BlogWonks

Houston, we have a problem. We now see clearly why people who despise hierarchies, are not only organizing themselves in such, but don’t realize that they are going against our biology.

Hierarchy is a way of efficiently organizing, and what’s missed by the anti-hierarchicals, is that they are not fixed. So while equality is impossible because like all social creatures, we self organize. Unlike most social creatures though, we create hierarchies in suppositions, so while we may not be tops in the basketball team, we can be tops in the chess club. Most simple herd animals really only focus on one hierarchy, the one that leads to the greatest survival (they all look the same because the best single solution is near the same place, while in humans there are so many different solutions, that we no longer have the same appearance but are widely different). Humans, decidedly more complex, are more free due to the organization imposed by our babies need for safety and time, to more abstractly consider what is tops. Once the shared effort of creating a safe zone was possible, and constantly maintained (as our noisy uncooperative babies need), we were free to abstract hierarchy based on other contributions. This abstraction was the seeds of our natural proclivities to capitalistic exchanges for mutual societal benefit, and that the consideration of who is tops was no longer limited to who could bring in the most meat.

The only way such a system would clearly work is if we were hard-wired to make these choices, just as we are hardwired in how we count, how we naturally have a sense of fairness, even a natural understanding of exchange predicated on mutual value (or else when cheated we wouldn’t care).

Now once again, MRI technology (among others) is starting to show us that we are very much the expression of what our genes and our development has dictated us to be over millennia. In order for nature to flip a switch, there has to be a switch to flip. The nature nuture argument is predicated on ignoring the pre-existing condition of that switch.

Not the National institutes of health have discovered that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up and down a pecking order. In essence, different switches are flipped. Since we can’t tell you where we are verbally in the order, and our behavior changes based on where we are, this is a natural thing we do and often do not notice it happening. Though our ancestors were much more attuned to these natural proclivities as our culture adapted to our biology, not our biology adopted to culture.

These switches that are thrown internally then change our motivations, focus, interests, and those things lead to changes in our mental and physical well being. What is worse is that ultimately, negating these things through ideological practices, tend to intimately affect our biology, not just affect our mental regard for ourselves in some abstract way. In this way, our enlightened selves are killing ourselves by causing us to live like something we are not, like something else.

All this aside, the research detailed below is some remarkable work in teasing out our real inner natures as defined by our genetic biology, our store house of what has worked separated from what hasn’t worked through the crucible of time and merit.

Human brain appears ‘hard-wired’ for hierarchy

Human imaging studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status, according to researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the National Institutes of Health. They found that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up or down in a pecking order – or simply views perceived social superiors or inferiors. Circuitry activated by important events responded to a potential change in hierarchical status as much as it did to winning money.

“Our position in social hierarchies strongly influences motivation as well as physical and mental health,” said NIMH Director Thomas R Insel, M.D. “This first glimpse into how the brain processes that information advances our understanding of an important factor that can impact public health.”

Caroline Zink, Ph.D., Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues of the NIMH Genes Cognition and Psychosis Program, report on their functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in the April 24, 2008, issue of the journal Neuron. Meyer-Lindenberg is now director of Germany’s Central Institute of Mental Health.

Prior studies have shown that social status strongly predicts health. Animals chronically stressed by their hierarchical position have high rates of cardiovascular and depression/anxiety-like syndromes. A classic study of British civil servants found that the lower one ranked, the higher the odds for developing cardiovascular disease and dying early. Lower social rank likely compromises health through psychological effects, such as by limiting control over one’s life and interactions with others. However, in hierarchies that allow for more upward mobility, those at the top who stand to lose their positions can have higher risk for stress-related illness. Yet little is known about how the human brain translates such factors into health risk.

To find out, the NIMH researchers created an artificial social hierarchy in which 72 participants played an interactive computer game for money. They were assigned a status that they were told was based on their playing skill. In fact, the game outcomes were predetermined and the other “players” simulated by computer. While their brain activity was monitored by fMRI, participants intermittently saw pictures and scores of an inferior and a superior “player” they thought were simultaneously playing in other rooms.

Although they knew the perceived players’ scores would not affect their own outcomes or reward –and were instructed to ignore them – participants’ brain activity and behavior were highly influenced by their position in the implied hierarchy.

“The processing of hierarchical information seems to be hard-wired, occurring even outside of an explicitly competitive environment, underscoring how important it is for us,” said Zink.

Key study findings included:

– The area that signals an event’s importance, called the ventral striatum, responded to the prospect of a rise or fall in rank as much as it did to the monetary reward, confirming the high value accorded social status.

– Just viewing a superior human “player,” as opposed to a perceived inferior one or a computer, activated an area near the front of the brain that appears to size people up – making interpersonal judgments and assessing social status. A circuit involving the mid-front part of the brain that processes the intentions and motives of others and emotion processing areas deep in the brain activated when the hierarchy became unstable, allowing for upward and downward mobility.

– Performing better than the superior “player” activated areas higher and toward the front of the brain controlling action planning, while performing worse than an inferior “player” activated areas lower in the brain associated with emotional pain and frustration.

– The more positive the mood experienced by participants while at the top of an unstable hierarchy, the stronger was activity in this emotional pain circuitry when they viewed an outcome that threatened to move them down in status. In other words, people who felt more joy when they won also felt more pain when they lost.

“Such activation of emotional pain circuitry may underlie a heightened risk for stress-related health problems among competitive individuals,” suggested Meyer-Lindenberg.

In collaboration with other NIMH researchers, Zink and colleagues are planning follow-up studies to explore brain activity in response to the experimental social hierarchy in patients with mental illnesses like schizophrenia or autism, which are marked by social and thinking deficits. The researchers will also be exploring whether particular gene variants might differentially affect brain responses in similar experiments.

Source: National Institute of Mental Health