Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  As Rubén and I cross a bridge and amble along a tow path that runs alongside the river, my thoughts turn to a question I’ve been wanting to ask all day.

  “Rubén?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do I have an aura?”

  It feels strange asking. I know his colors don’t always represent a specific emotion, but I am still hoping that I won’t be green.

  He stops walking and stares at me, tipping his head to the side. “Yes, yours is a kind of orangey color.”

  “Ah, phew.”

  “I think I see this color on you because it is the color of the particular sound of your voice. And also, if I think of you, the beginning of you would be translucent—as that’s the color of the beginning of your name, and then it turns into this orangey color. So you’re like a light orange with a hint of translu—”

  He is interrupted by a topless jogger running past, wearing tiny blue shorts.

  Rubén gazes after the lanky figure, sweat dripping off the hairs on his back. He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, shakes his head and grins.

  “Definitely not red.”

  Tommy

  Switching Personalities

  In 2000, schoolteacher Luke found himself in a terrible situation. He had developed an increasing interest in child pornography. He began acquiring a collection of pornographic magazines and photographs off the Internet that focused on children and adolescents. He started soliciting prostitutes at massage parlors. He went to great lengths to conceal his activities—he knew they were completely unacceptable, but later said that the “pleasure principle” overrode his attempts at restraint. It was only after he started making subtle sexual advances toward his stepdaughter, who subsequently informed his wife, that Luke’s pedophilia was discovered and he was arrested for child molestation.

  The judge told Luke that he had to attend a twelve-step program for sex addiction or face jail. Luke chose the program but was expelled after repeatedly asking the nursing staff for sexual favors. The evening before his sentencing, Luke took himself to the University of Virginia Hospital. He said he had a headache and was scared he was going to rape his landlady. Doctors scanned his brain and dropped a bombshell: there was a tumor the size of an egg in his right orbitofrontal lobe, an area toward the very front of the brain. Although this region can show considerable variation among people, growing evidence suggests it is involved in working out what rewards or punishment we might receive for specific actions, as well as providing us with drive, motivation and judgment.

  Surgeons removed the tumor and, just like that, Luke’s pedophilia disappeared. After seven months, he was deemed no risk to the public and returned home to live with his family. A few years later, Luke’s pedophilic urges recurred—this time he went straight to the hospital. Scans showed his tumor had grown back in the same place. With its removal, his personality once again returned to normal.1

  Few demonstrations of the fragile nature of our personality are as remarkable as Luke’s. But changes in personality are not rare. More than five million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, a disease that can severely affect a person’s personality; every three and a half minutes in the UK someone has a stroke, which can induce temporary or permanent changes in mood, values and impulsiveness. We tend to think of our personality as something that is steadfast and strong, but in truth it can rapidly desert us.

  A few years before I started this book, I struck up an online friendship with a person who had experienced not one but two completely different personalities. A man called Tommy McHugh, whose behavior, thoughts and motivations had changed dramatically after a burst blood vessel damaged his brain. But I’d only known one side of him—the person he was after his stroke. So I decided to visit his daughter to find out more about where our personality comes from, and what it is like to experience two in one lifetime.

  * * *

  Tommy’s story starts with a potato. First it was just a few plants that showed signs of gray-green spots. Then the spots became bigger, turned brown and rough and firm. Soon, the fungus had spread to nearby crops, finally ravaging whole fields. The great potato famine, as it became known, sparked a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland that killed more than a million people.

  More than a million others emigrated. Between 1845 and 1852 several thousand families settled just across the Irish Sea in Liverpool. But they were far from welcome. Contempt for the Irish was vocalized by Benjamin Disraeli, who served as prime minister several years after the famine, when he called them a “wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race” that has “no sympathy with the English character.” Their ideal of human felicity, he said, is an “alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry.” As a result of this prejudice, many Irish immigrants faced daily persecution, discrimination and physical attacks.

  Although Tommy McHugh was born one hundred years after the famine, discrimination was still rife in Liverpool. Having a strong Liverpudlian accent did little to hide the fact that Tommy was from a poor Irish family. He quickly learned how to defend himself against the mental and physical abuse thrown at him at school. As did his brothers and sisters—all twelve of them.

  “We never let any taunting go unpunished,” said Tommy, when we first spoke over the phone. “I learned to fight with my fists from a very early age.”

  He also learned to hide his emotions—a lesson that came from his dad, whom Tommy described as a hard worker but a drinker, “never coming home with as much money as he should.”

  As a result, Tommy struggled to stay on the right tracks.

  “It was a tough life. I was a naughty boy. In and out of school all the time. Drugs, stealing, fighting. I did it all.”

  “DAD WOULD TELL US how he had to steal people’s shoes because he didn’t have any of his own,” says Tommy’s daughter, Shillo.

  I am at her house in Buckinghamshire, just outside London. It is lunchtime, and black clouds are wandering all over the county, darkening the skies. We sit at the kitchen table, facing the living room, where Shillo’s young son Issac is constructing a large wooden rail track. Rapid bursts of color flash from the cartoons playing on the TV—a treat for Issac, part of a deal made earlier in return for his patience while I talk with his mum.

  I ask Shillo about her father. I want to know what he was like as a dad, what she remembers about his past, what kind of person he used to be.

  “When he was young, it was a case of survival to a huge degree,” she says. “Dad and the others stole for what they needed. Very few of his brothers weren’t in prison at some point or another. He was never emotional. Never.”

  Tommy became a building contractor, married his childhood sweetheart and along came Shillo and her brother, Scott.

  Despite his lack of formal education, Tommy loved to read. When Shillo was little, he read her The Lord of the Rings. As a teenager, Shillo re-read all three volumes. She remembers feeling disappointed when she found that much of the story she had loved was missing.

  “I realized that Dad must have made up a load of the chapters. I was like ‘What about when Bilbo did this, or when he met that person?’”

  When times were good, they were really, really good, Shillo says. “He’d be fun and entertaining and the dad that all your friends said they wished they had.”

  But then there would be what she refers to as “incredibly dark times.” Tommy struggled with anger and aggression, and often took hard drugs, including heroin.

  “You never knew which dad you were going to get. He could be violent if he was drunk, there would be occasions when we’d be packed up by my mum and taken away and he’d threaten her and say, ‘If you leave me, I’ll find you and I’ll burn the house down.’”

  Shillo’s voice softens.

  “But then he was always good at getting everything back on track, being good and wonderful and talking with you and having lots of fun. It would be like that for a while, everything would be great. And then the darkness wo
uld return.”

  * * *

  Differences between personalities are clear to see in real life, but incredibly difficult to study objectively. Many scientists attempt the task by defining our personality in terms of traits, or patterns of behavior, thoughts and emotions that are relatively stable over time. The extraordinary variety of personality traits is commonly broken down into the so-called Big Five, namely: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

  Openness refers to having a general curiosity and willingness to take on new experiences, information and ideas. Conscientiousness is the ability to regulate your impulses, plan your life and display self-discipline. Extroverts tend to partake in a breadth of activities, are talkative, assertive and happy to be the center of attention. If you have a high level of agreeableness, you value getting along with others, so you may be more willing to compromise; you are kind, generous and considerate. Finally, neuroticism is a measure of how anxious you are, and your general tendency to experience negative emotions. The degree to which each of these traits exist in an individual is thought to predict their personality.

  But what causes us to express these traits? Is our personality a product of our genes or our environment? To find out, we need to travel to Ohio, once the home of two very unusual brothers.

  Jim Lewis and Jim Springer were identical twins, separated just weeks after they were born, renamed by their adoptive parents and raised apart. When they were reunited thirty-nine years later, they discovered that their name was not all they had in common. They both suffered from tension headaches, bit their nails, worked in law enforcement, enjoyed woodworking, smoked Salem cigarettes, and drove the same model car. They holidayed at the same beach in Florida, and both married women named Linda, only to divorce and remarry women named Betty. Both men have sons, called James Alan Lewis and James Allan Springer. They both even called their family dog Toy.

  Was it just a coincidence? The behavioral geneticist and evolutionary psychologist Nancy Segal at California State University, Fullerton, says there is more to it than that. The Jim twins story was the catalyst for a groundbreaking experiment called the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, initiated in 1979. Over the course of twenty years, researchers at the University of Minnesota followed the lives of twins who were separated at birth. They studied 137 pairs of twins in all—81 pairs of identical twins who had come from one egg that had split in two, and 56 pairs of fraternal twins who arose from two different eggs.

  Several researchers, including Segal, analyzed data from the study, along with data from a separate registry of twins who were raised together. They came to a remarkable conclusion: identical twins raised apart were as identical in personality as those raised together. Some traits, including leadership, obedience to authority, resilience to stress and fearfulness were more than 50 percent influenced by their genes.2

  The results imply that a child who is genetically predisposed to being shy may become more or less shy through their upbringing but is unlikely to become an incredibly extroverted adult.

  “It was really surprising,” said Segal, when I asked her whether she had predicted such a dramatic result. “We expected to see more differences between the identical twins who were raised apart, but we just couldn’t find them.”

  These studies have had their fair share of critics—one long-held complaint is that twins may have similar personalities merely because they look so much alike, which would tend to elicit the same sorts of behavior from other people.

  In 2013, Segal found a way to test this theory. If true that physical appearance triggers a specific treatment by others, then the personality similarities of doppelgängers—people who look alike but have different genes—should be as similar as identical twins.

  To find out, Segal recruited twenty-three pairs of doppelgängers from a project by the French Canadian photographer François Brunelle, who had been creating black-and-white portraits of doppelgängers for years. Each participant was given a questionnaire that assessed their personality using the Big Five traits, as well as other characteristics, such as degree of self-esteem. The result? Doppelgängers did not share significant personality traits, and were significantly less alike in personality than both identical and nonidentical twins raised together or apart.3

  So is it their shared genetic history that explains the number of similarities between the Jim twins? “It’s not that there’s a specific gene that will make us want to holiday at the same beach,” says Segal, “but why do you choose a beach holiday? It might be because you react badly to the cold, or that you are very sociable, and so like crowded places. These things are partly a function of your genetic tendencies. Taken collectively, they might explain why you’re more likely to choose one holiday destination over all the others.”

  In the nature-nurture debate, though, nurture still has a fundamental role to play. One of the most impressive demonstrations of the environment’s influence on personality came from a series of studies in the 1990s by Robert Plomin at King’s College London and his colleagues, who showed that unique life experiences had the greatest influence on well-being and depression in identical and nonidentical twins.4

  None of these studies are perfect, but the results suggest that we don’t inherit a blueprint on which our personalities are permanently stamped. Our genes may predispose us to certain paths, but our personalities can be shaped by our environment over a lifetime.

  And sometimes—they can change overnight.

  * * *

  Tommy had been suffering from a headache. It just wouldn’t go away. But that wasn’t unusual—he was often found with a belt tied around his head, he told me, trying to alleviate a migraine that would keep him locked up for weeks.

  He was on the toilet, reading the paper, when it happened.

  “I suddenly felt an explosion in the left side of my head and ended up on the floor. I think the only thing that kept me conscious was not wanting to be found with my pants down. I stood and pulled my trousers up, then the other side of my head went bang.”

  Tommy had experienced a subarachnoid hemorrhage due to a ruptured aneurysm. Burst blood vessels had sent blood squirting in and around his brain. He was discovered by Jan, his second wife, and rushed to the hospital, where surgeons operated on him for eleven hours. Doctors warned Shillo and her family that it might be a long time before he woke up.

  * * *

  “Once,” says Shillo, “Dad had to go work in Saudi Arabia for a while. I must have been about three or four. He’d write to me all the time, every two or three days. When I was thirteen I was looking at the envelopes from those letters and I noticed that all the stamps were from Liverpool. I asked Mum why, and she said it was because Dad would give them to people to take back to England and then they’d post them from there.”

  * * *

  Although doctors had managed to stem the bleed in Tommy’s brain, there was no doubt that some damage had been done. His doctors were pleased to see him sitting up in bed just days after the operation. Unfortunately, there was an unexpected complication.

  “As soon as I woke up, I knew immediately that something was different,” said Tommy. “My mind had changed totally and dramatically.”

  * * *

  “I was sixteen when I found out about the prison sentence,” says Shillo. “I’d just started college and this girl was saying they lived next door to a McHugh. Everyone knew a McHugh because there were so many of them. Anyway, she said that all of them had been in prison, one had even been in for murder. I went home and asked what was going on and found out Dad hadn’t been in Saudi Arabia. He’d been in prison.”

  A single fingerprint had been discovered on a fraudulent check—it was Tommy’s. He claimed this wasn’t possible because the finger it came from had been severed in a fight that he’d had when he was sixteen. Ever since, that particular finger had stuck up at a weird angle, unable to bend.

  “He always denied the charge,” says Shillo. She hesitates,
and I can’t work out whether she believes it or not.

  “He said that finger could never have touched a check. But at the same time he had done so much bad stuff that he said they were always going to catch him on something, so it might as well be this.”

  * * *

  I asked Tommy to describe how he felt when he woke up from his surgery.

  “I was totally emotional for a start,” he said. “And I just couldn’t imagine hurting a fly.”

  Tommy looked around his hospital ward and through the window to the grounds outside. “I could see the beauty in everything. I had all these thoughts in my head that I’d never had before. I suddenly had these emotions and cares and worries. I could taste the femininity inside of me.”

  “It was like two different people,” says Shillo. “He was incredibly emotional, he’d cry at the drop of a hat, he’d be sad, he’d be happy. The person he was before seemed to have just disappeared.”

  Tommy’s sudden appreciation of the beauty of the world and his new emotional compass weren’t the only changes he was experiencing. Looking out of his hospital window, he saw a tree sprouting numbers.

  I thought I must have misheard. “You saw numbers out there on the tree?” I asked.

  “No, they were numbers in my mind,” he said. “The numbers three, six and nine—then I couldn’t stop talking in rhyme.”

  “Rhyme?”

  “Yeah, I had this urge to rhyme all the time.” He laughed. “There I go again. I was spouting poetry left, right and center. New stuff, old stuff, I wander lonely as a cloud. I can recite poetry upside down, sideways, on an angle—you name it, I’ll say it.”

  A month passed and Tommy was well enough to go home. It wasn’t wholly obvious to his doctors what was wrong with him. Although they knew that his hemorrhage had likely damaged parts of his brain, during his emergency surgery they’d had to insert a metal clip to stop the bleeding, which meant he wasn’t able to have any more scans to pinpoint the exact regions of damage.