Pavlov talked a lot about inhibition and disinhibition. And it took us awhile after Pavlov to really understand the importance of that. It probably took at least 50 years before behavioral scientists began to fully appreciate the importance of disinhibition. So, Phineas P Gage you’ve heard about, multiple times in this course, and you’ll probably have another opportunity or two to hear the words Phineas P Gage mentioned. Probably the most famous brain injury case in our literature. Railroad worker who had this big tamping iron run through his head, entering underneath the cheek and popping out on the other side about 30 feet away, and he lived to tell about it. But he was never quite the same after that. Never quite the same. And that's because he was missing an important part of his brain, mostly frontal lobe. That is now known to be an extension of the limbic system. And one of the critical things that gives humans the ability to look into the future, to do these little mental experiments, what would likely happen if I did this? What would likely happen if I did this? What if I did this? And then decide to do or to not do something, based on that emotional analysis. Phineas P Gage who was a model citizen, thoughtful, compassionate individual, a responsible railroad foreman. After this accident had a personality change. He became impulsive. He became childish. He didn't care about others. He had poor planning abilities, as though the traveling self were somehow on vacation. People found this to be amazing that something that happened to the brain could change our personality. We don't find that amazing now. Sometimes kind of embarrassing to talk about Phineas P Gage with any sort of enthusiasm because most of you are sitting there saying, well duh, of course he changed his behavior after this. But he changed it in a very important way because he was still very good at doing lots of things. At doing lots of things, but he wasn't at not doing things. Alcohol. It is widely described, specially in social situations, as a stimulant drug. As a stimulant drug, that it kind of makes us more interactive. Livens up the conversation. Makes people more likely to talk to others and so on and so forth. It is absolutely not a simulant drug. It is a depressive, an inhibitory drug. But, because of its chemical nature and because of the distribution of different chemicals inside the brain, it has, among other things, a fairly selective influence on our frontal lobes. And it relieves us of the ability to look forward and see things in a thoughtful and rational way, and decide not to do certain things, like Phineas P Gage with his brain damage. It causes a temporary and largely reversible change in the same direction and makes people a little bit impulsive, childish, not caring about others, and acting like their traveling self might be on vacation for a while. There are some individuals, the name changes every once in awhile and has some vaguer in its definition, but, we'll go with the psycho path today. And there are some individuals probably mostly men who just engage in the most bizarre behavior. They may walk in to a bar and meet this attractive young woman and marry her a week later. Minor little complication. Already married perhaps to someone in a neighboring town. Gets a little short of cash and embezzles money out of the bank account of one of his wives and takes off on a weekend flight to Paris. Picks up another wife. Little short on cash may Rob a 7-Eleven store, gets thrown in jail. All three wives show up begging them to let him go because he's just such a marvelous, charming individual. Amazing case histories of some of these people. And if you take them into the laboratory and hook them up and image their brain and do all sorts of things like that, what you find out is that they're traveling self is very often on a pretty much permanent vacation. That they're not very good at imagining things. And when you ask them the question, how would you feel, how would you feel if somebody did this to you? And they act like a chicken watching a card trick. Like, what do mean how would I feel? What's that got to do with the world around me? So we have all of these different things here that can alter our inhibitory behavior. Alter our ability to inhibit behavior all the way down to an individual case history that I think you saw in a video when I was on my own little vacation a few weeks back. This poor guy who couldn't decide which card to pick out in the drugstore. Couldn't decide which card to pick out because he couldn't project himself into the future about how someone would like that card. We do that all the time so routinely that we don't think about it until we've done experiments and seen these examples. Now I want to get back to children for just a moment here, because this is hard for us to grasp. It's easy to understand why Phineas P Gage might have a problem with withholding responses. Easy to understand how a drug might do the same thing, how some sort of a genetic or other type of anomaly might cause a person to have these disabilities. But what’s up with the children? The brain does a lot of developing during our lifetime. And one of the reasons why children are impulsive and why they act childish, and why they sometimes don't care about others, and things like that. One of the reasons is that they are missing the same part of the brain that Phineas Gage is missing. Not because it's been damaged, because they don't have it yet. So this is kind of an important way of looking at the brain and how it emerges over a long period of time in humans, as we develop these various behavioral systems that fall into maturity and behavioral inhibition is one of the latest. So we can now begin to look at this in a little different way and begin to attribute some of our abilities to do things or to not do things. Make it tribute them to something that's going on into the brain instead of something that the devil might be telling us to do or some other thing like that. And we all live in the most remarkable time. As Professor Mussolino pointed out, we have some facts about human behavior. And those facts have been present for as long as modern humans have been present. But now, for the first time in history, for the first time in history, we have a new way of interpreting these facts. A new way of understanding them, that we have observable, lawful, physical origins for our mental events. And we can look at brain science, all different kinds of brain science from clinical observations to laboratories that study language, laboratories that study different parts of the brain and so on and so forth, and begin to put together a complex, evidence-based observing of the brain. And we can look at evolution and begin to piece together the long history of humans. And we can look at our neighbors, our other species and follow their evolutionary pathway. Look at what other creatures can do that we can't. Look at what we can do that other creatures can and have a logical natural, evidence-based explanation for that. And we now have complicated, thoroughly documented laws of learning that are almost as complicated as the tax code, for heaven's sakes. All the little, different wrinkles in our learning abilities. And this in our generation, maybe a generation before as well, but very very recently, we, for the first time, have that ability, have the ability to do that. I am not by any stretch of the imagination, a scholar of religion. I'm a psychologist. But we do have some tools now that can sometimes give the illusion of being scholarly when it just involves pushing a couple of buttons. Couple years ago, I decided to get onto my computer and push some buttons and I downloaded a bunch of the full texts of various Holy books that tell us what to do and what not to do. And rather than actually studying and reading all of them and becoming a religious scholar, I did a word search, and I searched for the word brain. And the word brain, as far as I can tell, and if you have an example, please let me know, but as far as I can tell, the word brain does not appear in any of our Holy books. They talk about the heart, hands and feet and loins. Brain, not so much. And I think one of the big difficulties that we have in trying to understand our behavior as a natural event, is that we don't have much history of that. It's really only in the last hundred years at most, probably more like the last 50 years that we really had the ability to analyze our behavior based on something like this. So we have a convergence of solid scientific evidence about the brain mechanisms of behavioral inhibition. They're new and sophisticated systems. Some of the latest to develop evolutionarily. They are extensions of the limbic system and really guide our behavior and this is really kind of a new concept for behavioral science. Our behavior being guided so much by our ability to see forward and see the emotions that would result from various types of behavior. It makes us what we call emotionally intelligent, and we are now beginning to see certain types of disorder, certain types of developmental disorders as a failure of certain aspects of our behavior to develop and it can be linked to certain aspects of brain activity. Professor Solomon. Reference Kierkegaard, who talked about our ability as humans to look ahead and see the future. And part of that looking ahead and seeing the future is just a very trivial thing, because you all have the ability to look ahead and see yourself having dinner tonight. You can look ahead and see yourself perhaps having a family or owning a house, or all sorts of things like that. And raising a family sending your children off to college, babysitting for your grandchildren. And then wait a minute, die. And that is the awe and dread that Kierkegaard talked about and that Professor Solomon has done so much research on. So this ability to look ahead and plan things and filter our responses, is something that is very, very human. But, in the same way that I talked about last week that we have these emotional systems that prepare us to respond appropriately and in some cases dramatically to physical challenges to our welfare or survival that we are able to bring in our biological resources to flee or fight or whatever is appropriate. And we have those same types of reactions to challenges to our psychological well being. When somebody tries to tell us something that we don't want to believe, when somebody tells us that you're just wrong about that, it makes us emotional, and strangely enough it arouses the same types of biological preparedness as if it were a real physical event out there. And now I think we can even add to that. We don't even need anything or anybody challenging us. And we could just sit home and do it to ourselves. We can sit home and think about bad things that we could think about doing the thou shalt not, and think about how we and other people, perhaps God, would react to that. And we have a full-fledged set of emotions to go with it. And the thoughts in our heads, certainly the thoughts in our human heads, are very, very important part of our life, and as we came into the lecture I was playing Springsteen's Johnny 99. And one of the things in that last verse of the song, Johnny 99 asking the judge if you can take a man's life for the thoughts that's in his head, then sit back think it over one more time and get on with it. Bruce Springsteen knows a lot about human behavior and can communicate it very well, but if you stop to think about our entire judicial system is based upon the thoughts that are in our head, the thoughts that are in our head. That one of the things that judges and juries sometimes spend weeks or months struggling with is what was going through this person's head when they did that? What was going through their head when they shot and killed somebody, was it deliberate? Was it their free will? Did they think about this in advance? Was it premeditated? And often with young offenders or people who are psychologically impaired, were they able to think about it? So these controls of our behavior, our ability to walk down a narrow line within a complicated society and not get into trouble, requires the thoughts in our head. And Professor Musolino in other contexts has talked about this in some detail. And if you think about you being brought into a court situation as the accused. As the accused. So somebody in your neighborhood gets murdered and you are brought in and put on trial. It makes a very important distinction that if you are in fact guilty of that crime, your best bet is to be able to select a jury that would just kind of take a look at you, and view you favorably. And say, well I don't think he would do that. And even if he did, probably had good reason for doing it. That's the kind of a jury you would want. If in fact you had not done it and got falsely accused, then you would like the jurors and the witnesses to be like all of these CSI shows and things like that. You would want them to be pulling tiny hairs off things and doing blood samples and getting all of the possible evidence they could so that you would be released because there would not be any physical evidence, because you hadn't done it. So these are important things, both in terms of trying to understand our own behavior, and trying to understand our legal system. And in parenting and teaching, to give the kids a break. That children don't really respond well to punishment because their brains don't do punishment very well. And a lot of developmental psychologists have this credo that the way to successfully raise a child is to catch them being good. Because if you can catch a child being good and reward that they'll keep doing that. If you catch a child being bad and punish it, they don't yet have all the brain mechanisms that allow them to withhold that response. So new of understanding good behavior and bad behavior based on what we know about the brain and how it develops. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
