1
What Is Personality?
from a street gang to university is just a small step
The scissors were stuck in his flesh. The guy looked at me, bewildered. We were both taken aback. It’s in the nature of an impulsive act that those involved do not really understand it. Not the one who commits it, and certainly not the victim. Now it was too late — this guy now had a pair of scissors sticking out of his foot. He screamed blue murder, and I was in trouble. Of course the teachers called the police.
We have a tendency, as we get older, to furnish our past with a meaningful context. Or, in the words of the Swiss writer Max Frisch, ‘Sooner or later, everyone invents a story which they believe to be their life.’ Politicians love to tell how they were elected class representative at school and already displayed a talent for debating and public speaking. Writers like to regale us with stories about composing their first poems at the age of ten. And scientists pride themselves on having prepared a hay infusion and observed the resulting microbes under the microscope when they were still knee-high to a grasshopper, or having pondered centrifugal forces while playing on the swings in the park, a little like Sir Isaac Newton, who is said to have come up with the theory of gravity while sitting under a tree in an orchard, after an apple fell on his head.
I’m afraid I can’t offer you stories of any such brilliant, or, at the very least, venerable, childhood accomplishments. Instead, I was a member of a teenage street gang.
We stole, ran riot, broke into cars, and generally thought we were the toughest guys in Vienna. There’s nothing special about that, but even that would have been enough to get me into trouble. But we were clever enough not to get caught. So we weren’t just tough, we were smart, too. Everyone paid attention to us. In short, we were cool. Or so we thought. In my case, at least, it wasn’t the tiniest bit true. I may have been impulsive, but I certainly wasn’t cool.
As was the case on that fateful day, when I stabbed my classmate in the foot with a pair of scissors.
The battle for prestige and brawn
The victim was a member of a rival gang who wanted to prove himself to his pals. That’s why he chose me — one of the most notorious boys in the school — to steal breakfast from. His booty: a brawn sandwich. If it had happened now, he would probably have stolen my phone, but back then, in the late 1950s, meat sandwiches were the measure of all things. And top of the list was brawn — known to Americans as headcheese — and its more-vinegary version, souse, which were popular in those meagre postwar days for their high fat content and meaty flavour.
My reaction was spontaneous, but, looking back, it is hard to say whether the theft of my brawn breakfast was the main motive, or the presence of my fellow gang members judging my every move. Both were extremely important to me. Anyway, I immediately saw red, grabbed a pair of scissors from my satchel, strode over to the brawn thief’s seat, bent over him, and — just as he was taking a hearty bite — stabbed him with the scissors. The kid got a hole in his foot, and I was dragged off to the police station.
Now, everyone thought I was even tougher and cooler than they did before. But, in fact, I was nothing of the sort. Whenever we engaged in any criminal activity, my heart would be in my mouth. I was able to hide it, or to carry on in spite of myself; and anyway, my actions were sometimes so impulsive that there was no time for fear to kick in and slam on the brakes — which will become even more apparent as this story continues.
I was marched to the police station, with a female police officer close behind me. Just before we entered the building, I happened to spot a banknote on the ground: 100 schillings! I immediately put my foot on the bill, bent down, and pretended to tie my shoelace. Unfortunately, the policewoman was observing my every move. Her reaction was probably just as spontaneous as my scissor attack shortly before: ‘My God, what a psychopath!’ She then muttered something about how they should lock me up and throw away the key. It was obvious what she was thinking — this lad is being arrested for stabbing someone in the foot, and all he can think about is making sure he gets his hands on 100 schillings that belong to somebody else!
In short: she saw me as extremely cool, too. Not in the sense of ‘role model’, but rather in the sense of ‘scum’. However, putting my foot on that banknote was not the result of some cold-hearted calculation; rather, it was triggered by a spontaneous impulse. Like a dog clamping its jaws around a piece of meat it finds, I put my foot on the 100-schilling note and launched a cover-up manoeuvre. That was everyday behaviour in our gang, something we had become really good at; we had conditioned each other to act quickly and precisely to our own advantage, and then disguise or conceal it and adopt an innocent air so nobody noticed. And brains have a tendency to repeat actions they are particularly good at, without the involvement of the conscious mind to consider the possible consequences of those actions. The main thing is that the desired effect is achieved.
The fact that well-learned behaviour patterns are recalled and repeated over and over again leads to the conclusion, which is supported by statistical evidence, that violent teenagers turn into violent adults; if not always, then often. Why, then, did that fate not befall me? Why, in the more-than-half-a-century since the scissor-stabbing incident, have I never resorted to any kind of violence, not even an impulsive slap? There are several reasons, but the deciding factor was a complete change of surroundings, both in terms of location and in terms of my social environment. A different, better school, new friends, and — finally! — girls; different rules of behavioural effect and different role models. Learning and memory recall are dependent on context, as I’ll discuss more than once later in this book (for example, when I examine addictive behaviour).
So, I did not get locked up; my father came to release me from police custody a few hours later. However, he had finally had enough of his 15-year-old son’s antics. He threatened to force me to start an apprenticeship as an upholsterer, and even made me do some work experience in an actual upholsterer’s workshop. That convinced me pretty quickly that staying at school was the better alternative. After all, as much as educationalists are loath to accept it, negative stimuli can be effective. My father and I made a deal: he would allow me to change schools, and I would finally start behaving. The agreement worked. In my new surroundings — a liberal school that, unlike the strict, Catholic rearing station I attended before, did not positively reinforce my thuggish posturing with attention and punishment — I was able to break out of the gang and eventually graduate.
I went on to study at the University of Vienna. There, however, my new-found middle-class conformity began to crumble, and I was drawn into the cheerful anarchy that was burgeoning there. Along with other young scientists, I protested against the completely outdated content of the courses being taught, and against the incorrigible high-ranking members of the former Nazi regime who still dominated the university. We sabotaged the lectures of established professors and held our own instead.
All this sometimes became pretty violent, and I’m not convinced the motivation was always political. Just like back in my teenage street gang, we rebels were keen to impress each other. And to impress the attractive female students, too, of course. It was the same phenomenon: our brains wanted to achieve effects such as social acknowledgement and attention from like-minded peers. And just like in my youth, I had a big mouth, but secretly I was peeing my pants. No sign of the psychopath, but rather a lot of fear, which I made great efforts to compensate for and to hide. And I had a great deal of impulsiveness, which got me into rather a lot of trouble.
I was thrown out of university and a rapid round of phone calls to other institutes of higher education meant I had no chance for the time being of getting a place anywhere in the German-speaking world. I went to England, and it was only much later, after the dust had settled over my Viennese exploits, that I was able to switch to a university in Germany itself.
Memories, or made-up stories?
I have often been asked — indeed, I have sometimes asked myself — whether my childhood and teenage experiences were partly responsible for my later scientific interest in anxiety, psychopathy, and the brain’s self-control mechanisms. Some have even theorised that the unusual circumstances of my birth contributed to my independence (if you see it positively) or unpredictability (if you see it negatively) as a scientific researcher. I was born in 1945, on a plane that had made a forced landing on the way from Czechoslovakia to Austria. I was immediately baptised four different times, because my father, desperately in search of care for his newborn son and his wife who was suffering from puerperal fever, went to various churches to seek help.
I believe such connections to be nothing more than speculative constructs that people like to recount and to hear because they lend to their lives a patina of consistency, as if everything followed a certain internal logic. This representational strategy is particularly prevalent among those who believe their success in life was somehow predetermined — those who believe they were ‘always destined for greatness’.
The fact is, however, that we have only very patchy memories of what happened to us in our childhood. This has a great deal to do with the phenomenon of ‘state-dependent learning’, which means that memory retrieval works best when an individual is in the same or a largely similar state of consciousness as they were when the memory was formed. This explains why many exam candidates fail, because they are unable to retrieve information in the stressful examination situation of the examination hall, which they have memorised in the comfortable home setting of their student rooms. This is also why most psychotherapeutic treatments of severe anxieties and depression fail, since it is impossible in the context of a calm conversation to tackle the enduring consequences of a serious accident or abuse suffered by the patient.
And this is also the reason why we often deceive ourselves when we tell stories about our childhood or adolescence. Our lives in the past were very different to the present. Not only were we smaller, less experienced, and dependent on our parents, with our whole lives still ahead of us, we were also different, psychologically. As ten-year-olds, we are not troubled and confused by our sex hormones; as teenagers, very much so; and as 60-year-olds, not so much again. Which is not to say that our minds are largely dependent on sex hormones. But there is no doubt that they play a large part in shaping our life situation at any given time, and, according to the theory of state-dependent learning, this means we have difficulty consciously remembering what happened to us as six- or ten-year-olds because at that age we ‘marched to a completely different beat’, hormonally speaking, than we do today.
The bulk of our earliest reliable memories come from the time of puberty. Our memories of earlier experiences are concocted later, or they are related to us by those who were there at the time, such as our parents. It is, however, uncertain whether their memories are true or also concoctions, since parents, too, make up their own histories. And those histories, of course, can be dependent not only on the situation, but also on their own interests.
My protestant mother, for example, denied that I was christened four times, while my atheist father insisted those baptisms took place. It was not until many years later that I was able to verify this by checking church records.
Situation, not personality
This tendency to make our own life story coherent in retrospect is also closely connected to the fact that we believe we have a personality, an immutable essential character. Some people even believe that there is a ‘higher meaning’ to our lives. There is no evidence for either of these beliefs.
The American psychologist Stanley Milgram managed to persuade 65 per cent of his randomly selected subjects — from a representative sample of healthy, non-violent candidates — to administer what they believed were electric shocks to a life-threatening level, to complete strangers. And those people included some that nobody would ever have thought capable of such behaviour. Their actions were controlled by the force of the situation they were in and the dispassionate repetition of instructions by the researcher, not by the force of their personality.
The research was replicated in many countries around the world, and always came up with the same result: completely healthy, apparently mentally and emotionally well-adjusted people obeyed authority right up to the point of killing. And these subjects had no personality traits that would have predicted their unconditional obedience — just as the 35 per cent of subjects who resisted authority and broke off the experiment showed no particular personality traits that might have predicted their refusal to comply.
We do not have an ‘essence’, nor do we possess an immutable character that guides us through our lives. It is rather the case that we function in a certain way, and are able to observe ourselves as we do so. Our brains are permanently checking whether our actions have the desired effect, whether they bring benefits (respect, success, wealth, prestige, love) — if that is the case, they are repeated. If that is not the case, they are quickly suppressed. This has helped us survive in the natural world. But there is no ‘deeper meaning’ to it.
Those who assume that the way they function in certain situations means that those patterns of behaviour are part of their personal essence, are wrong. Rather, external circumstances and happenstances play a much greater part in our lives than we would like to believe. It starts with economic circumstances — as a child from a poor working-class family, I would never normally have been able to go to university — and ends with the people we meet throughout our lives — I would probably never have gone into brain research if it weren’t for the psychologist Hubert Rohracker in particular, who drew my attention when I was still a student to the way in which our behaviour is dependent of our brain, which in turn awakened an interest in me in the processes that go on inside our skulls.
There is little point in speculating about whether there is some kind of ‘explorer personality’ in me that always made me want to get to the bottom of things. There was little of the Captain Cook in me when I stabbed my schoolmate in the foot with that pair of scissors. And when that policewoman called me a psychopath, I just thought it was one more insult among many; my scientific interest in that subject came about much later. We ‘wing it’ from one situation to the next in life and in each of those situations, our brains seize on the behaviour options it hopes will bring the desired results, or which have produced the desired results in the past.
I never used to be interested in the slightest in psychopathy, and now I do not stab people in the foot. Which is not to say that there is more integrity among university staff than in a teenage gang. But if I were to stab one of my colleagues in the foot, it would cause me nothing but problems; there would be a scandal, and no one would look up to me or respect me for it. My brain no longer expects to gain the desired positive effects from such an act; it has now been trained in less brutish methods of conflict resolution. That is not because I have turned into a thoroughly moral character; it is because those actions that used to produce the desired effect now have the opposite result. Conversely, the behaviours that now result in helpful effects were unknown to me then, so I could not have employed them and therefore could not have achieved any effect from them.
The brain doesn’t mind
This brings me to two of the main, fundamental theses of this book:
We often criticise people for changing their minds or their preferences, for seeking out new enemies, friends, or sex partners, because this makes them unpredictable. Just consider the way ‘turncoats’ were criticised in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. Such rebukes may be understandable from a moral point of view, since ethical precepts are usually aimed at preserving social values, but from a psychological point of view they are completely baseless. This is because the brain can theoretically adopt anything as its guiding principle for thinking and acting. That can be gaining power over other human beings, bringing about the destruction of the entire species, offering boundless love for God, or nurturing a passion for a famous musician or actor.
We have recently heard a lot about the ‘selfish brain’, which thinks only of itself, constantly craves sugar, and ignores the needs of our other organs. Even this theory ascribes a stable preference to the brain, which it does not, in principle, have. There are cases in which the brain brings about its own downfall simply by pursuing a certain effect. Addiction is an obvious example, but others are bravery, martyrdom, and heroism.
There will be those who think that my own theories go a step too far. And such an attitude is perfectly understandable, since the plasticity of the brain and its fundamental indifference mean, among other things, that human beings are unpredictable variables. There is nothing stable about the mind, and therefore also about ideology and character. It is possible that the person we have just married might make our blood boil with loathing in ten years’ time. It is possible that the co-worker you find so unbearably arrogant now will in two years be leading you down the aisle. It’s possible that our children might hate us when they grow up. It is possible that a passionate socialist might turn into a neo-Nazi, or that a money-grabbing plastic surgeon might turn into a self-sacrificing doctor. Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus, but the opposite process is just as possible. Facing such changes is often less than pleasant and, in some cases, can really pull the rug out from under us.
However, the completely open plasticity of the brain also means that mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression, cognitive problems such as ADHD, and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and dementia can be influenced — most importantly by the patient him- or herself. Even epilepsy and stroke patients can prepare themselves for a return to everyday life; even completely paralysed, locked-in patients can communicate again with their fellow human beings and achieve a state of happiness — if they train their brain in the right way. The enormous degree of plasticity exhibited by the brain also means we don’t have to confront illness or accidental injury with fatalistic acceptance; rather, we can learn to deal with them almost perfectly.
There was a time, in the 1970s, when many psychologists and brain scientists, myself included, believed that everything could be learned or unlearned by conditioning. Schizophrenia? No problem, if we just show the brain how to adjust its perceptive filters to avoid being overwhelmed by a tangled mass of signals. Cancer? No problem, if we just teach the brain how to interrupt the flow of blood to the tumour. Some of us even believed infections could be successfully treated by training patients’ brains to activate their immune systems. No more pills, no radiation therapy, and no psychoanalysts — just patients learning to reorient their brains with neurofeedback or other techniques. It seemed as if we were on the verge of a revolution in medicine and psychotherapy.
That euphoria, the kind which often accompanies the rise of new directions in science, has since dissipated. We now focus on that which is possible, and try not to overshoot the mark. We have not always succeeded in achieving that. For example, when we first discovered that we could help patients with anxiety disorders by regulating the activity in certain regions of their brain, we ventured so far with this technique that some of our patients developed the opposite problem to the one we were treating them for. They no longer feared anything, which unfortunately tended to lead to situations that were dangerous for themselves and for other people. These effects were not usually long-lasting, but they meant we needed to take a more cautious approach to the problem. After all, even researchers’ brains should be plastic enough for them to be able to cast off any pretence of omnipotence before it is too late.
SELF-REGULATION OF BRAIN METABOLISM
(magnetic-resonance brain–computer interface, or BMI — brain–machine interface)
Configuration of a neurofeedback system for self-regulating brain metabolism
The person (left) lies in a magnetic-resonance scanner (MRI, top), which measures the blood flow in one or several areas of the brain. The person monitors her own brain activity, measured by detecting cerebral blood flow with functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI), which is represented on a screen (centre) as a red or blue ‘thermometer’. When the person increases the blood flow to a selected region of her brain, the thermometer shows red; when she reduces the blood flow, the thermometer’s colour changes from red to blue. The computers (right and bottom) analyse the person’s brain activity in real time so that she is always aware whether she has achieved the learning criteria.
RECOGNITION OF EMOTIONS IN FACIAL EXPRESSIONS
Recognition of positive and negative facial expressions by schizophrenics before and after fMRI neurofeedback training
This chart shows the result of what appeared to be completely harmless brain training for patients with schizophrenia, but which resulted in undesirable side effects.
Patients with chronic schizophrenia have great difficulty recognising emotionally critical, negative facial expressions in other people. My associates, the Chilean psychiatrist Sergio Ruiz and the Indian engineer Ranganatha Sitaram, trained such patients to improve the blood flow to certain regions of their brain — in particular, the anterior insula, as this area is involved in recognising negative visual expressions in others.
While inside a magnetic-resonance scanner, patients watched a coloured thermometer, which rose to red levels when blood flow was increased to the insula region of their brain. After about ten hours of training, patients had learned to achieve this desired outcome at will. Before and after the training, Ruiz and Sitaram tested the patients’ ability to recognise positive and negative facial expressions. As expected, patients were significantly better at recognising negative expressions after the neurofeedback training than before — but they paid for this improvement with a significant deterioration in their ability to recognise positive expressions. The increased activity in the emotionally negative regions of the brain presumably caused a decrease in the emotionally positive regions.
To sum up
Personality development does not follow any inner logic or predetermined (genetic or divine) plan. Rather, it occurs in constant interaction with the environment, which opens up the way for chance to play a large part, and explains why a change in external conditions can cause alterations to ingrained behaviour patterns so dramatic that other people are apt to speak of ‘a complete change of personality’, despite the fact that this is, on the contrary, evidence that there is no such thing as personality at all. And although we may be convinced that we would never have administered those supposedly deadly electric shocks if we had been part of Milgram’s experiment, or that we would never have become one of Hitler’s zealous Nazi henchmen, we may be very much mistaken.