July 28 2008
In the last 30 years neuroscience has given us great insight into the workings of the human brain and as more information emerges, it becomes clear just how out of step with reality conventional attitudes towards drug use really are. Countless words have been spilled pointing out the failures of psychoactive drug prohibition - policies that are generally slanted towards recreational drug use. Increasingly, we are seeing more tolerant attitudes towards use of some psychotropic drugs as performance enhancers. Drug use appears to be acceptable if it is for 'good' purpose (like working harder, making more money), but when drugs are used for 'bad' purpose (to have fun or flip into a state of spiritual or mental ecstasy), the ban hammer of the law comes crashing down. Why is this so?
One insight which has the potential to radically alter these popular perceptions is recognition of the role of dopamine receptors in stressful organizational situations. In short, the neurochemical response to stress appears to be very similar to (if not the same as) cocaine addiction. It's likely that individuals become addicted to the chemical reward delivered from stressful situations in the same way as they become addicted to other dopamine releasing drugs. It appears that there are several distinct modes of brain activation that affect perception and logic in everyday working situations. The stress related focused attention mode appears to severely inhibit the kind of creative juxtapositional thinking that leads to invention, insight, and successful integrative problem solving.
Alan Carter began exploring this hypothesis when trying to answer the question of why he observed a common pattern of behavior across organizations where small hyper-productive groups began to cause widespread resentment and negative feedback amongst their supervisors and administrators. He puts forward the idea that what iconoclasts and creative thinkers have traditionally dismissed as 'groupthink' or beauraucratic chaos can actually be attributed to stress releasing a dopamine reward for those locked into the focused attention mode and participating in the shared attention economy of stress.
Where groups are nursing a given level of socially generated stress, the person free of addiction won't be playing their part in the maintenance dance, and people will be conditioned to resent them. Without an explicit reason for the mutually experienced dislike, a demonizing groupthink will emerge. Gelled teams can trigger this in stress addicted organizations, and children can trigger it in schools.
Given the above, it is hardly surprising that many children become distressed, particularly in the process and bureaucracy, testing obsessed educational systems of today.
The irony is that - until they become distressed and disturbed by the side effects of drugs at least - it is the diagnosed children that are the healthy ones, free of stress addiction and its cognition and behaviour warping effects, best able to work on intellectually challenging tasks.
This idea is further explored in Peter Whybrow's book American Mania, which describes the effects of the dopamine feedback loop on modern Western society. Still, it does seem surprising that nobody has noticed this before. Maybe the problem is so widespread and rampant that we are almost completely blind to the fact that it exists at all. Clearly, the school system instills these cognitive deficits at a very early age, so much so that it appears the healthy children are the ones being diagnosed with 'disorders' like ADD:
We've now got a context to explain the minority who retain creative, juxtapositional thinking. They lose it when stress goes up just like everyone else - that's what "state evaporation" is. But for some reason they aren't hooked on it, so they don't take opportunities to perform little niggle dances, such as the social policing of arbitrary conventions. The DRD4 dopamine receptor referred to in the Arnsten paper above seems to be involved in this. The R7 allele (which fails to bind dopamine) is associated with the fruits of juxtapositional thinking, although many who write on ADHD do not consider the tests of cognitive flexibility and look only at tests of focussed attention.
This split in diagnosis is backed up by the studies of Michel Foucault, who showed that judgements of what is normal are not objective, but rather determined by a particular intervention of disciplinary power through an arbitrary social standard of inclusion and exclusion. Indeed, the 1990's distinction of ADD as a 'disorder' versus a healthy 'normal' can be understood in similar terms to Foucaults description of a socially constructed distinction between the 'sane' and 'insane'. Today, this same disciplinary power manifests in all the organizations and institutions that contribute to our public life.
Looking at this social pathology in terms of a 'dopamine feedback economy' provides a reasonable explanation for the bizarre and irrational behavior that emerges in many organizations and schools. Creative, juxtapositional thinking is not a unique gift or talent - everyone has this ability. But very few people develop this mode of thought in our present society, so dominated by systematic social regimes of fear and command and control ideologies. The Little Manchurian Candidates explains in detail how school systems immerse children in this stress affective mode from an early age, retarding their ability to develop creative and associative problem solving skills. One example of the conditioning is through enforced repetitive readings of certain types of stories in American classrooms:
The stories in the readers consistently associated individual initiative with emotional or physical pain. Consider the example of the little squirrel whose wheel falls off his wagon. When he tries to replace it, the wagon rides with an awkward and embarrassing bump, noticeable to his friends, who then tease him about it. Another attempt to repair the wheel results in an accident, with bruising and bleeding and more humiliation. The cumulative effect of this and similar story lines, given the vicarious nature of the reading experience, would be to discourage initiative and reduce self-confidence in the first grader.
After absorbing all of this, it's pointless to buy into claims of 'liberal conspiracies' or deliberate political machinations within the education system. A far more consistent explanation is that members of the stress affective culture (most notably teachers, school administrators, managers, and politicians) are unconsciously compelled to make decisions stemming from the predatory delusion that they must train future citizens to respond to the same psychological impulses that shape their own experience. Carter describes this simply as hostility towards those with mismatching stress levels. Training this response is vitally important to maintaining the culture of addiction - the emergence of creative, logical and integrative thinkers would threaten the grip of stress feedback and deny the addicts their fix.
Perhaps the greatest irony of this conditioning is the situation of the legal status of certain dopamine affective drugs, characterized by bizarre and pervasive contradictions. Anyone who wants drugs can generally get them, but by being illegal the only people who can profit from the drugs are criminal organizations. Governments are effectively encouraging and supporting crime by creating a vast market, too lucrative for gangs to resist. The social destruction, carnage, and horror which has resulted from prohibition far outweighs the negative aspects of the effects of the drugs themselves. But sadly, for governments to reverse their stance on this issue is tantamount to a massive global admission that they were wrong the whole time. The fact that cocaine is considered dangerous and destructive (and therefore MUST be banned) by people who are addicted to the very same release of dopamine in the brain is another one one of those twisted contradictions that the stress focused brain can easily glide past without comprehending. Only creative, juxtapositional thinkers could lose sleep over the reality of such an enormous irrational and incompatible belief system. It would be pure comedy if it wasn't for the bloodstained atrocities of the War on Drugs in Central America.
It's pretty obvious that policy makers and administrators are too permanently fried to change the perceptions that were drilled into their heads when they were young. While creative, juxtapositional thinking is entirely within their grasp, one can only change if one wants to change. Very few repressed adults want to change, or are even willing to admit their obvious flaws and weaknesses. The only way to break the cycle of stress and mis-education is to consciously identify the different modes of thought and creativity and provide a consistent message to the younger generations that shows up this culture for what it truly is.
File this one under self improvement, I guess.
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