Owls and Humans and the Brain

[kaco...@aol.com]

 

This hurricane news is so awful and I often write on a topic I’ve been thinking about as a distraction from events.  You may or more likely may not find this exploration interesting but it does help me focus elsewhere and escape from what’s going on in this scary world:

 

I’ve just heard on NPR that owls have the ability to shut down all external sensory input that would distract them when they swoop down on their prey. The reporter went on to suggest that this mechanism, this ability  to turn off or tune out information, has been observed in owls and likely exists in all animals  with brains, because the brain has the ability to selectively do that.

 

Psychologists have created a long list of defense mechanisms in humans.  One is anger displacement:  Kicking the dog because you’re angry about something else.       The one the owls bring up is denial.  It’s healthy, even necessary, when something terrible happens and you need time to absorb it, to adjust to it.  But in the extreme, people simply avoid truths they cannot or choose not to face.  That is denial.

 

As brain science becomes more sophisticated, our behaviors appear less to be about conscious choice Than previously believed.  (Agency is quite another matter: What you do has consequences and you are responsible for that and you change your behavior.)

 

Somewhat tangentially but very interestingly, there is increasing documented evidence that environment, in addition to your genetic inheritance, does shape who you are and “choices” you make in your behavior.  For example, mice that are mothers can be negatively impacted by their environment and forsake their mothering instincts.  When given certain negative stimuli, even good mothers no longer well tend their offspring.  Both poverty and adverse dysfunctional family conditions shape who you are and can turn off or on certain genes.  Interventions can remedy some of this but it’s unlikely that profound remediation is possible in a single generation. 

 

Libertarians and those who want to marginalize groups like the poor and racial minorities as a cohort believe that human beings make entirely conscious choices and that “bad” choices are independent of psychological or sociological origins, that “choice” is somehow absolute and wholly deliberate.  They minimize or ignore data that does not support their beliefs.   They minimize psychological and sociological explanations, claim that sociology in particular is soft, that social beliefs are only subjective constructs lacking any objective reality that can be measured.  That the truth of their own social beliefs is absolute.  This is what people believed in the 18^th Century.

 

But it’s been interesting to see that even those things that once seemed objectively measurable in absolute numbers—people’s decisions about money, in particular—in reality are rooted not only such measures but also in feelings.  People may spend or invest rationally but they may also spend or invest irrationally.  Milton Friedman notwithstanding.  The science is clear.

 

Boring digression, I know.

 

For me, right now, the most interesting thing will be human studies of the brain that help to explain denial.

 Kathy