Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Blair also explored J. S.’s reactions to slides portraying anger and disgust expressions—the kinds of expressions that often signal disapproval and trigger our embarrassment. How did J. S. respond to these signs of moral disapproval? He had great difficulty identifying the emotions conveyed. Unlike comparison participants, he also failed to show a skin-conductance response—the release of sweat from tiny glands underneath the skin of the fingers. His body was not wired to respond to the judgments of others.

J. S. had damaged the orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the frontal lobes that is adjacent to the jagged, bony ridges of the skull’s openings for the eyes. This region of the brain is often damaged in falls and bike and motorcycle accidents, as the brain jostles during the fall and is carved up by the bony backside of the eye sockets. This damage had left J. S.’s reasoning processes intact, but it had short-circuited his capacity for embarrassment. In actuality, he had lost something much larger: his ability to appease, reconcile, forgive, and participate in the social-moral order. More in-depth studies of this region of the brain would tell us what might have changed in Eadweard Muybridge the fateful day he was thrown headfirst into a tree.

MUYBRIDGE’S IMMODEST BRAIN

 

When Eadweard Muybridge regained consciousness after his injury, he felt strange. He had no sense of smell or taste. He had double vision. In his own muted words, he had “confused ideas.” Most likely those confused ideas centered upon a new disconnect to others, a sudden blindness to the rich web of conventions and subtle acts of cooperation that bind people to one another.

Like J. S., Muybridge had damaged his oribitofrontal cortex, which might be thought of as a command center for the moral sentiments. Anatomically, the orbitofrontal cortex receives information from the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped part of the midbrain, which provides a millisecond, unconscious assessment of whether objects are good or bad. It receives information from the cingulate cortex, which is involved in assessments of pain and harm. Soft, velvety touch to the arm activates the orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting that this portion of the brain tracks physical contact between people so central to the currency of gratitude and compassion and the formation of intimate and egalitarian bonds. It receives information from the vagus nerve, which is activated during our experience of compassion.

Remarkably, damage to the orbitofrontal cortex does not impair language, memory, or sensory processing, as Blair’s study of J. S. revealed. Patients who damage these regions speak with the fluency that would please any grammarian, and the cogence that would satisfy the most persnickety of logicians. Cold reason remains intact. But damage to the orbitofrontal cortex does tend to turn individuals into impulsive, everyday psychopaths.

We know this from case studies of people who have damaged that region of the brain. The most famous is Phineas Gage, who accidentally blew a thirteen-pound tamping rod through his skull while working on the Rutland and Burlington Rail Road in Vermont. The doctor who cared for Gage, John Harlow, offered one of the few recorded observations about Gage, who, prior to the accident, was uniformly considered a considerate, reliable, upstanding man: “He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires.”

In research with Jennifer Beer and Robert Knight on orbitofrontal patients, we sought to document that these patients, so skilled in the tasks of cold reasoning, have lost the art of embarrassment. They have lost the ability to appease, to reconcile, and signal their concern for others. In the study, our participants navigated a veritable obstacle course of embarrassing traps and hurdles. First, they disclosed personal experiences to a relative stranger—an exercise fraught with the possibility of being inappropriately intimate. Participants then teased an attractive female experimenter whom they had just met. They did so by making up a nickname and a provocative story for that person. Finally, patients were presented with slides of different facial expressions of emotions, including one of embarrassment—a trigger of reconciliation and forgiveness.