The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012
Page 23
The basic idea is to give the frontal lobes practice in squelching the short-term brain circuits. To this end, my colleagues Stephen LaConte and Pearl Chiu have begun providing real-time feedback to people during brain scanning. Imagine that you’d like to quit smoking cigarettes. In this experiment, you look at pictures of cigarettes during brain imaging, and the experimenters measure which regions of your brain are involved in the craving. Then they show you the activity in those networks, represented by a vertical bar on a computer screen, while you look at more cigarette pictures. The bar acts as a thermometer for your craving: if your craving networks are revving high, the bar is high; if you’re suppressing your craving, the bar is low. Your job is to make the bar go down. Perhaps you have insight into what you’re doing to resist the craving; perhaps the mechanism is inaccessible. In any case, you try out different mental avenues until the bar begins to slowly sink. When it goes all the way down, that means you’ve successfully recruited frontal circuitry to squelch the activity in the networks involved in impulsive craving. The goal is for the long term to trump the short term. Still looking at pictures of cigarettes, you practice making the bar go down over and over, until you’ve strengthened those frontal circuits. By this method, you’re able to visualize the activity in the parts of your brain that need modulation, and you can witness the effects of different mental approaches you might take.
If this sounds like biofeedback from the 1970s, it is—but this time with vastly more sophistication, monitoring specific networks inside the head rather than a single electrode on the skin. This research is just beginning, so the method’s efficacy is not yet known—but if it works well, it will be a game changer. We will be able to take it to the incarcerated population, especially those approaching release, to try to help them avoid coming back through the revolving prison doors.
This prefrontal workout is designed to better balance the debate between the long- and short-term parts of the brain, giving the option of reflection before action to those who lack it. And really, that’s all maturation is. The main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this fact underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized largely involves developing the circuitry to squelch our first impulses.
This explains why damage to the frontal lobes unmasks unsocialized behavior that we would never have thought was hidden inside us. Recall the patients with frontotemporal dementia who shoplift, expose themselves, and burst into song at inappropriate times. The networks for those behaviors have been lurking under the surface all along, but they’ve been masked by normally functioning frontal lobes. The same sort of unmasking happens in people who go out and get rip-roaring drunk on a Saturday night: they’re disinhibiting normal frontal-lobe function and letting more impulsive networks climb onto the main stage. After training at the prefrontal gym, a person might still crave a cigarette, but he’ll know how to beat the craving instead of letting it win. It’s not that we don’t want to enjoy our impulsive thoughts (Mmm, cake), it’s merely that we want to endow the frontal cortex with some control over whether we act upon them (I’ll pass). Similarly, if a person thinks about committing a criminal act, that’s permissible as long as he doesn’t take action.
For the pedophile, we cannot hope to control whether he is attracted to children. That he never acts on the attraction may be the best we can hope for, especially as a society that respects individual rights and freedom of thought. Social policy can hope only to prevent impulsive thoughts from tipping into behavior without reflection. The goal is to give more control to the neural populations that care about long-term consequences—to inhibit impulsivity, to encourage reflection. If a person thinks about long-term consequences and still decides to move forward with an illegal act, then we’ll respond accordingly. The prefrontal workout leaves the brain intact—no drugs or surgery—and uses the natural mechanisms of brain plasticity to help the brain help itself. It’s a tune-up rather than a product recall.
We have hope that this approach represents the correct model: it is grounded simultaneously in biology and in libertarian ethics, allowing a person to help himself by improving his long-term decision making. Like any scientific attempt, it could fail for any number of unforeseen reasons. But at least we have reached a point where we can develop new ideas rather than assuming that repeated incarceration is the single practical solution for deterring crime.
Along any axis that we use to measure human beings, we discover a wide-ranging distribution, whether in empathy, intelligence, impulse control, or aggression. People are not created equal. Although this variability is often imagined to be best swept under the rug, it is in fact the engine of evolution. In each generation, nature tries out as many varieties as it can produce, along all available dimensions.
Variation gives rise to lushly diverse societies—but it serves as a source of trouble for the legal system, which is largely built on the premise that humans are all equal before the law. This myth of human equality suggests that people are equally capable of controlling impulses, making decisions, and comprehending consequences. While admirable in spirit, the notion of neural equality is simply not true.
As brain science improves, we will better understand that people exist along continua of capabilities rather than in simplistic categories. And we will be better able to tailor sentencing and rehabilitation for the individual rather than maintain the pretense that all brains respond identically to complex challenges and that all people therefore deserve the same punishments. Some people wonder whether it’s unfair to take a scientific approach to sentencing—after all, where’s the humanity in that? But what’s the alternative? As it stands now, ugly people receive longer sentences than attractive people; psychiatrists have no capacity to guess which sex offenders will reoffend; and our prisons are overcrowded with drug addicts and the mentally ill, both of whom could be better helped by rehabilitation. So is current sentencing really superior to a scientifically informed approach?
Neuroscience is beginning to touch on questions that were once only in the domain of philosophers and psychologists, questions about how people make decisions and the degree to which those decisions are truly “free.” These are not idle questions. Ultimately, they will shape the future of legal theory and create a more biologically informed jurisprudence.
PART FIVE: Society and Environment
JOHN SEABROOK
Crush Point
FROM The New Yorker
ON THANKSGIVING DAY, 2008, shoppers began lining up outside the Walmart in Valley Stream, Long Island, at 5:30 P.M., near a small, handwritten sign that read BLITZ LINE STARTS HERE. Like many other retailers holding “doorbuster” Black Friday sales, Walmart was offering deep discounts on a limited number of TVs, iPods, DVD players, and other coveted products. Only two months earlier, the US economy had nearly collapsed, and although the Christmas shopping season was looking dismal, there was still some dim hope that the nation might be able to shop its way out of disaster, as we were advised to do after 9/11.
By two in the morning, the line ran the length of the building, passed Petland, turned at a wire fence, and stretched far into the bleak parking lot of the Green Acres Mall, a tundra of frosted tarmac. There were already more than a thousand people. Store managers had placed eight interlocking plastic barriers between the front of the line and the outer doors to the store to create a buffer zone that would keep people from crowding around the entrance. But at three, people began jumping the barriers. The store’s assistant manager, Mike Sicuranza, spoke to the manager, Steve Sooknanan, who had gone to a hotel to rest, and told him that customers had breached the buffer zone. Sicuranza sounded frightened. Sooknanan told him to call the police.
The Nassau County police arrived soon after the call and, using bullhorns, ordered everyone to get back behind the barr
iers. The police were still there at four, when Sooknanan returned to the store. Shortly afterward, a Walmart employee brought some family members inside the barriers, angering the crowd. About two hundred shoppers pushed into the buffer zone. Those in front were squeezed against two sliding-glass outer doors that led into a glassed-in, high-ceilinged entrance vestibule that also held some vending machines. These had been pushed to the center of the space to prevent people from crossing it diagonally and entering through the exit doors. As more people gathered, in anticipation of the store’s opening, at five A.M., the pressure on the doors built and they began to shake. “Push the doors in!” some chanted from the back.
Employees asked the police for help. According to a court filing, the police responded that dealing with this crowd was “not in their job description,” and they left. Of the two-man security force that Walmart had hired for Blitz Day, only one had shown up, and he was inside the store. Shortly before five, the crowd had grown to about two thousand people. The store’s asset-protection manager, Sal D’Amico, advised Sooknanan not to open the doors, but Sooknanan overruled him. He instructed eight to ten of his largest employees, most of whom worked in the stockroom, to stand at the sides of the vestibule as the outer doors were opened, and be ready to help anyone who tripped or fell.
One of those men was Jdimytai Damour, who lived in Jamaica, Queens; his parents were Haitian immigrants. Damour was thirty-four and beefy—at 6 feet 5 inches tall, he weighed around 480 pounds. Friends called him Jdidread, because he wore his hair in dreadlocks. He had been working at Walmart for about a week as a temporary employee in the stockroom. Like the others in the vestibule, he had no training in security or crowd control. A coworker had reportedly heard him say earlier, “I don’t want to be here.”
Just before five, the workers realized that a pregnant woman, Leana Lockley, a twenty-eight-year-old part-time college student from South Ozone Park, was being crushed against the glass on the outer doors. The managers slid them open just enough to pull Lockley inside the vestibule. The crowd surged forward, thinking that the store was opening. The workers shut the doors again and braced both sliding doors with their bodies to keep them from caving in, as Sooknanan initiated the festive countdown, a Walmart Blitz Day tradition. Ten, nine, eight . . . At zero, the doors were opened again. There was a loud cracking sound as both sliding doors burst from their frame, and the crowd boiled in.
Dennis Fitch, one of the workers standing at the entrance, was blown backward through the inner vestibule doors and into the store. Others managed to jump to safety atop the vending machines. Some attempted to form a human chain on the other side of the vestibule, to slow down the crowd rushing into the store. A crush soon developed inside the vestibule, but the people who were still outside, pushing forward, weren’t aware of it. Leana Lockley was carried through the vestibule and into the store by the surge, and she tripped over an older woman, who was on the ground. As she got to her knees, she later said, she saw Damour next to her. “I was screaming that I was pregnant, I am sure he heard that,” she told Newsday. “He was trying to block the people from pushing me down to the ground and trampling me. . . . It was a split second, and we had eye contact as we knew we were going to die.”
Coworkers later testified that Damour was hit by one of the two sliding glass doors. As he went down, the door fell on top of him, and people fell over it. Maybe he got up again to help Lockley, but that’s not clear in camera and cell-phone video footage of the scene. He just vanishes into the frantic tangle of limbs.
Lockley’s husband, Shawn, was able to pull her out, badly bruised. Their baby, a healthy girl, was born the following April. But though “Big guy down” was broadcast over the walkie-talkies that some of Damour’s coworkers carried, they had to fight their way through the crowd to reach him, and when they got there Damour’s tongue was out and his eyes had rolled back. The cops arrived at 5:05 A.M. and performed CPR (a cell-phone video made its way to YouTube), without success. Damour was pronounced dead at Franklin Hospital Medical Center, in Valley Stream, at 6:03 A.M. The coroner’s report did not mention any bruises, fractures, or internal injuries, as it would have if he’d been trampled to death; the cause of death was listed as asphyxia.
Crowds are a condition of urban life. On subways and sidewalks, in elevators and stores, we pass in and out of them in the course of a day without pausing to consider by what mechanisms our brains guide us through so easily, rarely touching so much as a stranger’s shoulder. Crowds are often viewed as a necessary inconvenience of city living, but there are occasions when we gladly join them, pressing together at raves and rock concerts, at sporting events, victory parades, and big sales. Elias Canetti, in his 1960 book Crowds and Power, sees these times of physical communion with strangers as essential to transcending the fear of being touched. “The more fiercely people press together,” he writes, “the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other.” In fact, a crowd is most dangerous when density is greatest. The transition from fraternal smooshing to suffocating pressure—a “crowd crush”—often occurs almost imperceptibly; one doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late to escape. Something interrupts the flow of pedestrians—a blocked exit, say, while an escalator continues to feed people into a closed-off space, or a storm that causes everyone to start running for shelter at the same time. (In Belarus in 1999, fifty-two people died when a crowd tried to enter an underground railway station to keep dry.) At a certain point, you feel pressure on all sides of your body and realize that you can’t raise your arms. You are pulled off your feet and welded into a block of people. The crowd force squeezes the air out of your lungs, and you struggle to take another breath.
John Fruin, a retired research engineer with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is one of the founders of crowd studies in the United States. In a 1993 paper, “The Causes and Prevention of Crowd Disasters,” he wrote, “At occupancies of about 7 persons per square meter the crowd becomes almost a fluid mass. Shock waves can be propagated through the mass sufficient to lift people off of their feet and propel them distances of 3 m (10 ft) or more. People may be literally lifted out of their shoes, and have clothing torn off. Intense crowd pressures, exacerbated by anxiety, make it difficult to breathe.” Some people die standing up; others die in the pileup that follows a “crowd collapse,” when someone goes down and more people fall over him. “Compressional asphyxia” is usually given as the cause of death in these circumstances.
Crowd disasters occur all over the world, and for a variety of reasons. According to a recent paper published in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, reports of human stampedes have more than doubled in each of the past two decades. In the developing world, they often occur at religious festivals. In November, hundreds of people died in Cambodia, in a crush that occurred on a bridge in Phnom Penh during the annual water festival; there were reports that the police had fired water cannons at people on the crowded bridge. Thousands have died making pilgrimages to Mecca in the past twenty years, mainly in the ritual called the Stoning of the Devil, which occurs near the Jamarat Bridge; 360 pilgrims were killed there in 2006. In India last month, more than a hundred Hindu worshipers died in a crush in the state of Kerala.
In the developed world, soccer games and rock concerts are the most likely events to generate deadly crowds. In 1989 in Sheffield, England, ninety-five people died after they were caught in a crowd crush at Hillsborough Stadium when fans were trying to get into a soccer match between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool. (A ninety-sixth victim was taken off life support four years later.) At a rock festival in Roskilde, Denmark, in 2000, nine people died after a crowd collapse that occurred near the stage while Pearl Jam was performing in front of an audience of 50,000. Last July twenty-one people were killed at the Love Parade, a free electronic-music festival in Duisburg, Germany, when a crush developed in a disused rail tunnel that led to the festival grounds. With the world’s population increasing,
and with more people moving to cities, crowds will become ever larger, and disasters more frequent, unless scientists and safety engineers can figure out how to prevent them from happening.
In the literature on crowd disasters, there is a striking incongruity between the way these events are depicted in the press and how they actually occur. In popular accounts, they are almost invariably described as “panics.” The crowd is portrayed as a single, unified entity that acts according to “mob psychology”—a set of primitive instincts (fear, followed by flight) that favor self-preservation over the welfare of others and cause “stampedes” and “tramplings.” But most crowd disasters are caused by “crazes”—people are usually moving toward something they want rather than away from something they fear, and if you’re caught up in a crush, you’re just as likely to die on your feet as under the feet of others, squashed by the pressure of bodies smashing into you. (Investigators collecting evidence in the aftermath of crowd disasters have found steel guardrails capable of withstanding a thousand pounds of pressure bent by crowd force.) In disasters not involving fire, panic is rarely the cause of fatalities, and even when fire is involved, as in the 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate, Kentucky, research has shown that people continue to help one another, even at the cost of their own lives.
So why do we still think in terms of panics and stampedes? In many crowd disasters, particularly those in the West where commercial interests are involved, different stakeholders are potentially responsible, including the organizers of the event, the venue owners and designers, and the public officials and private security firms whose job is to ensure crowd safety. In the aftermath of disasters, they all vigorously defend their interests, and rarely are any of them held accountable. But almost no one speaks for the crowd, and the crowd usually takes the blame.