UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH
IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13th Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
How the Mind Makes Morals
By: Patricia Churchland
March 25, 2011
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13th Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
[START pinkel_churchland2011.mp3]
MALE VOICE 1: It gives me the greatest pleasure to welcome you
here today to the 13 t h Annual Benjamin and Anne A. Pinkel
Lectures on mind-brain paradigms. These lectures are made
possible by a generous gift from Sheila Pinkel on behalf of
the estate of her parents. The lectures are a most fitting
tribute to the memory of Benjamin Pinkel creating, as they
do, a forum for the continuing discussion and investigation
of fundamental questions concerning the nature of the mind,
which were his intellectual passion.
Dr. Pinkel, who received his BSE in Electrical Engineering
from the University in 1930, sought in his 1992 monograph
“Consciousness, Matter and Energy" to, and here I quote Dr.
Pinkel, “propose an expansion of the scientific view of
nature to include a concept of mind.” In light of this
proposal, it seems especially appropriate that these lectures
should be sponsored by our University’s Institute for
Research in Cognitive Science. This institute has as its
mission the development of the scientific understanding of
cognitive processes and the creation of technologies based on
this understanding. A mission very much in harmony with Dr.
Pinkel’s vision.
Well, actually, before I give you my colleague Michael
Weisberg, who will introduce today’s distinguished speaker
Patricia Smith Churchland, who will speak to us about how the
mind makes morals; I would like to present Patricia a copy of
Dr. Pinkel’s book on behalf of the Institute.
MS. PATRICIA SMITH CHURCHLAND:
MALE VOICE 1:
MS. CHURCHLAND:
MALE VOICE 1:
Thank you so much.
Well, thank you, Patricia.
That was very nice.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And Michael Weisberg.
Thanks.
[Applause]
DR. MICHAEL WEISBERG: Thanks. It’s with great pleasure that I
introduce today Professor Patricia Smith Churchland. She’s
Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of
California, San Diego and also the Salk Institute for
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
1
Biological Studies. Professor Churchland studied at the
University of British Columbia and the University of
Pittsburgh before going up to Oxford where she received her
B.Phil.
She was on the faculty of the University of Manitoba and
spent an academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton before arriving at San Diego, which has been her
academic home ever since. Professor Churchland has received
many awards and honors, but just to name a few, she received
the MacArthur Foundation Research Fellowship in 1991. She
became the University of California’s Presidential Chair in
philosophy in 1999 and, of course, is today the 13 t h annual
Pinkel lecturer for the Institute of Research in Cognitive
Science, surely the pinnacle of a career of a cognitive
scientist.
Besides writing many highly regarded research articles,
Professor Churchland has published a number of very
influential books, including, and especially, her 1986 book
Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain
and her most recent book, which this is the cover,
Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. I
have it on good authority it was just this week received by
the Penn bookstore. There are many copies and I encourage
all of you to go have a look at it and buy a copy after the
lecture.
Let me just turn a little bit to tell you about Professor
Churchland. To tell you a little bit more about the
background of her work, I thought I would tell you a story
about how I first met Professor Churchland. When I was a
freshman, or a sophomore maybe, at UCSD, I took the required
Introduction to Logic course, which at least in those days
was regularly taught by Professor Churchland. It was taught
at UCSD, unlike at Penn, it was taught to lecture halls of
hundreds of students, 300 students or so, at a time.
One of the units of this course had to do with what logicians
call informal fallacies. Fallacies like begging the question
or employing a slippery slope in their argument. This was
clearly one of Pat’s very favorite parts of the course to
teach and she took great delight in illustrating each fallacy
by using quotations from her critics and some of the people
that she wanted to attack. For example, I remember her
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
2
showing a quotation from John Cyril to the effect that it was
simply inconceivable and unimaginable that anyone could ever
show a connection between some aspect of conscious experience
and some region of the brain.
The next slide, of course, had a study or two that actually
established this connection and showed, of course, that this
was clearly an appeal to ignorance or perhaps maybe an appeal
to false authority on Cyril’s part. I think this really
exemplifies Pat’s really great contribution to philosophy.
Whenever there are empirical data available, her work on a
wide range of topics in philosophy of mind or science has
been informed by it.
When the requisite data wasn’t available, she has been known
to get her hands quite literally dirty with brains and get
the data herself. Her work exemplifies the idea that there
is no such thing as first philosophy. That philosophical
reflection about the nature and function of minds or of
morality must be informed and may even be transformed by the
findings of the natural sciences. Many philosophers, and
even those not in her own sub fields, have taken these themes
and her exemplifications of them to heart in their own work.
I certainly count myself among them.
For much of her career, Pat has worked on foundational
questions about the nature of mind and is well known for
defending a version of eliminative materialism, which is the
thesis that folk psychological notions, such as belies and
desires, may be eliminated as psychology and neuroscience
mature. She’s also always been interested in questions about
the nature and origins of morality and this work has been
synthesized in her new book Braintrust. She argues in this
book that the evolved structure, processes, and chemistry of
the brain incline us to strive for the well-being of our
allies as well as ourselves.
She will discuss these themes in her lecture today, which is
titled How the Mind Makes Morals. Please join me in
welcoming Professor Churchland, our 13 t h Pinkel lecturer.
[Applause]
MS. CHURCHLAND: Well, thank you so much. I should say, Michael
did quite well in that class, actually. It’s a great honor
and a great pleasure to be here today and to give the 13 th
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
3
Pinkel lecture. It’s always a particular and special
pleasure to come to Penn. It’s been a while since I’ve been
here and it really is a thrill to see how beautiful the
campus has become. I’m going to move right on and try to say
a little bit about the neurobiological story about the
platform for morality.
I should just begin by saying that it does seem that the
story of moral behavior has two major components. One, of
course, is the biological platform and the other one has to
do with culture and the evolution--the cultural evolution of
certain kinds of social practices and conventions, and the
way that brains are, in particular human brains, are able to
pick up and conform to and sometimes change those social
practices and conventions.
What I will mostly address has to do with the neurobiological
platform in so far as it makes possible certain aspects of
the cultural phenomenon that we know as sociality and social
behavior, but I won’t have a very great deal to say about the
cultural part of the story. In addressing the neurobiology
of sociality and, hence, of moral behavior, I want to begin
with an idea that was expressed by Paul McClain who was a
neurologist at NIH. He pointed out, quite rightly, that what
is new with mammals is nursing and parental care, playful
behavior, separation vocalization;when the baby rat falls out
of the nest, it squeaks and squeals. It bothers the mother
to hear this squeaking and squealing, it’s painful in a
certain sense, and she hoists it back into the nest.
The other thing that is rather new is maze attachment. This
prompted Paul McClain to say that the history of the
evolution of mammals is the history of the development of a
family way of life. This suggested to me that although from
the point-of-view of evolutionary biology, it’s very common
to lump all altruistic or cooperative behavior together, that
is insects, fish, birds, and mammals, that it might be that
these actually have rather different genetic and rather
different neurobiological bases,and at that neurobiological
bases for sociality that we see in mammals is almost
certainly quite distinct from what we see in ants and
termites. Birds are a rather different sort of case. It may
be that what we’re looking at is a rather similar story, but
we don’t actually know and that’s partly because we know
much less about the neurobiological basis of sociality in
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
4
birds than we do in humans. What we do know suggests that
either there was convergent evolution or perhaps there was a
common ancestor who had the same kind of sociality that we
see in both. At any rate, it’s that the possibility is
suggested by the fact that the peptide I’m going to talk a
lot about, namely oxytocin, seems to be important for
sociality both in the case of mammals and in the case of
birds.
As we know, of course, the evolution of the mammalian brain
was really an extraordinary thing. Amongst various things
that appeared, in addition to the six layer cortex that seems
to have made, learning and flexibility and behavior so
important in mammalian species. There were many other
changes as well. The flexibility and learning, of course,
comes at a certain cost. Now, as we see in this slide, a
turtle hatches out of its egg. It’s basically ready to go,
and there is no mom around to tend it, feed it, and insure
that it gets to the water in the proper way that it needs to.
On the other hand, of course, all mammals are dependent on
their mother and, in some cases, on both the mother and the
father, and the dependency, especially in humans and in other
large brain mammals, can actually last for a very long time.
The dependency requires a real change in the mammalian brain
of the mother and in some instances of the father. It
requires that that mother takes care of, feeds, nurtures, and
responds to the needs of the infant. There are a number of
neurochemicals that are absolutely vital in this story, but I
just want to begin by mentioning oxytocin. I should probably
have up here also its sibling peptide vasopressin, which
probably had a common ancestor. They differ really only in a
couple of amino acids.
In this slide, of course, we are seeing a common mammalian
behavior, suckling. One of the things that’s very important
about suckling is that oxytocin is released in the brain,
both of the infant and of the mother. It’s important for the
attachment and the bonding that takes place between the
mother and the infant. That attachment means that, for
example, when the baby disappears or the baby is taken away,
the mother is upset, feels pain, and does what she can to try
to retrieve the baby.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
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What is it--let me just mention, something that I find really
interesting from an evolutionary point-of-view, and that is
that all vertebrates have oxytocin and vasopressin or some
homologue thereof.
What’s new with mammals is really that Mother Nature, so to
speak, recruited those peptides for rather new jobs. It’s
not that suddenly something wholly new arose, but as we so
often see in the course of biological evolution, all things
are recruited, modified, changed, and put to new uses. The
hypothesis then that I want to develop is that sociality is a
basic value for social mammals, and that sociality comes
about as a result of natural selection.
I think the many, many reports that we have of field
ethologists telling us about the value to animals of living
in groups where those values are going to depend a lot on how
those animals make their living and on the ecological
conditions. That we understand that being together in a
group can be very important for defense, for mutual care, for
food sharing, and for a variety of other tasks.
The hub of the story, but only the hub of the story, is
oxytocin. I’ll say a little bit more about what we think at
this point is the role of oxytocin in under girding sociality
in humans. The basic urges to be together, to have the
infant close by, and so forth; those basic urges constitute a
kind of platform, but, nevertheless, if the animal lives in a
social environment -- even a small social environment that
just encompasses the mother and the father and the siblings - nevertheless, the infant needs to learn the ways of the
others, the temperaments of the others, how to predict what
the other will respond, how will the others respond in
certain kinds of conditions in order best to survive and to
prosper.
With the elaboration of pre-frontal structures, especially in
large brained mammals, we see the emergence of a kind of
flexibility and the capacity for self-control and also, of
course, for seeing further into the future and for
reorganizing one’s goals and plans and so forth accordingly.
This is not a story that is unique to humans. It’s a story
that explains how so much of what our sociality is like has
deep roots in the evolution of mammalian brains.
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INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
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Let’s then talk about how this actually might have happened,
albeit in a rather schematic way. All animals are organized
to see to their own survival and their well-being. The
variables within the homeostatic safety range have to be
attended to, so that the animal does not get too hot or too
cold, so that it’s not too hungry, so that it does not lack
oxygen. It’s also the case that there are homeostatic
emotions that respond to things like threat, probably fear,
and pain are instances of those homeostatic emotions.
In vertebrates and, in particular, in mammals the circuitry
is really part of the brainstem. The circuitry, although you
might think, well, it’s just the brainstem, is actually
extraordinarily complicated. One of the things that’s so
interesting, I think, about the circuitry of the brainstem is
not only does it insure that we are within the proper
homeostatic range, but it also sets priorities, so that you
don’t, even if you’re very hungry, keep feeding if there is a
predator from which you need to flee.
It’s not just then that these homeostatic variables have to
be seen to. It’s also, as Paul McClain said, it’s organized
to see to the four F’s. The feeding, fleeing, fighting, and
reproduction. It sometimes, because I think there is no—and
this is a point that many people in cognitive science have
made -- because there is no clean distinction between
rationality and the emotions, but rather it looks like part
of a continuum, it does suggest when you think about the
intelligence of the brainstem that we can already see certain
rudiments of rationality in the way brainstems respond to
contingencies and the way that they prioritize. I mean, it’s
really interesting to me, for example, that even lobsters
fighting over some food or other, they’ll fight a little bit
and then when one recognizes that he just doesn’t have a
chance, he backs off. That’s not stupid and it’s not exactly
a reflex. It involves being able to size up what’s going on
and to make an adaptive response.
The hypothesis, and this is really something I got from Yaric
Pancsetman [phonetic] many years ago, the hypothesis really
is that the deepest level of value. I think of values as
more fundamental than rules in sociality and morality. The
deepest level of value is what emerges from the brainstem.
What it seems that happened in part, and this is to put it in
very simplified terms, what happened in the evolution of the
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INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
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mammalian brain, given the need to see to these helpless but
potentially smart infants, is that the circuitry to take care
of my own homeostatic variables expanded, so that just as I
take care of my own temperature, oxygen, and food, so I take
care of its temperature, oxygen, food, and so forth.
It’s not that a mother rat cannot distinguish between herself
and the pups, but rather it’s just that she recognizes that
when it squeals, she feels pain and she needs to do
something, and she makes the appropriate behavior. The idea,
really, is that the homeostatic circuitry for self-care,
self-survival, and self-prospering is extended and expanded
and in ways in the details of which we do not yet understand,
to the care of others.
The important simplification here, really, is that the social
urges involve pleasure and pain caused by social
interactions. All social mammals of any consequence feel
pain when they are punished, but particularly they feel pain
if they are ostracized and shunned. It feels bad. We take
pleasure, as baby rats do, in being groomed. I was going to
say in being licked, but you know what I mean. In being
groomed, cuddled, and so forth. This connects to the
pleasure circuitry, so pleasure and pain, although, of
course, we want to elaborate that story in subtle and complex
ways. Pleasure and pain are really the anchors for what goes
on in social behavior.
This is a slide I got from Matt Lieberman who sketches out
very schematically the pain and pleasure systems in the human
brain, which are very, very, very similar, so far as we know
given the anatomy at this point, to the circuitry scene in
all mammals. But what’s kind of interesting is that it
suggests that an old hypothesis, namely that the social
emotions kind of are a wholly new invention is not exactly
right. It looks like what we call the social emotions is
really an extension and an elaboration of the basic caring
about me emotion’s that are already in place in all
vertebrates.
I’ve been trying to be cautious about this story and
indicating that it is a simplification. This is just a
reminder in this slide taken from Dawn Pfaff that it isn’t
only a story about oxytocin. There are many other parts to
the story that are extremely important and all of them have
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INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
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to kind of work together in a very particular sort of way in
order to achieve proper social behavior. What’s not actually
on this slide and what we also think plays a really important
role in sociality and in the pleasure we derive from company
has to do with the endogenous opiates.
There is some evidence, both from animal studies and from
humans, that if, for example, you give a suckling rhesus
monkey naloxone, which binds to the endogynous opiate
receptors, so that her own endogenous opiates will not
produce an effect of pleasure. If you do that, she tends to
being to neglect the baby and the baby has to really get to
her in order for her to suckle, as opposed to the normal
behavior where she would take the baby and comfort it and
cuddle it and so forth. There’s a story there. I think it’s
not yet understood in anything like the detail that
ultimately we would like to understand. Then just to kind of
reiterate, it looks like attachment and trust are the
platform for moral values.
I should maybe just say here that it’s a fair question what I
mean by moral. I don’t really have what you might call a
precise definition and that’s because I think there isn’t one
that’s really available. I tend to think of, in the human
domain, what we call moral is on the very serious end of what
we’d call social. Serious questions having to do with the
welfare and pain and so forth of others is one thing.
Whether to lick your knife in public, is a social convention,
but not of any consequence, so even if you’re offended if I
lick my knife at a table, that’s probably quite different
from me grossly insulting you in public or my convincing you
to support all of your money into my wonderful ponzi scheme.
I think of attachment and trust then--I haven’t said too much
yet about trust. I think of attachment and trust as a
platform for moral values. They’re the dispositions that
contour the problem space, so that within the problem space,
such things as how best to reconcile, when to back down in a
fight, how to distribute resources when they are scarce, and
so forth.
There are many kinds of solutions to that problem that social
animals will not entertain and need not entertain. Finally,
they are the motivation to find good solutions to practical
social problems. Now, as I said, I think culture is an
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INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
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essential part of the whole story and, just for the record; I
listed a number of authors who are working on this and who
have much more sophisticated things to say about this than I
do. So far it’s essentially been a story about how the
homeostatic circuitry has extended to offspring, but morality
involves more than that.
How do we get from family values, so to speak, to the larger
sphere? Here I want to talk about Prairie Voles and Montane
Voles. Many of you will know the story about Prairie and
Montane Voles, but it’s just about my favorite story, so I’m
going to go through it, but I’ll do it fairly quickly. There
are many, many species of voles and Sue Carter happened,
who’s shown here. She’s at the University of Illinois in
Chicago. She happened to notice that Prairie Voles, after
the first mating, tend to bond for life. They are attached
for life. The male will guard the nest. He just likes to
hang around with her and she just really likes to hang around
with him and there are very nice experiments showing that
this is the case.
The male also--that’s probably him here, the male also will
take care of the pups. He will defend the pups, he huddles
over them. And finally the siblings will also take care of
the pups, which is rather unusual. Montane Voles, by
contrast, have a very different social behavior. They are
promiscuous bonders. The male takes no part whatever in the
rearing of the pups, and even the female cares for the pups,
but she abandons them much earlier than the female Prairie
Voles do. Because voles are really rather similar species,
Sue Carter said what’s the difference in the brain. Is it
possible to find out what the difference in the brain is to
the Prairie Voles, and an answer actually emerged.
Although there are probably other components to the story,
this does seem to be an important part of the story. These
are coronal sections taken from Montane Voles and from
Prairie Voles. OTR means oxytocin receptor. Of course, for
oxytocin to have any effect on the brain, it has to do so by
bonding to a receptor, which is on a neuron and it changes
some aspect of that neuron’s function. The density of
receptors is going to be important. If you had no receptors
for oxytocin, even if you had lots of oxytocin sloshing
around in the brain, it wouldn’t help or it wouldn’t do
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
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anything for you, let’s put it that way.
receptors.
These are vasotocin
The main finding and they looked at many, many brains in
order to be sure that this was correct, was that the density
of receptors in the nucleus accumbens, part of the reward
system, the density of receptors for oxytocin was much higher
in the Prairie Vole than in the Montane Vole. The density of
receptors in the ventral pallidum, also part of the striatal
rewards system, was much higher in the Prairie Vole than in
the Montane Vole.
They weren’t sure that this correlation meant anything and so
they did the kinds of manipulations that would occur to you
in order to determine it, and suffice it to say, without
going through all of those experiments, but some of them
included blocking those receptors. Suffice it to say, that
it looks at the moment that this is the main thing that
distinguishes that social aspect of behavior in Prairie Voles
and Montane Voles.
Initially, people thought, well, heck, if you can find that
difference, and it really is as simple as density of
receptors, you should be able to find the gene because you
should be able to find the gene that regulates the gene for
making receptors. After all, it’s just a protein receptor.
You should be able to find the gene. Initially, it looked
like a region had been found. Larry Young and his colleagues
did find a region in Prairie Voles that was different from
that in Montane Voles and they did the manipulation
suggesting that that was the critical feature. That all
looked good until people did the genes in Pine Voles versus
Meadow Voles. Pine Voles are also monogamous bonders versus
Meadow Voles who are not, and a quite different set of genes
seemed to be involved.
As we often discover in molecular biology, the gene story
turns out to be much more complex than we think.
Nevertheless, what does seem clearer is that at least in
these animals and in some other animals that were looked at,
for example, California deer mice and in marmosets who are
also monogamous pair bonders, that the density of receptors
for these, they’re two very simple but important peptides, is
a very important factor. It’s not known in humans what the
story is. That is to say, let’s go back a little bit. Many,
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13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
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many species, I guess, the vast majority of species of birds
are monogamous pair bonders. Only about 5 percent of mammals
appear to be monogamous pair bonders. Just a little aside
here, also, and that is that monogamous pair bonding does not
imply sexual exclusivity, not even in Prairie Voles.
Which means that if you to do the genetic studies on the
pups, what you find is that both partners are getting a
little crumping on the side, as they say in England. It
looks like much of the attachment and much of the sexual
activity is with the mate, but that’s not necessarily--that
doesn’t preclude other activities from taking place. We
can’t tell about receptor densities for these two receptors
in humans, because the way that you determine receptor
densities involves putting in a dye that binds to the
receptor. Then, as we say, sacrificing the animal and
cutting the brain and then counting those sites that show the
dye. Obviously, that’s not something we can do in humans.
There may be ways of determining such things as techniques
get fancier and more interesting, but, at the moment, we
don’t actually know the answer. The other thing, of course,
is that one should always remind ourselves that there’s
always individual variability in a species, so not all
Prairie Voles show the phenotype. Some of them are kind of
loners. Whereas others of them are very attached. That
brings me just to this other aspect of sociality that I find
so interesting about Prairie Voles. If you take a basket of
Prairie Voles and you kind of park them at different places
in the room, they’ll eventually kind of all come together and
they kind of just like to be together. If you do that with
Montane Voles, they’re really quite happy staying where they
are.
There’s also something about just liking to be with others
that turns out to be important. Initially, I said that
attachment and trust seem to be a part of the basic platform.
So what’s the trust bit? That I think has come out of really
close studies by many people on what actually oxytocin does.
Let’s start with the Prairie Voles where it’s been studied so
carefully. The answer, first of all, is that it decreases
defensive postures. When an unknown animal, a strange
animal, comes into the group, initially, you don’t know
whether this guy’s going to be friendly, whether he’s going
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13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
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to be nasty, whether he’s going to be okay.
defensive postures.
There are
With raising the level of oxytocin, those defensive postures
decrease. When that animal makes a kind of friendly gesture,
then there can be an increase in oxytocin, which is also part
of the loop. Whereby when oxytocin goes up, your stress
hormones go down. When stress hormones go down, that feels
good, because you’re not anxious, you’re not being
excessively alert to problems and so forth.
It looks that as though part of what goes on with the release
of oxytocin from the hypothalamus is that there is down
regulation of certain parts of the amygdala and, also, down
regulation of arousal in the brainstem. How exactly the
tradeoff is handled with stress hormones, like corticotropin
releasing factor, is not completely understood and, suffice
it to say, it’s more complicated than what I’ve shown here,
but that gives you the basic story.
When animals are able to be in a comfortable situation with
each other, their oxytocin levels are up, their stress
hormones are down, they’re able to trust one another. I
don’t have to be vigilant that you’re going to balk me.
Under those kinds of conditions, especially if over the long
haul I know that you are trustworthy, then we kind of have
the conditions without having a separate gene for it. We
have the conditions for cooperation and working together.
That often comes, to my mind at least, in thinking about
wolves. As I’m sure you all know, that wolves show behavior
that’s not unlike what my Golden Retrievers show when they
get back together. They jump on each other. They lick on
each other. They wag their tails. Wolves do much the same
thing. Here you can see them being happy together and
howling, howling probably for the others to join the hunt.
Wolves are really, really terrific pack hunters. Although,
when I say they’re really, really good it’s estimated that
they’re successful only about one time out of ten. I have a
feeling that’s better than I would do after much of the same
prey. It’s interesting, really, how some of the things that
animals do are dismissed as just kind of reflexive behavior.
I live on a farm and on that farm--the farm was encircled by
a creek and in the creek lived beavers. The beavers, of
course, built dams, but because we didn’t want the water
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INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
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backed up for complicated reasons, my father would rip the
dam apart at night and, of course, or in the afternoon then
the next morning it would be rebuilt, beautifully built,
because this was rushing water.
One day, my sisters and I without much to do, thought let’s
try to build a dam like the beavers do, just with our hands.
We don’t get to use any tools. It’s really hard. I mean,
these are just beavers. Although, I must say, beavers are
monogamous pair bonders. Anyway, to get back to trust and
cooperation, I can cooperate with you in a risky undertaking
if I trust you, but not if I don’t. If we’ve been together,
and now I’m talking wolf talk, if we’ve been together and I
know I can count on you and we lick each other, we like each
other, then I can do what these guys are doing.
What you’ll notice, and this is a rather unusual situation,
but wolves, of course, are tenacious. Here’s a grizzly.
This is in the north. Here’s a grizzly and the grizzly has a
moose down and he’s obviously very keen to keep that moose
and here are the wolves. All of the videos that you see,
show this extraordinary complicated, sophisticated behavior
where they’re watching each other, watching the pray,
watching what the alpha male is doing, and they are
relentless. In this instance, they were successful. The
grizzly is not chopped liver. Highly social mammals. The
thought is that relative to the ecological conditions and the
way an animal makes its living that it might sometimes be
worth it to extend care or to extend attachment and bonding,
not just to infants and offspring, not just to mates, but
also to affiliates, as in the wolf case. That when it does
and it can be useful, but it need not always, then we see
this extension to kiff.
I’ve given them slightly different colors to indicate that
probably most of the time, but, of course, not always, there
may be more intensive investment in kin than in kiff. This,
of course, has been noticed in humans as well as in other
animals. In this slide, I really just want to emphasize that
different social organizations are possible and that the
kinds of social organizations that a particular species has
is, of course, always going to reflect non-trivial aspects of
its environment. Here is one of these lovable meerkats out
in the Kalahari Desert.
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The males take turns standing sentry looking for lions. Not
a lot of fun probably, but there he is. In meerkats, as in
wolves, there’s only one breeding pair, but, of course,
that’s not the way it is with all social mammals. Even all
social big-brained mammals. If the alpha female finds that
one of the ladies has got herself pregnant, she is quite apt
to kill her. On the other hand, it’s very interesting that
the auntie, so if the alpha female has a litter and there are
babies, the aunties will help and they will care for the
babies and do things with them and they will even lactate.
That suggests an interesting role in this particular species
that oxytocin plays simply as the result of being attached to
these infants, albeit not the infants of her own.
This has been a nice story so far about cooperation and trust
and kindness and so forth, but, of course, especially in
humans and in chimpanzees, I’m not sure about other species,
but I think we do not see it in bonobo’s and we do not see it
in marmosets, probably, Robert Seyfarth can tell us much more
about where else we do and don’t see it, but offsetting in
group bonding is out-group hostility. In humans, it seems
something that’s very easy to manipulate, as has been shown
in a whole range of psychological experiments. On the other
hand, close in-group bonding also seems to be an extremely
important part of human sociality.
In-group bonding is probably important for sociality in all
highly social groups and it certainly is in humans, and
arguably, many institutions have developed in order to foster
in-group bonding. Institutions including things like
religions or special kinds of rituals, dancing around the
fire in preparation for an attack or undertaking a
particularly risky job. Aggression, I think, is very, very
complicated, because there are many kinds of aggression.
There’s what’s involved in within the group competition, but
very often it’s carefully regulated so that the animals are
not actually hurt, but enough happens so that one can
recognize that the other guy is eventually the stronger and
the more dominant.
Then, of course, there can be aggression in the predator
situation. There can be aggression when the predator attacks
the babies or attacks some member of the group as, for
example, a lion attacking a baboon. Sometimes, depending on
the nature of this situation, the other baboons will try to
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do something about it, but sometimes not. I think aggression
is probably going to be much more complicated, actually, than
this kind of sociality of extending trust that we see as
originating out of the parental infant bond.
I want to say a little bit that’s relevant to culture and
that is that if you look at culture from the biological
perspective, you can think of humans as creating long lasting
niche changes that actually alter their selective pressures.
This can happen when there are certain kinds of solutions to
difficult problems. Solutions that involve, for example,
building a boat and building a boat, this one happens to be a
hide-a-boat that is very suitable to being on the very wavy
ocean by the Queen Charlotte Islands in Northern British
Columbia as contrasted to the kind of boat that the Inuit
built. This might be a point to say a little bit about
genes.
It is sometimes argued and this, I think, is actually quite a
worrisome argument. It’s sometimes argued that when they see
that a behavior is universal, or very nearly so, that you can
infer that it’s got a genetic basis. I don’t actually think
that’s true. In the case of boats, I think what we see is
that essentially every human group that we know anything
about, and even Homo erectus probably, if they have access to
wood and water was nearby, they made boats out of wood. Now,
you could say, right, it’s universal, so there’s got to be a
gene for making boats out of wood. Well, I don’t really
think so. I think it’s very unlikely.
Similarly, essentially every human group we know anything
about has figured out ways of carrying stuff on their back.
But I don’t think there’s a gene for knapsacks or what have
you. This is partly because I’m going to segue into the fact
that humans have this enormous capacity for learning and for
learning in a very deep way, so that certain things become
intuitive and obvious and yet they are rooted in learning.
The other point that those people who do think about culture
make is that as a population grows, for example, especially
after the advent of agriculture, then there can be benefits
that come from trusting relationships that go beyond the
groups. Matt, really, I think has done, as has Paul
Seabright, a wonderful job of talking about how early trade
amongst hunter gatherer groups was probably very important
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for establishing trusting relationships with strangers. Some
recent work by Joe Heinrich has also shown that there is a
difference. If you measure that difference by using one of
these trust games neuroeconomics has developed, there’s a
difference in the degree of trust manifested by a huntergatherer group that does lots of trading. The huntergatherer group that is largely self-sufficient. These guys
are less trusting in those games than those guys.
Of course, I said I think probably religion plays some role.
Especially as groups get larger and you need ways of
enforcing some of the social conventions and the social
rules. I think it is useful to create a myth, or maybe it’s
not a myth, but to have a story that indicates that you might
be punished. Now, I did say that I didn’t have a crisp
definition of morality. I think it’s reasonable not to, but
I think this is not just a trivial point. I think it’s
actually a fairly deep point. In the ‘60s, Eleanor Rosch did
some work, followed up by George Lakoff and many other
psychologists, which showed that our everyday categories
chair, coat, house, river, vegetable are similar in the
following respect.
They have a radial structure with sort of prototypes at the
center where the prototypes are things on which we pretty
much all agree, then there are degrees of similarity falling
off as you go out further, and that there are fuzzy
boundaries. There aren’t necessary insufficient conditions
for being a mountain or for being a river as opposed to a
stream, as opposed to a creek, as opposed to a brook. The
classic example, of course, is vegetable where, at least in
America, carrots are the prototypical vegetable. We don’t-not everybody agrees that a radish is a vegetable. Some
people will say, ah, it’s just a garnish. It’s not really
something you’re expected to eat, but people do. Then
there’s mushrooms, which are kind of way out on the fuzzy end
of things.
To be honest, there’s no point in arguing about whether
mushrooms are really vegetables or not, because there is no
fact of the matter. It really--mostly it doesn’t matter. If
you can get them in the store where there are other
vegetables, why do you care really that it’s not a real
vegetable? What Lakoff and Mark Johnson did, that I think
was really interesting, was to say that the same is true in
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the social domain. We learn the prototypical cases of what
it is to be a friend or to be honest or when to tell the
truth. We sometimes are given rules, like never lie, but
before very long you teach your kid, well, yeah, but it’s
okay in this instance or it’s okay in that instance. What
they learn are the prototypical exceptions and the
prototypical cases where you must not lie.
The same, I think, is actually true of what we count as moral
or as not moral. Our culture provides us with a story, or a
set of stories, about what are the prototypical instances of
morally appropriate behavior. There are a similarity of
cases, but it falls off as we get towards the periphery.
There are some cases on the periphery where there might
actually not be a right answer. For example, there might be
no right answer whether it was okay for Martin Hartwell, a
bush pilot who went down in the Arctic while carrying a nurse
and an Inuit boy with appendicitis. The Bush plane crashed.
They waited for days and days and nothing happened.
Actually, the little boy survived. He finally starved to
death. Martin Hartwell ate the nurse. He ate her leg.
Well, some people are quite horrified by this. There may not
be a right answer.
Similarly, many people are horrified by the idea of eating a
dog. The Inuit are horrified by the idea that you would
starve to death when the dog is right there. I think that
the prototypes also vary as the culture varies and that often
the culture reflects something about the ecology. I try to
make that point in this slide, which is sort of goofy, but
it--there is no necessary and sufficient conditions for
defining what a house is. There is no precise definition.
If you’re in Texas, that’s a house. If you’re in the Arctic,
a completely different thing is a house. If you’re on the
prairie circa 1910, that’s your house. Where I grew up,
there should be a window there, I guess, but that was a
house. Paul’s mom was born in one of these, so that was a
house. And so forth.
There can be, as Liechtenstein might have said, a certain
family similarity between these prototypes, but there isn’t
something like a set of precise definitions for what counts
as a house. Just as some of our social conventions and our
social practices reflect our way of making a living and the
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equipment we’ve got and the technology we’ve got, so I think
it is in the case of a house.
Of course, one can’t close without saying something about
reasoning. The Kantian tradition and philosophy, of course,
advocates that we suppress emotion and we give all to
reasoning. This seems to be biologically not a go. But one
wonders what exactly reasoning is, because for many, many
social problems, Jon Haidt notwithstanding, for many social
problems, we might have an intuitive response, but then, of
course, we think about it. When is a war just war? I
actually don’t have an intuitive response for that. Maybe he
does. There are other questions about, for example, when and
whether inheritance taxes are fair. That’s something for
which I don’t have an intuitive response and where it’s
important for us to reason together, to negotiate, for me to
understand how you see it, and for you to understand how I
see it, and so forth.
I think of reasoning in an individual case--and this is a
sloppy account, because we don’t know neurobiologically what
reasoning is. In an individual case, I think of it as a
constraint satisfaction process where there are many
constraints with different probabilities and different
weights that somehow in the brain interact in such a way that
the brain settles into a good local minimum and the decision
is made. How that works, of course, we’d like to know. I
think it’s also a constraint satisfaction at the social level
where we get together to try to figure out what would be
acceptable to us regarding inheritance laws.
Reasoning has to be involved, as there’s no point in just
saying, well, I have this intuition and I have this intuition
and we clash. I don’t really have time to talk about that.
That can come up in the question period. I include this,
because it’s a way for me to emphasize that big brained
mammals are capable of a lot of earning and that we can
sometimes end up doing things and behaving in a way in which
you might think is surprising given what is supposed about
our nature. We have all learned, or at least I learned, that
fundamentally orangs are loners and that that’s partly got to
do with the way that they make their living and they each
need a large territory. Of course, the mother and the infant
are together until the infant is independent.
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But sometimes things can change. This guy might be an
outlier or it might just be that the resources are available
and that allows his, sort of, suppressed sociality to spring
forth. Here’s the go. He’s in a rescue center and the dog
wanders into the rescue center and before very long, like
almost instantly, they become inseparable. This seems so odd
to me as a kind of social closeness and a real attachment and
bonding between a dog and an orang. Now, of course, we see
kinds of sociality that differ from the norm in lots of
cases. Black bears can be very sociable depending on the
availability of resources. There can be cross species
fostering and cross species care as well.
I think one of the really important things that the people
who look at the culture of all of this do is ask the
question: “What kinds of institutions will be both stable and
will help most people to maximize their well-being?”
Different ideas are beginning to emerge, but I think those
are really, really important questions. We do know that when
certain kinds of institutions, such as institutions for
policing and for the criminal justice system, when they come
into being, it does change how people respond to things like
aggression and I think that’s probably terribly important.
With that, I’ll close. Thank you.
[Applause]
DR. WEISBERG: Before our reception, we have time for some
questions. I believe there’s a microphone on the floor.
It’s right here. Please raise your hands and wait for the
microphone to come to you. After the questions, there will
be a reception right outside the doors.
MALE VOICE 2: Hi. Your discussion at the end involving
prototypes was interesting. I know that experiments have
been done. I think it was Lila Gleitman [phonetic] who did
it, is she in the room? Okay. Where asking people to rate
how prototypical even numbers are and two is very
prototypical and other numbers aren’t as prototypical, so
even numbers. There is a fact of the matter, unlike
vegetables.
MS. CHURCHLAND:
Sure.
MALE VOICE 2: But they still look like prototypes with fuzzy
edges, and I’m wondering, even though morals might seem like
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
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prototypes, there might be a fact of the matter that’s we
don’t know or it’s unknowable. I mean, most of us are
scientists in the room, so we know we don’t know things, but
we assume there’s a fact of the matter and we hope it’s
knowable, so I’m wondering if you could comment on that
whether it’s necessarily the case that the same is true of
morals.
MS. CHURCHLAND: That’s a wonderful question. I think that it’s
not necessarily true, but I think that morality is kind of
human dependent in a way that being hemoglobin is not human
dependent. There can always be a question, is this really
hemoglobin or not? But in the case of, especially, these
things that we find out on the periphery where there is a lot
of disagreement, it’s hard to see what would ground the fact
of the matter, if you take my meaning. If you’re Plato, you
know what would do it and that would be all of the truths are
written in Plato’s Heaven, but that’s no good.
If you are utilitarian, like Peter Singer, and you believe
that you should maximize aggregate utility, then you think
there’s a fact of the matter because you just do your
calculations. Although, it’s sometimes quite difficult to
get those calculations. How do you do the calculations for
Martin Hartwell? And so it’s hard to see where the fact of
the matter would come from. Now, again, some people who have
a particular kind of religious belief might say that you
could go to that, but the problem is that that there are many
people who don’t.
When you think about Asian religions where there isn’t really
a personal God of any kind at all, there’s just really wise
folks and where there isn’t a set of rules like the Ten
Commandments, so it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be just
something that humans come to agree about in the end. I
think there’s just more fluidity with regard to some of these
things in the social and moral domain. Yeah. That’s not an
answer that traditional philosophers would have liked. They
want there to be an either you’re right or I’m right. I
think in the real world, alas, it ain’t so.
MALE VOICE 3: I was--can you hear me? All right. I was hoping
that you could situate your project against, sort of, what
Jonathan Haidt is doing with moral modularity, so it came to
my mind when you were talking about eating dogs. It looks
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like Haidt’s going to say, well, it’s going to pick up a
disgust module that most people have that I assume that most
people in here are liberals, so we would say, well, that’s
probably disgusting, but that’s not morally relevant. Haidt
says, well, for people who aren’t western liberals, disgust
is one of the five sort of psychological bases for
normativity.
MS. CHURCHLAND: Yeah, well, there are a number of things that I
think--I mean, this is a really big, sort of, project that
he’s got going and there are a number of things to be said.
One is this, and I kind of alluded to it.
FEMALE VOICE 1: Can you just say a little bit for other people
what Jonathan is?
MS. CHURCHLAND: Okay. Jonathan Haidt--okay.
do this. I have to--all right.
FEMALE VOICE 1:
Let’s se if I can
The one sentence summary.
MS. CHURCHLAND: The one sentence summary. So the idea is that
during human evolution there were selective pressures such
that there came to be certain innate dispositions for
loyalty, for disgust, for caring, for sanctity. I guess
that’s part of what we’re discussing.
FEMALE VOICE 1:
Avoidance of harm.
MS. CHURCHLAND:
And for what?
FEMALE VOICE 1:
Avoidance of harm.
MS. CHURCHLAND: Avoidance of harm. Now, the thing of it is, that
ever since Plato, really, and probably before that, people
have made lists of fundamental virtues. It’s a good thing to
do. I actually don’t--I think Plato’s list was quite
interesting. Aristotle had a quite different list. Thomas
Aquinas’ list, it turns out, that religious devotion or
devotion to God turns out to be very important, but that’s
not the case in Aristotle’s list. In fact, Socrates
absolutely rejects it. He says we shouldn’t have religion in
there at all, because that’s something that Delphic oracle
should be taken care of. So I think, I mean, it’s
interesting to talk about.
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When you talk about what’s fundamental, and this I think is
Jonathan Haidt’s point, is he wants to link it to
evolutionary biology. All right. Go for it. What’s the
link? All right. The link is universality of response.
Well, it depends on how selective your evidence is. Anyway,
universality doesn’t imply innateness. All humans eat with
their hands as long as they’ve got hands. Is that innate? I
don’t know. I mean, you could eat with your feet. You could
just put your face into it. Do you need an innate hand
module in order to eat with your hands? I don’t think so.
It’s just that’s a really good and reasonable way to do the
job.
The problem with innateness claims is this, if you can’t
connect it to something in the neurobiology and you can’t
connect it to something known about the evolution of humans
and you can’t connect it to genes, there are people who think
it’s only a just so story. That’s always been the difficulty
with innateness claims. Occasionally, you can make the
connection. For something like the eye blink reflex, we have
a pretty good idea how to make that connection or with
something like having trichromacy. We think that that’s
innate. We know something about how the genes for
trichromacy evolved and although we’re not entirely sure why
that happened and that it happened many times in evolutionary
biology. That’s always the difficulty.
I have no idea whether sanctity is innate or not. I have no
idea even whether sanctity is universal. That some people
feel disgusted at the idea of eating a dog doesn’t qualify.
And much depends on the circumstances about what’s found
disgusting, so, I mean, those of you who go camping realize
that you do things in the bush that you don’t do normally. I
was once told by a very distinguished biologist that humans
have this innate capacity or this innate disposition--I’m
sorry, this is going to get a bit nasty, but anyway, this
innate disposition to defecate in private. I said, well,
look, I mean, we were on the farm. We had a two holer. Most
people did. What are you talking about?
It’s that he had grown up under a very particular kind of
circumstance, where his intuitions were shaped and honed by
the way he was brought up. I have no problems with a two
holer. I mean, you could say I’m a mutant, but then were we
all mutants back on the farm? I don’t think so. Strength of
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intuition or the fact that it comes very automatically and so
forth doesn’t tell you anything about where that comes from.
When you find that there is variability and variability in
context, but you have to actually look for it. So Marc
Hauser says everybody finds it disgusting to drink fresh
apple juice out of a brand new bedpan. Well, it depends.
Suppose you’re out in the desert and you’re so thirsty,
you’re incredibly dehydrated. Along comes a camel and
strapped to the camel’s back is a bedpan, which low and
behold, has apple juice in it. Would you be so disgusted?
wouldn’t even be a little bit disgusted if I was that
dehydrated. I think it’s just a lot harder than this.
I
If your science is such that you don’t need to attach it to
evolutionary biology in any way we know anything about and
you don’t need to attach it to the brain, and you don’t need
to attach it to genes, heck, you can say anything. So it’s a
worry. I realize that he’s become very popular. There is a
criticism of this in the book. There’s also an article
jointly published by me and Chris Suhler in the last issue of
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, so I have actually have
thought about it. That didn’t just come spontaneously.
MALE VOICE 4: I think for much of your talk, you were alluding to
Dunbar’s number at various points. I wonder if you can tell
us about immune tests investigating the play of the immune
system or other hormonal systems in Dunbar’s number. I ask
in terms of morality, because I think we’re about to enter a
period of planetary scarcity, a very moral question of who
will live and who will die, and so I wonder if you could talk
about any tests of sort of chemical neurological roots for
Dunbar’s number?
MS. CHURCHLAND: Robin Dunbar has made the claim that it’s
important for social animals to understand in quite a lot of
detail the history and the temperament and the dispositions
of the members of the group and that seems very reasonable.
His idea with regard to humans is that we max out about 150
people. We can have a casual acquaintance with many more
than that, but to really know people and work well with them
and so forth, the number is about 150. I don’t know of
anything that that connects to neurobiologically. Off the
top of my head, I can’t quite see how you do it, but really
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smart graduate students are always figuring out good
solutions, so I don’t know.
There is a kind of relation that has recently been explored
between levels of oxytocin and healing. That’s really
because, I mean, it was prompted by the observation that
there is this sort of bio behavioral loop where when oxytocin
levels go up, corticotrophin releasing factor and other
stress hormones go down. We’ve known, of course, for a long
time that under conditions of stress that things like healing
take longer. In the rat studies if the rat has a cut on its
leg and it’s sitting there in a stressed situation all by
itself, the healing takes N days. If there’s another rat
close by, it takes N minus M days, whatever that happens to
be.
A study was recently done with humans, which has certain
queries and confounds, but to a first approximation the
affectionate high level oxytocin couples healed faster in
this administered lesion than the couples who were kind of at
each others throat and, oh, Jim, did you have to say that
kind of thing. The healing was significantly lower. That’s
only a behavioral study. As far as I know, it hasn’t been
replicated. We don’t really know what the mechanism other
than this presumed idea that it’s because stress hormones are
going down, but what the stress hormones exactly have to do
with healing you’d have to ask a physiologist who knows more
than I do on that. Yeah. Yes?
MALE VOICE 5:
Anyway, I didn’t get the microphone.
MALE VOICE 6:
Hi, sorry.
MS. CHURCHLAND:
Oh, okay.
MALE VOICE 6: Hi. As a philosopher, you’re telling us there’s a
biological basis for morality. So you were hinting at it at
the end, but what do you think the ramifications of that
finding are for the history of madness and the treatment of
psychotics and so on and criminality?
MS. CHURCHLAND: Well, I mean, the treatment for schizophrenia and
so forth is obviously a very, very complicated business.
There is one place where people are interested in
administering oxytocin with a view to changing the
psychiatric condition. Actually, there’s two. One is postUNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
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traumatic stress disorder where the thought is that, because
stress hormones are so high, if you give people oxytocin
maybe it’ll make a difference. As far as I know, the results
are not clear yet whether that’s effective. The other place
is in autism and there, I think, Angela Sirigu’s group from
France have some preliminary data saying that in high
functioning autistics, there is some change in behavior, so
that there is eye contact that lasts a little bit longer and
there’s a little bit more in the way of turn taking. But
these are really, really preliminary results at this point.
I think it’s really too early. When I was in Japan and I
gave this talk, someone said, well, surely you know that many
Japanese parents are getting oxytocin online and spraying it
up the nose of the kids to get them to be more social. I
mean, this is really not a good idea. Why do I say that?
Because oxytocin is a very powerful hormone and you would no
more, sort of, fool around with testosterone, say, in this
way, as you should with oxytocin, so I think that great
caution is actually in order.
One of the things that Sue Carter’s lab found was that if you
just take a regular female Prairie Vole who has not yet had
pups and you raise her level of oxytocin, she immediately
goes into estrus. The other thing they showed was that if
you take a Prairie Vole female who’s nicely attached to her
mate and has had pups and everything is going along
swimmingly and you give her oxytocin, the attachment to the
mate falls off.
Now, this is kind of like that usual U curve, upside down U
curve that we see in biology. There is an appropriate level.
Too much is not good. Too little is not good. I think we
have be extremely cautious. The idea that, for example, you
might treat really aggressive people by just shooting them up
with oxytocin is just--I mean, I think it’s nuts. I’m glad
you asked that, because it gave me an opportunity to make
these cautions that we should just be really, really careful
with it. We don’t want 20 years down the pikes people saying
you wrecked my life by testing me with oxytocin.
DR. WEISBERG: I think this is going to bring the discussion to
the end, but I just want to remind you again there’s a
reception right out these doors and you’re all welcome to
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
26
join us. Professor Churchland will be there, perhaps to
answer a few more questions. Let’s thank her again.
[END pinkel_churchland2011.mp3]
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
13 t h Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture
March 25, 2011
27