Excerpt of: Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts A psychologist probes how altruism, Darwinism and neurobiology mean that we can succeed by not being cutthroat. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=kindness-emotions-psychology&page=2 (...) DISALVO: Your team at U.C. Berkley has done a lot of interesting research on the vagus nerve and its association with altruistic feelings. Tell us a bit about this research and its implications for better understanding the nature of altruism. KELTNER: The vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system. It is a bundle of nerves that originates in the top of the spinal cord, it activates different organs throughout the body (heart, lungs, liver, digestive organs). When active, it is likely to produce that feeling of warm expansion in the chest, for example when we are moved by someone's goodness or when we appreciate a beautiful piece of music. University of Illinois, Chicago, psychiatrist Steve Porges long ago argued that the vagus nerve is a care-taking organ in the body (of course, it serves many other functions as well). Several reasons justify this claim. The vagus nerve is thought to stimulate certain muscles in the vocal chamber, enabling communication. It reduces heart rate. Very new science suggests that it may be closely connected to oxytocin receptor networks. And it is unique to mammals. Our research and that of other scientists suggests that the vagus nerve may be a physiological system that supports caretaking and altruism. We have found that activation of the vagus nerve is associated with feelings of compassion and the ethical intuition that humans from different social groups (even adversarial ones) share a common humanity. People who have high vagus nerve activation in a resting state, we have found, are prone to feeling emotions that promote altruism-compassion, gratitude, love, happiness. Arizona State University psychologist Nancy Eisenberg has found that children with elevated vagal tone (high baseline vagus nerve activity) are more cooperative and likely to give. This area of study is the beginning of a fascinating new argument about altruism-that a branch of our nervous system evolved to support such behavior. iTunes Podcasts: Dacher Keltner's UC Berkeley Courses Psych 156: Human Emotion http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2008-D-74501 &semesterid=2008-D Psych 160: Social Psychology http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978522 ------------------ Of course compassion and cooperation are powerful survial strategies that have probably been strongly selected for over the millennia. Of particular interest to me is that our "mirroring" neural net, while physically confined to our heads, processes and creates internal meaning for physically external and non-sensory events (i.e. others' experiences), perhaps reflecting the underlying universal quantum entanglement proposed by bell's theorem. Is the neural net acting as an "antenna", or is it only reflecting the fractal nature of self-organizing systems like minds, similarly to how subsets of the mandelbrot set contain "copies" of the entire set? Is there a difference, quantum-mechanically speaking? Contrast these empathically obvious discoveries with current "state of the art" american obstetrical practices. Is it really necessary to "derive" the fact that newborn babies need their mothers and only their mothers, and that people should treat each other with respect? "Performing [circumcision] without anesthetic has allowed researchers to study the parameters of extreme pain in experiments that would not have been allowed on laboratory animals. Using routine, unanesthetized circumcision as a model of stress, Porter et al. were able to examine the relation between cry acoustics and vagal tone in 49 (32 experimental; 17 control) 1 to 2-day-old, full-term normal, healthy newborns during the preoperative, surgical, and postoperative periods. Vagal tone was significantly reduced during the severe stress of circumcision. These reductions were paralleled by significant increases in the pitch of the infants' cries." Male Circumcision: A Legal Affront. Christopher Price 1996 http://www.cirp.org/library/legal/price-uklc/ ------------------- Abstract: Clinical Studies have demonstrated that the cries of chronically stressed infants, medical compromised infants are characteristically higher and more variable in pitch than those of healthy infants. Other studies have indicated that the vagal tone of chronically stressed infants is significantly reduced in comparison to that of normal infants. A neural model of cry production has been proposed which suggests that decreased vagal tone among infants at risk may, in fact, be related to these increases in cry pitch. Using routine, unanesthetized circumcision as a model of stress we were able to examine the relationship between cry acoustics and vagal tone in normal, healthy newborns undergoing an acutely stressful event. Vocalizations, heart, and respiratory waveforms were continuously recorded from 49 (32 experimental; 17 control) 1-2 day-old, full-term infants during preoperative, surgical, and postoperative periods. Vagal tone, as measured by the amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia extracted from heart rate data, was significantly reduced during the severe stress of circumcision, and these reductions were paralleled by significant increases in the pitch of the infants' cries. In addition, individual differences in vagal tone measured prior to circumcision surgery were predictive of physiological and acoustic reactivity to subsequent stress. These results emphasize the potential role of vagal control of the autonomic nervous system during stress. Newborn Pain Cries and Vagal Tone: Parallel Changes in Response to Circumcision http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/porter2/ It seems obstetrical medicine is riddled with sociopaths. ---------------------- "Based on recent survey data, 54% of pediatricians, family practitioners, and obstetricians perform at least 1 circumcision per month. Of physicians performing circumcision, 45% use anesthesia, most commonly dorsal penile block with lidocaine (71% of pediatricians, 56% of family practitioners, and 25% of obstetricians). Those physicians who reported not using anesthesia cited concern about adverse effects and a belief that circumcision does not warrant anesthesia." http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/no-index/about-ama/13585.shtml ------------------- Abstract "During the 20th Century, when medicine rose to dominate childbirth in developed countries, it brought with it a denial of infant pain based on ancient prejudices and 'scientific' dogmas that can no longer be supported. The painful collision of babies with doctors continues today in neonatology, infant surgery without anesthetic, aggressive obstetrics and genital modification of newborn males. This presentation includes an historical review of empirical findings on infant pain, some the reasons for physicians' indifference, and speculations about the negative consequences of violence to infants." Introduction Babies have had a difficult time getting us to accept them as real people with real feelings having real experiences. Deep prejudices have shadowed them for centuries: babies were sub-human, prehuman, or as Luis de Granada, a 16th- century authority put it, "a lower animal in human form." In the Age of Science, babies have not necessarily fared better. It may shock you to consider how many ways they have fared worse. In the last hundred years, scientific authorities robbed babies of their cries by calling them "random sound;" robbed them of their smiles by calling them "muscle spasms" or "gas;" robbed them of their memories by calling them "fantasies" and robbed them of their pain by calling it a "reflex." In this paper, I reflect on the painful impact of medicine on infants over the last century. This is not an easy story to tell. It has been a century of discovery and denial, of promise and disillusionment, and the story still has a very uncertain ending. In the 20th Century, infants have had a head-on collision with physicians, typically male physicians. Before this time, they always found themselves in the hands of women: mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and midwives. In the collision, infant senses, emotions, and cognitions were generally ignored. Over the years, doctors paid increasing attention to the pain of mothers but not to the pain of infants. Actually birth become more painful for infants. We must try to understand why. Experiments with Infant Pain Against a back of general (scientific) ignorance of infant behavior, experiments were undertaken as early as 1917 at Johns Hopkins University to observe newborn tears, smiles, reactions to having blood drawn, infections lanced, and to a series of pin-pricks on the wrist during sleep.1 In these experiments (the first of many), infants reacted defensively. When blood was taken from the big toe, the opposite foot would go up at once with a pushing motion against the other ankle. Lancing produced exaggerated crying, and pin-pricks during sleep roused half the babies to move the hand and forearm. Rough cleaning of the back and head to remove vernix provoked vigorous battling movements of the hands, frantic efforts to crawl away, and angry crying. Psychologist Mary Blanton concluded: This line of investigation continued in a series of experiments 3,4,5 at Northwestern University and Chicago's Lying-In Hospital in which newborns were stuck with needles on the cheeks, thighs, and calves. Virtually all infants reacted during the first hours and first day after birth, but the trend, the researchers noted, was toward more reaction to less stimulation from day one through day twelve. As a physiologic finding, this suggested that, at birth, newborns were not very sensitive, but became so gradually. However, they failed to tell us (and apparently overlooked the possible consequences) that all the mothers had received anesthetic drugs during labor and delivery! For the missing information, we are indebted to psychologist Daphne Maurer.6 http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html --------------- Sir-Taddio and colleagues (Feb 4, p. 291) are to be commended for their study showing the permanent psychological damage inflicted on infants subjected to unanesthetised penile reduction surgery--i.e., circumcision. It is both instructive and frightening that the severe and unalleviable pain of circumcision permanently alters the neural pathways in an adverse fashion. Where else might the clinician look for signs of circumcision flashback? The suggestion that analgesia be used for circumcision is, however, incongruous with the results of Taddio and colleagues' study. Investigations of the effectiveness of analgesia in circumcision show that at best, topical, caudal, or dorsal analgesia may cause infants to suffer only slightly less. For instance, Stang et al (1) found that an injection of lignocaine hydrochloride reduced the plasma cortisol concentration slightly, but left the babies with a concentration of 331 nmol/L, whereas a contented child at rest has a plasma cortisol concentration of 28-138 nmol/L. Benni et al (2) found that EMLA (lignocaine/prilocaine local anaesthetic cream) could only reduce the circumcised child's heart rate from 180 to 160 beats a minute. No infant's heart should beat at 160 beats a minute, nor should his plasma cortisol concentration be 331 nmol/L. These rates are consistent with torture. With or without anaesthesia, circumcision will cause the psychoneural damage found by Taddio et al. Despite the obviously irrational cruelty of circumcision, the profit incentive in American medical practice is unlikely to allow science or human rights principles to interrupt the highly lucrative American circumcision industry. It is now time for European medical associations to condemn the North American medical community for participating in and profiting from what is by any standard a senseless and barbaric sexual mutilation of innocent children. THE LANCET, VOL 345, P. 927, 8 APRIL 1995; CIRCUMCISION http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/fleiss/