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The brain mechanisms of aggression
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International Society for Research on Aggression
Behavior Genetics Association Ethics Committee
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United Nations University for Peace
Charlie Robbins, barefoot runner
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I often came across research projects which were not being undertaken by others, but which could have proven fruitful if one took the time and preparation to investigate them. Here are some of them.
In my 1980 review of muroid rodent behavior, I saw that there was remarkable inter-species variability in scent-marking behavior and the anatomy of scent-marking glands. This suggested to me that the behavior was probably a learned behavior, and I thought this could be checked by skin grafts of scent-marking glands in young animals to see if the scent-marking behavior was altered as a result.
Another study to tease out nature/nurture factors was my idea to cross-foster the young pups of muskrats and Norway rats. Genetically the two species are not so far apart (both are Muroid rodents), yet behaviorally, it is hard to imagine a greater difference. Would baby muskrats be able to survive and act like Norwary rats if raised with them on the land? Would baby Norway rats be able to survive and act in a colony of muskrats which live much of their lives in the water? I was inspired by the muskrats at Crystal Lake in Middletown where we rented a summer cottage several seasons. Early in the morning one could see baby muskrats at play in the lake, swimming in schools like fish and leaping out of the water together like dolphins. Later, when we commandeered a classroom at Wesleyan and turned it into a rat pen with a blind to observe rats in a free environment, we saw young rats doing a similar play, running in schools and leaping at the same time!
If I had decided to specialize in motor systems, I would have tried to develop a laboratory preparation involving locomotion in the mudpuppy salamander. This is because many of the neurons of the mudpuppy are a hundred times larger than those of other animals because of a great multiplication of genetic material in their nuclei, a fact that had been exploited very well in the classical studies on the optic retina by John Dowling. One year I bought a number of mudpuppies and put them in a big aquarium at Wesleyan, but the young man who planned to work with them turned out not to be available and eventually the project was abandoned.
Ever since I first help David Egger prepare decorticate cats in the lab of John Flynn I have been fascinated by the cerebral cortex which accounts for most of the increase of brain size in humans. Just as we could not measure the deficits in Egger's decorticate cats, we still don't understand what the cortex does. However, my student John Kanki and I opened a window into cortical function when we studied the role of the thalamus in changing the sensory systems that guide shock-induced boxing in rats. Here was a very concrete thing done by the cortex, shifting the guidance mechanism from sensory system to another. Unfortunately, we could not follow up on this, and the experiments have yet to be done. The situation is complicated by the questionable ethics of experiments involving shock-induced fighting, so a different behavioral model would need to be employed.
One year I had a very bright student at Wesleyan named Bob Gershon who did an undergraduate thesis by observing and photographing rats as they built underground burrow systems against a glass wall. One thing we observed, unlike others who did similar experiments (Richard Lore at Rutgers, the Blanchards in Hawaii, and David's Collective Number 2 in Soviet Georgia) was the burial of dead rats by the other rats who sealed off the tunnels where the animal had died. Unfortunately, Gershon never published his results because he was arrested for selling marijuana and went to jail instead.
In 1981, working with SunHi Lee and Heather Schroeder in my lab at Wesleyan, we tried to test whether there are rapid production and circulaton of male and female sex hormones in the blood system during behavior. We installed indwelling catheters in the carotid artery and pulled blood samples while one rat ran on a running wheel toward another (especially males running toward an estrous female), a procedure that Harry Sinnamon, Jon Mink and I later used for single neuron recording in free-moving rats. Unfortunately, the centrifuged, quick-frozen samples that we sent for analysis were botched by the lab that had promised to do the hormone assays, so we never got any data. This kind of experiment has yet to be done, as far as I know.
As a runner I was always fascinated by the perception of runners that there is a certain state of euphoria called the "runner's high" that one sometimes gets into. With another scientist who was also interested, Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University, we started to set up an experiment to measure heart rate and footfall rate simultaneously during running on the theory that the two rates (which are roughly similar) might get locked into a synchonous pattern and produce such a "runner's high" under certain circumstances. But his wife became gravely ill and we could not continue our experiment.
With a graduate student, Maz Burbank, we videoed the fights of children and were able to see the overt acts that would later be introjected into the superego. I have described this in my page on psychoanalysis.
Working with Jaap Koolhaas
In the summer of 1981 I worked in the lab of Jaap Koolhaas in Haren, Netherlands, and we did a lot of little experiments, one of which had profound implications, but couldn't be completed because of ethical problems. We deprived male rats who were fighters from vision (darkness and we observed with infrared goggles), plugs in their ears, and anesthesia in their vibrissae and then confronted them with another male that they could smell but not locate. We did this twice, and both times the rat attacked an "imaginery rat" jumping into the air and coming down biting and kicking. But since he could not find the other rat, he was attacking "the air." Deprived of feedback he went into a grand mal seizure. What we saw is that the sensory systems get stimulated by the odor of the other rat, but when there is no consummation of the attack, they get more and more stimulated to the point of convulsions. This is an important observation of the dynamics of the brain, but we could not ethically justify an experiment that produced grand mal seizures.
I have always been fascinated by the fact that couples often die one after the other, as if the surviver has given up the will to live. But what is the physiological basis of "the will to live" or perhaps its opposite, the "will to die"? There was a report many years ago that if a wild rat male is attacked by another male and cannot escape, it simply dies of stress. But what is the physiological basis of this, and can it help to explain some human deaths as well? With my student Michael Lehman we trapped some wild rats and tried to work with them in the lab to replicate this phenomenon, but the rats were completely unmanageable and we gave up the attempt.
With my colleague and friend, Harry Sinnamon at Wesleyan, we often speculated about the brain mechanisms that must have been present in the primate ancestors of humans and that got used for the production of language. In particular, we considered the mechanism by which an animal learns an "internal map" of the environment in which it moves, a mechanism which provides rapid, integrated sensory and motor sequences that might be transformed as the mechanism for the rapid sensory and motor sequences of understanding and producing speech. We thought that with the development of imaging of human brain activity during movement it might be possible to compare the processes of walking, talking and sign language in humans with directed locomotion in animals, with the idea that the processes were derived from each other. After all, when humans stood upright, they no longer needed, and hence made available for other uses, the enormous neural system of forelimb posture and motor control. See my later page on language.
Most of these experiments have never been done by others, as far as I know. In fact, over my years of experience as a scientist, I became convinced that most scientific research is not very interesting, because it is determined by careerism that seeks "safe" results or funding sources that seek narrow goals. Not many scientists take a broad, interdisciplinary view based on general principles such as evolution and the curiousity to understand fundamental processes of nature. The most interesting experiments usually go undone.
There is another limitation as well. The scientific method requires repeatability. But what about events that one sees rarely and cannot reproduce? I think of "Rocky", the rat one year that amused much of the student body of Wesleyan by standing on his hind legs and beating his chest with his forelegs each time after copulating with a female. The most amazing thing is that his genetic code was identical to those of the other rats (I used only homozygous lines), and his upbringing differed little from the others. There was often a line of students at the door to see his performances!
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Fall of Soviet Empire
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UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme