The Frontal Syndrome
Neuroscientists have a difficult time figuring out which parts of the brain are involved in different functions. Naturally-occurring lesions to the brain are rarely specific to a particular anatomical region, the complications involved with the injury and treatment act as a smokescreen, and finding a patient who’s damaged the particular spot you want to learn about is frustrating at best and nigh-impossible at worst.
Fortunately for researchers, inappropriate surgical interventions of the past can shed light on neurological questions.
The strange and horrifying history of psychosurgery is a topic beyond the scope of this site, and certainly beyond this post. Interested readers can easily find a great wealth of relevant discussion on the Net and in libraries, even (in more extensive collections) works written by the physicians involved in such surgeries during the era in which they were popular. Even a casually-curious individual can find lots of non-technical analysis and history to read—for such people, I particularly recommend Great and Desperate Cures by Elliot Valenstein.
Of especial relevance is the prefrontal leukotomy, more commonly (if somewhat imprecisely) known as the lobotomy. There are several features in particular that are of interest to people interested in the nature of effective thought:
To begin, people with frontal lobe damage have problems with impulse control. And by ‘problems’, I mean they’re pretty much incapable of it. It would be more precise to say that lobotomized patients display a remarkable degree of rigid, stereotyped behavior patterns. Give one patient a broom, and she’ll begin to sweep the floor; show another a room with a bed, and he’ll lie down on it. And do the same thing every time the stimulus is presented. The precise response varies from person to person, but the general reaction is consistent and replicable. Whatever the strongest association with the stimuli is in their mind, that’s what they do when they encounter it—and every time they encounter it.
For this reason, it was at one time suggested that only patients with a reputation for rigorously moral behavior be lobotomized, because people who would characteristically break social mores would do so ostentatiously after the surgery. Shoplifters and petty thieves who might have tried to steal particular kinds of things before they were lobotomized would immediately try to do so when they came across those things again—regardless of whether it was a good opportunity or even whether others were clearly watching. Restraining such behavior, or even limiting it, was simply impossible.
Furthermore, such people don’t get bored. Present them with a simple task, and they’ll carry it out… and keep doing so, even if the consequences become absurd. Set them to building a picket fence and forget to check up on them, and they’ll build it past your property line and down the street if given enough time. Set them to washing dishes, and they’ll keep washing—to the point of redoing the job several times over. The ability to interrupt the sequence of behavior, to put a “Stop” order in the chain of macros built up, no longer existed once the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain had been severed.
Motivation becomes almost non-existent. Left to themselves, lobotomized people often do not initiate action, or they do not begin to act in ways other than patterns they incorporated before. They repeat things they did before, but mindlessly and without variation, and cannot adapt if the pattern is disrupted. More alarmingly, the associations between concepts and basic responses are destroyed, to the point where sensations like pain are noted but not perceived as important, and actions to diminish or avoid the pain are not taken. One well-known case ended when, after having been released to her home, a woman was scalded to death because she didn’t leave a bath of too-hot water she’d drawn.
Learning in any abstract sense ceases. Teaching the lobotomized new responses is virtually impossible. And even basic conditioning, such as that is used with dogs to train them, becomes problematic due to lack of avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure.
These points are only part of a general overview—the details are far, far worse.
There’s one point which I have yet to discuss, and yet in the context of the information above, is the most shocking. Lobotomization did not disrupt the IQ of patients to any degree. This was actually one of the excuses made for why doctors didn’t realize the utterly destructive effects of the surgery earlier. If it didn’t impair IQ, surely it couldn’t be grossly harmful, it was claimed. Well, it was.
This sets the stage for an important question: If the lobotomy so profoundly levels the house of the mind, why don’t IQ tests measure any of the mental aspects destroyed in the process?
That is a subject for the next posts.
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This post contains lots of info that I don’t fully trust to be true, but I’m not interested enough to go hunt for references. Could you give some yourself?
Yes, but I’m not going to.
I intentionally limited myself to reporting facts that are both commonly known (among those familiar with a subject that is admittedly obscure to most people) and that can be easily verified by reading a few books and articles.
Even a quick Google search should be sufficient to validate most of the statements.
[edit to add] The reputation of the lobotomy as a mind-killer is extensive enough that only my claim about its effects on IQ really need to be verified by you. And that’s easy enough to do.
Although this is a good post, and the information presented sounds right based on what I remember from my psychology classes, I would also want a few references, particularly for readers who aren’t familiar with the subject.
In my view, the point of writing a Less Wrong post is to share one’s knowledge with others, and that includes organizing and presenting the information one is sharing in an efficient format. This way, an author of a post can spend a bit of time (e.g. Googling) and save many readers that same time expenditure. Consequently, we maximize the rationality learned by everyone per unit of time.
So what you’re saying is that it would have been just as easy for you to perform said search and provide a link as it was for you to post this pointlessly antagonistic reply? Do you really believe your input is more useful to us this way? I’m looking forward to seeing your predictably condescending rationale, if you care to provide one.
No, what I’m saying is that it would have been just as easy to do the search yourselves as ask me to do it. Given that I previously said I wasn’t going to do so, it would have had a much greater expectation of utility, too.
The question then arises: why did people ask, if asking was so pointless? I’ll let you mull over that one for a while.
At that moment, loqi was enlightened.
I wasn’t clear that it was pointless.
That doesn’t answer my complaint, as I specifically said that I’m not interested enough to research anything on my own. Of course I understand that most of your claims can be checked with a bit of effort.
You didn’t make a complaint, you asked a question.
And since I had already stated in the post that I wasn’t going to go into the details and that they could be easily verified with a little research, you should be grateful that I bothered to respond to your already-dealt-with question rather than just calling you a moron.
Then either accept my claims or shut up.
You seem to have a poor model of other people’s minds that leads you to be too quick to dismiss others as morons. By itself, this is understandable, as understanding how other people think can be hard. But you stubbornly refuse all help to improve your model, and reject advise on how to communicate your points better.
This is unfortunate because your article is well written and introduces an interesting question. So it would be good to support with background sources. Presumably you have references where you learned about the examples you give, it should not be hard to actually cite them, to give your readers the benefits of your research. This would give your argument more credibility, and allow to reach a wide audience, as you provide an overview that is easily approachable by those with casual interest, and technical references would satisfy those who want to dig deeper. And, of course, citations would distinguish your article from something that someone just made up.
The problem with expecting readers to use Google is that they may find bad or irrelevant references. You should choose and present the reference that best supports your points, and not make your readers wonder if your point is really unsupported or if they just have not found the right support yet.
No, I have a good understanding of other people’s arguments, and of the nature of good arguments, that lets me accurately dismiss others as morons.
What distinguishes things people say from the truth is the fact that true things are actually true—that is, there are aspects of objective reality that show the claims to be correct.
No one can free you from the responsibility of checking claims—both others’ and your own—against reality. How would you know I wasn’t just fabricating the sources, or citing sources that were themselves based on fabrications?
When a person systematically believes things that are true, it involves a causal chain from that truth to that person’s cognitive state. While it is true that the truth is a cause of the true belief, one should not dismiss the intermediate links in the chain. In this case, an important link is citation of the sources that you, presumably, have already gathered and read in order to be able to write your article. This allows readers to distinguish in their own minds, in a manner correlated to how reality distinguishes truth from falsity, well supported arguments ultimately based on empirical evidence, from nonsense theories with no grounding in reality.
That misses the point, which is to tell people where they can look to verify the claim. It is not like the mere existence of a citation makes your claims correct, the cited source still needs to be evaluated.
I would expect to get to a first hand account of the actual observations within a few steps of following citations. (If I don’t, I would worry that sources themselves are not grounded in reality.) I would judge an undisputed account of first hand observations in a refereed journal of the appropriate topic to be unlikely to be a fabrication. Though, I would expect the original article I am evaluating to at least show me the first step of this process, since it is so easy for anyone who has actually based their discussion on relevant sources and is therefore likely to be correct.
You can’t offer citations for spending more than a decade researching, reading, and communicating/speaking to experts about a topic.
There is no source to cite. I am a source.
I’ve already done that. I even provided a specific source people could turn to if they wished. Further confirmation is easily found via web search.
Utter horseshit. I’ve spent slightly less than a decade researching, reading, and communicating with experts about methods for proteomics, and also applied Bayesian statistics. On these subjects, I too am a source—and I can drown you in citations. In this day and age, anyone with a legitimate claim to be a source on a subject ought to be able to do likewise.
And I can do that. But I have no interest for hunting down citations for information which you can verify for yourself with a trivial investment of time and energy.
The facts I referenced don’t require access to university-library-level facilities to locate; if you can read the post, you have Internet access and a browser capable of taking you to any number of search engines suitable for the task.
As for the reason why you should consider the statements worth attempting to verify: I said them. Even if they were wrong (which they are not), finding evidence of that and displaying it would be quite a coup for anyone who dislikes me enough to want to eliminate me from this site. Fact-checking me should be a matter of course.
I find it interesting that you consider it trivial for others to verify the information with a web search, but, for you, it is a matter of “hunting down citations”. It should be easier for the expert to find the sources.
I, for one, am not interested in driving you from this site. I would rather see you become a better contributor, more capable of explaining your ideas without gratuitously offending everyone, without calling people morons for asking questions when it should be easy for you to just answer the question. This is why I said earlier that it is unfortunate that you chose not to support a well written article with citations.
Seconded. Nonetheless, in the absence of any evidence that this is likely to happen before we all get turned into tiny molecular smiley faces by a rogue AI, I would settle for a “Don’t show me comments by [Annoyance]” option in my preferences. The signal-to-noise ratio is generally just too low to be worth it, yet I find the noise sucking me in anyway.
The sources from which I learned the information would be difficult for me to locate, even if I remembered all of them.
It’s trivially easy for you to find sources that confirm my claim, though. It’s the difference between sources and the sources.
Given the choice between accurately relaying the truth, and refraining from offending, I prefer to accurately relay the truth. Sometimes offending is required.
Giving citations would have relayed truth and avoided offending. It follows that offending, in this case, was not “required”.
I think you forget the economics of the burden of time investment. You spent the energy to write the original article, a small amount of additional energy for source material would have greatly increased any expected effects (that I can imagine you holding to originally write said article), and overall it is far more effecient for one person—namely, you, the author, to invest some additional energy into your article, rather than having every potential reader go and wastefully recapitulate the search on their own.
So not only is your approach rude, it is also ineffecient.
Apparently, Annoyance knew what he’s doing when he chose his nickname.
Wow, do you have personal experience with lobotomies or something? ;-)
I choose to interpret this as a serious question rather than a casual insult.
If I did have personal experience, I would be unlikely to have been able to write the post. I suppose I could have had a relative who was lobotomized, although with the passage of time that’s not very likely.
The answer is no, I don’t. I merely have access to the experiences and data gathered by others.
Research shows that wink emoticons convey sarcasm.
I’ve done the googling that Annoyance considers so vital to our moral development. Here are the results, for those who wish to remain slothful and debased. For the truly pious, youtube has a video of the so-called icepick psychosurgery from a PBS documentary.
Googling “effect of lobotomy on IQ” returns a Google Books excerpt from a Neuroscience textbook. The author is professor of Neuroscience at MIT. The text claims that ”...lobotomy can be performed with little decrease in IQ...” It also says that in the most popular lobotomy technique, it was impossible for the doctor to see what sections of the frontal lobe he was “treating.”
An online psychology textbook here describes the behavior of lobotomy patients as “stimulus-bound,” and reports that they were easily distracted by their immediate surroundings and had little ability to plan or set goals.
This site and this book (see p. 20) have more information on the general effects of damage to the frontal lobe.
I am intrigued by your plain-spoken honesty. Tell me, do you have a newsletter?
I googled for reference about the lack of iq reduction and it’s not as easy as Annoyance claims.
I found: http://www.springerlink.com/content/x952046576561443/
http://www.mytherapy.com/discussion/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=19021
In the case of Rosemary Kennedy the lobotomy lead to mental retardation although I don’t know if IQ was specifically measured: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
In other places I read that although the IQ is maintained the victim loses the capability for abstract reasoning.
Rosemary Kennedy was considered mentally retarded before the operation.
That is, her intellectual prowess (or lack thereof) was a pre-existing condition.
(edited for clarification)
I just read the wikipedia article more carefully. Her mental retardation before the procedure is highly disputed.
Quote:
This reminds me of this post about the difference between emotionlessness and rationality. The lobotomy patients, assuming that you describe them accurately, suffer a failure of motivation and initiative and generative thought; that doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t solve IQ test problems that are presented to them. That is, after all, what one does with IQ test problems, in much the same way that washing is what one does with dishes and lying down is what one does with beds.
Your point is well-made. However, you miss the deep issue—why is it that IQ test problems don’t require the vastly important functions and capabilities that lobotomized patients lack?
The answer to that question, I believe, reveals the difference between being bright—which IQ is an approximate measure of—and being intelligent—which IQ doesn’t indicate.
Can you elaborate on your working definitions of “bright” and “intelligent”? They don’t seem to map onto mine.
Yeah. I’d prefer to do so in a post rather than a comment, though. I should have something ready in a few days.
Interesting stuff. The fact that lobotomy was often used to treat schizophrenia—a catastrophic failure of rationality—is suggestive.
I vaguely remember a neuroscience lecturer of mine saying that a possible factor in the bizarre nature of dreams was that frontal regions were inhibited during sleep, so the dreamer has no way of telling the difference between plausible and implausible scenarios among those they are perceiving. I can’t find any references to substantiate this though. Maybe I dreamt it.
Unfortunately, it was used to ‘treat’ so many things that the suggestiveness is lost in the noise.
Really, it was actually used (regardless of the excuses people made at the time) because it rendered difficult patients so tractable and easy to handle in an institutional setting. Pretty much the same reason all the old antipsychotics were used, too.
The obvious reason, I guess, is, as you said yourself, their motivation is lost. You can possess vast intelligence and still do nothing if doing nothing has the same utility as doing anything else. Present the person with an object, and the first impulse or association sort of hijacks the utility function. That’s a pretty simplistic explanation, of course.
Yes, it is. And I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that.
But that’s a topic for another post.
The author of “My lobotomy” seems to be highly functional.
He appears to be an extreme(ly lucky) case in the distribution of outcomes.
Apparently, Annoyance knew what he’s doing when he chose his nickname.