world.
If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the drive of humans to comprehend (dC) and learn how to make sense of the world, they only have to read Chapter 3, Finding and Making Meaning. As the book’s title indicates, it emphasizes art as a mode for making meaning, but it does not belittle religion and science as other modes.

Chapter 4, ‘Hands-on’ Competence, puts a fresh perspective on the drive to acquire (dD). It humanizes this drive as a search for a sense of competence in our dealing with the essentials of the material world with respect, as well as with skill. It shows how the industrial/informational revolutions have distorted and diminished our sense of this competence. The only fault I have with this point is that the author understates, I believe, the potential for people to build a sense of competence from mastering complex machinery, including computers.

The book’s last two chapters unify its message around art by showing how all art forms have served to evoke and increase our sensibilities to our most basic human emotions by Elaborating (the title of Chapter 5) art objects to help humans take seriously the fundamentals of human existence. It’s contribution in this regard will enable me to rewrite the portions of Chapter 9 of Being Human that cover the contributions of the arts to making meaning. I have always felt that this part of the RD theory was inadequately expressed.

I am tempted to quote many parts of this remarkable book but I will limit myself to its last paragraph that is, surprisingly, a quotation from another person.

I cannot do better than to end this chapter with some impassioned words from Robert Hughes, which come from a quite different approach to the arts but echo uncannily the message of this book:

One of the ways you measure the character—indeed, the greatness—of a country is by its public commitment to the arts. Not as a luxury; not as a diplomatic device; not as a social placebo. But as a commitment arising from the belief that the desire to make and experience art is an organic part of human nature, without which our natures are coarsened, impoverished, and denied, and our sense of community with other citizens is weakened. This may sound like rhetoric, but after twenty-six hears of writing in America I know it to be true—I know it in my heart, my sometimes mean and irritable writer’s heart. The arts are the field on which we place our own dreams, thoughts, and desires alongside those of others, so that solitudes can meet, to their joy sometimes, or to their surprise, and sometimes to their disgust. When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning.

Tags: Book Review, Drive to Comprehend, Drive to Bond, Drive to Defend | 0 Comments »

The Innate Drive to Bond in Infants

Posted: November 28, 2007

A colleague just sent me an item from Nature that indicates that very young children have a capacity to distinguish helpful people from those that are unhelpful. This clearly suggests that children have a capacity, that in all likelihood is innate, to seek out people who have a caring (Drive to Bond) response to others and to avoid those who do not. From the introduction:

You might scoff at doting parents who proudly tell you that their youngster, even though still in diapers, takes an instant liking to kind-hearted people and shows disdain for less savoury characters. But a new experiment shows that such claims could be more than parental pride.

The article by Micheal Hopkin is entitled “Babies can spot nice and nasty characters” and is located in the 11/21/07 issue of Nature News.You can read the piece here if you have a subscription to the journal.

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