How stress shuts down reasoning

Dr. David Potter, Stress and Coping Skills, 2013. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to even mild stress. When they shut down, primal impulses go unchecked and mental paralysis sets in | Scientific American - Amy Arnsten, Carolyn M. Mazure, & Rajita Sinha:

April 2012 - "For decades scientists thought they understood what happens in the brain during testing or a battlefront firefight. In recent years a different line of research has put the physiology of stress in an entirely new perspective. The response to stress is not just a primal reaction affecting parts of the brain that are common to a wide array of species ranging from salamanders to humans. Stress, in fact, can cripple our most advanced mental faculties....

"Older textbooks explained that the hypothalamus, an evolutionarily ancient structure lodged at the base of the brain, reacts to stress by triggering the secretion of a wave of hormones from the pituitary and adrenal glands, which makes the heart race, elevates blood pressure and diminishes appetite. Now research reveals an unexpected role for the prefrontal cortex, the area immediately behind the forehead that serves as the control center that mediates our highest cognitive abilities — among them concentration, planning, decision making, insight, judgment and the ability to retrieve memories.... The new research demonstrates that acute, uncontrollable stress sets off a series of chemical events that weaken the influence of the prefrontal cortex while strengthening the dominance of older parts of the brain. In essence, it transfers high-level control over thought and emotion from the prefrontal cortex to the hypothalamus and other earlier evolved structures....

"The prefrontal cortex is so sensitive to stress because of its special status within the hierarchy of brain structures. It is the most highly evolved brain region, bigger proportionally in humans than in other primates, and makes up a full third of the human cortex. It matures more slowly than any other brain area and reaches full maturity only after the teen years have passed. The prefrontal area houses the neural circuitry for abstract thought and allows us to concentrate and stay on task, while storing information in the mental sketch pad of working memory.... As a mental-control unit, the prefrontal area also inhibits inappropriate thoughts and actions.

"The neurological executive center functions through an extensive internal network of connections among the triangular-shaped neurons called pyramidal cells. These neurons also send out connections to more distant reaches of the brain that control our emotions, desires and habits.... Keeping this network firing as it should can be a fragile process — and when stress hits, even small changes in the neurochemical environment can instantly weaken network connections. In response to stress, our brain floods with arousal chemicals such as norepinephrine and dopamine, which are released by neurons in the brain stem that send projections throughout the brain. Elevated levels of these signaling chemicals in the prefrontal cortex shut off neuron firing, in part by weakening the connection points, or synapses, between neurons temporarily. Network activity diminishes, as does the ability to regulate behavior. These effects only worsen as the adrenal glands near the kidneys, on command from the hypothalamus, spritz the stress hormone cortisol into the bloodstream, sending it to the brain....

"Our research clarifying how easily the prefrontal cortex can be shut down started about 20 years ago. Studies in animals by one of us (Arnsten), along with the late Patricia Goldman-Rakic of Yale University, were among the first to illustrate how neurochemical changes during stress can rapidly switch off prefrontal function. The work showed that neurons in the prefrontal cortex disconnect and stop firing after being exposed to a flood of neurotransmitters or stress hormones. In contrast, areas deep within the brain take a stronger hold over our behavior. Dopamine arrives at a series of deep-brain structures, collectively called the basal ganglia, that regulate cravings and habitual emotional and motor responses. The basal ganglia hold sway not only when we ride a bicycle without falling but also when we indulge in addictive habits....

"After dopamine and norepinephrine switch off circuits in the prefrontal area required for higher cognition, enzymes normally chew up the neurotransmitters so that the shutdown does not persist. In this way, we can return to our baseline when stress abates. Certain forms of a gene can weaken these enzymes, making people more vulnerable to stress and, in some cases, mental illness. Similarly, environmental factors can increase vulnerability; for example, lead poisoning can mimic aspects of the stress response and erode cognition.

"Still other research focuses on what happens when the assault on the prefrontal cortex lasts for days or weeks. Chronic stress appears to expand the intricate web of connections among neurons in our lower emotional centers, whereas the areas engaged during flexible, sustained reasoning — anything from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to calculus — start to shrivel. Under these conditions, the branching, signal-receiving dendrites in the primal amygdala enlarge, and those in the prefrontal cortex shrink. John Morrison of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and his colleagues have shown that prefrontal dendrites can regrow if the stress disappears, but this ability to rebound may vanish if the stress is especially severe.... This chain of molecular events makes us more vulnerable to subsequent stress and most likely contributes to depression, addiction and anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress....

"One question that still perplexes researchers is why the brain has built-in mechanisms to weaken its highest cognitive functions. We still do not know for sure, but the triggering of these primal reactions may perhaps have saved human lives when a predatory wild animal was lurking in the bushes.... Absent our slow, deliberate higher-brain networks, primitive brain pathways can stop us on a dime or ready us to flee. These mechanisms may serve a similar function when we face danger in the modern world — say, when a reckless driver cuts us off and we need to slam on the brakes. If we remain in this state, though, prefrontal function weakens, a devastating handicap in circumstances where we need to engage in complex decision making about a loved one’s serious medical condition or organize an important project on a tight deadline."

Read more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4774859/

Covid19 a 'pandemic of fear' (in Canada, too)

COVID-19 a Pandemic of Fear ‘Manufactured’ by Authorities: Yale Epidemiologist | Epoch Times -Isabel Van Brusen & Jan Jekielek: 

December 6, 2021 - "The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of fear, manufactured by individuals who were in the nominal positions of authority as the virus began to spread across the globe last year, according to Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch. In an appearance on Epoch TV’s American Thought Leaders program, Risch, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, argued ... what has characterized the ... pandemic has been a 'degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.'

'''Overall, I’d say that we’ve had a pandemic of fear. And fear has affected almost everybody, whereas the infection has affected relatively few,' said Risch. 'By and large, it’s been a very selected pandemic, and predictable. It was very distinguished between young versus old, healthy versus chronic disease people. So we quickly learned who was at risk for the pandemic and who wasn’t. However, the fear was manufactured for everybody. And that’s what’s characterized the whole pandemic is that degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.'

"Risch has authored more than 300 original peer-reviewed publications and was formerly a member of the board of editors for the American Journal of Epidemiology. 

"The epidemiology professor suggested that individuals who held the nominal positions of authority during the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 initially spread a much worse picture of the 'dire nature' of the virus than was warranted. That included the message that everybody was at risk, anybody could die from contracting the virus, and everybody needed to stay in their homes to protect themselves.... 'People were quite afraid of that message, as anybody would be … with the government, with authorities, with scientists, scientific people, with medical people in authority in the public health institutions, all saying the same message starting in about February, March of last year'.... 

"Risch said that the types of messages issued by authorities led to widespread heightened anxiety levels. 'All of our anxiety levels were raised, and we all made decisions to curtail, to various degrees, our exposures to other people, some more than others, but I think everybody had levels of anxiety that really affected how they carry out their life at that time,' he said."

Watch the full interview with Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch": https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/covid-19-a-pandemic-of-fear-manufactured-by-authorities-yale-epidemiologist_4106244.html

Military leaders saw pandemic as unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on Canadians, Forces report says | Ottawa Citizen - David Pugliese:

September 27, 2021 - "Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes. 

"The federal government never asked for the so-called information operations campaign, nor did cabinet authorize the initiative developed during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, then headed by Lt.-Gen. Mike Rouleau. But military commanders believed they didn’t need to get approval from higher authorities to develop and proceed with their plan, retired Maj.-Gen. Daniel Gosselin, who was brought in to investigate the scheme, concluded in his report.

"The propaganda plan was developed and put in place in April 2020.... A copy of the Dec. 2, 2020, Gosselin investigation, as well as other related documents, was obtained by this newspaper using the Access to Information law.

"The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for 'shaping' and 'exploiting' information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.

"A separate initiative, not linked to the CJOC plan, but overseen by Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario.... Senior military officers claimed that information was needed to ensure the success of Operation Laser, the Canadian Forces mission to help out in long-term care homes hit by COVID-19 and to aid in the distribution of vaccines in some northern communities."

Read more: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/military-leaders-saw-pandemic-as-unique-opportunity-to-test-propaganda-techniques-on-canadians-forces-report-says

There's nothing novel about pandemic hysteria

Fever pitch | The Guardian - David Aaronovitch [Note: This article is more than 17 years old]:

April 6, 2003 - "There are no poisonous snakes on Hampstead Heath.... So why, walking on the Heath last weekend, did I levitate at the sight of a twisted green stick across my path – I, who have never even seen a snake in the wild? It must, I reckoned, have been one of those rare appearances by the Old Animal inside, a sudden throwback to our hairy days of roaming the rift valley, alert to danger.

"I think something similar happens when – as last week – we hear about yet another deadly disease, which has killed someone in China. Boats or planes are, even now, carrying a new strain of pneumonia from the teeming Asian continent to the heart of Europe and the United States. The Old Animal, recalling past pandemics, sounds the alarm.... 

"Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) should not be confused with Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which was an African flu epidemic from last autumn and – frankly – is so last year (I presume that next year's epidemic will, because of this name inflation, have to be called something like Bloody Terrible Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.) A health website describes the main symptoms of Sars as being 'high fever, dry cough, shortness of breath or breathing difficulties. Sars may be associated with other symptoms, including headache, muscular stiffness, loss of appetite, malaise, confusion, rash and diarrhoea'. All of which, as I write this, I am currently suffering from, save lack of appetite. Oh, and a rash.

"If I have somehow picked up the coronavirus behind the disease, and am not just suffering from a spring cold,... [i]t would be about time. In 1997 I avoided the Hong Kong chicken virus, which killed six people when a strain of the virus somehow 'jumped the species barrier' for the first time. A million Chinese chickens were slaughtered, and the disease was stopped. Three years later I survived the emergence of the West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne infection that led to the whole of New York being sprayed with pesticide. Since then there have been 4,003 cases of West Nile virus and 263 deaths. Nothing, however, gives me as much relief as having been spared Ebola virus, which a few years back (and courtesy of Hollywood and Dustin Hoffman) was poised to sweep the world.

"Ever since we settled down in cities and communities, we have been open to the possibility of communicable disease. And, in our folk history, most of this arises in the East, a treacherous result of trade and modernity. The Black Death is supposed to have originated variously in the Gobi desert, in Manchuria, or (best of all) 'in the depths of Asia', reaching Dorset in August 1348. The cholera pandemic that swept across England in 1832 was supposed to have entered on a ship from Hamburg, but to have started in Bengal. Latterly Africa has been fixed upon as an alternative starting place for terrible diseases. Teeming Asia or the Heart of Darkness - take your pick of which most frightens you.

"This fear of epidemics and pandemics is interesting. In psychological terms it is a way of externalising evil and badness; the nastiness is placed outside us. And there are, of course, other outside threats to our continued survival, ranging from mega-tsunamis (tidal waves which will drown New York), the currently vogueish killer asteroids and - at an individual level - alien abduction.... But none of this sci-fi stuff has quite the power of an authentic health scare. It is many millions of years since we last struck by a huge asteroid, yet within the lifetime of a centenarian we have seen one pandemic and one epidemic; Spanish flu and Aids respectively. And, in any case, our own health and its susceptibility to external threat, is a very big part of our inner lives....

"For all kinds of reasons, we are living through a pessimistic moment, and we constantly expect to be assailed by external devils. So everyone is worried despite the fact that Sars appears to be less infectious than ordinary influenza, and that the World Health Organisation expects a treatment for Sars to be available in weeks rather than months. Even so there were mutterings this weekend about what would happen if the infection enters a country like Brazil, where the health system may not be able to cope. My guess, however, is that we will be talking about Sars in five years time in the same way that we now mention chicken flu. And yet, at some point in the next couple of years, there'll be another scare....

"We are consciously creating what one sociologist, Peter Berger, has described as a 'cultural climate of pervasive anxiety'. In this climate certain groups become over-sensitive to alarms about health and lifestyle, and end up trying to do things that actually contradict each other.

"It is hard not to think about the story of the boy who cried 'Wolf!' Every now and then an Aids epidemic or an established link (such as that between lung cancer and smoking) comes up and demands action. But by then we will have stayed at home because of virtually non-existent viruses, banned GM foods on the flimsiest of evidence and taken ill-advised exercise under the supervision of ignorant trainers - and so we won't believe what we are being told. This is, I fear, becoming a time when we are all scared of the wrong-shaped sticks."

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/06/publichealth.comment

Fear and misunderstanding distort Covid policy

On My Mind: They Blinded us from Science | Franklin Templeton - Sonal Desai: 

July 29, 2020 - "The first round of our Franklin Templeton–Gallup Economics of Recovery Study has already yielded three powerful and surprising insights:

1. Americans still misperceive the risks of death from COVID-19 for different age cohorts — to a shocking extent;
2. The misperception is greater for those who identify as Democrats, and for those who rely more on social media for information; partisanship and misinformation, to misquote Thomas Dolby, are blinding us from science; and
3. We find a sizable 'safety premium' that could become a significant driver of inflation as the recovery gets underway.

Misperceptions of risk 

Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19:

1. On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.
2. Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.
3. Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).

"These results are nothing short of stunning. Mortality data have shown from the very beginning that the COVID-19 virus age-discriminates, with deaths overwhelmingly concentrated in people who are older and suffer comorbidities. This is perhaps the only uncontroversial piece of evidence we have about this virus. Nearly all US fatalities have been among people older than 55; and yet a large number of Americans are still convinced that the risk to those younger than 55 is almost the same as to those who are older.... 

"This misperception translates directly into a degree of fear for one’s health that for most people vastly exceeds the actual risk.... for people aged 18–24, the share of those worried about serious health consequences is 400 times higher than the share of total COVID deaths; for those age 25–34 it is 90 times higher....

Partisanship and social media 

"For the last six months, we have all read and talked about nothing but COVID-19; how can there be still such a widespread, fundamental misunderstanding of the basic facts? Our poll results identify two major culprits: the quality of information and the extreme politicization of the COVID-19 debate:

1. People who get their information predominantly from social media have the most erroneous and distorted perception of risk.
2. Those who identify as Democrats tend to mistakenly overstate the risk of death from COVID-19 for younger people much more than Republicans.

"This, sadly, comes as no surprise. Fear and anger are the most reliable drivers of engagement; scary tales of young victims of the pandemic, intimating that we are all at risk of dying, quickly go viral; so do stories that blame everything on your political adversaries. Both social and traditional media have been churning out both types of narratives in order to generate more clicks and increase their audience.... 

"Stories that emphasize the dangers of the pandemic to all age cohorts and tie the risk to the Administration’s handling of the crisis likely tend to resonate much more with Democrats than Republicans. This might be a contributing factor to why, in our survey results, Democrats tend to overestimate the risk of dying from COVID-19 for different age cohorts to a greater extent than Republicans do....

"The policy decision of what activities to keep shut and for how long is a very difficult and consequential one. It requires balancing two opposite effects of uncertain scale: on the one hand the benefits in terms of slowing COVID-19 contagion, on the other hand the harm to the economy and to people’s long-term health and livelihoods. This decision is strongly influenced by public perceptions of dangers, not only because politicians are sensitive to the public’s concerns but also because politicians are people too, subject to some of the same biases. Our poll results suggest fundamental misperceptions of the risk of death or serious adverse health consequences from COVID-19 could be distorting these decisions."

Read more: https://www.franklintempletonnordic.com/investor/article?contentPath=html/ftthinks/common/cio-views/on-my-mind-they-blinded-us-from-science.html

Libertarians the most analytic voters, study finds

Study of Politics and Analytical Thinking Puts Libertarians on Top - Bloomberg - Tyler Cown:

March 28, 2018 - "You might think being 'analytical' is a good thing. We associate 'analysis' with people who are smart, well-informed and relatively dispassionate in their assessments.

"You might think that politics is an area where being analytical is especially useful. If you do, well, I have news for you: Libertarians measure as being the most analytical political group. That’s according to something called the cognitive reflection test, which is designed to measure whether an individual will override his or her immediate emotional responses and give a question further consideration. So if you aren’t a libertarian, maybe you ought to give that philosophy another look. It’s a relatively exclusive club, replete with people who are politically engaged, able to handle abstract arguments and capable of deeper reflection.

"What else can we learn from this new study of political and analytical tendencies, conducted by Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand of Yale University?

"For the 2016 election, one group that measured as especially nonanalytical was Democrats who crossed party lines and voted for Donald Trump. There is a stereotype of a less well-educated voter, perhaps both white and male, who reacts negatively and emotionally to Hillary Clinton... For all the dangers of stereotyping, the study’s data are consistent with that picture.

"Both nonvoters and independents do poorly on the analytic dimension. There is a myth of a reasonable, rational politically independent America, sitting in the middle of the spectrum, weighing arguments carefully and seeing which candidate or party has the better ideas and platform. In reality, that group measures as relatively impulsive and prone to less informed judgments.

"If you are a Democrat, you might take some cheer in the fact that Democrats/liberals measure as somewhat more analytical than Republicans/conservatives. But ... individuals who are conservative along economic dimensions measure as more analytical than those who are not, again on average.... The opposite is true for social conservatives, by the way: They are less analytical on average.

"Do these results, combined with the presumption that being analytical is good, mean you really ought to be a libertarian? Well, no ... First, any test has biases, and this test was conducted online, as was earlier and broadly compatible work by other researchers. Maybe it is only the internet-savvy libertarians who have greater analytical skills.... Second, being very analytical in some ways puts you out of touch with the American citizenry.... Extremely analytical leaders might be best for managing an organization of predominantly analytical people, but that doesn’t mean they will be good national politicians. "

Read this: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-28/study-of-politics-and-analytical-thinking-puts-libertarians-on-top
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