Animals in Translation (29 page)

It's not clear whether the brain system underlying fear and anxiety is the same. I think most researchers have assumed that it is, but recent research by Ned Kalin, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has found a difference between our “initial responses to fearful stimuli” and an “anxious temperament.”
⁷
The amygdala handles fearful stimuli, but the prefrontal cortex is responsible for an anxious temperament. When the amygdala is damaged the anxious temperament doesn't go away.

Based on my own observation of animals and of myself, I think nature created at least two different emotional systems to handle threats: fight-or-flight fear and the orienting response I talked about in Chapter 2. The fight-or-flight corresponds to fear, and I wonder whether the orienting response might correspond to anxiety or to the anxious temperament.

I say that because if I'm God and I'm designing an animal I don't want to give him
only
a fight-or-flight system. I want to give him vigilance as well, because I want him to keep a lookout. I need two
different systems because if he just chronically flees every potential threat, he's going to use up his energy reserves. The reason I think vigilance may be linked to anxiety is that anxious people are always on guard, always watching for trouble.

I don't know what the research will show, but I do know that antidepressants have separated my orienting response from my fear response. One reason I say this is that I take antidepressants, and they've gotten rid of my fear but not my orienting response, which makes me think the two responses are based in separate systems in my brain. If you take something like the high-pitched back-up alarm on a garbage truck, before I took medication I would almost have a panic attack hearing that sound. On medication I don't panic, but the beeping turns on my orienting response and I can't turn it off. If I'm trying to sleep and I hear a back-up beep I can't
not
orient to it; I have to pay attention. There's no way I can fall asleep. It's as if the medication split my system apart chemically. Intense fear got turned off; orienting and hyper-vigilance stayed on.

Autistic people have so much natural fear and anxiety—I'm almost comfortable saying it's universal—that when they're young they can be like little wild animals. For years people thought autistic children were unteachable because they were so uncontrollable, and a lot of people think that the
feral children
we've heard about over the years—children said to have been raised by wolves—were actually autistic. No one would call an autistic child feral today, but the word is a pretty accurate description of the way a lot of these children—not all, but quite a lot—
appear
to normal people who've never dealt with them before.

Autistic children seem “wild” for a lot of different reasons, not all of which relate to animals. A huge problem for autistic children, though not for animals, is scrambled sensory processing. The world isn't coming in right. So young autistic children end up looking wild for the same reason Helen Keller looked wild: parents and teachers can't get through to them. In some ways it's almost like they have to raise themselves. A lot of them do a good job of it, because over the years they seem to start piecing things together. One mother told me she felt as if her son had to “learn to see,” and I bet there's a lot of truth to that.

But one of the biggest reasons autistic children (and more than a few autistic adults) seem so “untamable” is that they're terrified of so many things. It can take years for an autistic child to lose his fear of the most ordinary events, like getting a haircut or going to the dentist, if he ever does. There are plenty of autistic adults who have to be given general anesthesia to have their teeth worked on. They've never gotten over their terror.

This is what we have in common with animals. Our fear system is “turned on” in a way a normal person's is not. It's fear gone wild. In my own case, overwhelming anxiety hit at puberty. From age eleven to age thirty-three, when I discovered antidepressant medication, I felt exactly the way you feel when you're about to defend your dissertation, only I felt that way all day long, every single day. I was in a constant, daily state of emergency. It was horrible. If I hadn't gone on medication I couldn't have had a life at all. I certainly wouldn't have been able to have a career.

F
REEDOM FROM
F
EAR

It seems likely that animals and autistic people both have
hyper-fear
systems in large part because their frontal lobes are less powerful compared to the frontal lobes in typical folks. The prefrontal cortex gives humans some freedom of action in life, including
some
freedom from fear. As a rule, normal people have more power to suppress fear, and to make decisions in the face of fear, than animals or (most) autistic people.

The frontal lobes fight fear in two ways. First, the frontal lobes are the brakes. The frontal lobes tamp down the amygdala, a tiny, evolutionarily ancient structure in the middle of the brain that produces fear. The amygdala tells the pituitary to pump out stress hormones such as cortisol; the prefrontal cortex tells the pituitary to slow down. I don't know for a fact that an animal's or autistic person's frontal lobe braking system is weaker than a nonautistic person's, but my guess is that it is. We could certainly discover that different species have different levels of frontal control over fear, too.

Even if we find out animal frontal lobes do just as good a job of suppressing stress hormones as the human brain, the frontal lobes
have a second means of combating fear that we know almost to a certainty is different in animals and in typical humans, and that is language. Nonautistic people use language to talk themselves out of fear.

There's probably more to it than that. I have come to believe, from my own experience and from published research, that
mental images
are far more closely connected to fear and panic than words. Ruth Lanius, an assistant professor psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario, did a brain scan of people suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder,
or PTSD.
⁸
She scanned the brains of eleven people with PTSD as a result of sexual abuse, assault, or car crashes and thirteen people who had suffered the same experiences without developing PTSD. The main difference she found between the two groups was that one group remembered their trauma visually and the other remembered it verbally, as a
verbal narrative.
Their scans backed this up. When people with PTSD remembered the trauma, visual areas of their brains lit up (along with other areas), and when people without PTSD remembered their traumas, verbal areas lit up.

Somehow words are associated with lower fear. This is one of the meanings of the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” A picture of a scary thing is a lot more frightening than a verbal description of a scary thing. By the same token, a visual memory of a scary thing is more frightening than a verbal memory. No one knows why or how words are less frightening, or how this works in the brain. But I think that when it comes to managing their fear, animals and autistic people are at a big disadvantage because they have to rely on pictures.

 

I don't know whether it's easier to traumatize an animal than a human being overall. I think it probably is. I do know that once an animal has become traumatized it's impossible to un-traumatize him. Animals never unlearn a bad fear.

There's no reasoning with an animal who's been scared half out of his wits. Here's a classic example. When she was little, a friend of mine had a collie who became deathly afraid of the basement.
Apparently the dog had gotten really sick when she was a puppy, and my friend's parents put her in the basement so she wouldn't mess up the house. Afterward the dog associated the basement with being horribly sick.

That dog
never
got over her fear of the basement, and she never set foot downstairs again for as long as she lived. It was sad, because the dad had his office in the basement, and the dog wouldn't spend any time with him at all. My friend remembers her dad standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling “Lassie, Lassie. Here, Lassie,” in his softest voice. (They named the dog after the Lassie in the TV show.) Lassie would stand at the top of the stairs, staring at the dad, wagging her tail frantically, even whimpering and crying because she wanted to go down to him so badly. But she would not move. You could put a big thick juicy piece of raw steak halfway down the stairs—nothing doing. She wouldn't budge. And if someone tried to pick Lassie up and carry her down the stairs she'd get violent. This was a
collie.
This dog was so terrified of the basement she was fighting for her life.

People with severe cases of PTSD don't get over it, either, but people with milder traumas have a lot of leeway in dealing with their fears. My friend with the collie developed a mild case of PTSD herself after a car crash about six years ago. She was having semiflashbacks while she was driving, and she felt a huge amount of tension and fear whenever she had to drive on the freeway. I say semiflashbacks because she didn't feel as if she was reliving the accident; it was more that she kept vividly remembering the accident anytime she had to drive anywhere, and sometimes even when she wasn't anywhere near a car. Her memories were all visual, just like the people in Dr. Lanius's experiment.

It took her a good two or three years, but today she's basically over it. Getting into a car doesn't automatically trigger memories of the accident the way it used to, and most of the time she takes driving for granted the way she did before the accident. An animal can't do this. No animal goes back to acting nonchalant about a person, place, or situation once he's been scared half out of his wits. It just doesn't happen.

F
EARLESS
G
UPPIES

I don't know where autistic people fall on the trauma spectrum, although I believe animal fear is more adaptive than autistic fear, on the whole. Autistic people have way too much fear, while in most circumstances animals have just enough.

I say “enough fear” because fear has a purpose, and an animal or a person
without
fear has a disability. The purpose of fear is to keep us alive. It does an excellent job of this, judging by what happens when you're low-fear. Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams describe a terrific study on fear and survival in their book
Why We Get Sick.
⁹
Some researcher put a bunch of guppies in with a piranha in a fish tank. Some of the guppies were highly fearful, some were moderately fearful, and some were practically fearless. The fearless guppies were the ones who would stare straight at the piranha.

The fearless guppies got eaten first. If you're a guppy and you're not afraid to swim out in the open and stare straight at a piranha, you're not going to live long. Next to go were the medium-fear guppies, who didn't stare straight at the piranha but didn't do everything in their power to get away, either. They got eaten next.

The fearful guppies lived the longest. They got eaten, too, but not until everyone else was eaten up. Fear kept them alive longer.

It's pretty obvious how fear would help keep you alive when you're a guppy swimming with a piranha. But fear is also a survival mechanism when you're a piranha swimming with another piranha. Researchers found this out doing genetic
knockout
work with mice. A knockout mouse is a mouse whose genes have been manipulated to eliminate, or knock out, just one of them. You can eliminate both copies of the gene, or just one copy. Once the gene is knocked out the researcher studies the mouse to see what's different about it, if anything.

The link between fear and survival popped out in the middle of a knockout study on learning. Six months into the study there were some strange things going on in the mouse colony. The researchers would come to the lab first thing in the morning and find dead mice in the cages. Their backs were broken and there was blood everywhere. They had obviously fought to the death, which is very
unusual for mice. Mice normally either avoid fights, or end a fight before either mouse dies.
¹⁰

The researchers discovered that they hadn't just knocked out some aspect of learning; they'd also knocked out fear. A normal mouse, with a normal amount of fear, does not fight to the death. He fights until he's beaten, or sees he's going to lose, and then he yields. Fear keeps him alive. The knockout mice were almost fearless, and they fought to the death.

The researchers discovered some other interesting things about their mice. A normal mouse will fight an intruder on his territory. Lab experiments on this are clear: if you put a strange mouse inside another mouse's cage, the
resident mouse
will attack. That's called
defensive aggression,
because the resident mouse is fighting to defend his home. A normal mouse who's forced to
become
an intruder—a mouse who suddenly gets put inside another mouse's cage—
won't
fight. It will either run away or stand up in a defensive position to protect itself.

Mice with just one copy of the knockout gene were different. (Mice with both copies of the gene knocked out were messed up in so many ways that I'm not going to talk about them here. They had huge problems in lots of realms, which makes it harder to say anything specific about fear.) These mice showed normal defensive aggression if a stranger mouse was put into their cage. They fought to protect their home territory. But they also fought when
they
were the intruder. They'd get dropped into a strange cage already “owned” by a strange mouse, and instead of trying to run, they'd fight. Not only did they attack the resident mouse, but after an initial skirmish they'd approach the resident mouse
again
and start a whole new fight. This is something you'd never see in a normal mouse. A normal mouse finding himself on another mouse's territory would be too frightened to fight.