Most of the psychiatric drugs we use today are refinements of drugs whose value for mental disorders was discovered by accident decades ago. Now we can look forward to a more rational way to design psychiatric drugs. It will be guided by the identification of the gene variants that predispose certain people to particular mental disorders such as schizophrenia or severe depression.

Introduction

Psychiatrist Samuel Barondes, M.D. is interested in the ways that chemicals influence mental processes. "Despite decades of tinkering," he notes, "the drugs we presently use still have serious limitations. First, they don't always work. Second, they still have many undesirable side effects. Instead of continuing to invest in more minor improvements, pharmaceutical companies are becoming interested in a new approach to psychiatric drug development." In this discusion he traces the accidental discovery of LSD by Albert Hoffman in 1943 as a contribution to a milieu that favored the discovery of many psychiatric medications.

For example, he notes that "in the course of just a few years there were these two discoveries of extremely valuable psychiatric drugs that radically changed the practice of psychiatry. Before the discovery of chlorpromazine and imipramine disorders like schizophrenia and major depression were usually dealt with by talking, exhortation, and hospitalization—and with limited success. With these new drugs many patients had remarkable improvements."

There are new approaches that take advantage of the fact that there are genetic vulnerabilities to mental disorders. "The hot new technologies that psychiatric scientists are now using," he says, "include not only genetics but also brain imaging...It will be possible to correlate knowledge about genetic variation with knowledge about how specific brains operate in specific circumstances, as looked at with various kinds of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Right now our ideas about mental disorders are mainly based on interviews, questionnaires, and observations of behavior. Being able to look at what's going on inside the human brain, once considered to be an inscrutable black box, is turning out to be quite informative."

—JB

SAMUEL H. BARONDES is the Jeanne and Sanford Robertson Professor and director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He is past president of the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience and recently served as chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Barondes is interested in psychiatric genetics and psychopharmacology. He is the author of Molecules and Mental Illness; Mood Genes: Hunting for the Origins of Mania and Depression; and Better Than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs. 

Samuel Barondes' Edge Bio Page

The idea that animals can be used to study mental illness strikes many people as strange, because human behavior seems unique. After all, only humans use language for introspection and long-range planning, and it is just these functions that are disturbed in many psychiatric disorders. Nevertheless, we have enough in common with other animals to make them very useful for studies that can’t be done with patients.

Of the animals used for this purpose, apes and monkeys have been favorites because they are our closest relatives. Dogs, too, have obvious human qualities. They may even display patterns of maladaptive behavior that resemble those in DSM-IV. For example, Karen Overall, a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying a dog version of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which is fairly common in certain breeds. Like people with OCD who each have their particular patterns of symptoms, individual dogs with canine OCD also have distinctive main symptoms such as tail-chasing or compulsive licking of their paws. Like humans with OCD, the dogs tend to perform their rituals in private. And, like human OCD, the canine version responds to drugs such as clomipramine and Prozac. Because of these many similarities, Overall’s dogs may provide information about the human disorder—an aim that has already been achieved for another canine behavioral disorder that I will turn to shortly.

But despite their value for certain types of studies, primates and dogs are not ideal experimental animals. Their main shortcoming is that they are costly to raise and maintain, which makes them impractical for the many experiments that require large numbers of subjects. For this reason scientists have been turning to a much less expensive alternative, the laboratory mouse. Although it is more difficult to empathize with these tiny rodents than with a chimpanzee or a golden retriever, we now know that all these mammals share much of our complex brain machinery. What makes mice especially attractive is that their genes are relatively easy to manipulate by traditional breeding methods and by the new techniques of genetic engineering. Both experimental approaches have been successfully employed to make special strains of mice that are being used to study mental disorders and to develop new psychiatric drugs.

What the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system. Of course, chimpanzees don't proceed to develop full-blown language the way you and I have. Grey parrots, such as Alex and Griffin, are never going to sit here and give an interview the way you and I are conducting an interview and having a chat. But they are going to produce meaningful, complex communicative combinations. It is incredibly fascinating to have creatures so evolutionarily separate from humans performing simple forms of the same types of complex cognitive tasks as do young children.

Introduction 

Irene's intellectual journey with Alex is an impressive one because she has sustained a consistent line of research exploring some of the deepest problems concerning the nature of mind, and in particular, the relationship between language and thought. Her work has revealed that Alex can grasp important aspects of number, color concepts, the difference between presence and absence, and physical properties of objects such as their shape and material. These results are not only relevant to the evolution of human cognition, but they are also relevant to the evolution of animal cognition. By understanding what animals such as Alex can do under tigthly controlled laboratory conditions, we can apply such knowledge to what parrots do in the wild, the kinds of strategies they might use to negotiate in such a complex social world. How far this work will go is anyone's guess, but it is clear that Irene, Alex and her new stars will teach us a lot along the way.

—Marc D. Hauser, Director of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard, and author of Wild Minds: What Animals Think.

IRENE PEPPERBERG studies Grey parrots. The main focus of her work is to determine the cognitive and communicative abilities of these birds, and compare their abilities with those of great apes, marine mammals, and young children. She is studying the mechanisms of their learning as well as the outcomes.

Dr. Pepperberg is a research scientist at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Brandeis University.

Irene Pepperberg's Edge Bio Page

"Our new web site is up and running," writes Marc D. Hauser of Harvard's Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. "We are interested in understanding people's moral intuitions. The web site, includes background information and importantly, The Moral Sense Test. I would very much appreciate it if you would not only take the test, but also spread the word to your friends and colleagues, of all ages. We are particularly interested in getting cross-cultural data as well as developmental information, so even young children who can read would be terrifically helpful. The more the word spreads, the better for us. Thanks a lot for your help." — Marc

Introduction

Nicholas Humphrey is a research psychologist whose interests are wide ranging: He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; and is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta. Thirty years ago he breathed life into the newly developing field of evolutionary psychology with his theory about "the social function of intellect." His more recent ideas concern the nature of phenomenal consciousness.

Unlike Daniel C. Dennett, who sees the role of philosophers as disabusing people of their "primitive" ideas about the nature of consciousness, Humphrey believes that we should take these primitive intuitions at face value. If people say that the problem is what it "feels like" to be conscious, then the problem is indeed to explain "feeling." Humphrey and Dennett are a pair of bookends. Humphrey has been described as a "romantic scientist", who believes in the heuristic value of stories that go beyond the limits of established facts. But he would probably not agree that there is a hard and fast line between facts and stories. "I'm me," he says. "I'm living an embodied existence, in the thick moment of the conscious present. I'm trying to work out why."

—JB

What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?

Introduction by John Brockman

"Isn’t more information always better?" asks Gerd Gigerenzer. "Why else would bestsellers on how to make good decisions tell us to consider all pieces of information, weigh them carefully, and compute the optimal choice, preferably with the aid of a fancy statistical software package? In economics, Nobel prizes are regularly awarded for work that assumes that people make decisions as if they had perfect information and could compute the optimal solution for the problem at hand. But how do real people make good decisions under the usual conditions of little time and scarce information? Consider how players catch a ball—in baseball, cricket, or soccer. It may seem that they would have to solve complex differential equations in their heads to predict the trajectory of the ball. In fact, players use a simple heuristic. When a ball comes in high, the player fixates the ball and starts running. The heuristic is to adjust the running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant —that is, the angle between the eye and the ball. The player can ignore all the information necessary to compute the trajectory, such as the ball’s initial velocity, distance, and angle, and just focus on one piece of information, the angle of gaze."

Gigerenzer provides an alternative to the view of the mind as a cognitive optimizer, and also to its mirror image, the mind as a cognitive miser. The fact that people ignore information has been often mistaken as a form of irrationality, and shelves are filled with books that explain how people routinely commit cognitive fallacies. In seven years of research, he, and his research team at Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, have worked out what he believes is a viable alternative: the study of fast and frugal decision-making, that is, the study of smart heuristics people actually use to make good decisions. In order to make good decisions in an uncertain world, one sometimes has to ignore information. The art is knowing what one doesn’t have to know. 

Gigerenzer's work is of importance to people interested in how the human mind actually solves problems. In this regard his work is influential to psychologists, economists, philosophers, and animal biologists, among others. It is also of interest to people who design smart systems to solve problems; he provides illustrations on how one can construct fast and frugal strategies for coronary care unit decisions, personnel selection, and stock picking. 

"My work will, I hope, change the way people think about human rationality", he says. "Human rationality cannot be understood, I argue, by the ideals of omniscience and optimization. In an uncertain world, there is no optimal solution known for most interesting and urgent problems. When human behavior fails to meet these Olympian expectations, many psychologists conclude that the mind is doomed to irrationality. These are the two dominant views today, and neither extreme of hyper-rationality or irrationality captures the essence of human reasoning. My aim is not so much to criticize the status quo, but rather to provide a viable alternative."

— JB

GERD GIGERENZER is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. He has also published two academic books on heuristics, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics).

Gerd Gigernezer 's Edge Bio Page

The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

Introduction

Every few years a book is published that commands our attention and causes us to consider questions that challenge our basic assumptions about ourselves. This month marks the publication of such a book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by MIT research psychologist Steven Pinker.

Pinker is a unifier, someone who ties a lot of big ideas together. He has studied visual cognition and language acquisition in the laboratory, and was one of the first to develop computational models of how children learn the words and grammar of their first language. He has merged Chomskyan ideas about an innate language faculty with the Darwinian theory of adaptation and natural selection. Pinker also wrote one of the most influential critiques of neural-network models of the mind.

His book The Language Instinct discussed all aspects of language in a unified, Darwinian framework, and in How the Mind Works he did the same for the rest of the mind, explaining "what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life."

In The Blank Slate, he notes "that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions. The theory has three parts".

One is the doctrine of "the blank slate": that we have no inherent talents or temperaments, because the mind is shaped completely by the environment§parenting, culture, and society. 

"The second is "the noble savage": that evil motives are not inherent to people but come from corrupting social institutions. 

The third is "the ghost in the machine", that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history.

These three ideas are increasingly being challenged by the sciences of the mind, brain, genes, and evolution," he says, "but they are held as much for their moral and political uplift as for any empirical rationale. People think that these doctrines are preferable on moral grounds and that the alternative is forbidden territory that we should avoid at all costs".

—JB

STEVEN PINKER, research psychologist, is Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and Language Development: Learnability and Cognition; The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

His research on visual cognition and on the psychology of language has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. He has also received awards for his graduate teaching at MIT and for his undergraduate teaching at MIT, two prizes for general achievement, an honorary doctorate, and five awards for his popular science books.

Pinker is a fellow of several scholarly societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an associate editor of Cognition and serves on many professional panels, including the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and the Scientific Advisory Panel of an 8-hour NOVA television series on evolution. He also writes frequently in the popular press, including The New York Times, Time, Slate, and The New Yorker.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page