Peikoff Outdid Himself


Michael Stuart Kelly

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Speaking of the hippocampus, I am about halfway through Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer and he discussed early on what happens to a man (going by the initials of EP) who loses his hippocampus.

Rather than type passages, I came across a National Geographic article he wrote in 2007 called Remember This: In the archives of the brain our lives linger or disappear where he discussed EP in a manner similar to what he wrote in his later book.

From the article:

EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He's personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP's memory.

The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there's one on each side of the brain—include an arch-shaped structure called the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. The memories aren't actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain's corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area is the part of the brain that makes them stick. EP's hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn't record.

EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened.

. . .

I met EP at his home, a bright bungalow in suburban San Diego, on a warm spring day. I drove there with Larry Squire, a neuroscientist and memory researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center, and Jen Frascino, the research coordinator in Squire's lab who visits EP regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even though Frascino has been to EP's home some 200 times, he always greets her as a stranger.

Frascino sits down opposite EP at his dining room table and asks a series of questions that gauge his common sense. She quizzes him about what continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a year, the temperature water boils at. She wants to demonstrate what IQ tests have already proved: EP is no dummy. He patiently answers the questions—all correctly—with roughly the same sense of bemusement I imagine I would have if a total stranger walked into my house, sat down at my table, and very earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water.

"What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?" Frascino asks.

"Well, you'd put it in the mailbox. What else?" He chuckles and shoots me a sidelong and knowing glance, as if to say, Do these people think I'm an idiot? But sensing that the situation calls for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and adds, "But that's a really interesting question you've got there. Really interesting." He has no idea he's heard it many times before.

"Why do we cook food?"

"Because it's raw?" The word raw carries his voice clear across the tonal register, his bemusement giving way to incredulity.

"Why do we study history?"

"Well, we study history to know what happened in the past."

"But why do we want to know what happened in the past?"

"Because, it's just interesting, frankly."

EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it's obvious what it's for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it.

"Hmm. It says memory loss."

EP doesn't even remember that he has a memory problem. That is something he discovers anew every moment. And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip—an annoyance and nothing more—the same way it would to you or me.

Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness.

On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it's not always clear whether he's just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he'll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he'll have breakfast a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three-quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which one can only imagine must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Bush who? Iraq what? Computers when? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he's usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he'd be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can't remember and a future he can't contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. "He's happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it's because he doesn't have any stress in his life," says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby.


How's that as a recipe for happiness?

:smile:

I'd like to give more because this is fascinating, but I've probably stretched the limits of fair use.

btw - The book is predominately about Foer winning a memory contest by learning the ancient art of the memory palace, which is mostly forgotten in the mainstream the world over (but alive in sporadic places). He does not have an exceptional memory. He just learned how to do the ancient techniques and he won, so he wrote it up.

His book (published in 2011) is now used as a reference in many of the bestselling neuroscience and modern psychology books for laypeople (I first saw it in Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman).

Michael

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Humans do indeed have instincts, i.e. natural, inborn, inherited, unlearned tendencies of reaction in thought, emotion, and action to various different situations, phenomena, and stimuluses. Evolution makes us thus. Usually these instinctive tendencies are healthy; they should often be trusted in reality-evaluation and decision-making. Some instincts are quite strong. But usually they can be defeated by rational volition. Instincts are important in analyzing human behavior. They seem to manifest themselves rather differently in an industrialized Big City relative to out on the savana while living in a tribe. But free will is far more important in determining behavior and how humans react. Will dominates instincts. This is progressively less so in low-order animals.

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Kyrel, the human infant will go through a period in which she is inwardly compelled to reach for anything she fixes upon visually. That would seem to be an instinct, as you conceive it. Yet the infant will just as surely become able thereafter, with further maturation of prefrontal cortex, to inhibit those reaches, thereby beginning success in wider actions. Won’t this second development, which is called inhibition of prepotent responses, also be an occasion of instinct under your broad definition? If the growth of willful control is instinctual, wouldn’t willful control be an instinct, an especially strong one in mature humans? It seems against the idea of instinct to end up with instincts to will or instincts to intelligence. Actually, I think neither the reaching compulsion nor the later overcoming of it should be thought under instinct.

Your definition of instinct is on the face of it only a little broader than the first definition given in my American Heritage Dictionary: “The innate aspect of behavior that is unlearned, complex, and normally adaptive.” (See also the various senses in William’s dictionary.* ) The more restrictive conception for science, given by Tinbergen above is consistent with this American Heritage definition for ordinary usage, only narrowed down for finer distinctions among animal behaviors. The complexity factor (e.g. a spider spinning a web) is not salient in your definition, and indeed I think now that what you are calling instinct should be narrowed so as to distinguish instinct from temperament.* Your conception in #27 is close to that secondary meaning for instinct used in connection with emotions, mentioned in #10. But that is not what is at issue in Rand’s (and Branden’s) complaints against portraying such things as the extensive human ability to make tools as an “instinct for tool-making.” That purported instinct, of course, should be ruled out by the ordinary requirement that instinctive abilities be unlearned ones. The additional, distinctively Objectivist objection is to the obliteration of intelligence, of reason, by expansion of the notion of instinct.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS

Now I’ve found a moment to open my massive tome Principles of Neuroscience (5th ed., Kandel, et al.) to get refreshed on what is really meant by the “fight or flight response” and to get up to date on its neurology. I conclude that in no way with any precision should this response be thought of as an instinct in man or beast. William is right in #6 to not take the fiight-or-flight arousal as something at odds with rationality for the human animal. The name Fight or Flight for this specific arousal type was from the researcher Walter Cannon who discovered it in the 1920’s. The name is rather misleading, as it is now understood that the response does not have the bivalent character the researcher originally thought it to have.

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Stephen -- Hand-grasping by extreme infants is a classical example of a human instinct. As this infant matures, and develops her cognitive abilities, she can either suppress or augment this instinct, according to will or reasoned choice. If she trains herself consistently enough, this new -- almost instant and automatic -- reaction becomes what Rand correctly calls "second nature." It functions very similarly in human behavior to an instinct but, in fact, is a product of volition or rational calculation. Instincts are tendencies or reactions given to you by Mother Nature, and which steadily decline in importance as you age. Both human nature, and your own individual nature, provide you with various instincts, usually rudimentary.

Instincts are simple, basic, and general, by definition. I don't know why all those dictionaries insist on calling it complex. Pretty much only reasoned, calculating behavior is complex. Simple inborn reactions are of these types: (1) When a monkey is naturally afraid of a snake, despite never having seen one before; (2) when a young child is disgusted by and flees putrescence; (3) when a human baby is afraid of heights. These are all quick, emphatic, natural reactions which were mostly, or at least heavily, implanted by Nature.

Temperament is largely inherited and so some instincts, or parts of instincts, are embedded inside it. Some babies instinctively startle sooner than others, and at different things. This is genetic, inherited, natural, and unlearned. Of course, the rational faculty comes into play quickly and thus the rapid behavioral responses to different seemingly scary situations is a hybrid of "knee-jerk reaction" and quick reasoned analysis.

I haven't thought about this all that much, but I agree with the conventional view that humans have considerable tool-making instincts. Our brain power, brain configuration, hands, body, senses, etc. naturally incline toward tool-making conceptualization and creation; humans have a definite knack or gift for this. I also think people have an instinct of self-preservation which manifests itself when the mind is still fairly weak, such as around 3 to 7. And I think, generally speaking, that there is a fight-or-flight (and sometimes quick-think, catatonia, delusion, etc.) instinct which can be seen in humans in their virtually instantaneous mental and emotional reactions to perceived sudden extreme danger. It's not natural for your mind, biological drives, and emotions not to shift into sudden high gear, and of a particular type, usually well-directed toward survival. If a hungry aggressive lion unexpectedly approaches you, you have to fight many instincts to remain ignorant of, and indifferent to, your immediate future.

(All the above is speculation, and an attempt to add to the discussion. Even more than usual, I don't claim it to be the final word on the subject of instinct.)

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Fortunately breathing is an instinct we don't lose until the end of our lives. It is automatic behavior and can only be slightly modified by will power.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Fortunately breathing is an instinct we don't lose until the end of our lives. It is automatic behavior and can only be slightly modified by will power.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Functionings of the autonomic nervous system are not instinctual. Instinct is an idea defined into existence to explain what we don't know scientifically. We know the autonomic nervous system. No "instinct" is necessary so its use here by you is gratuitous.

--Brant

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Encyclopedia Britannica defines "instinct" as "an inborn impulse or motivation to action typically performed in response to specific external stimuli." Furthermore, "instinct can refer to reflexive or stereotyped behaviour,"

Thus the distinction between "instinct" and "reflex" is arbitrary. There are in fact a variety of behaviors which are biological, not learned, as documented in the responses of infants to certain stimuli,

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