Left or Right?

I am up early morning and before I realize ‘am awake’… I have my sports shoes on. I am half asleep when I start jogging, but soon all the senses come alive. I try to go the distance till my muscles feel exhaustion. When I stop, I try controlling my breath. Sometimes while returning, there is a paper vender, whom I chat with. I ask for a specific paper on Saturdays’, as my wife likes to read the supplement which comes along with the main newspaper. Sometimes they are over before I reach the paper stall. Then I have to walk some extra distance to get a copy. Finally I come back home. All this happens in not more than 30 minutes of a day.

If we look at small instances of our lives (like an hour or two), we find that our body/brain is taking decisions continuously. Sometimes we are conscious of it, some are intuitive. Some decisions are important (as they influence our future) others have a short term effect. We opt for options provided to us by external conditions. That is a response towards stimuli. Other way round sometimes we drive the situations. Some decision making is at a level of biochemistry, which does not always involve conscious. In other words, our neurons do not participate in it. The physiological decisions have definite constrains within which each organism as a system has to function. As in my case, the sprint should end when a tiring feeling comes. This is a pure biochemical decision. I have to stop when the oxygen supply is not adequate in comparison to what my body is burning in that rigorous activity. Cells have to metabolize anaerobically producing loads of lactic acid in my muscles. So I stop for a breath.

The other level (tier) of decision making system involves brain. Concepts such as ‘right/ wrong’ come into play at this level. This comes under the domain of behavioral psychology. An old friend passes by, judging the affection that you two share, goes out the response; a handshake, just hello, a scream or a hug. Human decisions either follow a rationale or are based on emotional grounds. The later is true in most of the cases though. Again when it comes to logic, how much rational is our rationality is a subject of debate. It seems we cannot overcome the hard-wired errors we are predisposed to. But ignoring this aspect, momentarily let us focus on the two types of decision making systems one can follow; 1) rational 2) emotional.

The emotional intelligence humans possess can be looked at from two very different angles. The usual way of looking at it is the social view. Bonding between individuals of a species, empathy, development and maintenance of culture is the part of it. Second is the biological view. It depicts that the traits (like trust, empathy, altruism) we possess, do not exist because they represent the ‘righteous’ path, but simply because we are programmed to. These traits will find their roots in the urge for survival. We can observe that our emotions are greatly based upon intuition, which we can hardly explain. Hence, when intuition is relied upon, we take decisions first and then justify them with reasoning, which is acceptable to the society. Acceptance by society, group or community has a major influence on our judgments. If one tends to go against the consensus, the person is either called a ‘rebel’ or the person himself will experience guilt and take back the decision.

The other side, i.e. rational or logical, is relatively easy to understand. There lies a simple logic, limited parameters and mostly calculable consequences when it comes to rational decision systems. Even if we are convinced that logic driven systems are more accurate, you will see that humans believe what their ‘heart’ says. Why is it so? Why is it that we mostly go by our intuition rather than taking a learned decision? Is it that our brain already knows that its ‘heuristics’ are far better than the calculations it can perform (in other words does it prefer speed over accuracy)? Or are we simply lazy? The answers must be lying deep hidden in cognitive neurology and behavioral psychology. But as biologists (students of natural sciences), it’s our job to decipher reason behind the choices we make. So next time when your brain decides to go ‘Left’ ask it why not ‘Right’?

Determinism

This post has been brewing in the brain for some time, but the recipe was not clear. Finally I decided to chalk it down, irrespective of the ingredients I am adding here (because recently I learned from my colleague that cooking is more about confidence than the quantity of ingredients added ;) ).

Chapter 4 of the book ‘Genome - An autobiography of a species’ by Matt Ridley, is dedicated to the concept of ‘Fate’, i.e. organisms are destined to reach a state due to their predisposition towards certain conditions (disease/aging/other traits). The example discussed is about Huntington disease, caused due to ‘CAG’ repeats in the gene found on short arm of Chromosome 4. It has been observed that when the number of repeats is more than 39, the individual shows symptoms like loss of memory, hallucination, loss of primary body maintenance functions etc. Diseases like these and other conditions (like cancer) are major evidences of genetic determinism in living world. We display so many phenotypes; all of them are being governed directly or indirectly by various clusters of genes. How/ where/ when/ which genes control which phenotypes are the questions which have been the center of attraction for biology since Sir Gregor Mendel’s discovery of gene-phenotype correlation. Everyday there is more and more data pumped into the knowledge pool which helps to identify the mechanisms of each and every component affecting the phenotypes. All this summed up shows positive prospects towards answering the question; ‘How exactly Genes determine physiology of an organism?’

This cannot be called as an end of it. We cannot refrain ourselves from asking the broader questions of course. When we focus ourselves on ‘Gene-Phenotype’ as experiment systems, we are bound to relate these two as ‘cause-effect’ components, respectively. I would like to make a statement here; gene expression is a symptom, an effect, rather than a cause. Well, most of the biologists, who have moved beyond the reductionist approach, will not disagree to this statement. As even in Chapter 5 of Matt Ridley’s book (mentioned earlier); he discusses the influence of ‘Environment’ on cells. So there is another ‘cause-effect’ system which (‘environment-gene expression’) should be investigated in detail. Finally, we may end up saying that it is chains of such ‘cause-effect’ systems with which universe moves forward in time.

But the idea behind this post is not to conclude about the materialistic nature of Universe. That would be a digression right now. I would like to keep my thoughts (hence this post) around the effect of genes on behavior or nature of organisms. Since we call ourselves conscious about our own existence, studying genetic determinism with respect to behavior might get interesting. Definitely, this is not a novel thought. It has been explored earlier by many biochemists, behaviorists and psychiatrists (relatively less number of psychologists too). Since, humans are concerned about the safety of our own kind rather than the absolute knowledge; most of our efforts have been around the patho-psychological disorders and their genetic causes. In addition, if we logically think about it, we do find the correlation of both, environment as well as genes on the psychological states that we tend to get in. With this background in mind when I say; ‘I felt like doing a particular activity, so I did it’, sounds stupid. Naturally the thought arising at any given moment in the brain is based on 1) one of the previous states brain has experienced, 2) the environment/situation to which we are logically responding, 3) the emotional state (reaction) that is governed by hormones (ultimately gene expression) {NOTE: It would be an exciting area of research to build an automaton (response prediction system) based on the above mentioned prior data. Although, please excuse me for talking about such fictional system so casually. I do not wish to underestimate the complexity of a multi-parametric system that it is}. Hence, if we say ‘I wish to…’ and are not clear about why, then certainly we are unable to isolate and understand the objective behind our own actions. This reminds me of a great quote (apt to this discussion) by a great biologist;

‘Free will is a delusion caused by inability to analyze our own motives’ – Sir Charles Darwin on ‘Genetic Determinism’.

That leaves us with a rather discouraging thought that if we are predisposed to certain traits (physiological/psychological) then we have no choices to make but to follow the same determined path. Being an optimist, I have to negate the conclusion coming out of this discussion. Humans have another capability which can be applied in this case. If environment->genes->behavior is the working control structure in case of our thought process then we may work towards a better environment to ultimately reveal the true potential (knowledge) we possess (here better environment does not mean comfort, social or financial status).

A wrap up thought: Chaos theory talks about patterns existing in random processes in the universe. But I believe there is more to this universe than randomness. Motive exists (even to an individual thought); we need to introspect more, by asking the right questions.