Tom Schulte

Edgar Allan Poe had an intuitive grasp of this principle. He wrote: "When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is

Edgar Allan Poe had an intuitive grasp of this principle. He wrote: "When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression."

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Social Awareness

Social awareness refers to a spectrum that runs from instantaneously sensing another's inner state, to understanding her feelings and thoughts, to "getting" complicated social situations. It includes:

• Primal empathy: Feeling with others; sensing non- verbal emotional signals.

Attunement: Listening with full receptivity; attuning to a person.

Empathic accuracy: Understanding another person's

thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Social cognition: Knowing how the social world works.

Social Facility

Simply sensing how another feels, or knowing what they think or intend, does not guarantee fruitful interactions. Social facility builds on social awareness to allow smooth, effective interactions. The spectrum of social facility includes:

• Synchrony: Interacting smoothly at the nonverbal level.

• Self-presentation: Presenting ourselves effectively. • Influence: Shaping the outcome of social interactions.

Concern: Caring about others' needs and acting accordingly.

This ability to apprehend what seems to be going through someone else's mind is one of our most invaluable human skills. Neuroscientists call it "mindsight."

Mindsight amounts to peering into the mind of a person to sense their feelings and deduce their thoughts-the fundamental ability of empathic accuracy. While we can't actually read another person's mind, we do pick up enough clues from their face, voice, and eyes-reading between the lines of what they say and do-to make remarkably accurate inferences.

Crabbe was now a behavior geneticist at the Oregon Health and Science University and the Portland VA Medical Center—and of all things, renowned for his studies of alcoholic rodents. He has for years done research on mice from a strain called C57BL/6J, who are unique in their voracious appetite for alcohol. Studying them holds the promise of clues to the causes and, one hopes, cures for alcoholism in humans.

This strain of alcohol-loving mice is one of a hundred or so that are useful for medical research, such as a susceptibility to diabetes or heart disease. Each mouse in a given inbred strain is, in effect, a clone of every other such mouse; they share their genes like identical twins. One virtue of these strains for scientific researchers is their stability; a mouse of a given strain tested in various labs around the world should react like every other such mouse. But this very assumption of stability was questioned by Crabbe, in a now famous, simple experiment.

“We asked just how stable is ‘stable,’” Crabbe told me when I called. “We did the identical tests in three different laboratories, trying to make every aspect of their environment identical, from the brand of mouse feed they ate—Purina—and their age, to their shipping history. We had them tested at the same hour on the same day with identical apparatus.”

So at the identical point—April 20, 1998, between 8:30 and 9:00 A.M. local time—all the mice from eight different inbred strains, including C57BL/6J, were tested. One test simply offered them a choice of drinking regular water or an alcohol solution. True to form, the liquor-lovers chose the rodent martini far more often than did other mouse strains.

Next was a standard test for mouse anxiety. A mouse is placed at the crossroads of two runways, elevated three feet off the ground. Two arms of the crossroads have walls while the other two are open, which can be scary. Anxious mice cower next to the walls, while more adventurous ones explore the open runways.

To the great surprise of those who believe that genes alone determine behavior, however, within a given strain some decided differences on the anxiety test were found from lab to lab. For example, one strain, BALB/cByJ, was very anxious in Portland but quite adventurous in Albany.

As Crabbe noted, “If genes were all, you’d expect to find no differences whatever.” What could have caused the differences? Certain variables were beyond control from lab to lab, like the humidity and the water the mice drank—and perhaps most important, the people who handled them. One research assistant, for example, was allergic to mice and wore a respirator while holding them.

“Some people are confident and skilled at handling mice, while others are anxious or too rough,” Crabbe told me. “My bet is that mice can ‘read’ the emotional state of the person handling them, and that state in turn has an impact on the mouse’s behavior.” His study, featured in the prestigious journal Science, aroused a storm of debate among neuroscientists. They had to grapple with the disturbing news that minor differences from one laboratory to another, such as how the mice were handled, created disparities in how the mice behaved—which implied a difference in how the identical genes acted.

Crabbe’s experiment, together with similar findings from other labs, suggests that genes are more dynamic than most people—and science for more than a century—have assumed. It’s not just which genes we are born with, but their expression, that matters.

To understand how our genes operate, we must appreciate the difference between possessing a
given gene and the degree to which that gene expresses its signature proteins. In gene expression,
essentially, a bit of DNA makes RNA, which in turn creates a protein that makes something happen in our biology. Of the thirty thousand or so genes in the human body, some are expressed only during embryonic development, then shut off forever. Others turn on and off constantly. Some express themselves only in the liver, others only in the brain.

Crabbe’s finding stands as a landmark in “epigenetics,” the study of ways the experiences we undergo change how our genes operate—without altering our DNA sequence an iota. Only when a gene directs the synthesis of RNA does it actually make a practical difference in the body. Epigenetics shows how our environment, translated into the immediate chemical surround of a given cell, programs our genes in ways that determine just how active they will be.

Research in epigenetics has identified many of the biological mechanisms that control gene expression. One of them, involving the methyl molecule, not only turns genes on or off but also tones down or speeds up their activity. Methyl activity likewise helps determine where in the brain the more than 100 billion neurons end up, and which other neurons their ten thousand connections will link to. The methyl molecule sculpts the body, including the brain.

Such insights put to rest the century-old debate on nature versus nurture: do our genes or our
experiences determine who we become? That debate turns out to be pointless, based on the fallacy that our genes and our environment are independent of each other; it’s like arguing over which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width.

The OFC also goes awry this way in those war veterans who, on seeing a battle scene on the evening news or hearing a truck back- fire, are flooded with traumatic memories from their own wartime nightmares. The culprit is an overactive amygdala, one that sends surges of panic in mistaken reaction to cues vaguely reminiscent of the original trauma. Ordinarily the OFC would evaluate such primal feelings of fear and clarify that it's just a television show or a truck we're hearing rather than enemy guns.

While it is kept in line by high-road systems, the amygdala cannot play the brain's bad boy. The OFC contains one of the array of neu- rons that can inhibit those amygdala-driven surges, that can just say no to limbic impulses. As low-road circuitry sends up primitive emotional impulses (I feel like yelling, or She's making me so nervous I want to get out of here), the OFC evaluates them in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of the moment (This is a library, or It's only our first date) and modulates them accordingly, acting as an emotional brake.

When those brakes falter, we act inappropriately. Consider the results from a study where college students who did not know each other came to a lab and were "virtually" put together in pairs in an online chat room to get acquainted. 28 About one in five of these Internet con- versations quickly became startlingly sexual, with explicit terms, graphic discussions of sex acts, and outright solicitation of sex.

But when the experimenter who conducted these sessions later read the transcripts, he was astounded. As far as he had seen while escorting the students in and out of the cubicles, they all had been low key, unassuming, and invariably polite-completely out of keeping with their uninhibited licentiousness online.

Presumably none would have dared plunge into such blatantly sexual talk had they instead been having a live, face-to-face conversation with someone they had met only minutes before. That is just the point: during in-person interactions we loop, getting an ongoing flow of feedback, mainly from the person's facial expressions and tone of voice, which instantly tell us when we are on track and off.

Something like the out-of-place sex talk in the lab has been documented ever since the earliest years of the Internet: "flaming," in which adults make childishly offensive comments online.

We know that low levels of vitamin C, smoking, and sleeping poorly all increase the likelihood of infection. The question is, can a stressful relationship be added to that list? Cohen's answer: definitely.

Cohen assigns precise numerical values to the factors that make one person come down with a cold while another stays healthy. Those with an ongoing personal conflict were 2.5 times as likely as the others to get a cold, putting rocky relationships in the same causal range as vitamin C deficiency and poor sleep. (Smoking, the most damaging unhealthy habit, made people three times more likely to succumb.) Conflicts that lasted a month or longer boosted susceptibility, but an occasional argument presented no health hazard. 24

While perpetual arguments are bad for our health, isolating our- selves is worse. Compared to those with a rich web of social connections, those with the fewest close relationships were 4.2 times
more likely to come down with the cold, making loneliness riskier than smoking.

The more we socialize, the less susceptible to colds we become. This idea seems counterintuitive:
don’t we increase the likelihood of being exposed to a cold virus the more people we interact with?
Sure. But vibrant social connections boost our good moods and limit our negative ones, suppressing cortisol and enhancing immune function under stress.

...

In a simulation of the impact of cortisol on learning, college students volunteered to get injections that raised their cortisol levels, then to memorize a series of words and images. The result reflected the inverted U: in mild to moderate ranges, the cortisol helped the students remember what they had studied when tested on it two days later. But at extreme levels, the cortisol impaired their recall, apparently because it inhibited the crucial role of the hippocampus." This has profound implications for the kind of classroom atmosphere that fosters learning. The social environment, remember, affects the rate and fate of newly created brain cells. New cells take a month to mature and four more to fully link to other neurons; during this window the environment determines in part the final shape and function of the cell. The new cells that facilitate memory during the course of a semester will encode in their links what has been learned during that time-and the more conducive the atmosphere for learning, the better that encoding will be.

Distress kills learning. One classic finding dates back almost half a century to 1960, when Richard Alpert, then at Stanford, showed experimentally what every student already knew: high anxiety cripples test-taking ability." A more recent study of college students taking math exams found that when they were told the test was a practice, they scored 10 percent better than when they thought they were part of a team that depended on their score to win a cash prize-under social stress their working memory was hampered. Intriguingly, the deficit in this most basic cognitive ability was greatest for the smartest students.

A group of sixteen-year-olds scored in the top 5 percent on a national test of potential in math. Some were doing extremely well in their math class, but others did poorly despite their aptitude for the subject. The crucial difference was that the high-achieving students experienced focused pleasure about 40 percent of the time they were immersed in their studies-more often than they felt anxious (about 30 percent). By contrast, while studying math the low achievers experienced such optimal states only 16 percent of the time and great anxiety 55 percent.