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All In The Mind is Radio National's weekly foray into the mental universe, the mind, brain and behaviour - everything from addiction to artificial intelligence.

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2007-09-29 Therapy Goes Digital: Is the Internet good for your head?

28/09/2007

The Internet is celebrated and castigated in equal measure - but is it good for your mental health? Are you compelled to check your email morning, night and day? Some believe Internet Addiction Disorder is a very real and growing concern. Others aren�t at all convinced it exists. Also, the rise of psychological therapies online - from depression to social phobia or bulimia - can a computer really replace your therapist? TRANSCRIPT: Transcript is published mid-week after broadcast.

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2007-09-22 The psychological power of forgiveness in South Africa

21/09/2007

Psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was on South Africa�s historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chairing many of its tortuous public hearings about atrocities committed in the apartheid era. In an unprecedented dialogue she met with one of apartheid's most abhorrent killers, in jail, to explore forgiveness, psychological redemption and the symbolic language of trauma. She joins Natasha Mitchell in a feature interview. Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: How good are you at forgiving those who�ve done you wrong? Natasha Mitchell joining you on ABC Radio National and my guest today on All in the Mind, a psychologist, has seen victims forgive perpetrators for the most heinous crimes. Her book A Human Being Died That Night: Forgiving Apartheid�s Chief Killer was written after serving on South Africa�s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Australia at the invitation of Indigenous groups in the west, last week she presented at a workshop on healing trauma.Desmond Tutu: We will have looked the beast in the eye. We will have come to terms with our horrendous past and it will no longer keep us hostage. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: My name is Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela I come from South Africa in Cape Town. I�m affiliated with the Department of Psychology and hold a position there as associate professor of psychology at the University of Cape Town. News archive of Desmond Tutu: We will cast off its shackles and holding hands together black and white, we will stride together into the future and looking at our past we will commit ourselves. Never again. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Maybe I could mention also that I am a former member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the committee that is called the Human Rights Violations Committee which was responsible for organising public testimonies and collecting testimonies from victims of gross human rights violations.News archive: As the new South Africa grapples with legislation to deal with crimes of its apartheid past, there�s disagreement on how to forgive those who violated human rights during that era. News archive: ...the confrontation with the past of white South Africans learning, many for the first time, of the crimes committed in their name. The death squads, the cross border raids, the letter bombs mailed to anti-apartheid activists. When the deadline for amnesty applications was about to close in 1996... Natasha Mitchell: Welcome to Australia Pumla, thanks for joining us on ABC Radio National. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Thank you, Natasha. Natasha Mitchell: Before we come to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and your involvement in that, to what extent was the apartheid era in South Africa as much an apartheid of the mind? You talk about an apartheid of the mind but also about a psychological splitting that happened in the community. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Just to bring in another discipline that contributed to the engineering of a process such as apartheid, and that is the religion. In South Africa the dominant religion is Christianity particularly among Afrikaaners. And what the apartheid government did was to use religion and psychology to integrate religion and psychology as a way of getting to the minds of their supporters. Any group or individuals who were opposed to the states were perceived as the anti-Christ, these were the apartheid leaders placed by God so as to speak. And at a deeper psychological, even perhaps one might say unconscious level, I mean that word sometimes is overused, but at a much deeper level is a level at which people then split off their ability to understand right from wrong, and abuse from treating people as fellow human beings. This whole idea of splitting within the self so that if you are not for me, then you are other, and if you are other then I can treat you anyway that I want. So you make the other person invisible, you don�t see them as human beings and that happens at a very deeply psychological level -- to the extent that people may not even be consciously aware of what they are doing, just their mind splits off: I don�t exist in your eyes, or you don�t exist in my eyes, as a human being. Natasha Mitchell: Your book, Pumla, A Human Being Died That Night, is the most extraordinary dialogue between you and one of the apartheid regime�s chief killers. Tell me about Eugene de Kock, whose peers dubbed him prime evil, he�s in prison now for two lifetimes, who is he and what did he do? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Eugene de Kock was the head of covert operations units in the security forces of South Africa and his role was to train black and white collaborators with the state as death squads. Black and white anti-apartheid activists were targeted by the security forces or the state and word would be out that they needed to be eliminated. And so Eugene de Kock ran an operation on a secret farm that was called Vlakplaas, just outside of Pretoria, fully funded by tax payers' money. And so Eugene de Kock ran a series of death squads placed all over the country; many, many people were killed. Murders that were engineered to look like so-called terrorist operations when in fact the government had lured activists into a trap and then killed them basically -- so they would basically provide them with firearms, train them and they lured them into a trap using either black or white collaborators. Remember this was a time when the white student movement was also very active and so some of those white students who were seen as leaders in the liberation anti-apartheid movement were used also by the state to target both white student leaders as well as black. Natasha Mitchell: Eugene de Kock presided over some vicious, horrendous killings. Why did you want to meet with him in jail, you in fact met with him over six months and had extended conversations with him...I mean with a person you describe as apartheid�s henchman par excellence, he was the most vicious of all it seems. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: What motivated me to speak to Eugene de Kock was at one of the hearings we testified Eugene de Kock asked to meet privately with some of the widows of his victims. From that meeting the widows came out and told me that they had forgiven Eugene de Kock. Now that struck me as something that is impossible; I�ve never, up until then, even as I was involved in the Commission I have never imagined the possibility of forgiveness in the context of these kinds of crimes. One of the women when I tried to understand what she meant by forgiving Eugene de Kock, she said Eugene de Kock gave us so much more than anybody ever has done in terms of information about the killing of our husbands. I want to hold Eugene de Kock by the hand and to show him that there is a possibility to change, I forgive him, unconditionally. And now when they were in the room with Eugene de Kock they were in tears, they were crying, so I asked them what were the tears about and she says I want him to know that our tears were not just for our husbands, they were tears for him as well. And this was just so unbelievable for me and this was the beginning of my work in this field of trauma and forgiveness. And so I wanted to see de Kock, I asked myself the question, is he deserving of forgiveness by my people, what does a genuine apology mean in these kinds of contexts? I mean this person was the embodiment of evil, we called him prime evil, that was his nickname in South Africa. He was kind of like the very essence of what evil is about in apartheid. I went to see de Kock for all those reasons and my first meeting with him was really going to be the last meeting, the only meeting. But what happened was I asked Eugene de Kock to describe his encounter with these widows who forgave him. And as I asked that question his face just fell and you could visibly see how distressed he was; he started to shake, to tremble and he took off his glasses and his voice, it was cracking and you could see the voice was breaking. Natasha Mitchell: It was at this point actually that you did something that reverberates throughout your book in the most chilling way, and in fact it reverberated through every meeting with him subsequently. What did you do? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: I reached out and touched his shaking hand, just responding to a human moment someone feeling a sense of pain and my being drawn to respond to touch him with my heart, with my hand -- to kind of indicate my sense of empathy or my sense of sympathy. I don�t know, it�s just that human quality that draws us into community with others who are in pain. Natasha Mitchell: But why did that trouble you so, it really, really distressed you, you were almost afraid of your own empathy for many months to come. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: The question you ask me now Natasha is the question that led me to write the book. In opening myself, making myself vulnerable in so many ways, what I realise is that we are taught to distance ourselves and to despise those we define as evil. To split off the side that carries or bears the possibility of engaging in evil in ourselves so that the other person who commits evil never is brought into the community of moral human beings. And we see them as monsters and these words help us in a way to distance ourselves from them. And that instinct to respond to de Kock in the way that I did is what I�ve come to know as a human tendency. It�s what you are brought up with that will recognise the humanness of another person. Natasha Mitchell: Even if they have denied us all of our humanity, as Eugene de Kock had done to so many of his victims? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: That�s an important point but leaving it there doesn�t help us understand the complexities of what led them to that point, the potential in ourselves to dehumanise others and that is why I think it is important for us to recognise the journey people like Eugene de Kock choose to embark on when they at last listen to the voice of conscience. Natasha Mitchell: But he was very confused, I mean your reaching out to touch him stayed with him too, and at one point down the track when he met you at the commission hearings again, he called for you and he said to you with no explanation, he said, you know that hand that you touched that was my trigger hand -- that was the hand that he�d used to kill so many people. That freaked him out but it also freaked you out. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Yes, exactly. Here is a human hand touching him and it happens to be a black human hand as well, I mean he spent his life targeting black people, and so it threw him off, even that idea of referring to it as my trigger hand, it�s another level of splitting. Here�s something that is important I want to mention, Natasha, and I really think we all so often miss this point, which is that Eugene de Kock may have been an operator conducting these treacherous horrific acts -- he was not alone, he was backed by a whole society of voters, and in fact during the years where Eugene de Kock stepped up his operations, where the operations became more horrific, the number of voters who supported apartheid increased. So it was a vote of confidence in the government. De Kock was the most decorated police officer in the entire police force in South Africa because of what he did.News archive: While Australia is in the grip of a crisis in Indigenous affairs South Africa has begun an historic bid to come to terms with its apartheid past. News archive: Did you or did you not assault the late Mr Bickle? News archive: I did not assault him your honour other than to bring him under control. News archive: While it has served as a national confessional it has also on hundreds if not thousands of occasions been the scene of devastating personal confrontations. Paul Verryn: The thing that has been most difficult for me is that having heard the allegations ... and I did not remove him from the Mission house and get him to a place where he could be safe. And I think that if I had acted in another way he could be alive today. News archive: And that says Archbishop Desmond Tutu is where South Africa�s healing will begin. Desmond Tutu: It is very humbling, it is very ennobling too. Many times when these things happen I almost always feel like saying to people, we should take off our shoes, we are standing on holy ground. Natasha Mitchell: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is my guest on ABC Radio National�s All in the Mind going global on Radio Australia and as podcast, I�m Natasha Mitchell. A psychologist, Pumla was on South Africa�s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Let�s come back to this idea of forgiveness, you talk about a concept of radical forgiveness and if we think about those women who expressed forgiveness towards Eugene de Kock doesn�t forgiveness in some sense bestow some psychological power back onto the perpetrator? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: You are right that sometimes perpetrators who really have no sense of remorse, they benefit from kinds of amnesty and so forth. Forgiveness, true forgiveness is a very specific process. Forgiveness is not an event, they are engaging with the perpetrator who has felt a sense of remorse. They are responding to the sense of remorse. Now I think the essence of forgiveness at the relational level is about transforming the relationship. If in South Africa black/white relationships have been strained, when once we begin to talk about forgiveness and reconciliation we are urging towards a transformation of those relationships. Now I call it radical forgiveness in opposition to the notion that these acts are unforgiveable. There are scholars who have talked about the limits of forgiveness. Natasha Mitchell: Well Hannah Arendt, the great moral philosopher who wrote about the holocaust and spoke about the banality of evil, she wrote about this phenomenon of radical evil in the holocaust. So much so that she said there are some events that are truly so awful that they can neither be punished or forgiven, they are just too radically evil. So you in a sense have taken your cue from her, haven�t you? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Yes, and to point out Hannah Arendt espoused the views at a time when we did not even imagine the possibility of the notion of restorative justice. Now the notion of restorative justice has become common practice in western culture. And then of course secondly the Truth and Reconciliation is its own work has illustrated that it is possible for former enemies to engage in dialogue with one another. It is possible even to forgive one�s perpetrator. Natasha Mitchell: You�re interested in the ways Pumla in which trauma is carried across generations and this has so potent and palpable in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Just as part of that, tell me about the necklace game that you witnessed amongst a group of young girls and what it represented for you. It�s a powerful scene. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: In the 1980s in South Africa in the height of violence in South Africa, there emerged a phenomenon that came to be known as the necklace murders. Protesters would identify a black person identified as a collaborator with the police, an informer. These people were called in South Africa impipis, a word that means they were spies. Once people were named as informers and traitors they were then killed, a tyre would be placed around their necks, doused with petrol, set alight and people would be burned alive and the crowd would then sing around and dance until this person died, fell and died. Now in 1994/1996 I was doing my research for my PhD on this phenomenon of necklace murder, trying to understand what leads people to commit this terrible evil. And I was struck by -- in the streets of one township in the Eastern Cape, young girls 7 to 8 years old were playing in the streets. Natasha Mitchell: This was many years after the necklace murders had occurred, these young people hadn�t witnessed these murders? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Exactly and it struck me, I stood there in the background and witnessed what was going on. This girl said let�s play the necklace game,=; sending someone to get a tyre from the motorist passing by which is what happened in those days, people were forced to give the crowd a tyre, they were forced to allow them to suck petrol from their cars, and any questions would lead to violence against the person. And these girls played this game and the leader sort of becomes the victim and she instructs the others on what to do, put the tyre around my neck, the imaginary tyre and then set it alight, now dance, sing around and dance around me, and now I�m dying, I�m screaming, I�m crying and she flails her hands, the arms in the air and then she falls to the ground and dies. It was just incredible. But that to me was an illustration of how memory is passed on into generations, there are very many subtle ways in which trauma is passed on into generations. For example people are humiliated by exclusion, placed in areas that are so desolate and homes that are not fit for human habitat, and joblessness and abuse, and violence -- these make people feel a deep sense of humiliation; they don�t matter in the world, they are worthless. And so they have children and they pass on this anger, that kind of impotent anger -- it�s a kind of a re-enactment of trauma -- because trauma has not been fully worked through, part of telling the story of trauma is an effort to make sense, to integrate the traumatic experience into their own life�s narrative, to draw some meaning from something that makes no sense, really, and this is what was happening in the streets of this township. Natasha Mitchell: And yet you make the point that often language doesn�t always do justice to traumatic memory and so instead we reach out for symbolic languages, in a sense, which is so interesting because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was so much about telling stories, so much about putting words to these indescribable experiences and yet you think language falls short often. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: It does but it does not mean that you cannot talk about it. We refer to these experiences as unspeakable. So while language is inadequate it is precisely in that inadequacy that somehow we understand just how horrendous these crimes were. And for victims who suffered trauma it helps them to reclaim, find their voice, even in the process of fumbling for words. For as long as traumas are silenced and remain silent, so often victims sometimes are confused, they don�t know whether they are to blame for what happened to them or sometimes whether they actually imagined that these things happened. And the process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission filled this void, what is critical is that victims relate to their trauma in a different way. News archive: The appearance of Winnie Madikizela Mandela before the Commission was to be perhaps its most troubling moment. Publicly South Africa struggled with its conscience, torn between unshakeable respect for her role in the anti-apartheid struggle and the mountain of evidence pointing to her role in appalling human rights abuses including the death of teenage activist Stompie Seipei. Desmond Tutu: There are people out there who want to embrace you, they love you very deeply. News archive: Time stood still as Archbishop Tutu pleaded for a sign of contrition. Desmond Tutu: I beg you, I beg you...please you are a great person and you don�t know how your greatness would be enhanced if you were to say, sorry -- things went wrong, forgive me. Natasha Mitchell: Well you talk about the transfer of inner realities between the perpetrator and their victim, or their victim�s relatives which is interesting. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: The dialogue between these realities resuscitates a victim that was dehumanised. One very powerful story on the TRC was a man whose wife was killed in a bombing operation by the extreme left wing organisation the Pan Africanist Congress, and at the Truth Commission he asked the perpetrators, he said, 'My wife was sitting next to me in the church when you came to bomb the church and she was wearing a long blue coat.' And at that point he broke down and cried and in sobs he was asking them, 'Please tell me, do you remember shooting my wife?' Now it�s a quest for the re-humanisation of one�s loved one, I want you to remember her as my wife as a human being. And of course you and I know in a church as large as this church was, a thousand people at a sitting, there�s no way they could remember this woman, but he had to ask them. And that is the point of real turnaround when perpetrators acknowledge that remembering of the other human being. It touches a core in the victim's inner world, one that invites their engagement with this terrible man -- and that opens the door to forgiveness. It can be disempowering too when a perpetrator continues to deprive the victim of that sense of acknowledgement, and even saying words of forgiveness, forgiveness can be disempowering. Natasha Mitchell: It can be very false. How do you reflect on your exchange with Eugene de Kock now, some years later, he�s still in prison? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: On a personal level it was a huge learning experience. Having grown under apartheid as a child, having witnessed my parents -- the dehumanisation that my parents suffered -- my own experiences of being excluded under apartheid as an adult in the professional world; but in encountering Eugene de Kock who represented the worst of apartheid was a huge moment of healing for me, because -- these sometimes are symbolic actions, but symbols are so important to put us on a course of transformation in societies. The challenge is how to make it possible for us to go beyond the symbolic, the real transformation of people�s lives, economic justice for example. Now that is the realm of the government, our government in so many ways has made a lot of changes and transformation. In so many ways they have not done enough. Natasha Mitchell: You�re presenting to and with Indigenous communities in Western Australia while you�re here in Australia -- and what connections do you hope to make with the stories of Indigenous people? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: The devastation that trauma causes is a very strong parallel between how the life of Aboriginal people in this country has unfolded and the life of South African, black South African has unfolded. And what happens when the trauma is unaddressed, the kinds of cycles of repetition of violence that sometimes is directed at the self. These are some of the issues that I�m going to raise. And I�m also going to draw from the Truth Commission...a most important learning from the TRC is that of dialogue. It doesn�t mean that the experiences are the same but it means that people who are troubled by what is happening -- for example among Aboriginal communities -- can talk about how troubled they are and can talk about even their own guilt, because guilt can be experienced as trauma. Because it's guilt passed on from generations among white people who are really, really concerned about what's happening in Aboriginal communities, who feel a sense, an immense sense of guilt and helplessness because they don�t know where to start. And so these narratives, if they are used creatively, can be a message to the powers that be, a message about how society can be in the future. Natasha Mitchell: In all this, how have you...in a sense you became a receptacle for so much trauma, how do you deal with that, how do you carry that over so many years? Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Yes, that is a perpetual problem, I mean the other side of that coin is that so often when people carry trauma themselves engaging with other people�s traumas is a way of containing their own. We become wounded healers in a way, witnessing the healing journeys of others becomes them vicariously a healing for us as well. Natasha Mitchell: Professor Gobodo-Madikizela, thank you very much for joining me on the program this week. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Thank you so much Natasha. Natasha Mitchell: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, associate professor of psychology at the University of Cape Town and her extraordinary book A Human Being Died That Night is published by Portobello Books. That reference plus audio, podcast and later in the week a transcript are at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind email us from there too. My thanks to David Le May, Anita Barraud and Carey Dell, I�m Natasha Mitchell looking forward to your company next week. Bye for now.

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2007-09-15 Carer Couples: when a partner has a mental illness

14/09/2007

Lover or carer? Partner or dependant? This week, when a partner is afflicted with a severe mental illness, how is the relationship redefined? Do they feel like the body and soul you first fell in love with? Two couples -- Lana and Paul, Gerard and Brendon -- share the trials and triumphs of confronting illness and prejudice together. Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: All in the Mind on ABC Radio National. Natasha Mitchell with your weekly fix of heady matters. Today, caring couples, the rollercoaster ride when one partner is diagnosed with a mental illness. Does one become carer, the other dependant? Is carer even the right term? Lover or carer, partner or dependant: two couples join me to talk intimately and candidly about the inner world of their relationships. At last week�s annual TheMHS or Mental Health Services Conference in Australia, Gerard Reed really wanted to highlight this rarely discussed issue. He�s general manager of Community Connections with the Mental Illness Fellowship Victoria and as you�ll hear he has his own story to share with his partner Brendon Clarke, who also works with the Fellowship. Brendon Clarke: My name�s Brendon, diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 18, I�m Gerard�s partner and a mental health worker -- yeah, and all the rest. Gerard Reed: Gerard yes, well Brendon�s partner of five years; I also work in the mental health field which is where Brendon and I met. Paul Thomas: Paul Thomas; my wife has bipolar disorder; we�ve been married now for 11 years from Launceston. Lana Thomas: Hi, and I�m Lana Thomas, I was diagnosed with bipolar three years ago but there were probably signs of it way before that. Natasha Mitchell: Welcome to the show all of you. Thanks Natasha. Natasha Mitchell: Great to have you here. Gerard can I come to you, because you�ve organised a session for couples at a conference on carers -- being a carer of someone with mental illness -- and some of the issues that are faced by carers. Now why did you think it was so important to showcase the issue of couples in this area? Gerard Reed: The development of the whole carer thing is interesting in the sense that it�s become a professionalised role, though a big volunteering role not just in mental illness but in lots of illnesses. But a lot of the literature that�s written, a lot of the way that it�s developed and conceived is really, I think, dominated by the parent/child relationship. And there�s something natural about a parent being a carer for a child, even as that child grows older -- like my dad's 75 but he�s still my dad, although I have to offer some care to him in his older sort of age -- the general relationship is one of inequality of power. But when you start talking about partnerships, marriage or other sorts of partnerships, that power disparity is not the way that those relationships came to be, they are very equal relationships. So I wanted to give the opportunity to couples to come together and say what it�s like for us and let�s put some language of our own around this. I think partners themselves have started to kick up and say none of this stuff talks to us. I don�t want to be a cared-for person and I don�t want to be a carer, you know we want to be husband and wife, or we want to be partners or whatever it is. Natasha Mitchell: What are the implications for the couple of that lack of discussion, public discussion? Gerard Reed: Well it leaves people really isolated and I know from my own work we�ve created some family education programs really aimed at carers, and those programs tend to be dominated by parents, just in numbers I mean. So for partners who walk in and have the experience of the program, they can walk out at the other end feeling even more isolated. Natasha Mitchell: Brendon can I come to you, do you think of Gerard as your carer? Brendon Clarke: Absolutely not, no. In fact we have a running joke that, you know, Gerard might give me something and I might say, 'Thanks, carer...' Certainly my parents, I would view as my carers, they were the ones that took care of me when I was very sick. Natasha Mitchell: In fact you got together at a time when you�ve been well for a number of years now. Brendon Clarke: Yeah, I�ve been really well for quite a few years so I haven�t experienced any symptoms for quite some time. But there�s certainly times when you know my illness will give me a little kick up the butt and say yeah, I�m still here. Gerard�s certainly seen that sort of thing happen. Natasha Mitchell: How does it do that? Brendon Clarke: You know it�s usually when I�ve been doing too much I�ll get stressed, maybe a little bit paranoid, just start feeling myself losing touch a little bit with reality. And then it�s a matter of me putting strategies into place which I purposely don�t involve Gerard in. Natasha Mitchell: There�s a lot of self management in the relationship I imagine? Brendon Clarke: Yeah, definitely. Natasha Mitchell: Take us back to when you were 17, because you�ve been well for a number of years now but you�ve had a really rough trot for your entire 20s and late teens. What happened at 17? Brendon Clarke: You know, the last years of high school and the stress levels were huge, I started hearing voices, became quite delusional, paranoid, totally lost touch with reality. At 17 I was put into psyche hospital for the first time when I got the diagnosis of schizophrenia and from then on it was in and out of hospital, you know, medication after medication, and mum and dad being my carers really took the whole load of that, really. Natasha Mitchell: How bad did it get, I mean what was going on in your mind? Brendon Clarke: Oh gosh, it�s a different world; your entire reality is different to what�s actually happening. I was certainly very depressed a lot of the time so I�d always be crying most of the time, self harm, and suicide attempts were commonplace really. Natasha Mitchell: What was it like spending your 20s in and out of psyche hospitals, that�s not what you want to be doing in your 20s when other kids are going to uni, or TAFE, or finding work, love, life? Brendon Clarke: It was really hard, back then hospital admissions would last two to three months not like today where they get you in and out in a matter of weeks. So I would be in hospital maybe six to nine months of the year. So hence all your social networks are formed in the hospital, you know I lost touch with friends from high school. So all those social skills especially, I mean I still have a lot of trouble with it at times. You know, you apply for a job and you�ve been out of work for 10 years and why is that? Natasha Mitchell: So you don�t describe Gerard here as your carer but you did find love and that must surely play a role that a carer can provide too which is about loving you. Brendon Clarke: Oh absolutely but you know I don�t want to refer to him as a carer because he�s my partner, lover and whatever you want to call it. Natasha Mitchell: So what difference has that relationship made, you�ve both blushed of course? Brendon Clarke: You know I think when you find that union, nothing compares to that. Yeah, it�s an amazing thing and I think too the fact that I don�t refer to Gerard as my carer that means that I take responsibility for my illness really. I�m not sure I really want to involve Gerard in all that stuff. Natasha Mitchell: Have you talked about what would happen given that schizophrenia is something that can re-occur and sometimes medications need to be changed to respond to that. That�s a difficult path often for people -- have you talked about how your relationship might deal with a psychotic episode? Brendon Clarke: Just briefly, I think last night was the first time ... I think we�ll just deal with it when it happens. I don�t know what my symptoms are going to be next time round, I mean I have been so well for so long my symptoms might be totally different to what they were. Certainly if they were the same as things I used to do back then, I�d be quite embarrassed I think to have Gerard see all that stuff. I mean that self stigma thing too, I think it is fed by the stigma that�s out there. You know quite a lot of the time I don�t feel worthy of this or that, or I don�t feel as good as someone else who doesn�t have an illness. And you know I certainly underestimate myself a lot too -- you know I�m schizophrenic therefore I can�t do blah, blah and blah. Which probably isn�t the case Natasha Mitchell: Gerard do you have any comments there, because has the presence of Brendon�s illness influenced the relationship in ways that you can see? Gerard Reed: Just periodically, I mean if Brendon says he feels like he�s getting on the edge or will say to me you know my brain�s fried. So if we have social events coming up, and that means he�s going to step out of those for a while -- and that impacts, it means I have to go to places without him that I�d really love him to be with me at. On that side of it it affects our relationship, the pace at which we can live and some of the things we can and can�t do. But not to an enormous extent, I suppose I�ve never really broached the subject about 'what if', because maybe I�m superstitious. But if you start talking about it maybe it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. But I�d also like to think that the strength of our relationship will get us through that if it did occur. The biggest thing -- I mean I hear Brendon talking about skills he missed out in his 20s and all that -- from my point of view I see all those skills, I think he has them. But I feel that Brendon interprets some of his lack of confidence around his illness and maybe that is where it comes from but I also think that a lot of other people lack confidence in areas that he lacks confidence in, just as I have areas where I lack confidence. So I try not to interpret anything in terms of illness but in terms of well we�ve all got things we�re good at, things we struggle with ... and in terms of caring, Brendon cares for me as much as I care for him and he has to tolerate my ups and downs and the warts that I bring to it and things that happen in my head and my moods and all that sort of stuff. Natasha Mitchell: Sounds like a normal relationship. And on ABC Radio National this is All in the Mind coming to you internationally on Radio Australia and as podcast. I�m Natasha Mitchell and my guests today are couples Brendon Clarke and Gerard Reed and Lana Thomas and Paul Thomas talking about the experience of mental illness in their relationships. Can I come to you Lana and Paul because you do have a relationship where the carer is a factor. Paul Thomas: Big time, yep. Natasha Mitchell: You, Paul, consider yourself a husband, a father but also a carer. Paul Thomas: Absolutely. Natasha Mitchell: Tell me about that. Paul Thomas: Bipolar disorder because it�s a mood disorder there is the potential for her to shoot up or shoot down and there�s early warning signs of that. And that�s something we have to keep our eye on. And we�ve pulled it up in the past haven�t we? Yes, so I am a carer in that way, every week. So if she starts to climb or something like that then I�ll make sure she gets to bed a little bit earlier. Natasha Mitchell: Do you still think of yourself as her lover? Paul Thomas: Yeah, we�ve been together for 13 years, we�ve got two kids. You know she had a psychotic episode three and a half years ago now and that was difficult. Natasha Mitchell: Well Lana, tell me about that, because it was pretty horrendous for you wasn�t it? Lana Thomas: It was amazing. I guess I�d been really, really busy, you know I�d been really well for a while because I�d been diagnosed with post natal depression after the birth of our second son, he was about six months old. I was seeing a psychiatrist, I was on antidepressants, you know Paul, it was really hard on him and the boys. Thank goodness all I ever wanted to do was look after the boys, I never wanted to hurt myself and I think that�s one of the things I�m really lucky for. I�d started just to work a little bit again. Natasha Mitchell: A little bit? You became a gung-ho sales rep for a product. Lana Thomas: It just took off, I was really good at it, I was very successful, I went to Sydney then I went to Perth and South Africa, and then it took me to Hawaii as well, I had a ball. Paul Thomas: That�s an understatement. Lana Thomas: And it was fantastic until on my way home. Natasha Mitchell: You were on a high and of course you�d be on a high but what happened at the international airport in Sydney that became what was then a diagnosis of bipolar? Lana Thomas: I had a ten-hour wait at the airport, I thought yep, this�ll be great I can do some more shopping. I�d bought the boys a couple of ukuleles in Hawaii and lots of other things. Paul Thomas: Lots of other things. Lana Thomas: I had quite a bit of luggage with me and so I found myself going to a disabled toilet to take my whole trolley in there with me. After I�d come out and realised I�d left my backpack in there, I went back and a man was coming out and I thought, what if somebody�s put something in my bag? And the whole time at the international airport it�s just constantly do not leave your luggage unattended, this just started to go round and round in my head. I started to not know where I was, who I was, I looked at my wedding ring and I knew that I was married and I knew I had the boys because I had photos of those with me. But I didn�t know how much of my life was real. I started to write things down because I thought the cameras were on me all the time, I was really paranoid and I thought security would be following me because I�ve got something in my bag, they think I�m going to go and do something. I didn�t know what to do. Natasha Mitchell: A very distressing situation at an airport on your own. Lana Thomas: But I thought I was really cool. Natasha Mitchell: You did get home, but that�s when you were hospitalised I gather. What confronted you? Paul Thomas: I got a call from Sydney airport and she was in security and they asked me whether she had any condition or illness and I said no, she�s had a bit of post natal depression and then they put me on the phone to her and she was telling me that she was sitting next to a witch on the way back from Hawaii. I got back on to the airline and I said I think someone may have spiked her drink that�s what it sounds like, I was unsure. They let her come back escorted, then she was at home for about a week. Natasha Mitchell: What happened in that week, because that�s probably the most unwell you�ve been isn�t it? Paul Thomas: She started to settle down a bit, we were told to get her to sleep and don�t alarm her in any way that may flip her into a severe mania or anything like that. Natasha Mitchell: What do you remember from that time? Lana Thomas: I remember that whole week, coming back from Hawaii, being really excited and all I wanted to do was talk about it and have a party -- and Paul�s just telling me all the time you can�t do this, you need to rest. We�d seen the psychiatrist who had given me some medication. During this week I did some really amazing stuff. I had the police at our house in the middle of the night telling them that somebody was breaking in, I rang up Auto House and ordered Paul a Mercedes compressor, ordered myself a $600 kitten, I was predicting numbers all the time and I was giving people money. My friends, I�d get them to try and put bets on for me and they�d go and tell Paul and I�m like Oh, God, and I�d get up in the middle of the night and write all these numbers down. And in the end I�m in hospital, Paul�s taking me, my suitcase was still packed from Hawaii, so here I was with this huge suitcase going into 1E, I was in the psyche ward, I was having a ball. Natasha Mitchell: You couldn�t have imagined that for yourself, really. Lana Thomas: No, never and it wasn�t until we actually walked in and I saw you know the 1E and I thought oh my gosh, this is where I�m going. Paul was terrified. Paul Thomas: She actually left the hospital that night and walked all around Launceston. Lana Thomas: In my dressing gown and slippers ... scared. Paul Thomas: I didn�t know what it really held for the future, they said it can be managed, you know you�re going to need some luck on your side, so I had to make a decision there and then to walk away from it or put 110% into it, so I put 110% into it. Natasha Mitchell: I mean you�ve had a wholesale life change really, you�ve changed careers, you�ve... Paul Thomas: Yep, I decided to give up the job that I was in and concentrate on getting it managed, and so I went back to uni, which gave me 20 hours of contact there at the uni and that worked out really well. You know I could go along to the psychiatrist and psychologists and get in there and straighten it out with her. Lana Thomas: After I had my psychotic episode and I was really, really high, then of course I had the huge, huge low. There were times when Paul would have to feed me, I didn�t want to get up and have a shower. Paul Thomas: I used to spoon feed her like a baby, I�d put her in the shower, take her to the toilet. Lana Thomas: And I didn�t know what clothes to wear, I couldn�t make any decisions. I�ve worn makeup every day of my life since high school I guess, and I went months and Paul would say to me sometimes, why don�t you just try and put a little bit on. And I�d say no, I don�t care, I didn�t care. Natasha Mitchell: What about the kids? Paul Thomas: Very hard on our eldest one. The youngest one seemed to have got through it completely unscathed, he�s a bit of a character this one. The eldest one he�s matured well beyond his years, you can see that, when Lana was in hospital and she went missing that night I had to put them next door in a hurry while I tried to drive around and find her in Launceston and the next morning he came walking up the driveway with the newspaper and he unwrapped it and he was looking in the notices and he said has mum died? He knows about bipolar disorder, he knows what it is, he knows what depression is, he knows what mania is. Natasha Mitchell: Well you really know what these things are now, you�ve written a lot of information out for family and friends, you�ve distributed it. I just wonder in knowing so much about the illness now whether you feel like you�re on illness watch all the time in the relationship and certainly I know you look for signs of a high. I mean if you're, Lana, starting to feel good and happy and joyful is there a risk that you might Paul go voomp? Paul Thomas: It has caused clashes in the past and this is where psychology has helped a lot here. We actually sat down together and listed out a list of normal behaviours, a list of excessive behaviours that are possibly leading to a dangerous high, and came to an agreement with it. And if she starts to demonstrate those behaviours then we get that out and say hey, here you are, there it is. And that�s got Lana to become a lot more in tune with her illness and take responsibility with it. And she can actually start to identify herself now when things are starting to get a bit high. Whereas before, this is the problem with bipolar disorder, you�re feeling good, so if someone says you�re driving too fast, or you know you�re going out too late, or you�re talking too much, they can see you as the problem. Everything else is all right, it�s the rest of the world that�s got the problem. Natasha Mitchell: Have you felt that Lana? Lana Thomas: Oh lots, and before I was diagnosed I did used to speed, I did used to get lots of speeding tickets, I did used to obsessively visit friends. And now we realise they were little things that were giving me little highs and I was addicted basically to doing that. But of course I can see why people don�t take their medication just to try and get that little bit of a high, it�s great, everybody wants to be a little bit on the upside, but I just don�t want to go back there. Just in the last couple of months I can still see now I�m still getting better and better. Paul Thomas: Oh absolutely. Lana Thomas: I�m working casually, sometimes one day a week, sometimes five days a week up until, well I guess I was there for over 12 months before they even knew that I had bipolar. Paul Thomas: I guess our relationship, because it was so close for so many years, although there were signs of this bipolar now on reflection, we just didn�t know what it was, but I guess because we had such a strong relationship, such a close one, it probably made it even closer really. I guess when I tell it pretty much in depth.. Lana Thomas: Yeah, the things that I did when I was psychotic, my gosh, once somebody has seen you like that you can�t go back. Natasha Mitchell: I�m going to ask this because it�s the elephant in the room when you�re talking about couples and mental illness. What about your sex life? Paul Thomas: Ups and downs. (laughter) Natasha Mitchell: Literally? I mean you�re on heavy medication. Lana Thomas: Yes medication I think, and I can see where that is a really big issue with lots of couples. Paul Thomas: We were only talking about that this afternoon, saying how some men would probably not be able to do it. Lana Thomas: And you can see that. I�m obviously the lucky one, I�m really lucky, lucky. Natasha Mitchell: In a sense that you can keep the relationship going without sex? Lana Thomas: Yeah, and everything we�ve been through as well, I had all my teenage years, you know I had my 20s, I had the big wedding and the babies and you know everything was a fairytale and then this happened and we�re still going and we know that it�s going to be there for ever. Natasha Mitchell: Brendon and Gerard -- what difference, Brendon, does it make that Gerard and now yourself both work in the mental health sector, do you think that brings a different kind of literacy to the relationship? Brendon Clarke: Certainly, you know meeting Gerard and here was somebody who already knew about mental illness, knew what schizophrenia was. You know certainly in the past I�d have a lot of trouble telling prospective partners that this is something I�ve got when they�ve got no knowledge of it. Natasha Mitchell: Were you able to tell them? Brendon Clarke: Well I�d have to, if you enter into a relationship where you are staying over, taking medication at night time which zonks you out, you can�t actually lie about that, you�re just out cold pretty much and nothing will wake you up. Gerard Reed: Brendon wanted to put it right up front, you know it was the second time we met cause we�d talked on the phone a few times after we�d met the first time and we were both a bit starry eyed and it was like he wanted to table it so that if it was going to be an issue we had to sort it right at the start before we went any further. I don�t know how I would have responded to that four years earlier when I hadn�t worked in the field, because I would have had the same sort of understanding the average person in the street in Australia has which is not much about schizophrenia. I probably would have had all sorts of terrible images about what that meant that he could turn into an axe murderer at any moment, or that I had something to fear out of it. It didn�t make me feel fearful or any of those things. Natasha Mitchell: You�re manager of Community Connections at the Mental Illness Fellowship of Victoria, what do you see among other couples and relationships. Do a lot of relationships just simply not survive one of the partners having a major mental illness? Gerard Reed: Oh sure and I think Paul and Lana�s story is very typical of a lot of people that would come to the fellowship where it�s come out of the blue, it�s come suddenly and unexpectedly after people have been together for a long period. And your story is just so marvellous because Paul stuck in there and Lana, you�ve stuck in there as well, it seems to me like you�ve worked at it. I mean that�s what we try to help couples to do, but often it can be that somebody�s made it -- one or the other in a relationship will make a different decision -- and there was one woman I worked with particularly that I remember very well whose husband just had no acceptance that he had any illness. So all her attempts to try and manage and bring things back into line were just met with resistance and in the end, after a long, long time, she had to give up. Natasha Mitchell: There�s no blame here it�s just simply unsustainable. Gerard Reed: It�s just unsustainable, they were in a completely different worlds and despite all the best efforts, tragically for them, you know, the whole family did fall apart and there were kids involved and all that sort of stuff. Natasha Mitchell: Messy. But I imagine too Gerard among some of the stories that you come across people come together in a partnership on the basis of the person that they first meet and they get to know and an illness can actually transform a person. I mean is there a sense for some people, look I don�t know that I want to be with the person that they�ve become when they�re ill? Gerard Reed: Yeah, these illnesses can really change people�s personalities and turn things upside down. I think people do have to make a new decision for commitment. But I think for the person with the illness that�s true as well, that person has got a different life and experience of the world and they have to make a decision as well -- do I want to keep trying to work at what I�ve had? Natasha Mitchell: And work is the key, isn�t it? Lana Thomas: It wasn�t for a long time afterwards that we started talking about grieving, you know the whole grief of this big change in your life, because I�m not the person that I thought I was. Natasha Mitchell: Paul has there been a grieving for you? Paul Thomas: Broken hearted as hell when all that happened but I don�t know how I�ve handled it, I don�t know, maybe I just haven�t sat still long enough to think about it, I�ve just immersed myself in it to find out what was going on. I had two kids as well and I wanted to know what the deal was there, there�s a 10% chance that one of them may develop that illness. I haven�t had time to grieve I don�t think. Gerard Reed: And I think a lot of people also don�t want to grieve because that seems to be a bit hopeless where you want to keep hope up all the time and think that it�s going to move forward and so grieving can feel like it�s disloyal or something, if you say I�ve lost something, well the person is still there. Paul Thomas: I�ve sort of looked on the lucky side of things -- in a way I can understand and I�ve seen a lot of people that haven�t been able to make it through with their marriages and I can see why. And some of the things that the person who is suffering from this illness have done would be very hard to cope with. The bipolar disorder, their libido can go through the roof, they can have multiple partners, that sort of aspect of it -- we haven�t had that. I don�t know how I would handle that. I always try to look on what we�re lucky to have and not what could have been. Natasha Mitchell: What sorts of support could support couples better in their relationships in navigating a mental illness that isn�t available now? Gerard Reed: You know some of the things that Paul has talked about in terms of getting accurate information; we are very bad in the mental health system generally at getting information out to people. Just for people to know what this illness is and what it means and to understand it�s an illness of the brain and there�s chemicals involved and there�s treatments -- because often people are just left not knowing anything. Secondly I think people need to be able to create a social network of support because so many people keep these sorts of illnesses hidden in the confines of their own four walls. Paul Thomas: And we�ve got this great network of friends that Lana�s had since high school and I�ll take my hat off to them, I�d go to war for them. Some people don�t have that and the other thing I think is just general community awareness and I acknowledge people like Jeff Kennett bringing it out in the open, it�s talked about now a lot, and it�s great to turn on the Footy Show and see a football player up there telling you he�s suffering with a mental illness. People like Jeff Kennett saying there�s no shame in going to see your doctor and that�s partly why I�m here talking, I want to contribute to that, it�s not to be hidden anymore because I believe that that should stop. It�s just like diabetes, if there�s a problem with your pancreas -- well Lana�s got one in her brain with her neurotransmitters and making endorphins -- what�s the difference. Natasha Mitchell: Well Lana and Paul Thomas and Brendon Clarke and Gerard Reed thank you for joining me on the program this week and on ABC Radio National. Thanks Natasha -- it�s been a pleasure. Natasha Mitchell: Good luck with your relationships. Song: In Spite of Ourselves Natasha Mitchell: John Prine and Iris DeMent serenading each other -- yes, the complicated and cheesy life of love. And thanks to Brendon Clarke and Gerard Reed, and to Lana and Paul Thomas for being very open with their stories on national radio. That takes some courage, so give them an applause wherever you�re listening. I�ve popped links to relevant info and resources on our website and you can email us your thoughts from there too. All at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and there you�ll find streaming audio, the podcast and the archive of transcripts too. Thanks to producer Anita Barraud and engineer Carey Dell, I�m Natasha Mitchell, that�s it from me until next week bringing you an extraordinary psychologist on South Africa�s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and her meetings with one of apartheid�s most notorious killers.

Episode media

2007-09-08 Bird brains: Smarter than the Average...

07/09/2007

Bird brains don't deserve the bad rap they get. Like us, songbirds are among the only animals that can learn new and complex vocal skills. Mental time travel isn't beyond them, and even mastering grammar-like patterns could be part of their cognitive repertoire! This week, three top bird brain researchers leave their aviaries and join Natasha Mitchell to discuss the unique heads of our flying feathered friends. TRANSCRIPT: Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell joining you on ABC Radio National. Welcome to All in the Mind. Today we're picking birds' brains, heading inside the heads of our more than brilliant feathered friends. And a leading scientist appears incognito...as a starling. Tim Gentner: Ah, I'll never live this down. Tim Gentner: (Starling impersonation) Tim Gentner: There you go! Natasha Mitchell: You've clearly spent way too many hours with starlings! Tim Gentner: Well that's debatable, yes. Natasha Mitchell: Incredible. Tim Gentner, and more from him on his almost grammatically gifted starlings later in the show. Erich Jarvis: You've got this tiny hummingbird brain which is no bigger than the size of the tip of my pinkie finger, but that animal can learn how to sing songs yet a chimpanzee or a horse can't. You can fit probably 700 humming bird brains in a chimpanzee brain. Nicky Clayton: In some ways it's so different from, say, looking in a chimpanzee's face where you know, the eyes look back at you and they're so similar. When you look at the face of a raven it's such a different world, they continually live in this three dimensional world and see much more than we do. They see in the UV for example, the speed of movements that they can detect is so much more sophisticated, and that's always fascinated me. Tim Gentner: I think that in general science has a very long tradition of under-estimating the abilities of non-human animals and the more closely we've looked at their abilities the more we are amazed by them, and really all that's required is someone who takes an interest in an animal to find out that, yes indeed, that animal is miraculous in ways that we hadn't imagined or even conceived of before. And I think what that does at a larger level is obviously humans are unique, we're special - but almost all organisms are unique and special by definition. Natasha Mitchell: It's a rare event if I manage to catch the dawn chorus outside my urban squat - but when you do aren't you left wondering what all the musical chatter is about? Are they having deep and meaningfuls in the acoustic clutter or is it little more than an orgy of mating calls? Today - grammar, memory and picking up new repertoire, bird brains can do it all. And, by the way, the music you'll hear throughout is by the extraordinary French composer Olivier Messiaen who as an ornithologist transcribed birdsongs into many of his marvellous compositions. Erich Jarvis: Birds actually evolved after mammals, approximately 50 to 100 million years after mammals. So mammals are actually older than birds. Mammals actually didn't even evolve from reptiles, they evolved from a stem amniote ancestor and reptiles also evolved from a stem amniote, amphibian-like ancestor. So we have to get rid of this idea of mammals being more advanced than birds and so forth. All that has to be thrown out the window. Nicky Clayton: For a long time people said 'bird brain' and thought of it in a very derogatory way and said 'oh well, birds don't have a cortex, they must be dumb.' We know now that that just isn't true, they do have a cortex, it's a different cortex from the mammalian one. But you've got to remember that birds and mammals diverge from that common reptilian-like ancestor about 280 million years ago, and birds and mammals have very different brains. The mammalian brain has a series of layers to it. So our frontal cortex for example has six layers, I think of this as a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, you have to add butter to get the sixth layer. But bird brains are very different, they're what's called a nuclear arrangement, they look more like a pepperoni pizza, there's a basic layer and then these clusters of cells. So they have a very different arrangement. And one of the interesting things is going to be to what extent do some birds and some mammals, so for example, scrub jays and other members of the crow family - like the ravens - and probably members of the parrot family as well would be the other one I'd pop my money on as being smart, you might compare that say with the apes - the chimpanzees and bonobos for example - and perhaps with the cetaceans the dolphins and whales. To what extent do those animals do things in similar ways or different ways and what kinds of constraints have these different structural organisations of the brain had? Natasha Mitchell: Nicky Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge. And Eric Jarvis from Duke University. Nicky works with hand reared scrub jays - large blue and white song birds with surprisingly good memories as you'll hear. It turns out they have really big brains relative to body size, the next largest to ours. Sweety Pie wouldn't have it any other way! Nicky Clayton: Sweety Pie is the prima donna female scrub jay. She's 10 years old now, she's my favourite and I think I'm her favourite. She likes to courtship feed me. At first she used to try with wax worms but I'm not a great fan of bugs. Over the years I've managed to persuade her that I prefer pinenuts, but it's very sweet. Natasha Mitchell: Well, Nicky Clayton, you've called it `mental time travel�, most of us would probably think of it as long term memory. Why has there been this prevailing belief that birds are somehow stuck in time? Nicky Clayton: I think in some ways this is best illustrated by a poem by the Scottish baird, Robbie Burns. It's called Ode to a Mouse. So the setting is that Robbie Burns has been out all day and it's been dusk and he's just ploughed over a mouse's nest and he sees this poor little mouse run off into the dusk. And then he consoles himself with the following thought and he turns to the little mouse as it's running away into the wilderness and he says: Still thou art blessed compared with me, the present only touches thee. But oh I backward cast my eye on prospects drear and forwards, though I cannot see, I guess in fear. Natasha Mitchell: Beautiful, I didn't know I was interviewing a poet. Nicky Clayton: (Laughs) You know, for Robbie Burns and I think for many philosophers and psychologists who study the human mind this just seems the obvious thing, that animals live in the present whereas human beings can reminisce about the past and imagine the future. We travel back in time in our mind's eye. Natasha Mitchell: We build a whole narrative too don't we, words, or language seem so key to our memory and mental time travel. Nicky Clayton: Yes, it's hard to imagine for one thing how on earth an individual that didn't have language would do it and equally it's hard to imagine how in an individual that didn't have language how you would test for this. Natasha Mitchell: Well your subjects are western scrub jays. They are not your average bird I gather, people say they are extraordinarily intelligent. But what you've been focussing on is the hijinks they get up to with storing or caching food. And they pay attention you've found to what's going on around them and who's watching them hide food at a given point in time. What have you done there? Nicky Clayton: Well food caching is just such a fun behaviour because you can see them doing this in the wild and you can also study them in experiments. It's something they do for a living so they hide, that's what we mean by caching, thousands of items in the Autumn and have very accurate memories for where they've hidden their caches. And at the time I began this work everybody had really focused on their spatial memories, not surprisingly, but I often wondered, well, wouldn't there be a lot more to this than just remembering where they've hidden food because they hide different types of foods, some of which perish. But it also struck me that they have quite complex social worlds. Natasha Mitchell: And they've got a whole hierarchy, there's dominant scrub jays and non-dominant scrub jays, and their partner of course. Nicky Clayton: Absolutely, so it makes it quite an interesting social world. And the thing about the caching behaviour is that these birds not only hide their own food and rely on memory to recover their own caches of food, but they also readily steal other birds' caches. And they can also look and learn, the posh word for it is observational memory, and basically what this means is that they don't have to be actually there `here and now� to steal the food, they can also have a look, see somebody else caching, and come back later. Natasha Mitchell: It turns out scrub jays employ all sorts of tactics to stop their food being pilfered. Nicky Clayton's recent study in the journal Science set up a complex experiment where birds were able to hide food but only ever when another bird was watching. She wanted to know if their relationship to that bird affected how they retrieved their food later in private. And, if whether they were a seasoned thief themselves, made a difference too. She found that savvy scrub jays knew that if another bird was watching the first time, they'd better sneak back in private to re-hide their food in far away places. And this was especially the case if the watching bird wasn't their partner. Nicky Clayton: But it turns out that only experienced savvy scrub jays know to do this. Young birds and birds who haven't themselves been thieves in the past don't do it. So it's not just a hardwired behaviour it's clearly quite sophisticated by virtue of the fact that it's only those that have been thieves themselves that do it. Natasha Mitchell: It takes a thief to know a thief. Nicky Clayton: Absolutely. And if another bird is still present at the time of recovery they also recover the food but only from those places that that particular bird had seen them caching, the other places they ignore, they withhold information if you like as if it wasn't really there. But what they then do is when they re-hide it, now they move each item up to six times, which of course makes it very difficult for the observing bird to actually know where the food is hidden. Natasha Mitchell: Sort of like lollies under cups, which one is it under now!? Not everyone agrees though that this is a representation of memory or intelligence. It may well be instinct or habit. Nicky Clayton: Well you can certainly rule out instinct and habit if we go back to the `it takes a thief to know a thief� adage. I mean, the very fact that it's only those birds that have been thieves in the past automatically rules out it being the hardwired response because it's only birds with certain kinds of experience. And the birds are never rewarded for doing this re-caching, this moving, so it's not they do it by trial and error once and then come back and re-find it and learn that it's a good thing. By the same token I'm certainly not trying to claim that what they're doing is what we're doing, because I think they have very different minds from us. So I wouldn't dream of assuming that in the absence of language they are doing it in exactly the same way. Natasha Mitchell: There are limitations though aren't there to projecting the structures in the human brain onto something like the bird brain. It's not always the case that complex behaviours, like what you're seeing in the western scrub jay, necessarily translate back to complex thought. Nicky Clayton: Well absolutely, you've got to be very careful about what you mean as well by complex behaviour. Let me give you one example. There are these species digger wasps and they provision the nest for the future. The female goes out, and she goes and gets some food and then she brings the caterpillars back and she pops them in her burrow before laying her eggs. Well you could say, `well isn't that future planning?� Clearly she's not doing it for her own immediate benefit, this is to benefit her offspring. But in that case we know that in fact it is innate behaviour and that it's not sensitive to the consequences, it's a robotic routine basically, that goes through a series of stages. And if you interrupt the routine part way through the animal continues through the routine regardless of consequences. So what you have to do is then actually starting unpacking the behaviour by doing experiments. Natasha Mitchell: Professor Nicky Clayton at the University of Cambridge, who is a dancer in her other life it turns out. And on ABC Radio National this is All in the Mind, or...all in the avian mind this week, I'm Natasha Mitchell coming to you also on Radio Australia and as podcast online too. Tim Gentner is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, he's our starling impersonator from earlier. One of his interests is finding the links between bird talk and human language. Tim Gentner: Well language is one of the most miraculous things that we do. All animals are specialist in one or another regard, and some would argue that for humans we're specialists in our ability to communicate. It's allowed us to do all the crazy things that we're doing. It's allowed me to sit here in California and talk to you in Australia and that's something that most other orgasms can't really do. It's an amazing and incredible ability that we have but it didn't emerge from thin air, and it's likely that it shares many, many characteristics with the sorts of communication and pattern recognition and learning that other animals are engaged in. And understanding that both increases our knowledge about the world in general, and tells us something about who we are as humans more specifically. Natasha Mitchell: Well Tim Gentner, you've turned to song birds and their elaborate vocal communication system. What drew you to song birds and the brains of song birds because traditionally we've thought of bird brains as rather primitive? Tim Gentner: So 'bird brain' is kind of a pejorative term. If you look out in the world at that range of creatures that produce sounds and use those sounds to communicate one quickly sees that song birds are among the most sophisticated vocal communicators. So they produce lots of different sounds and they use those sounds to convey different meanings. But they also learn their vocalisations so like humans, song birds need to have exposure to other birds singing in order to sing a species-typical song and that's something that is actually very rare. There are very few species out in the world besides humans... Natasha Mitchell: ...Dolphins and elephants. Tim Gentner: ...Dolphins, some whales, some species of bats also do some vocal learning but the number is very, very small and so we know a lot about song birds. And they provide a system in which we can ask questions that allow us to get at the neurobiological basis. So it's a great model system for looking at vocal learning, the acoustic processing of complex auditory material. Natasha Mitchell: And Tim Gentner's team has even looked at how bird brains respond to different songs they've learned - right down to taking measurements of single brain cells as it's happening. But it was his lab's recent effort to teach starlings to recognise what many argue is a uniquely human form of grammar that has sparked headlines this year. Tim Gentner: Well the basis for this study was to ask a relatively simple question, that is, can starlings learn a song that has been generated using a rule? And if they can learn that song, can they recognise when that same rule is applied to another song? So, what we did was to train birds up using two different patterning rules. And so we took a bunch of little chunks - and starling songs are composed of these little stereotype sounds called motifs. And we took several of the motifs... Natasha Mitchell: ...So, they sort of whistle, if we think about a starling sound it's kind of a whistle, and a rattle and a warble and lots of combinations of that. Tim Gentner: Exactly. Natasha Mitchell: I won't ask you to reproduce it using your own vocal chords.... Tim Gentner: [Starling impersonation]. Natasha Mitchell: Oh, do that again! Tim Gentner: [Starling impersonation]. Natasha Mitchell: This is Tim Gentner on national radio in Australia being a starling! Tim Gentner: Oh, I'll never live this down. Tim Gentner: [Starling impersonation]. Tim Gentner: There you go. Natasha Mitchell: You've clearly spent way too many hours with starlings! Tim Gentner: Well that's debatable, yes. Natasha Mitchell: So you were teaching them... Tim Gentner: OK, so starling song is composed of these small, little repeatable parts called motifs. And what we did was to take two different sorts of patterning rules. One that said take a warble, follow that by a rattle, and then follow that by another warble, and follow that by another rattle. And then a separate patterning rule that said take two warbles; warble, warble, and follow that by rattle, rattle. So that's all the songs had to identify. They went `warble, rattle, warble, rattle� or `warble, warble, rattle, rattle�. Natasha Mitchell: You had a particular interest in this sort of sequence didn't you? Because this is a type of grammar, if you like, that traditionally we've thought only humans can achieve. Tim Gentner: That's correct. One of the ideas that has been out there for a long time is that animals are only capable of using very simplistic types of syntactic patterning rules, so called `finite state grammars�. In order to capture some of the sorts of patterns that appear in natural language, that is, in the English we're using or in computer languages, one is required to use what's called a `context-free grammar�. And one of the hallmarks of a context-free grammar is that you can insert clauses or phrases into other clauses or phrases. So I might say, 'The man likes butter'. I might add to that, 'The man, I saw, likes butter'. So 'I saw' is a phrase that I've now inserted into 'The man likes butter'. And that can continue, not infinitely, but up to a relatively high level and it's that kind of embedding or recursiveness that makes human language, or so we thought...one of the things that makes human language quite special. Natasha Mitchell: So how did you test whether they were learning these rules? Tim Gentner: Well, once we'd trained them up to discriminate between or to classify sequences that had been generated by either of these two rules, we then just gave them a bunch of novel strings that either followed the rules or didn't follow the rules, and watched to see how they behave. If they classify novel strings according to the patterns that they used, then that's a pretty good indication that they've learned something about the patterning rule. Natasha Mitchell: And what better way to train a starling than to use food? Starlings learned to peck a button for a food treat when they heard one pattern or rule, so for example 'warble, rattle, warble, rattle'. And to do nothing when the other was played, say, 'warble, warble, rattle, rattle'. If they got it wrong the lights went out. When these building blocks were added together to make complicated starling sentences the starlings still managed to recognise them. Tim Gentner: Well, it reveals their ability to recognise these patterns which is something that we didn't think a non-human was capable of. Natasha Mitchell: It took a lot of trials though didn't it, I mean tens of thousands in some cases, and you only got 9 out of 11 songbirds over a number of months to recognise these patterns successfully. Is that a convincing result for you? Tim Gentner: Yes, it's convincing in a number of ways. And I should point out that it did take a lot of trials, but we're forcing them to do a relative arbitrary thing. We're saying, look, other animals can do this sort of patterning skills. We're not saying that they use the same sorts of mechanisms that humans do. Natasha Mitchell: Certainly there were a lot of public criticisms about this study looking at the ability of starlings to pick up a kind of grammar or pattern in song - because people couldn't even get tamarin monkeys to learn these sorts of sequences in the past - and yet you managed to teach it to a common old starling. Tim Gentner: Well when we read the tamarin study we thought if there is a species that could do it then I bet starlings are that species. Incredible mimics, they have a very, very rich, acoustically rich system of vocal signals and frankly they're quite a bit easier to train than tamarins are. Natasha Mitchell: Assistant Professor Tim Gentner at the University of California, San Diego where he heads up an auditory neuroethology lab...starling man to his friends. Associate Professor Erich Jarvis runs a team probing the neurobiology of vocal learning at Duke University. Erich Jarvis: I'm not at all surprised that birds do have a form of grammar that they can understand. But I can see why the general scientific community would find this surprising because a lot of scientists enter the field, particularly those who study language and linguistics, on making this assumption that humans have a lot of specialisations in their behaviour. And we do have some, but I don't think we have as many as they automatically assume. Natasha Mitchell: People were debating over whether what they were really learning was a sort of language structure or, a grammar, if you like. Erich Jarvis: Yeah. I think this is all ego. Because I sit on grant review panels and reviewed papers and all the time you get scientists saying 'OK this is what's special about humans and non-human animals don't have this,' right. Then you find a non-human animal that does and they say, 'Yeah, but you haven't shown this...' or 'Yeah, but it's not exactly like this...' No two species are alike. I just call this a lot of just ego bashing. Natasha Mitchell: Perhaps a bit more than ego bashing, one of the sceptics of Tim Gentner's finding was no less than linguist Noam Chomsky. The cognitive talents of our feathered friends are certainly capturing the popular imagination. Erich Jarvis has just been named one of Popular Science magazine's top ten brilliant young scientists for 2006. He's part of the International Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, which has been revolutionising how scientists label and model bird brains. So birds don't get a bum steer by always being compared to us humans. Your interest is in the evolution of singing and vocal skills in birds. Now it's not all birds or animals for that matter, in fact we're the only primates that can, that can learn new vocal skills beyond what's already innate to them. Erich Jarvis: Among birds we know there are three vocal learning groups, or orders, as we call them. One is the parrots, the other is the hummingbirds, and the songbirds, like starlings, European robins, canaries, zebra finches and so forth. Those are three orders amongst 23 or 28 orders, whoever you listen to, but three orders among 20-something orders. The other 20-something are thought to be non-vocal learners. Natasha Mitchell: Now why would just three groups of birds have that skill, this is a really interesting evolutionary question isn't it? Erich Jarvis: Well, see we humans think that all birds are the same. Some of us think that but that's not the case. So the phylogenetic distance between a dolphin and a human is about similar, not identical but similar to that between a parrot and a songbird. Natasha Mitchell: By saying phylogenetic you're meaning the sort of genetic time-line throughout evolution. Erich Jarvis: Between their common ancestors. Yes. So, parrots and songbirds, these two vocal learners shared a common ancestor approximately 65 or more million years ago. So at some time in that 65 million years there came about this vocal learning ability. Natasha Mitchell: Now why do you think that was? Erich Jarvis: I have a theory that's not mine alone of what can select four vocal learning and what can select against it. And what can select for it I argue is sexual attraction. That the female will select the male based upon how variable the song is. Natasha Mitchell: So a good singer and a creative singer is a sexy singer? Erich Jarvis: That's right. The more different syllables he produces in his song, the sexier the song, the more likely she'll mate with him. Natasha Mitchell: Now if this was such a good thing evolutionarily speaking then all birds would have this skill. So there must be a reason for why this didn't pop up in all birds, it mustn't be useful all the time. Erich Jarvis: Yes, so I argue what's selected against it is the predators. A lot of scientists do argue against my view in this way. So not only do the variable sounds of the vocal learning singer become sexy to the mate but they also become attractive to the predator. Natasha Mitchell: Mm. What have you discovered over the years about what it is in bird brains that allow them to learn vocally? What are the unique structures that allow for this to happen? Erich Jarvis: We've used a molecular mapping technique. Think of an MRI machine where you go to the doctor and you stick your head into this machine or your whole body and it scans. It scans the brain for areas that have high activity and low activity. We've developed a similar approach for gene expression studies where when a bird sings, neurons in the brain, these cells, fire these electrical pulses to control the singing behaviour. Those electrical pulses then cause a synthesis of certain gene products (proteins). And then we can look at those gene products (proteins) in the brain and see where they were synthesised. Natasha Mitchell: Well I'm fascinated by how you work, because you actually freeze the brains of birds in different states of song, or silence for that matter. And then look at what genes have been expressed at different stages of the song cycle. Erich Jarvis: That's right, so yes, we have to actually get the animals to behave for a certain repetitive number of times. And then we freeze the brains and we have to cut very thin slices, thinner than your nail, to be able to see these expression patterns, as we call it, of these genes in the brains underneath the microscope. Natasha Mitchell: And are there particular genes that are particularly associated with singing, and particularly learning new vocal skills? Erich Jarvis: What we're finding is we find genes that are expressed in various brain areas depending upon the behaviour the animal�s performing. So, if he sings, then it's expressed in the areas now that we call Vocal Nuclei. If he hears, it's expressed in the areas that is called the Auditory Pathway. But it's not just as simple as that. We notice that he has to hear his species-specific songs, so songs that he was raised with, in order to have the expression. Or, we even notice that when he sings in different social contexts - or who the bird sings to - makes a difference in the vocal areas. Natasha Mitchell: Wonderful, so it's all about social context as well. Erich Jarvis: It's about social context, that's right, yes. And what we found is that the songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds each have seven brain areas in their forebrain that become active during the production of those learned sounds. Natasha Mitchell: And these are across all birds capable of vocal learning...? Erich Jarvis: All vocal learning birds. Natasha Mitchell: How interesting. Erich Jarvis: Whether they be parrot, humming bird or songbirds, yes. You know we've found some people that are sending us messages that this helps prove the existence of God because how could you come about with a similar solution like this independently, over the past 65 million years. And, you know, we don't think that is the case. We think that what has happened is that there is some type of constraint already built into the brain, that Nature says, `if you're going to evolve vocal learning, then this is the way you're going to do it.� Natasha Mitchell: What sorts of things are these genes doing in order to drive singing and learning of new vocal skills? Erich Jarvis: Well, the answer to that question, actually, is partly in a recent paper that we just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). Natasha Mitchell: Just this last week. Erich Jarvis: That's right, yes. We now have not just three genes but we have 33 genes that are regulated by singing behaviour in these brains. And we think there are more of them. And what's interesting is that many of them turn out to be everyday structural molecules that control the homeostasis of the cell. Natasha Mitchell: Well I was fascinated by the fact that five out of the 33 genes that you found that were involved in singing behaviour were involved in what you think is neuro-protection. What do you mean by this, does the brain effectively heat up as they sing? Erich Jarvis: Called `heat shock proteins�, yes, and they�re involved in neuro-protection. And so why does the brain need to protect itself from singing? The brain is one of the most highly energetic organs in the body, it uses up in the human at least 25 grams of sugar a day, it's probably really always in need of repair. Natasha Mitchell: Poor little bird brains, they're working overtime to produce such beautiful sounds. Erich Jarvis: Well if you can get a mate and work overtime you'll be doing it. Natasha Mitchell: That's what life is about isn't it? Erich Jarvis: That's right, you'll be surprised what we humans do to get a mate. Natasha Mitchell: Associate Professor Erich Jarvis at Duke University Medical Center. And he's just scored a grant of nearly two and half million US dollars to find out if his bird song work might inspire gene therapies, for example, for human speech disorders like aphasia. So, better think twice before you call someone a bird brain. Plenty of links and references on our website along with the downloadable audio of the show, a transcript later in the week. We're at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and email us from there too. Thanks to producer Abbie Thomas and sound engineer Jen Parsonage. I'm Natasha Mitchell and, next week, Reclaiming Imagination with renowned pop artist Martin Sharp and two artists who have been to the brink of psychosis and back, coming to you from the floor of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in Sydney. I'll catch you then.

Episode media

2007-09-01 The Nature of Fear debate: 2007 Australian Science Festival

31/08/2007

From terrorist threats to bushfire anxiety, the rise of panic disorders to political game play - are we living in an era of fear? A world leader in psychopath research; a personality psychologist, top political scientists; and author of The Chemical Weapons Taboo join Natasha Mitchell to take on a hot topic of the times. The good, the bad and the ugly of that visceral human emotion - Fear. Audio extra: listen to Q + A with Australian Science Festival audience. Download mp3 [16 min.52sec - 7.9MB] TRANSCRIPT: Doris McIlwain: My favourite person in this regard is RD Laing, and he says what we fear is death, our own minds and other people. James Blair: Well a lot of it is indeed to avoid things that are going to eat you and to be taught rapidly. Chris Reus-Smit: What is the risk that any one of us will be killed in a terrorist attack? That risk is minuscule but it is magnified because some things are politically useful. However fear can never make a society. Richard Price: It�s a biological response, that we have some kind of innate instinctual response to gas, to poison, to chemicals that we don�t have to other implements of warfare.Narrator: We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous; we must get ready for it just as we are ready for many other dangers that are around us all the time. Fire is a danger, it can burn whole buildings if someone is careless but we are ready for fire. Now we must be ready for a new danger, the atomic bomb. Natasha Mitchell: So, welcome to All in the Mind on ABC Radio National coming to you from the Australian Science Festival in Canberra with the Nature of Fear debate. It�s our fifth 'nature of' debate, a warm welcome to you here at the National Museum of Australia and across the country you may have in fact filled in the national fear survey as part of National Science Week, it�s online. Fear certainly shapes our lives and communities in powerful ways. We know that it�s part of the psyche post-September 11 -- or is it? Are we really living in an era of fear? That�s very much the subject for debate and discussion tonight. And obviously fear has a positive role in our lives as well, so the science, the psychology, the nature of fear. Let me introduce our panellists. Dr James Blair just here heads up the unit of Effective Cognitive Neuroscience in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders program at the National Institute of Mental Health. He�s well know for his research into psychopathic personalities, emotion, anxiety and also autism. Doris McIlwain, a personality psychologist, she�s senior lecturer at Macquarie University. Her research engages with narcissistic personalities, with psychopathic personalities, with Machiavellian personalities -- she has a lot of fun. Also the philosophy of psychoanalysis and a whole lot more. Political scientist Professor Chris Reus-Smit, he�s head of the Department, here at the ANU, of International Relations. He�s author of American Power and World Order and he�s co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of International Relations. And let me also welcome our other international guest on the panel. Richard Price is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, he�s author of The Chemical Weapons Tabooand has appeared among many other audiences before the UN Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission I gather -- that must have been fun. So let�s give them all a big warm welcome -- thank you. A question for you all, just a quick response, we�re on the eve of the APEC meeting here in Australia, in Sydney. The preparations are mammoth and I wonder if we look at our response to that event, happening in Australia, are we living in an era of fear in some way? Chris. Chris Reus-Smit: What we�re looking at actually in the case of APEC is politicians fearing the ultimate catastrophe, fearing the consequences of an attack which would then produce political backlash for them. I think the level of fear in society, I don�t sense is hugely palpable, but what I sense among politicians is the risk averse nature. If you don�t over-prepare for this event, and if it were to happen whatever the odds are, the political consequences for you would be enormous. So what you do is you over-prepare, you over-protect yourself. Natasha Mitchell: Doris are we living in an era of fear? Doris McIlwain: I�m not sure, because it�s so politically useful to exacerbate, to intensify fear. If we go that way then the war on terror is over and terror won, in a sense. You have to sort of acknowledge that while the fear might be real you mustn�t let the possible seem probable because then life stops for you, and you move over to the side of anxiety and all the negative affects instead of curiosity, interest and a sort of openness to possibility. So I�m trying not to make it an era of fear, personally. Natasha Mitchell: Good. Richard Brian Massumi has said insecurity is the new normal, what do you think? Are we living in an era of fear? Richard Price: I think I see it that we�re in a kind of third wave, if you look at really the past century, and the film you just showed I would say was the start of the second wave of fear of nuclear weapons. The first wave was with chemical warfare after the First World War which was a widespread chemical war. And I think we�re in the third wave now which was obviously caused by 9/11 and particularly as well the conjunction of the anthrax attacks in the United States, which seemed to have slipped off the radar screen and it�s other things that have been trumped up. And what we see now is much more, I�d agree with Doris, it�s the political construction, the use of fear and trying to actually stoke it a little bit to make it useful for political purposes. Natasha Mitchell: James, you work with anxiety clinically and in a research sense, do you have a sense that we are living in an era of fear? You�ve just moved to the US from the UK in the last number of years. James Blair: To my knowledge there�s not been an explosion in cases of any of the anxiety disorders -- other than obviously there was a lot of cases of PTSD around the Katrina disaster, a lot of cases of PTSD around the 9/11 itself. But as a general phenomenon I don�t know there�s been any clear indication that anxiety -- just using that as an index -- of whether we�re in a climate of fear has particularly peaked, although obviously I see the same pushes on the media that others see. Natasha Mitchell: Well can I pick up with you, as a cognitive neuroscientist, should we fear fear, I mean isn�t fear essentially human if we look at it from an evolutionary biology point of view? James Blair: It certainly is yeah, I mean it�s definitely not a good situation to be devoid of any fearful responses at all. It�s a balancing act; you want the system to work optimally, you want to be guided away from threatening things. But at the same time you don�t want to be so guided away that you�re not able to approach the positive things in the same environment. So it is good up to a certain extent. Natasha Mitchell: What�s the evolutionary account of fear? James Blair: Well a lot of it is to avoid things that are going to eat you, and to be taught rapidly. There�s some wonderful work showing in both humans as well as in primates that you can teach very rapidly things that you should stay away from just by showing a facial expression to a new object. If I look, if something new came in the room now and I looked frightened at it all of you would... Natasha Mitchell: Go on. James Blair: No, I�m not going to do that, especially nowadays I don�t know whether my face moves enough, but if I did and I could do it then you at least would have some warning that this new object was something to avoid. Natasha Mitchell: Well let�s come back to that because you work with a population of people who don�t feel fear and that�s very interesting. Doris you�re a behavioural vivisectionist of sorts, a personality psychologist... I mean fear must surely be one of the first emotions we experience, separation anxiety as a bub. Doris McIlwain: Yes, separation anxiety occurs pretty late because by the time you�re capable of that you�ve got to be capable of forming a very unique bond with one single other who�s not at all interchangeable. And that only really comes around at 6 months or so, and fear�s not really on the scene. Natasha Mitchell: Not even that first horrific earth-shattering scream that a child... Doris McIlwain: Well distress absolutely, I was going to say distress would probably be the first one when you first come into the world and then the joy of the first feed. Fear�s probably an also-ran in terms of arriving early. Natasha Mitchell: You�re fascinated by the range of fears, give us a sense of that range? Doris McIlwain: Well look my favourite person in this regard is R D Laing. He says what we fear is death, our own minds and other people. And I think he�s really on to something there, because if you look at death well it includes ageing, helplessness in that, you think about your own mind, and you�re afraid of the intensity of your own desires and feelings. And you know you can fear fear itself as you�ve already said Natasha. We are quite complex creatures and a lot of what we fear is sort of loss of status, or loss of respect and that can actually be the motivation for people suiciding in certain cultures where it�s a form of social death if you lose a certain status. So with our good cognitive complexity there�s no limit to what we can come to fear, I think. Natasha Mitchell: We often say it�s a negative thing, but do you see some endearing positive features of fear? Doris McIlwain: It�s toxic, but it�s transient, it�s pretty useful because it�s highly motivating, makes your senses more acute. There�s even suggestions that if you experience stress a little bit early on and it�s transient and short-lived, it makes you more resilient, makes you bolder later on. So it�s not necessarily inevitably a bad thing but once it sort of like diffuse and prolonged then you enter stress, and that�s pretty costly on the body. Natasha Mitchell: What about this idea of the fearful temperament, Doris, or disposition. I mean there�s an ongoing heated debate about nature/nurture, do some people come into this world with a particularly fearful disposition? Doris McIlwain: So many people suggest yes. People like Pavlov discovered individual differences in his dogs, some of them were falling asleep with boredom and others were kind of breaking the leather traces that constrained them, so certainly Kagan suggested that as early as four months old there were big differences in how much fear children showed and what they were frightened of. And that�s pretty stable although you know heredity is a little bit of the story but I think in terms of anxiety, and phobias, and panic, experience has got a lot going for it. Natasha Mitchell: This is ABC Radio National and the program All in the Mind coming to you this week from the Australian Science Festival and the Nature of Fear debate with my guests Doris McIlwain, James Blair, Richard Price and Chris Reus-Smit. Chris, can I come to you, let�s take this discussion about fear into the domain of the political and the social. We all received the Let�s Look Out for Australia packs a few years back and some of us might have laughed at that. But I wonder does this call for vigilance actually have a palpable impact on our lives personally? Chris Reus-Smit: The manipulation of fear is a deeply political process and one of the things that I find particularly useful in this regard is an American political scientist called Charles Tilley who once drew a wonderful analogy of the sovereign state with organised crime. Now basically what the Mafia used to do on the streets of Chicago was to walk into a hotel and say well, you know, you�re in real danger of fire here and the proprietor would say, well, I�ve never had a fire here and then that night there�d be a fire and the Mafia would turn up and say well, I could have fixed that for you if you paid me 100 bucks I could fix it. And Tilley drew an analogy of this with the way in which the sovereign state operates, that the sovereign state attains compliance from its citizenry through a promise of protection. And politicians are able to exploit that to enhance their political power. One of the easiest things for politicians to appeal to is the emotion of fear, and this dynamic is something that really only the strongest politicians manage to resist through their careers. Natasha Mitchell: Who has managed to resist that? Chris Reus-Smit: Actually the example of the Cold War at the international level is probably one of the greatest examples of this. So long as their populations and their allies believed that there was this big threat out there that threatened their existence, that enhanced the super powers' ability to control by fear on societies and also their client states and allies. And what brings the Cold War to an end? It�s a leader of the Soviet Union who says I don�t want to play the game any more, I don�t want to imagine the security of my state in this way any more, and the whole thing comes undone. But we also have examples that are very local and most people in this audience will remember two elections that we�ve had recently, one in which the incumbent government manages to turn around what looks like a losing wicket by highlighting the arrival of these boat people, the Tampa affair. So what you get is refugees become the threat and the government steps in as the protector of the nation. In the 1970s when you had the Vietnamese boat people, the Australian government�s position was this is not a threat, this is a responsibility. Three decades later and what we�re seeing is exactly the same kinds of process but constructed as a dire threat to everything that is Australian, and given different meanings that cultivate the emotion of fear. Natasha Mitchell: But are we really that gullible as a people, aren�t we smarter or is it all the media�s fault? Chris Reus-Smit: The media can play a huge role in this, one of the dynamics of media, particularly commercial media, is that it feeds off audience by feeding on fear. But you can also see the media doing completely the opposite, you know, what is a crucial turning point in the international response to Kosovo, is the imagery in the media of trainloads of Kosovar Albanians fleeing, absolutely identical to the kind of imagery associated with the Nazi Holocaust. That actually produces a reaching out to the Kosovars. Natasha Mitchell: Robert Higgs, political commentator with the US think tank the Independent Institute has said has described fear as the foundation of every government�s power. Is that over-stating it? The foundation... Chris Reus-Smit: At one level that�s correct. However, fear can never make a society. And one of the things I think is very important to raise in Australian society at the moment, is if you take the idea of the liberal polity that respects the rights and freedoms of individuals, that polity depends on an element of courage. Because you can only extend the right of freedom of expression, the creation of a private sphere free of the oversight of the state, if there is an element within that society of trust and of courage. If you don�t have those elements you can�t tolerate that sphere of social freedom. Fear is destructive of that. Natasha Mitchell: Richard Price, let�s take this discussion into the domain of war, into the relationship between state players at the international level. Your interest, one of your early interests in your work has been in chemical weapons and the taboo that surrounds chemical weaponry. But also perhaps the use of fear in the construction of moral limits. Where did that interest in chemical weapons and the taboo surrounding them stem from for you? Richard Price: I was just really struck, when you look at the history of warfare there is a really powerful sceptical school of thought which is war is just war, awful things happen, and the worst will happen. And I was really struck by how it is that the worst doesn�t always happen, and sometimes you see incredible occasions of restraint. And one of the most striking ones for me was whole categories of weapons being deemed out of bounds. Historically if you looked at that, any time there is a new weapon, a new innovation introduced, there�s always a recoil in fear. The first cross bow -- there was an attempt to outlaw it in the 12th century because it was this awful new contrivance that you could shoot down a noble knight from, you know, so far away. Always an outrage but eventually they get accommodated into the regular pattern of war. And chemical weapons just stood out as this incredible anomaly and it�s been very resilient. Natasha Mitchell: Even more so, you suggest, than nuclear weapons. Richard Price: Well the institutionalisation at the international level is much deeper with chemical weapons. Despite the fears of nuclear weapons, we have no international treaty that says you cannot use nuclear weapons -- there�s no such thing. Natasha Mitchell: There are some fascinating theories about why we�ve constructed this very particular type of taboo around chemical weapons. Let�s start with the biological fear, the core fear; poison. Richard Price: The first article I read and the first answer was it�s a biological response, that we have some kind of innate instinctual response to gas, to poison, to chemicals, that we don�t have to other implements of warfare. But the thing I dug into, the actual history, and said well is this true and I found an incredible result from WW1 which was half the soldiers who experienced chemical warfare decided that chemical warfare is a moral improvement of warfare because you�re not left amputated and, you know, horribly mutilated as you would be by shells. When you hear that now you go what were they thinking? Because it�s so deeply ingrained that these things are awful. And they are awful, but so are shells. Natasha Mitchell: There�s lots of interesting social ideas about our fear of poison as well and one that really struck me was men�s fear of women. Tell me about that. Richard Price: The deeper I kept peeling this onion, a lot of people said well chemical weapons have been outlawed because they are a form of poison and poison has always been taboo. And so I look back and sure enough there is a period in late Renaissance Europe where everybody was poisoning everybody else all the time. And it reached such terrible levels that a few crafty kings and leaders at the time had to generate some really interesting punishments. And the most effective one was boiling poisoners to death. One of the explanations, interestingly, is that during that time and you wanted to have political power or conduct violence it was the men who wanted to do it with big heavy things that meant control. Women on the other hand, they had control over the preparation of food and taking care of the sick, the young and the rest. Now if they were able to slip poison in, on either of those occasions, they had tremendous power. It was written in to these societies that poison was put in this outrageous category because in effect it was a kind of weapon of the weak, and so it was very successfully outlawed. Natasha Mitchell: So what do you think is at the heart of the chemical weapon taboo? You argue that it�s not just the fear of poison -- is fear part of the equation? Richard Price: Fear is very much part of the equation. The real trigger for chemical weapons for me like a recent effort to ban land mines which over the last decade was a very successful effort, have a very common root, which is the fear of indiscriminate killing of civilians. It�s accepted that soldiers will die in war but there are certain things that explode those boundaries that are so indiscriminate, then those tend to be the weapons that do have much more successful action. Natasha Mitchell: What is the role of fear in defining moral limits? Richard Price: I think it�s a very close relationship and it always has been. Friedrich Nietzsche long ago said that the history of morality is the history of responses to fear. The real peculiar thing about our era is we�re living in a time of the most powerful military entity that�s ever existed in the history of human civilisation. The most powerful economic entity, this being the United States, and it�s quaking in its boots like never before. There�s this palpable sort of society and culture of fear that gets exported to other political jurisdictions, I think Australia is near the top of that list. But you look at other countries; think of Sweden, or Argentina -- it doesn�t exist. Natasha Mitchell: Interesting. Richard Price: So it�s a hopeful thing, because you realise that it�s not simply that we�re living in a world of constant levels of threat for all of us. I think Doris hit it right on the head right at the outset of the program -- the goal of terrorism is fear. And they�ve been incredibly successful in part because of the responses which have played into their hands in certain governments; because just like in the Cold War it�s politically useful for both sides. Natasha Mitchell: James, let�s bring this back into the domain of the skull. You have been working over the years with psychopathic personalities, and this connects to this discussion about moral limits. Here are a group of people who don�t have necessarily well defined moral limits -- why? There�s a biological reason. James Blair: Yes, I mean the assumption is this core area I was talking about the amygdala, the core area for emotional learning is dysfunctional on this population and its core for fear and by having this problem there they find it very difficult to learn things to avoid; including things to avoid that harm others. It has to be said as the debate was shifting on to this, the fear of moral and moral limits and the Nietzsche quote: from a moral psychology point of view it�s not so clear how big fear as such is. And it�s really the victim distress, the sadness of other individuals which is another incredibly powerful aversive stimulus, and it�s that aversive stimulus that�s so important for socialisation. I certainly hope none of you go home thinking I must go and frighten my child into being good, because that will be bad and that would not be. There�s a good lot of literature showing that fear-inducing based techniques are not terribly effective, whereas if you focus the child�s attention when it�s hurt somebody on the victim�s distress, then the child becomes very guilt ridden and should not be doing these things in the future -- unless, obviously, the child has these sorts of reduced emotional responses that we think of as psychopathy, in which case those sorts of standard socialisation techniques don�t work, very well, anyway. Natasha Mitchell: Our understanding of another person�s fear is such an important part of being able to emphasise with other people isn�t it? Psychopaths don�t do this. James Blair: Well they certainly don�t understand other people�s fear in the same way that healthy individuals do. I mean if I show a frightened face to an individual with psychopathy they are much less able to recognise that face, we can see blood flow in the brain in particular areas when you�re doing particular things. You will see the brain of individuals with psychopathy showing less activity in this amygdala, this region I�ve been talking about before which is so important for emotional processes. Natasha Mitchell: So significantly less activity say in response to fearful or sad faces while having their heads scanned? James Blair: Yes exactly. Particularly fear faces because it�s such a good trigger for activating the amygdala, so you get a very clean distinction between the healthy individual and an individual with psychopathy. Natasha Mitchell: What are the consequences for their relationships with the world and other people? James Blair: Well their probabilities of anti social behaviour are significantly greater. This amygdala is so important for a whole bunch of emotional learning, not just fear. Significant attachments, part of our emotional learning is to be attached to other individuals, these individuals have significant problems forming attachments to other individuals. With an individual with psychopathy the idea would be that we would use a pharmacological agent to make the emotional systems work better and then we would be teaching that individual all the things that they missed when they should have been socialised as healthy individuals. So it�s a combination of psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical techniques. Well that�s the idea, that it will be, at the moment we are just trying to manipulate the circuitries in healthy individuals in order to then have a good idea to how we can help the patients. Natasha Mitchell: So we will be handing out little white pills to all those CEOs out there who are psychopathic but haven�t been diagnosed. Doris, can I come to you, a little quote that I read was that fear can be rational response to a real danger or an irrational response to an imaginary danger. But I just wonder whether those irrational responses to imaginary dangers are just as significant in our lives -- and I guess this translates across from the clinic, across to the global stage too. Do you think, Doris, that imaginary dangers and those irrational fears that we have are just as valid as the rational fears? Doris McIlwain: Well I do I suppose, because where do they come from? You know, they didn�t beam in from Mars. They�re part of something that�s come from your life experience, nothing in the mind not first in the senses. And it�s kind of like when people say, oh, you�re over-reacting and I�m always puzzled by that because you�re reacting for what it means to you at that moment in the state that you�re in at that moment. So an over-reaction is always someone else�s norm being applied to you. And I feel a little bit the same about irrationality, that to some extent you�ve got a basis for believing it. It could, in fact, be maladaptive, it could, in fact, be inflated by things that you haven�t picked up on, because while I think, Natasha, that we are smart, we still can be very manipulated into fearing certain things and not realising it�s happening. Natasha Mitchell: Richard, what about you and those imaginary fears, have you got any? Richard Price: I do, I have a very vivid imagination, but I worry that our imaginations aren�t enough of a motivator for us when we talk about global politics and where we may be headed. And I worry that in fact how much we actually have to go through those kinds of traumatic experiences ourselves to internalise what is otherwise an imagined fear. And let me give you just two examples -- one is global climate change. Until people actually experiences consequences for themselves I worry that there won�t be enough of a response and anticipation of things that will be decades or even generations down the road. How do we actually imagine those kinds of traumatic potential consequences enough to galvanise action now? And nuclear weapons for me is very similar. And the reason a worry about that, in part, is the last people to have experienced nuclear weapons are a generation that is passing. Now we are going to be living in an era where there are no survivors of a nuclear war to tell us what that was like. Natasha Mitchell: That�s in a way where we need popular culture to maintain that connection with the past, don�t we? Richard Price: That�s right.Narrator: Yes we must all get ready now so we know how to save ourselves if the atomic bomb ever explodes near us. If you do not know just what to do... Natasha Mitchell: Look, I just thought a final question for you all and then we�ll say farewell, but in the interests of the National Science Week Nature of Fear Survey, can you come clean and share one of your innermost fears, each of you. You�re on the couch, this is your chance. Chris. Chris Reus-Smit: I�m not sure what my innermost fear is but I can tell you what a current fear is that I�m one of the few people in Canberra who could ever say that they had discovered, in doing a renovation, in a natural spring under their house. And I now have a backyard that looks like a wetland and I have two very small children and I�m absolutely terrified about one of them falling in there and I can tell you the terror is absolutely related to my ability to imagine this circumstance. Natasha Mitchell: Doris. Doris McIlwain: Mine is so pathetic, I�m amazed I�m telling it, but when I was young I was always amazed at messengers in Indian Nations, First Nations in America, could run such long distances to deliver a message. I was always terrified that someone would get me to deliver a message and I wouldn�t be able to make the distance. Natasha Mitchell: Richard. Richard Price: Someone asked me once why I did a study of all horrible things, you know, The Chemical Weapons Taboo. And it wasn�t until after I�d written the book that my mother told me that her father was actually present at the first gas attacks in WW1 by the Germans, and that was a really haunting discovery because part of my own heritage had in fact been there on the ground for the very first attacks. Natasha Mitchell: Gosh, James. James Blair: Well I think the biggest fear I've got is dying, but that�s too much of a downer, so I�ll go back to my Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger, he was very frightening when I first saw that movie way, way back. Natasha Mitchell: Can I thank Dr Doris McIlwain, Dr James Blair, Professor Richard Price all the way from Canada and Professor Chris Reus-Smit, thank you -- a big hand. And you�ll find all the details of the panellists, links, references, the streaming audio and downloadable podcast on All in the Mind�s website that�s at abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind. A transcript goes up later in the week. And as an extra audio treat we�ve also posted there the very rich Q and A with the forum audience that followed today�s discussion. Email us your thoughts too, using our web form. My thanks to the National Museum of Australia, the Australian Science Festival and to sound engineers David Bates, Tim Nacastri and Nick Mierish. I�m Natasha Mitchell, I look forward to your company next week as we climb inside intuition. Bye for now.

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