A New Psychology

Out-of-control habits fog our awareness of their existence.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.“- Theodosius Dobzhansky

The science of psychology shines brighter in the light of evolution. Fully validated biological concepts help us better explain human behavior, both normal and abnormal. Here’s the Introduction to my new book,

A Better Psychology.


THERE’S SOMETHING STRANGE about the science of psychology. A good science explains things—helps us make sense of them, and so helps us deal with them. Since psychology is the science of behavior, it should help us understand and correct our behavior when it becomes irrational or destructive. But too often this science doesn’t help at all. You’d think people would get frustrated with psychology. Mysteriously, though, the failures seem to pass by unnoticed. That lack of awareness is just one of the odd things about this odd science.

These failures have consequences. More than the other sciences, we depend upon the insights flowing from psychology to help us live satisfying lives. But it disappoints just when we need it most, when we struggle with an addiction or some other destructive, out-of-control behavior. Neither is it much help in correcting the many pathological trends in our social, political, and business systems.

Why this weakness? The problem stems from psychology’s peculiar inability to accept that it is part of biology. Because it never adopted biological principles, our current psychology can’t explain even normal habits—and it definitely can’t tell us how a normal habit can turn into a diseased, dysfunctional habit like alcoholism. Biology uses concepts that could enlighten us. But psychology ignores them.

Biology is the larger science that explains living things’ adaptation to their environments. Psychology is a branch of biology, an offshoot, a child of that mother science. It’s about a specific type of adaptation—the kind reflected in animals’ perception, cognition, and behavior. Because it is an offshoot, psychology should properly make use of biology’s concepts to explain both normal and abnormal behavior. Today’s theorists can create a stronger, more useful science by applying the foundational ideas of that more mature science to psychology—especially the concept of natural selection, biology’s guiding light. That’s what this book is about.

The light of evolution

More than a century ago, evolutionary theory transformed biology. Researchers had already uncovered many truths about living things. Then a breakthrough insight—natural selection—brought all their separate discoveries together under a single umbrella. Finally, biologists could glimpse the larger picture behind those individual details—how living things arise, and how they adapt to their environments so effectively. Hundreds of puzzle pieces quickly fell into place, one after another.

Darwin and Wallace framed natural selection as “survival of the fittest.” The animals that were best adapted to their ecological niches lived longer to pass their positive characteristics on to their offspring. Those helpful features gradually accumulated to shape their species. Natural selection explained how the remarkably intelligent designs of living things come into being.

Consider the struggle between the African wildebeest and its predator the lion. In Darwin’s eyes, the strongest, wariest, fastest wildebeest were the ones that escaped the fangs and claws of the lion. So those individuals survived to pass their helpful characteristics on to the next generation. By the same token, the fiercest, strongest, most relentless lions ate better than their peers. So they likewise passed their characteristics on to their offspring. In this way, over the generations, both prey and predator refined their ability to do what they needed to do to survive.

Biology’s mistake

The contest between the lion and the wildebeest illustrates the way natural selection works. Yet the authors of evolutionary theory unwittingly left something quite important out of the picture. In describing the struggle for survival, they had failed to consider the influence of the animals’ parasites—the smaller lifeforms that live in or on them, exploiting their resources. And this omission had consequences far more serious than they might have imagined.

As originally conceived, “survival of the fittest” seemed to imply that fierce apex predators such as lions (on the land) and sharks (in the ocean) dominate the action. But in recent years life scientists have found, in almost every ecosystem they study, that the parasites are the ones actually running the show. [1]

Parasites controlling ecosystems? How could that be? Most parasites aren’t nearly as impressive as lions or sharks. They are most often small compared to their hosts. The majority are even microscopic—bacteria, yeasts, and viruses. It’s easy to see how Darwin and Wallace could have overlooked the influence of something so diminutive and seemingly insignificant. And yet, the evidence says parasites really do have that kind of power.

What kind of power is it? There’s a term, maybe an overly dramatic term, that’s frequently used to describe it. It’s “parasitic zombification.” [2] When the lion catches the wildebeest, it’s often because a tiny internal parasite has changed the wildebeest’s behavior, making it do things it would not ordinarily do, things that aren’t good for it. For example, it influences the animal to stray carelessly from its herd. Being isolated makes it easier for the lion to chase it down and devour it.

But wait! That sounds suicidal. Where’s the logic in a parasite’s arranging for its own host to succumb to a predator? Wouldn’t the parasite die with it? And how in the world could it have such a dramatic influence?

Answers to such questions come easier when we think in terms of natural selection. To complete its life cycle that species of parasite needs to move from inside the prey to inside the predator where the parasite will sexually reproduce. [3] And over millions of generations, the parasite has evolved a means of altering the wildebeest’s behavior to make it more likely to be eaten. This helps the parasite jump from one host to another.

This so-called zombification is kind of creepy. So we might hope that it happens only rarely. But it is far from rare. In fact, zombification is part of every parasite/host relationship. Why? Because of the way natural selection works. The fittest individuals of any species are the ones that survive to pass their characteristics to the next generation. When it comes to parasites, which individuals are the fittest, most likely to survive? The ones able to influence their host’s behavior in ways that favor the parasite. It makes sense, then, that through natural selection every parasite will, to the extent achievable, develop mechanisms to exert control over both the body and the activity of its host.

There are some wonderful advantages to being a parasite. It’s easier to ride in a boat than it is to row it. So parasites arrange for their hosts to do a good bit of the rowing for them. They stow away aboard their host organisms, treating themselves to an easy trip down the river of life. Parasitism is a popular lifestyle. It is so popular, in fact, that the majority of all species are parasites, from viruses to bacteria to much more complex lifeforms. They’re literally everywhere. As science writer Carl Zimmer put it, “the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology.” [4]

To be clear, when we speak of zombified host animals we are not talking about the scary, mythical “walking dead” of motion pictures. The zombified hosts are neither mythical nor dead. They are real and very much alive. It’s just that their parasites have co-opted their behavior, changing it in ways that benefit the parasite. Whether the changes are harmful depends on what the parasite needs. Some changes actually benefit their hosts. Whether harmful or helpful, though, a parasite always changes host behavior in ways that help the parasite complete its own life cycle, whatever that may be.

Psychology’s copycat error

Overlooking parasitic zombification was a big mistake for biology. It introduced a flaw that slowed progress for decades. Only recently has that science begun its recovery from this misstep. But this book is about psychology. So why are we talking about parasites? Does parasitism have something to do with psychology?

Yes, it does. We humans are host animals too, so our parasites change our behavior and our perception as well. Opening our eyes to this reality can demystify some of our strangely destructive activities. Unfortunately, though, psychology has followed in biology’s footsteps, duplicating its error rather precisely. It has overlooked the influence of parasitic forms upon normal and abnormal behavior. And unlike biology, it has not yet realized its mistake, much less corrected it.

This book details the unforeseen consequences of psychology’s copycat blunder and outlines a way to make things right. Fixing this fundamental error will provoke a change that should have happened a long, long time ago. Applying the fix will extend the light of evolution from biology to behavioral science. The result will be a more useful psychology. This constructive change hinges on our willingness to adopt a handful of well-validated biological principles in order to clarify normal and abnormal habits. Among the useful concepts available are parasitism, immunity, and parasitic zombification.

As we apply these ideas, we’ll see that addictions and similarly destructive, out-of-control behaviors are best understood as zombification. Already we know that certain biological parasites can change human behavior. Understanding that biological parasites can influence our acts helps us grasp how biological thinking can shed light on the quirks of our own behavior.

Jumping the fence

Recognizing that parasites influence our behavior is a valuable insight. But as long as we restrict our attention to the influence of biological parasites only, we’re sitting on the fence between biology and psychology. We can amplify that insight a hundredfold by jumping completely over the fence into the domain of psychology proper. Within this realm, the zombifying parasitic forms of greatest concern are not biological organisms at all. Rather, they are abnormally persistent patterns in an animal’s behavior, patterns of activity that maintain themselves at the animal’s expense—“behavioral parasites.”

A behavioral parasite is a habit that has escaped its normal controls to become self-reproducing. If this idea sounds strange, it is only because of psychology’s error, the decision to ignore the influence of parasitic forms. That omission makes the idea of diseased behavior sound strange at first. But in truth, it isn’t any stranger than the idea of diseased bodies. When we more accurately understand learning, we see that the learning process itself regularly and unavoidably engenders parasitic habits.

The normal assembly of habits occasionally produces self-repeating, malignant habits. This is an inescapable side effect of the learning process itself. It routinely creates unproductive behaviors that can spin out of control unless unceasingly suppressed. Addictions and other stereotypical, destructive, persistent behaviors arise when suppression fails. Once we apply the principle of natural selection to psychological phenomena, it’s impossible to avoid this conclusion.

Natural selection

If we want to know why natural selection is so important for psychology, we must understand what it is, and what it is not. It is certainly not something invented by Darwin and Wallace. Those thinkers were simply the first to write clearly about what was going on.

Natural selection is a process that has been guiding the development of life for billions of years. What those able thinkers invented was a way to understand that process. They discovered how living things adapt to their environments. Then they wrote about their discovery clearly enough that the world understood. That brilliant articulation opened our eyes to a cycle that has been shaping living things since the dawn of time.

Natural selection is the mechanism behind evolutionary change. The way it works isn’t all that hard to understand, but people seem to get confused anyway. Perhaps we can sidestep some confusion by introducing it with a parable, one I call “The Sculptor’s Secret.”

Once there was a sculptor who became famous for his magnificent marble horses. His works were so very lifelike—stallions and mares, fully grown animals and foals, some carved as if at rest and others as if in motion. His horses evoked such feeling in the beholder that he was the envy of all the other sculptors in the land. Was it indeed artistry, they wondered, or had this savant somehow acquired a gift from the gods? One of his rivals begged him to reveal his secret. “There’s really not much to it,” the sculptor modestly replied. “I buy a big block of marble. Then I take up my tools, and I chip away everything that isn’t a horse.”

The sculptor’s secret sounds kind of stupid. It may seem odd, then, that he has voiced the most profound principle of evolution. Natural selection does in fact create “what is” by chipping away “what isn’t.”

Here’s how it works. Suppose there’s a large group of mice living in a field. There are minor differences among the mice. For example, some individuals can run faster than others. Hungry hawks fly above the field looking for a meal. Naturally, the hawks eat the mice that are easiest to catch—the slower ones.

With those sluggish mice removed from the breeding population, only the faster ones remain. These mate to begin the next generation. Their genes are mixed, and the mixing creates more variation among them. Then the entire cycle starts again. Some individuals of the new generation are faster than the others. Once again, the slower mice are more likely to get caught and eaten. Over and over, the faster ones are “naturally selected” to begin each succeeding generation.

This cycle repeats indefinitely. In this way, with the features of the slower mice “chipped away” over the generations, the population becomes faster and faster on average, harder for the hawks to catch. Chipping away “what isn’t” creates “what is.”

We know this is how natural selection shapes animal species. But it shapes lots of other things, too. Once the concept was clear enough, people started seeing see it working everywhere. They came to recognize it in all kinds of systems—many of which have nothing to do with living things. Inventive people even started dreaming up ways of using it to grow solutions to difficult problems.

For example, stock market analysts harness it to develop effective trading strategies. How? They create a bunch of strategies at random. Then they use real market data to try the strategies out, to see which of them yield the best profits. They remove the worst-performing strategies from the pool. Those that remain are the “naturally selected” winners. The analysts add some variation to these, and they become the starting point for the next generation. The market analysts repeat this cycle of variation and selection hundreds of times. Profits get better and better. The result is a viable trading strategy. The strategy seems for all the world like an intelligent design. But it isn’t. It’s the mindless product of natural selection.

In much the same way, aircraft engineers apply natural selection to develop innovative designs for planes. And programmers tap the process to evolve better voice recognition systems. Given the wide applicability of this venerable “chip away the losers” principle, it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that nature has been using it all along to guide the development of habits. As the coming chapters emphasize, it is the very backbone of individual learning.

Though introduced to explain changes in the bodies of animal species, we can put natural selection to work in hundreds of other ways. What I am calling “a better psychology” recognizes that it is at work in learning—the evolution of individual habits. As with animal species, aircraft, and trading strategies, individual habits become more and more efficient as we remove the less satisfactory variants through a repeating cycle of variation and selection. Recognizing that process in individual learning yields huge practical benefits.

Of course, the way natural selection shapes learning is not quite the same as the way it shapes biological forms. To begin with, there is a vast difference in the timescale needed for the evolution of a species and the evolution of an individual habit. Animal bodies evolve over a time spanning multiple generations. That could be hundreds, or thousands, or millions of years. Individual habits evolve within a much shorter time span—the lifetime of a single animal. That could be months, days, or even minutes.

Notwithstanding this difference, natural selection has always been the engine powering habit formation. So far, we haven’t recognized it. We can acknowledge that engine now, or we can continue to ignore it. But it is better to see it for what it is, because awareness of its role in learning helps us understand psychology’s most perplexing failures.

What have psychological theorists missed by neglecting this principle? They have failed to recognize the parasitic nature of many maladaptive behaviors. I have noted that parasitic forms and parasitic zombification are common in biology. These things appear frequently in the realm of psychology too, a realm where bad habits sometimes seem to take on a life of their own.

Mindless resistance

An instructive example of a parasitic habit is alcoholism. Let’s see how its most puzzling features—the mind-boggling denial and incredible persistence of this malignant habit—make sense in terms of parasitic zombification. These troublesome characteristics arise predictably in the progression of a drinking problem, simply because natural selection promotes the growth of resistance.

Biologists know that because of natural selection, anything we do to eliminate a disease organism automatically fosters resistance. For instance, disease-causing bacteria always develop resistance to the antibiotics used to kill them. They can’t help it. The antibiotic wipes out the susceptible variants of the disease organisms, sparing only those having some natural resistance to it. The surviving bacteria reproduce to become the next generation.

The cycle of variation and selection continues over many generations. And in this way, the bacterial strain becomes ever more resistant. Eventually, the antibiotic no longer harms the bacteria at all. “What is,” a population of resistant bacteria, has been created by gradually chipping away “what isn’t,” the less resistant bacteria. This evolution of resistance is mindless and automatic.

The same thing happens when pathogens respond to bodily immune defenses. Whenever any form of life struggles with a pathogen, natural selection progressively shapes the pathogen to become more resistant to control. Harmful bacteria and viruses inevitably become resistant to immunity’s efforts to eliminate them. Just as with the hawks and the slower mice, an animal’s immune functions decimate the susceptible varieties of the pathogen, leaving only those with some natural resistance. The cycle repeats. Over generations the pathogens change, evolving to better combat the immune defenses. Immunity itself must adapt in order to meet the challenge. The result is a never-ending arms race between host immunity and the parasitic bacteria.

Now here’s a detail we shouldn’t overlook. If a disease organism comes to live only in or on one particular species of animal, then what shapes the disease’s ever-growing resistance is its success in overcoming the immune system of that specific species. In that case, the pathogen becomes a specialized parasite of that one species, making it the preferred host. This exclusive focus means that over time the parasite will refine its form and function—sometimes to the degree that it completely stymies its host’s immunity. Then it becomes endemic. Natural selection guarantees that the parasite will continue to refine its capacity to zombify its host.

Is there any reason to assume that the automatic growth of resistance, the emergence of parasitic forms, and the consequent zombification would apply only to biological pathogens? No. It isn’t hard to see that the same principle would also foster resistance in pathological behaviors. We can predict that unless controlled, any malignant behavioral pattern would over time become progressively more resistant, eventually gaining “parasitic” features. And that brings us back to the growing resistance typical of addictions like alcoholism.

Clinicians know flowering addictions are “progressive.” Over time, they become more and more destructive, even as they become more resistant to control. The conventional wisdom concerning addiction doesn’t really account for this. But the progression makes perfect sense when we interpret it as the automatic growth of resistance. Part of clinicians’ confusion arises simply because they aren’t thinking in evolutionary terms.

A better psychology would accept that natural selection shapes behavioral disorders just as it does biological pathogens, ultimately creating parasitic forms. Then psychologists could explain why resistance inevitably arises as we struggle with addictions, yet does not come about in normal, controlled habits.

Having introduced the idea of automatic resistance, we can dive more deeply into our example—the notoriously resistant, out-of-control behavior typical of alcoholism. Most professionals who deal with alcoholism are aware of its patently disease-like features. Does it make sense to understand it as a habit turned parasitic? Yes, it does.

Here’s the argument. Nature blesses drinkers, like the rest of us, with natural, powerful means of controlling bad habits. It lies in their awareness of the consequences of their actions. The awareness-based controls work like immune defenses, eliminating pathological trends in our behavior as they appear.

A drinker doesn’t do exactly the same thing each time he drinks. There is variability in the expression of his habit. Some of those variants are more likely to come to his focal awareness than are others, so he is more likely to remove them from the growing habit.

To illustrate, a man may enter an episode of heavy drinking on a weeknight, so his hangover hampers his job performance the next day. That alarming consequence may bring a looming problem to his awareness, so he may cut heavy weekday drinking out of the pattern. But other drinking episodes might take place on a Friday or Saturday evening. Then the hangover will be less of a problem. On those days, the threat is more likely to slip by under the radar. So he may continue to indulge heavily, but only on the weekends.

In one instance, a woman might rationalize her excessive drinking by telling herself she’s had a rough week and deserves a break. In another, her binge might spark memories of family members whose alcoholism ruined their lives. Both the details of the drinker’s developing habit and the way he or she interprets it fluctuate from occasion to occasion. This is the variation part of the variation/selection process.

Now consider the selection part of this repeating cycle. Some variant forms of the habit, for example getting drunk on a weeknight, are more vulnerable to the drinker’s awareness-based controls. These relatively susceptible habit varieties are like the slow mice the hawks can easily catch. The drinker eliminates those weak variants from the growing habit.

An alcoholic’s drinking becomes a sequence of repetitions. As the episodes continue, one after another, the less resistant varieties of the habit are progressively “chipped away.” This process of selective elimination leaves just the varieties with some resistance, the ones able to slip past the drinker’s awareness, and so to bypass his controls. These resistant varieties, the “faster mice” of our metaphor, accumulate within the pattern. Once again, progressively eliminating “what isn’t”—varieties more likely to spark awareness of the problem, creates “what is”—in this case an awareness-resistant pattern of malignant behavior.

Unless halted, the drinker’s pattern of cyclical indulgence inevitably and automatically develops resistance to control. Each repetition further shapes the dysfunctional habit toward forms that sidestep the light of the alcoholic’s awareness, and so his awareness-based controls.

As the pattern progressively undermines awareness, it becomes more impervious, more firmly entrenched—and ever more deserving of the label “parasitic.” The zombified drinker gradually loses his ability to put a finger on the source of his difficulties. It becomes harder for him to entertain the idea that alcohol is causing his problems.

Looking at alcoholism through the lens of natural selection shows us that the diminished awareness and illogical thinking clinicians call “denial” is simply part of the pattern of resistance growing within the drinker’s habitual behavior. Denial is one aspect of alcoholic zombification, the predictable result of natural selection in action upon the evolution of a parasitic habit.

Although the logic here isn’t all that complicated, many find it confusing—because the natural selection explanation differs from the conventional wisdom about addictions. Our current psychology provides no way to distinguish normal habits from those which have become parasitic. The required concepts, though readily available within the mother science of biology, are curiously missing from psychology. We will address their mysterious absence in a moment.

There is a logical, easily understandable reason malignant habits develop resistance over time, while normal habits do not. That crucial difference is a topic of tremendous clinical importance. We will thoroughly explore that topic in the pages to come. Briefly stated, though, the difference between normal and malignant habits parallels the difference, on a biological level, between normal cells and cancerous cells. Normal cells are part of a team, and evolve under the body’s control, as part of that team. Cancer cells have escaped those controls and evolve in their own interest. We will see that when normal habits turn malignant, it happens in much the same way, and for much the same reason, that bodily cells become malignant.

Threatening a disease

We can voice a general principle about pathogens, one that applies as certainly to behavioral disorders as it does to biological disorders. We could phrase the principle this way. “When we threaten a disease, it invariably responds with resistance.” In applying this principle, we must remember that there’s no awareness of threat here.

Antibiotics aren’t aware, and neither are germs. The antibiotics do not, of course, threaten as a human might threaten—by shaking their fists at the bacterial pathogens and yelling that they’re going to kill them. And the bacteria don’t get scared and put up their dukes in self-defense. Neither does insight threaten an alcoholic’s drinking pattern by whispering in its ear that its days are numbered. So as used here, the word “threaten” has a special, more objective meaning that has nothing to do with awareness. It means only that natural selection invariably eliminates the more susceptible varieties of an illness, leaving the resistant versions to proliferate.

Natural selection is the engine driving adaptive change at all levels of life. As a universal principle, this applies to parasites, and to parasitic zombification. Automatically and inevitably, pathogens adapt to threats by evolving resistance. When an antibiotic threatens bacteria, they mindlessly improve their resistance to that antibiotic. When the immune system threatens pathogens, they develop resistance to host immunity. And when an insight threatens an alcoholic pattern, the pattern automatically and mindlessly develops resistance to that insight.

Ideas gone missing

The example of alcoholic denial shows that it isn’t hard to apply the concept of natural selection to behavior. Both changes in species and changes in behavior reflect animals’ adaptation to their environments. Given that they share a concern with adaptation, it would have been natural for psychology to share biology’s romance with natural selection. We might have expected psychology to use—or at least try to use—the concept to help explain the behavior and misbehavior of individuals. But that hasn’t happened.

It hasn’t happened? Some readers might disagree, saying, “Psychologists study animal learning. Their careful animal research is a meaningful connection to biology.” There’s a problem with this argument. Even while they study biological creatures, psychologists make no use of biology’s conceptual tools to explain their findings. Despite the many thousands of animal experiments performed over the years, the researchers seem blind to the fact that those tools can help them better understand the behavior they are witnessing.

A curious void

All of the sciences relate to each other—except for psychology. Over a hundred years ago, it set itself apart as an area of study that was unique and self-sufficient. But it isn’t unique. There’s an obvious connection to biology. It’s strange that psychology has neglected natural selection and other basic biological concepts for so many years, and has neglected them so profoundly. The omission is so odd, in fact, that it stretches credibility to think it could be accidental. What could explain it?

Could it be that these ideas are too complicated, or that they have no benefit? No. Using them to make sense of alcoholic denial, as we just did, demonstrates that there’s really no logical reason to omit evolutionary reasoning from behavior theory. So what’s the problem? Why is that blank spot there? The answer that best fits the facts is disturbing because it has nothing to do with science or logic. Disease put the blank spot there. Perhaps the clearest way to explain this is through an analogy, one for which we have already laid the groundwork. Psychology’s failure of insight is like the blindness of the alcoholic. Here’s what I mean.

The alcoholic’s friends and family look at his behavior from outside his disorder. They can easily see that his drinking is the source of his many troubles. But the alcoholic is looking at things from inside the malignant pattern. He has trouble perceiving what is so obvious to those on the outside. The disease of alcoholism has created within him a bizarre dysfunction of his attention. This is what psychologists call an “inattentional blindness.”

It’s not that the drinker’s eyes are defective, or that he has brain damage. Rather, his disorder is interfering with his ability to focus his attention on his drinking and its consequences. His induced perceptual disability has impoverished his view of the world. “Denial,” the uncanny failure to grasp the reality of his condition, is an evolved inattentional blindness. His expanding cluelessness is an element of his zombification, one that stands out.

The alcoholic’s inability to recognize his all-too-obvious disorder works to perpetuate it. This barrier to insight allows him to keep drinking despite the chaos booze creates in his life. If he could drop the denial, he might end the chaos. But as treatment professionals know, the disease of alcoholism creates and actively maintains this bizarre void in his insight.

An evolved inattentional blindness is likewise crippling our psychology. Mysteriously inept at wielding the most basic and most important of biology’s conceptual tools, theorists have remained oblivious to the parasitic nature of many of our most destructive behavioral infirmities. Lacking the insight those tools would bring, today’s psychology has little power to stop us from doing absurdly unproductive things over and over.

Psychology’s inability to apply biological concepts is a barrier blocking its path forward. Where did this barrier come from? Remember that pathological patterns automatically and mindlessly evolve resistance. Just as with biological pathogens and just as with alcoholism, parasitic patterns in our collective behavior have developed resistance to a fully competent psychology, one that applies biological insights sensibly and effectively. The disturbing truth is that, like the alcoholic, psychology is looking at the world from inside a disorder. Let me explain.

Disabling insight

It is ideas—concepts—that give shape and structure to our awareness. The way we perceive and think about events depends on the specific concepts available to use in interpretation. I began this introduction by stressing that the concept of natural selection restructured biologists’ awareness of life in a sweeping and positive way as it spread through the scientific community.

Few have trouble believing that new concepts can engender new insights, as did the idea of natural selection. But it takes courage to accept that things can go the other way—that existing concepts can be removed, corrupted, or discounted, disabling our capacity for insight. And yet, as the example of alcoholism shows so clearly, a malignant process in our behavior can indeed degrade our ability to assess what is happening to us. An insight that would have been easy before becomes almost impossible to achieve. When that happens, the void in our thinking leaves us unaware, clueless, in a perceptual and conceptual fog, and so powerless to interrupt the malignancy that produced it.

Natural selection can strengthen a malignant habit by creating an inattentional blindness like the denial that is so common in alcoholism. The threat of insight fosters the growth of awareness-resistant forms of the destructive habit, a development that includes both behavioral and conceptual elements.

To be sure, the progressive disease of alcoholism changes the addict’s pattern of alcohol use. But another part of the change is an alteration in his interpretation of his behavior and its consequences. In line with the principle of natural selection, his behavioral malignancy taints his view of the world, distorting it so much that in the end, he has little ability to interrupt it.

Social blindness

It’s unsettling to think that pathological patterns of behavior could actually degrade our awareness. People steeped in the conventional wisdom of our time consider this a strange idea—some would even think it “bizarre.” But given that we regularly witness such distortions happening right before our very eyes, as with addiction, the truly bizarre thing is that we somehow cling to the belief that it just isn’t possible. Though the idea is both frightening and distasteful, we can’t doubt that it happens—unless we engage in frank denial ourselves. And when it happens, we should remember that it isn’t because someone is trying to trick or mislead us. Disabling threatening ideas requires no more conscious intent than bacteria’s growing resistance to antibiotics. It’s simply natural selection in action.

This train of thought can explain the weakness in our current psychology. It invites some important questions. Could this kind of attentional blindness come about in groups of people? Could the resistance fostered by pathological patterns in a social system likewise disable insight throughout the system? Could it even deplete the pool of ideas available to our scientific psychology?

If it can happen with individuals, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t happen with groups. In this book we will evaluate evidence that parasitic patterns in our cultural milieu have fostered resistance to a more effective psychology, specifically degrading those ideas that most threaten them. It is not at all coincidental that the gravest threats to rampant societal ills are basic biological concepts—the very ones that are missing from our current psychology. I believe that, as with the alcoholic’s tainted perspective, psychology’s view of behavioral disorders has over the years been gradually and systematically emasculated.

At present, it is hard for us to see that there’s anything wrong with psychology, or to understand what might have happened to it, because the ideas that have gone missing are the very ones required to spark that insight. Natural selection has chipped away at the pool of useful ideas to leave a collection harmless to malignant patterns—patterns threatened by the insight better psychology would bring.

The plan

In this introduction, I have drawn attention to a strange deficiency in our current psychology, and I have outlined an explanation. The coming chapters fill in the picture by exploring examples of dysfunctional behavior our current psychology does not adequately explain. Among the examples I have chosen are alcoholism, the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, and the morass of corporate malfeasance we affectionately call “Big Tobacco.” A close examination should make it clear that we have the power to create a more informed psychology—one we can use to meet the individual and societal challenges of our time.

Chapter summaries

  1. Sick Habits – Clarifies why it’s worthwhile to avoid moral judgments when trying to account for destructive human behaviors.
  2. Alcoholism – Interprets alcoholism, the best known of all substance addictions, as an out-of-control, parasitic behavioral pattern – a rogue habit.
  3. Anorexia Nervosa – Recasts the eating disorder anorexia nervosa as a rogue habit.
  4. Viral Schemes – Presents a point-by-point comparison of biological viruses with virus-like behavioral patterns.
  5. Viral Origins – Addresses this surprisingly relevant question: where do viruses come from?
  6. The Drive/Habit SystemExplains the birth of rogue habits in terms of a quirk in the evolutionarily designed system governing all learning.
  7. Runaway Habits – Documents the conditions under which habits are most likely to escape their normal controls.
  8. The Great Escape – Compares rogue habits’ escape from control to cancerous cells’ escape from immunity.
  9. Viral Incubation – Discusses the refinement of parasitic habits through the process of incubation, a form of evolution by natural selection.
  10. The Transfer of Control – A theoretical interpretation of speciation as “behavioral resonance,” extending the idea to rogue habits.
  11. Behavioral Immunity – Dwells upon the striking parallel between biological immune functions and the way we normally control our habits.
  12. The Attentional Fog – Calls attention to a problematic feature of all behavioral parasites – the means by which they incapacitate our behavioral immunity.
  13. Sociocultural Viruses – Describes a kind of behavioral parasite that operates not within one individual, but within entire social systems.
  14. Resisting Behavioral Disease – Suggests practical ways of dealing with virally induced behavior.
  15. Meme versus Virus – Distinguishes the viewpoint detailed in this book from “meme theory.”
  16. The Zeitgeist – Investigates an alarming reality: the viral removal of important concepts from the cultural zeitgeist.
  17. Dumbing Down a Culture – Details an example illustrating the way a sociocultural parasite cripples awareness on a large scale.
  18. A Psychology Without Awareness – Provides an explanation for the bizarre intrusion of behaviorism into psychology over a century ago.
  19. An Age of UnreasonNow that the information age is upon us, the destructive impact of sociocultural viruses is greater than ever. *

Appendix A provides explanations of some of the important terms used in the present volume. A more extensive chapter-by-chapter summary is contained in Appendix C.

The series

This book is part of a series entitled “Puppet Dreams and Viral Schemes.” It can stand on its own as an illuminating introduction to a more adequate psychology. But as with the other volumes in this series, it can also be enjoyed as an element of the whole.

Appendix B is a synopsis of the entire series, clarifying parasitic behavioral viruses, their origins, and our natural means of dealing with them. An even more detailed outline is contained in the first book of the series, Behavioral Viruses. [5]


I sincerely hope you find A Better Psychology a worthwhile investment of your time and attention.

     – Tom Whitehead


[1] Seilacher A, Reif W, and Wenk P. The parasite connection in ecosystems and macroevolution. Naturwissenschaften 2007, 94, 155-169.

[2] The term “zombification,” arguably more colorful than it needs to be, is used by some reputable scientists to describe the ability of parasites to influence the behavior of their hosts in a way that helps the parasite move through its life cycle. See for example https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2018/10/meet-5-zombie-parasites-mind-control-their-hosts

[3] Heteroxenous parasites move between two or more hosts as part of their lifecycle. A fairly well-known example is toxoplasma gondii, which commonly infects humans. See [Flegr J. Influence of latent Toxoplasma infection on human personality, physiology and morphology: Pros and cons of the toxoplasma-human model in studying the manipulation hypothesis. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 2013, 216, 127-133.]

[4] Zimmer C. Parasite Rex: Inside the bizarre world of nature’s most dangerous creatures. Touchstone Books, 2000. Page xxi.

[5] Whitehead T. Behavioral Viruses: A novel way of understanding repetitive, maladaptive behavioral patterns. 2016(a), A Kindle Book. Available from Amazon.

When Habits Slip their Leash

Comparing addiction to cancer
by Tom Whitehead

This essay is about a different way of understanding addiction. Addictions are commonly understood to be habits. But the people most affected – the addicts, their families, and the professionals who work with them – know they’re not normal habits. For one thing, these habits are devilishly persistent – even when the addict desperately wants to stop what he is doing.

Whiskey and cigars, both containing addictive substances.
Hard liquor and tobacco are addictive. But focusing exclusively on substances distracts us from a deeper understanding of addiction.

For another, the addict’s thinking and perception change over time. In the end, he seems unable to interpret what he is doing realistically. Those close to him may be aware that he has a serious problem, and know exactly what that problem is. But the addict himself doesn’t seem to see it. He has lost his perspective. Clinicians call this acquired blindness denial.

How can we best account for all these quirky features – the loss of control, the persistence, and the denial? Here’s a way that’s not so obvious: compare addiction to another out-of-control process – cancer.

On the face of it, lining these two things up side by side may seem absurd. They’re obviously very different things. And yet they do share a common feature. They both result from a gradual loss of control, a loss that happens in a series of predictable phases. To be sure, cancer is a disorder of cells, and addiction is a disorder of habits. But the process through which these different disorders develop is virtually identical. Clarifying that common process is the objective of this essay.

A failure of understanding

How do experts understand addiction now? The conventional wisdom is that exposure to “addictive substances” changes the brain, creating a craving for those substances. According to a 2018 statement by NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse,

Addiction is a chronic disease characterized by drug seeking and use that is compulsive, or difficult to control, despite harmful consequences. The initial decision to take drugs is voluntary for most people, but repeated drug use can lead to brain changes that challenge an addicted person’s self-control and interfere with their ability to resist intense urges to take drugs. These brain changes can be persistent … 1

Were this “brain changes” explanation adequate, we would expect it to reduce incidence and spawn effective interventions. Yet addictive disorders are rampant. In fact, they are on the rise. According to a US Department of Justice statement, “The abuse of several major illicit drugs, including heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine, appears to be increasing, especially among the young.” 2 This failure is reason enough to doubt whether we really understand these abnormal habits.

Denial and distortion

The common denominator of all addictions, whether they involve substances or not, is denial.  Entering into the pattern somehow distorts the addict’s perception of what’s happening to him. To be specific, it changes his perception in a way that permits him to continue the habit.

To illustrate, most treatment professionals believe that unusually dense denial is “one of the defining characteristics of the chronic alcoholic.” 3 Though the havoc wreaked by alcoholism is generally obvious to others, the alcoholic himself often seems blind to the reality of what’s happening to him.

But “denial” doesn’t simply mean saying “I’m not an addict,” though many addicts do say things like that. It’s common for an addict to see a problem, but to see it in a strange way that allows them to continue what they’re doing. An alcoholic may think, “Okay, I guess I’m drinking too much. That’s because I’m under a lot of stress right now.” Another may tell a concerned spouse, “Fine! I drink too much! Mind your own business. You’ve got plenty of faults yourself!” The common thread among all the varieties of denial is a change in perception that allows the pattern to go on.

As author Albert LaChance emphasizes in his book Cultural Addiction, denial is the defining characteristic not just of alcoholism, but of all addictive processes. The specific form the addiction takes is not as important as the fact that it is without exception rooted in a retreat from the truth. And that retreat takes a form that allows the pattern to continue. 4

The conventional wisdom – the “brain changes” idea – doesn’t really explain denial. Nor does it account for purely behavioral addictions – the so-called “process addictions” manifested in excessive shopping, gambling, or pathological involvement with pornography. These behavioral addictions are quite similar to chemical addictions – including that mysterious denial. Yet they don’t involve exposure to any chemical substances at all.

Crossing a boundary

We need a better way to make sense of addictive behavior. At a minimum, the explanation must (1) account for the gradual emergence of denial; (2) make sense of the habit’s persistence in the face of the destruction it causes; (3) explain process addictions; and (4) point to ways of bringing addictive patterns under control. As it turns out, a better explanation is within reach. But there’s a catch. To grasp it we must step over a boundary that we aren’t used to crossing.

The line to cross is the one that has traditionally separated physical illness from behavioral illness We have been taught to believe that these things belong to different realms. We normally interpret diseases in terms of bodily dysfunction. And we commonly associate behavioral problems with defects in psychological constructs like morality or willpower. To truly understand addiction we must bring the two together. We must think in terms of behavioral disease – not just as a metaphor, but as a fact. If the idea that behavior could be diseased seems alien, that’s partly because of the limits built into the science of psychology itself.

An incomplete psychology

Our current psychology artificially and misleadingly divorces animal behavior from animal biology. But in truth animal physiology, behavior, and cognition are all different aspects of the same life processes. 5, 6 Similar disease processes can and do exist within each.

Is addiction an actual disease?

Lots of people – even professional people – interpret addiction as a moral failure. They believe indulgence is entirely voluntary, no more than a disgustingly irresponsible lifestyle choice. Psychologist Jeffrey Schaler, for example, says “Addiction is a behavior and thus clearly intended by the individual person. What is obvious to common sense has been corroborated by pertinent research for years.” Schaler believes it’s a mistake to tell addicts they have a disease, because it “may encourage them to abandon any attempt to take responsibility for their actions.” 7 If addiction is indeed just irresponsible behavior, this advice would make perfect sense.

But others reject this “moral failure” interpretation. 8 They correctly note that centuries of moral condemnation haven’t reduced the incidence of addiction. Further, they point out that not all behaviors are voluntary. Sneezing is a behavior, but it’s mostly involuntary. Many involuntary behaviors are caused by disease. Skipping work is a behavior. But there’s a big difference between skipping voluntarily because you’d rather go to the movies, and skipping involuntarily because you’re down with the flu. Could it be that the failures we associate with addiction are involuntary, rooted in illness? Is addiction some kind of actual disease? Is it a chronic, involuntary disease?

In a widely quoted 2001 review, researchers Thomas McLellan and his colleagues formally compared drug dependence to three chronic diseases – diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. They considered causes, heritability, and environmental factors. McLellan found a great deal of similarity, and concluded that drug dependence (including alcoholism) should be interpreted as chronic illness. 9

Other scientists aren’t committed to the “brain disease” explanation because they don’t believe we have accumulated enough evidence to support that idea. Psychologist Wayne Hall and colleagues write that at present the disease notion is pointless,  because it “is not supported by animal and neuroimaging evidence to the extent its advocates suggest; it has not helped to deliver more effective treatments for addiction; and its effect on public policies toward drugs and people with addiction has been modest.” 10

Diseased habits

Neither the “normal habit” nor the “brain disease” interpretation can explain the peculiar features of addictive behavior. Although few deny that addictions are habits, their frustratingly intractable character makes clear that they aren’t normal, voluntary habits. And though few deny that addictions have disease-like features, the reality of process addictions undermines the brain disease argument. Addictions have features of both diseases and habits. Maybe we should think of them as diseased habits.

But how can a habit come to be “diseased?” In the same way that one of our bodily cells comes to be cancerous.

Cancer is a disease like no other. This disease is special, because it involves the gradual transformation of a normal and helpful part of ourselves into something abnormal and hurtful. A healthy cell becomes malignant. Unlike a disease caused by the invasion of an agent from outside ourselves – for example a foreign bacterium or virus – cancer arises from within. Addiction is like that too. It arises from within. An ordinary habit, a normal and helpful part of us, is gradually transformed into something abnormal and malignant. The uncanny similarity in the way this happens invites us to understand how habits can become diseased.

With that groundwork laid, let’s recount in detail the process by a normal habit becomes an addiction. Then we’ll compare that process to the way a normal cell turns cancerous.

The phases of alcoholism

Any addiction develops in stages. Take alcoholism, for instance. The late Vernon E. Johnson, a recovering alcoholic himself, found a good use for his intimate, first-person knowledge of the process. Johnson became an alcoholism expert, and wrote several insightful, practical books about it. He provided a detailed description of the phases through which a normal person passes on his way to being an alcoholic. Quite significantly, Johnson assigns a central role to denial, the alcoholic’s gradual loss of perspective on the pattern that is consuming him.

The three major phases Johnson describes are these: Discovery, Incubation, and Final Pattern. 11 Briefly, here’s what’s going on in each:

  • Discovery. The person first experiences the benefits of the behavior that will later become addictive. The benefit could be relief – for example relief from stress or anxiety. Or it could be a new positive experience – for example uninhibited fun. The important thing is that upon experiencing this benefit, the individual has found a good reason to repeat the behavior. The hook, so to speak, has been set. Without Discovery, there could be no alcoholism.
  • Incubation. The drinker adopts a normal, voluntary habit, one that he repeats often. As with any normal habit, with repetition the individual components of the drinking pattern are progressively adjusted so that they work together smoothly. Over time, the elements of the habit – what is drunk, how much, when and how it is drunk, and with whom – are fine-tuned to work with each other to support its continuation.

    During this second stage the drinking becomes a well-defined habit, but it is still voluntary. The individual may continue to meet most of his responsibilities. Even so, he has adopted a routine that revolves around drinking. It’s at this second stage that the vast majority of drinkers become aware that they are dancing on the edge of something dangerous. Significant drinking is not all fun and games. It has negative consequences – for example impaired functioning, hangovers, and miscarriage of responsibilities. Realizing the danger, the majority take steps to avoid falling into the bottomless pit of full alcoholism.

    Others fail to stop their descent. They find ways to deny, excuse, or minimize the negative consequences they experience. Though they may not know it, in discovering ways to quiet these concerns they are progressively yielding control of their drinking.
  • Final Pattern. This is the phase of full alcoholism. Now the drinking is causing major problems in the alcoholic’s life – degradation of health, disruption of important relationships, and impairment of job performance. Before this point, drinking was something the drinker was doing. Now drinking is something that is doing the drinker. His problem is apparent to almost everyone. Bizarrely, though, the alcoholic’s perception is different. He can no longer recognize the problem because he has lapsed into full denial. His capacity to sort out what he is doing, the very basis for his supervisory control over his habit, has been broken. He is deeply in the grips of a malignant, self-perpetuating drinking pattern. At this point he is drinking to escape his misery; yet his drinking creates more misery. And his diminished awareness prevents him from coming to grips with the self-renewing cycle.
A problem that evolves

Alcoholism starts as something small and harmless – just an experiment, really. The drinker voluntarily adopts the harmless drinking as a regular habit. But over time that habit changes its form. It evolves to become something far more dangerous. A critical part of that evolution is a clouding of the drinker’s awareness of the growing problem. He gradually loses his perspective, finding it increasingly more difficult to evaluate what the habit is doing to him. In its final form alcoholism is literally destroying his life. The final alcoholic pattern renews itself endlessly outside the alcoholic’s awareness or control.

Although we have used alcohol addiction to illustrate the three major phases of addiction, these phases are common to addictions of any kind. Normal habits evolve into addictions as they progressively escape our ordinary means of regulating habits. When it comes to habits, our ordinary means of regulation is our ability to be fully aware of what we are doing.

What we call denial is simply the loss of our ability to be fully aware of what we are doing. Denial is a progressive failure of attention. When we can no longer snap to what’s going on, the habit is no longer under our control. It is the gradual failure of controls that turns a normal process into an abnormal one.

Now that we have outlined the process by which we lose control, we can formally compare it to cancer.

Comparing addiction to cancer

Cancer is the abnormal, uncontrolled growth of cells; addiction is the abnormal, uncontrolled growth of a habit. Though cells and habits are very different things, the process by which each becomes malignant is virtually identical. Both cells and habits become “diseased” when they escape their normal controls. Curiously, the escape comes about through a process of evolution.

Uncontrolled growth                            

A cancerous cell reproduces itself over and over to become the mass we call a tumor. These abnormal cells have escaped the regulation of the body that harbors them. No longer governed, cancerous cells replicate themselves endlessly at the body’s expense. They are no longer a part of the disciplined team of cells that makes up the body. We could say the cancerous cells have come to behave “selfishly,” in that they work to benefit themselves only. They have in fact turned into parasites, sapping the body’s resources to promote their own interests. So the term Rogue Cells describes them very well.

Compare this picture to what we see with addiction. An addiction is essentially the abnormal, uncontrolled growth of a habit. A habit has somehow escaped regulation, coming to reproduce itself endlessly at the expense of the behaving individual.

Normal habits serve the individual’s interests. Each normal habit plays a role in satisfying that person’s needs. But an addiction is far from normal. It has slipped away from the usual controls on habits, and has begun to repeat itself over and over. Like the cancerous cell, this kind of habit has come to behave as a parasite. It is selfishly sapping the individual’s resources (and the resources of friends and family) simply to keep itself going. The term Rogue Habit is descriptive.

blind evolution

Cancer demonstrates a strange disregard for the health of the cancer patient. Cancerous cells often end up killing the patient. But of course if the host dies, the cancer dies with it. By what logic would a cancer destroy itself? That’s an important question. The answer is that cancer’s rush to “go down with the ship” is the universal logic of diseases. All diseases exploit their hosts, and many are deadly.

Cancer cells don’t have eyes or brains to direct them. Cancers have no way to know they are killing their host. Neither do they know they will die with the host. The evolutionary process that produces them is blind and stupid. The growth of a cancer is guided only by natural selection. That is, what we call a tumor is a mass of cells that have survived and reproduced best within the body. The tumor can’t know that the process that created them will kill them in the long term.

The same is true of habits. During the incubation stage of addiction, the varieties of a habit that best provoke its repetition are the ones that come to prominence. Like the cancer cell, the evolution of an addiction is blind and stupid. The final form emerges guided only by natural selection. In the end, the variants of the habit that prove most resistant to supervisory control are the ones that are repeated. Knowing this, we can guess why addictions can be so destructive, yet persist so doggedly. The pattern exactly mirrors cancer.

Immortal cells

The normal cells of our bodies reproduce themselves by splitting. They are like bacteria in this respect. They replicate themselves by dividing in two. This is good, because tissues need to regenerate themselves. If you cut your hand, for instance, the cut needs to heal. It is able to heal because uninjured cells can split to replace the damaged ones.

But normal cells are allowed to divide only a limited number of times. Nature has built this limit into each cell. Every cell’s chromosomes are capped with a DNA strand called a telomere. With each division the telomere gets a little shorter, counting down to zero. When the count reaches zero the cell line is toast. Its reproducing days are over. If cells could somehow keep their telomeres from getting shorter, they could stay alive forever. Then they could continue to divide, replicating themselves without limit. Cancer cells do just that. They are immortal.

If immortality sounds impossible, it’s only because we’re used to thinking that living things die because they “wear out.” But cells don’t wear out. They merely wear out their welcome in the body. A line of cells passes away because they reach the built-in limit on the number of times they are permitted to divide. This is called programmed senescence.

The body limits cell division for a most excellent reason. The longer a cell keeps splitting, the more mutations it undergoes. Each mutation produces a variant cell. And some of these variants are pre-cancerous. Programmed senescence limits a cell’s opportunity to mutate its way into cancer. In other words, the limit on division is a limit on its chance to go rogue. In fact, cells cannot become fully cancerous without overcoming this natural barrier. They must first become immortal. This is one of the body’s major controls on cancer. Without immortality every pre-cancerous cell line naturally fizzles out as soon as it reaches the built-in limit on division. 

But some pre-cancerous cells manage to sidestep this limit. How? A rare mutation allows them to “rejuvenate” themselves after each division by activating a cellular enzyme called telomerase. As reported by cancer researcher Kunitoshi Chiba and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley 12 the telomerase enzyme is a normal component of cells that “keeps chromosomes healthy in cells that divide frequently. The enzyme lengthens the caps, or telomeres, on the ends of chromosomes, which wear off during each cell division.” 13, 14 When the telomere caps get too short, cancer cells misuse telomerase to lengthen them. According to these researchers, about 90 percent of all malignant tumors use telomerase to achieve their immortality.

Immortal habits

Let’s compare this built-in limit on cells to the built-in limit on habits. The story is much the same. Addictions are habits that have found a way to endlessly provoke their own repetition. Each and every repetition opens the door to yet another repetition. We can compare such self-renewing habits to cells that have become immortal. Normal habits don’t provoke their own repetition, and they certainly don’t repeat themselves endlessly. Normal habits are activated when there is a need for them, and they are inactivated when that need is filled.

Think about playing a musical instrument. We may play a beautiful chord during a piece of music. Our fingers execute this chord by habit, filling our momentary need for it. With that temporary need filled, the execution of the habit stops. We move on to the next chord. We don’t get “stuck” in that chord, reproducing it endlessly.

But addictions are all about getting stuck. Endless reproduction is the essence of an addictive habit. It persists when there is no need for it – even when its continued execution is destroying our lives. If we can’t stop playing that single chord we have no chance of making beautiful music. An addiction is a habit that has found a way to live forever, without regard to any realistic need for it. Its immortality is what marks it as a rogue.

But how can a habit come to reproduce itself endlessly? The answer is the same as with cancerous cells. Occasionally a habit manages to throw off the built-in controls on its action. It slips its leash. The most important of those controls are limited lifespan and the immune function of attention. Addictions and other rogue habits first stumble upon a way to extend their lifespan – to get themselves repeated more often than normal.

Alcoholism, for example, is said to be a process revolving around the experience of misery. Indulgence provides temporary relief from misery; but at the same time indulgence creates more misery. It’s a self-invoking cycle. Over time, with frequent repetition, a habit evolves more and more effective ways to ensure its own continuation. One of these ways is disrupting our ability to snap to what we are doing. To the extent that we lose the awareness of what we are doing, we lose control. How can this happen?

On autopilot

Attention and habits are intimately related, a fact that has been recognized by theorists for hundreds of years. It is with attention to detail that we begin forging a new habit. In the 1890s famed American psychologist William James carefully described the interplay between attention and habit. “A strictly voluntary act,” he wrote, “has to be guided by idea, perception, and volition, throughout its whole course. In an habitual action, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper regions of brain and mind are set comparatively free.” 15 Once a habit is well-established we don’t have to pay much attention to it anymore. An established habit, in other words, runs pretty much on autopilot.

James believed that turning over routine behaviors to the autopilot of habit was much to be desired. As he put it, “The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.” 16 In this sense the mindlessness of ingrained habits is an unequaled blessing. The ability to turn parts of our behavior over to semi-autonomous habits is a human capability without which the complexity of life would surely overwhelm us. It is learned habits that allow us to perform fluidly and effortlessly while managing the thousand threads of activity woven into the fabric of our daily lives.

The academics of our own time generally endorse James’ conclusion about the governing role of awareness. Consciousness theorists Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi say,

The pervasive automatization in our adult lives suggests that conscious control is exerted only at critical junctures, when a definite choice or a plan has to be made. In between, unconscious routines are continuously triggered and executed, so that consciousness can float free of all those details and proceed to plan and make sense of the grand scheme of things. In action as well as in perception, it appears as if only the last levels of control or of analysis are available to consciousness, while everything else proceeds automatically. 17

All habits must be constructed under our full attention. But once a habit has solidified we reduce our attention to a tiny sliver, just enough to turn it on and off according to our needs of the moment. We continue to be aware of what we’re doing, but that awareness is no longer full. Though born in the full light of attention, habits normally recede into the shadows to execute on their own. As a habit matures over time, our awareness of our actions becomes remote, distant – almost unconscious. Routine supervision requires only a trifling piece of our attention.

Yet the control sustained by that bit of attention is all that keeps our behavior working in our own interest. It is this shard of remaining awareness that ensures our habits function as intended. Research has shown that an operating habit can be altered only when it is returned to our full attention. When a habit starts to turn dysfunctional, it is only our ability to detect it, to bring it back to full awareness, that stops it from screwing everything up. Bringing it to awareness, we can make a conscious judgment as to how it should be altered, or whether it should be eliminated entirely.

Returning a bad habit to our attention is like noticing that our car is running poorly, and taking it into the shop. As long as we keep mindlessly driving the sputtering vehicle down the road, there will be no repair. But habits never decide on their own that they need to be changed. In the same way that cells become cancerous by evading the body’s normal controls, habits gain the ability to perpetuate themselves endlessly when they evade the governance of attention. If a habit can dodge attention it can’t be changed.

In the last decade or so researchers have been surprised to discover that Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD), and Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (OCD) — syndromes marked by repetitive, nonsensical behaviors — have something in common. Although the superficial symptoms are different, say researchers, the affected individuals all have difficulties properly focusing their attention. 18 It is that inability that permits their unproductive habits to form and persist.

This is our Achilles heel. If a habit can somehow avoid the spotlight of attention, it can escape our control. The habit can become an addiction – or some other self-perpetuating behavior. Without governance, it can morph into a pattern that repeats itself without reason or limit, with destructive effect.

Attention and psychotherapy

Self-perpetuating patterns are a topic of special interest to psychotherapists. Many clients come into therapy because they are caught up in repeating patterns that make no sense. Focused attention often leads to positive change, so the job of the therapist is to help them shine the light of their awareness on what’s going on.

There are a variety of reasons why clients are unable to focus their attention. Sometimes renewed attention leads to overwhelming emotional pain. This is the case, for example, with post-traumatic stress. Traumatized individuals frequently develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which the memory of the traumatic event becomes a shadow that haunts and disrupts victims’ lives without ever coming to their full awareness.

As trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk notes, PTSD makes life a miserable experience. People who have experienced severe abuse as children, for example, have a 4 to 12 times greater risk for developing alcoholism, depression, drug abuse, and suicide attempts. Further, they are much more likely to succumb to physical diseases like heart disease, cancer, chronic lung problems, bone fractures, stroke, diabetes, and liver disease.

Worst of all, it’s common for the sufferer to be repeatedly re-traumatized in a similar way throughout her lifetime. She finds herself in the same fix over and over, without seeing why. For example, women physically abused as children unaccountably end up in relationships with batterers over and over. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was “fascinated with the issue of patients’ apparent compulsion to arrange their lives in such a way that they would repeat their trauma over and over again.” 19

Research suggests that the symptoms of PTSD persist largely because the sufferer finds it almost impossible to focus her attention on the traumatic events without being overcome by emotional distress. She remains “stuck” in the trauma because she is unable to psychologically process it in a normal way. Her inability to bring it to full awareness becomes an almost insurmountable barrier to achieving a meaningful perspective on her experience, and communicating that perspective to others.

trauma resolution

Because this barrier is the reason for the repetition, one effective approach to resolution is preventing emotional overload from disrupting attention. Van der Kolk says,

In order to help traumatized individuals process their traumatic memories, it is critical that they gain enough distance from their sensory imprints and trauma-related emotions so that they can observe and analyze these sensations and emotions without becoming hyperaroused or engaging in avoidance maneuvers … In recent years, a variety of new techniques have been developed that have the potential of desensitizing patients with PTSD without requiring them to fully engage in a verbal reliving of the traumatic experience. Of these treatments, EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing] has been best studied. 20

PTSD is one example of the trouble caused by inability to focus attention. But it is just one example. More generally, habits are automatons. These little behavioral “robots” are normally a blessing, but their relative independence can turn them into a curse. A habit that escapes our attentional controls can wreak havoc on our lives.

Semi-autonomy

The “blessing and curse” of semi-autonomy is a principle that applies to our bodily cells just as surely as it does to our habits. A multicelled animal is a highly complex system. Each of the cells in our body largely controls its own activity. But it does so under the body’s remote supervision. You could compare a multicellular animal to the behavior of traffic. All the activity on the road is that of the discrete “vehicles” – the individual cells. Their collective action becomes the activity of the larger animal. All these cellular “vehicles” are operating semi-independently. This relative independence is the strength of any multicelled organism. With only minimal oversight each autonomously functioning cell does its part in maintaining the health of the larger animal.

Each cell type – liver, skin, muscle, etc. – is programmed to do its special thing more or less on its own, so it doesn’t require much direct control by the larger body. In fact, a complex multicelled organism could not possibly function unless almost all of the activity was managed locally, by the cells themselves. The traffic system wouldn’t work unless the drivers had control of their own vehicles. Only the individual drivers know where they are going, how to get there, why they are going there, and when they need to arrive. 21

That semi-independence is the strength of the system. But its weakness is the flipside of the same coin. Because they are only minimally supervised, individual cells are like dogs straining against flimsy leashes. They are able to break away. They can go rogue.

Our individual habits too are like drivers on a highway. As long as the road system is well-designed, the behavioral traffic will flow in an orderly way despite the semi-independent habits operating to suit their own needs and purposes. The flow will be orderly, that is, as long as the drivers behave lawfully, in keeping with the rules of the road.

But as we know, there are naughty drivers who disobey the rules – they speed, they drive recklessly, they drive drunk, they fix their attention on their cell phones instead of traffic. Because they are semi-independent, operators can drive irresponsibly. So law enforcement is needed to keep these troublemakers from ruining everything. Police are essential. And that brings us to the topic of the immune system.

The immune police

It isn’t possible to understand cancer without knowing something about the immune system. It’s one of the body’s most important tools for policing the activity of the individual cells. Immunity in fact serves as the body’s law enforcement agency. One of its many functions is to spot cells that seem to be getting out of hand, going rogue, and to deal with them. The human immune system is enormously capable at detecting pre-cancerous cells and eliminating the threat they pose to our bodies.

According to researcher Alka Bhatia and colleagues, cells that are just starting to misbehave are quickly recognized and killed by the immune system. This “enforcement” activity is routine, and can be regarded as part of the body’s business as usual. The system is largely effective. Yet pre-cancerous cells do occasionally find a way to slip past this first-line defense.

According to Bhatia, precancerous cells aren’t a concern until they escape immune regulation. 22 The word “escape” returns us to the central topic of this essay. It invites this question: how can a cell “escape” the immune system? The answer is provided by another research group, that of Kunitoshi Chiba. And that answer is nothing short of fascinating. Cells escape in phases similar to those we have just identified for rogue habits

Phases of cancer development

First, there is a mutation in the gene that regulates the cell’s use of telomerase. The mutation allows somewhat more liberal use of the enzyme, increasing the lifespan of pre-cancerous cells. These cells aren’t yet immortal, just living longer than they normally would. In this first phase, the mortality leash has been loosened a bit, but hasn’t yet been slipped entirely. That happens later.

As long as the cells continue to split, they continue to evolve. The longer lifespan gives the abnormal cells extra time to discover ways to keep themselves alive. This is like the incubation phase of habit development. The process of natural selection itself pushes them toward extending their lifespan. As they evolve, some find a way to “turn up” the use of the telomerase enzyme even more. When that happens they qualify as fully cancerous – immortal, and free to reproduce themselves without limit. “If cells fail to turn up telomerase,” say these researchers, “they also fail to immortalize, and eventually die from short telomeres …” 23

So the initial mutation that extends lifespan does not immediately bring immortality. But it opens the door to the evolution of immortality. With the advantage of their longer lifespan, some of the pre-cancerous cells do evolve full immortality. And immortality makes possible the refinement of the cell line’s resistance to immunity. The new power of unlimited divisions removes all limits to evolution by natural selection. The rogue cells have all the time in the world to build their resistance to the body’s immune system.

Something like that happens with rogue habits. Normally, habits are active only for a limited time span. Under the distant control of attention, they are called as needed and dismissed when the need no longer exists. Execution isn’t normally repeated enough to allow change into something problematic.

But habits do normally evolve. The more frequently they are called, and the longer they are able to stick around, the greater is their opportunity to develop forms that resist going away. Given enough time, any habit will evolve ways of encouraging the frequency of its repetition.

The relationship between attention and habits closely resembles the relationship between immunity and cells. As noted, the only thing preventing an unruly habit from going completely rogue is our capacity to bring that habit fully into our attention in order to correct it. Part of attention’s “business as usual” is detecting habits that are becoming dysfunctional, bringing them to full awareness, and making adjustments. A dysfunctional habit is not a cause for concern unless it somehow bypasses this first line of defense.

An arms race                                                                   

There is a built-in tension between cancer cells and the immune system. Before it becomes cancerous, the cell and the body are on the same team. Their interests are identical. They’re pulling for the same survival goal. But the interests of a rogue cell diverge from those of the body. Now their interests conflict. In order to stay alive, the developing cancer must defeat the body’s immunity. On the other hand, immunity must defeat the cancer or the body will perish. This conflict of interests creates a high-stakes arms race between the cancer cells and immune defenses. It is widely recognized that arms races favor the development of new technology. The arms race is the topic of Matt Ridley’s enlightening book, The Red Queen. 24

Cancer is deadly. This creates a strong selection pressure that drives evolution. So over the generations, a species evolves better and better immune defenses against cancer. But within the body, the immortalized cancer cells are reproducing like crazy – and on a much faster timescale. The proliferating cells are racing through multiple generations at breakneck pace, and they are evolving at a breakneck pace. Cells with weak resistance to immunity are quickly eliminated. That leaves only cells having greater resistance.

So through natural selection the cancer cell line evolves better and better ways of dodging immunity. Despite the body’s immunity – or more precisely because immune surveillance creates strong selection pressure – the cancer cells evolve ever more sophisticated ways of resisting immunity. The bottom line is that once the cell really gets rolling toward becoming cancer, it naturally evolves better and better tools to keep it rolling.

invisibility

The most important of these tools is invisibility. Over time, the immortal cancer cells get better and better at slipping unseen past agents of the immune system. The body’s immune agents are looking hard for the spreading cancer, but they can see nothing, so they can do nothing to stop it. Invisibility in cancer is directly comparable to denial in addictions.

Rogue habits arise in pretty much the same sequence as rogue cells. Like cells, habits naturally evolve over time. Once created, their effectiveness is continually improved. The mechanism by which habits are polished was summarized long ago by psychologist Edward L. Thorndike. Every habit is continually improved through natural selection. Each begins its existence as a rather crude behavioral sequence that is progressively refined through reinforcement.

Any evolutionary process requires both variation and selection. The exact form of a habit does vary a little bit each time it is expressed. As Thorndike made clear, the variants that lead to greater satisfaction are more likely to be repeated. The less satisfying variants are crowded out. This unending process of habit refinement is what we know as learning.

As a semi-autonomous habit continues to evolve, it may occasionally stumble across some random feature that encourages its own repetition. By far the largest class of such influences consists of things that throw a monkey wrench into focal attention. The reason for this is easy to understand. In order to change an existing habit we must return it to focal attention. If focal attention is somehow derailed, then the habit will be able to continue uninterrupted. That’s good for the habit, but bad for the behaving animal.

Process addictions

As with cancerous cells, habits go rogue in phases. In the first phase the habit acquires some trick that gets it repeated more often. Sometimes the pattern involves a chemical substance. But focusing on substances is something of a red herring, because the number of process addictions – those that do not involve substances – is many times greater than the number of substance addictions. One increasingly common process addiction involves computer gaming. We can use this as an illustration.

There’s nothing unusual about trying a new game. Maybe our friends are playing this particular game, and they tell us how much fun it is. So we try it. Now, designers of games strive to make the games addictive – for the same reason that the manufacturers of junk foods try to make their products as addictive as they can. The most profitable industries are based upon addiction, in any of its many forms. Examples are the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries.

Image of a skeletal online gamer whose gaming addiction has killed him without his noticing.
Online gaming addiction is one of many so-called “process addictions.” They are similar in form and can be quite destructive. But none of them involve substances.

Game designers make their products addictive by appealing to some built-in archetypal theme – adventure, combat, problem solving, etc. So when we try the game, many of us discover that it is satisfying. This is the first stage of the addictive process we summarized earlier – Discovery. Playing the game does something for us, touching some instinctive need. Our satisfaction gives us a reason to play it again.

So we come back to play the game again, over and over. Gameplay becomes a voluntary, regular habit. We have entered the second stage of the addiction, Incubation. Each time we voluntarily repeat our gameplay, the habit evolves a little. According to firmly established laws of learning, those variants of our habit that lead to the strongest satisfaction become the most repeated. So as we continue to play, the specific way that we indulge our developing habit naturally evolves to make our indulgence more and more engaging.

This is a way of saying that the habit, through a process of variation and selection, comes to encourage its own repetition. Subtle changes in the perception of what we are doing is one of the primary factors that bias us toward its repetition. As with alcoholism, this “fun and games” habit isn’t all fun and games. The more we play the game the less frequently we do other things – things that are important to us.

Suppose one morning we find that we have stayed up so late playing the game that we feel horrible – bleary-eyed and achy all over. We are so sleep-deprived that we can’t function at work the next day. And yet, indulgence in more gameplay tends to temporarily distract us from such negative symptoms. So we find ourselves making excuses that allow us to continue our involvement with the game. We also find ourselves snapping irritably at friends and associates who suggest that we throttle back our obsessive play.

All such players eventually reach a critical threshold, sort of a one-way turnstile. There are signs that we are too obsessed with this game – that it is taking up too much of our time, that it is interfering too much with other aspects of our life. It is at this point that most of us snap to the cost of the pattern into which we are descending. We return our full attention to what we are doing, and we decide to do something about it. It is at this point that the vast majority of players impose limits on the habit, and put those limits into practice.

But a minority of players find ways to dismiss those obvious concerns. They continue to enlarge the time and energy they devote to the game, with their slide lubricated by their expanding denial. Finally, the unfortunate player reaches a point where most of the important activities in his or her life are being neglected in favor of gameplay. Despite this serious impairment, the player remains oblivious. This is the Final Pattern of the process addiction.

All habits evolve as they are repeated. And the more they are repeated, the greater the number of variants they run through. This increases the odds that one of those variants will by chance come to provoke its repetition even more strongly. Over time, any habit will become more entrenched even if it is dysfunctional, simply because it gets more and more effective at provoking its own repetition. The immune function of attention is the only thing preventing it.

denial: evolved invisibility

The reason denial is invariably associated with addiction is that the primary control on habits is focal attention – when it comes to behavior, attention plays the role of the immune system. Habits naturally vary as they are executed. Those variants that impair focal attention are the ones that persist. A runaway habit gets better and better at impairing focal attention, simply because the most persistent variants are those that impair attention. Again this is a process of variation and selection.

The wayward habit and its attentional controls slip into an arms race, paralleling what happens between rogue cells and bodily immunity. The predictable product of such an arms race is invisibility. That is, the variants best able to sidestep immunity are those that are difficult to bring to attention. Just as with cancer, the variants that escape the immune police are the ones that proliferate. But when it comes to habits invisibility takes the form of inability to attend to the problem behavior.

Parasites, cancer, and addictions

A team of researchers recently discovered that tumors nourish themselves by feeding on the “stromal” cells of the surrounding tissue. The proliferating tumor draws nutrients and energy from these structural cells. Alarmingly, cancers are employing the same biochemical tricks that infectious parasites use. “An in depth analysis of this phenomenon,” say the researchers, “reveals that aggressive cancer cells are ‘parasites’ that use oxidative stress as a ‘weapon’ to extract nutrients from surrounding stromal cells.” 25

As we have seen, cancer cells are rogues, focused on their own survival. Their interest lies in reproducing themselves, not contributing to the health of the body. Like parasites, they ruthlessly exploit the body’s healthy tissues to support themselves, often killing their host in the process. Should cancers actually be considered a kind of home-grown parasite? Is use of that label justified?

Whether or not to regard cancers as actual “parasites” is a matter of considerable controversy at present. The controversy is not about whether tumors act like parasites – everyone seems to agree that they do. Rather, the controversy is whether they are new species. In other words, scientists are uncomfortable with the idea that some of the host’s cells have evolved into a parasite species that is no longer the host species.

Cancer theorists have been toying with this admittedly creepy idea for at least half a century. As early as 1956 biologist Julian S. Huxley straightforwardly asserted that “All autonomous neoplasms can be regarded as the equivalents of new biological species.” 26 More recently Mark Vincent of the University of Western Ontario published an article in the journal Evolution arguing that the emergence of a cancer is a bona fide Darwinian speciation event. As he points out, almost no one denies that cancer cells evolve to successive levels of fitness within their hosts. It’s just that they find the implications distasteful. 27

The speciation idea also makes sense to theorist Peter Duesberg and colleagues. He argues that genetic instability within a cancer cell line produces many variants. “Most of these perish,” he writes, “but a very small minority acquires reproductive autonomy – the primary characteristic of cancer cells and species. Selection for autonomy stabilizes new cancer species …” 28

There’s even more to this story. Some types of cancer continue to develop, eventually evolving into a full-fledged, transmissible, parasitic disease that can infect other animals of the same type. Two strains of this kind of “contagious cancer” are currently decimating the Tasmanian Devil population.

For our purposes it doesn’t matter whether or not we consider tumors new species. The important point is that they act just like parasites.

Parasitic habits

Now let’s return our attention to habits. It’s clear that full-fledged addictions also perpetuate themselves by exploiting the addict’s resources – even going so far as to usurp the resources of family and friends. The beginning point of every addiction is an ordinary habit. The ending point is a malignant, self-reproducing disease process that behaves as a parasite behaves. A habit that begins as a normal “part of us” can go rogue, evolving as cancer evolves to become something that is “not part of us” – an alien parasitic behavior pattern that reproduces itself at our expense. Again, the pattern starts as “something we do,” but ends as “something that does us.”

A direction for recovery

One reason for pursuing the analogy between addiction and cancer is that it suggests a logical path toward intervention and constructive change. We already know something about prevention, management, and elimination of cancer and other physical diseases. This existing knowledge suggests ways of dealing with addictions and similar behavioral patterns. Here are a few of those suggestions.

1. Assign responsibility realistically. As mentioned, some of us have been all too ready to blame the addict for his or her addiction. But blaming the victim for the disease itself takes us in exactly the wrong direction. Blaming simply creates guilt within the sufferer – creating an extra motivation to deny or hide the reality of the problem. 29 And that, in turn, supports its continuation.

If we accept that addiction reflects disease rather than irresponsibility, our readiness to blame must be adjusted to match this reality. Though willingness to blame the disease is in no way a stamp of approval for the behavior, the addict’s denial and distortion should be understood for what it is – inability to perceive the problem provoked by the problem itself.

2. Support general immunity. Immunity is the single most important issue in the control of any disease, physical or behavioral, because it is our naturally evolved means of controlling what goes on within us. When it comes to physical disease, research has shown that the effectiveness of our inborn immune responses depends upon a variety of factors, many of which are under our control. Some things contributing to cancer risk are consumption of alcohol, use of tobacco products, chronic inflammation, radiation (including excessive sunlight), exposure to foreign chemicals, poor diet, and obesity. 30 Psychological factors such as depression also contribute to vulnerability. Chronic depression is associated with both increased cancer risk and shortened survival time. 31, 32

Similarly, risk factors have already been identified for addiction vulnerability. To illustrate, it is widely recognized that people whose lives are unsatisfying or painful are more likely to develop repetitive, unproductive habits, including drug addiction. Less well known is the fact that the same principle applies to every higher animal. Animal research shows the emergence of repetitive, stereotypical, addiction-like behavior is “an invariant consequence of experiential deprivation or restriction of all species tested.” 33 Recognizing the continuity between human addiction and this universal tendency toward the emergence of repetitive habits is a source of real insight.

A series of studies performed by psychologist Bruce K. Alexander confirms that frustration of natural, inborn impulses strongly biases animals toward the use of drugs. 34 It certainly makes sense that when drugs are available animals would learn to use them to escape misery, just as people do. Though some chemical substances undeniably carry addictive potential, that potential is most likely to be realized when life is otherwise bleak. When living conditions severely limit ability to satisfy inborn needs, any higher animal is likely to begin engaging in repetitive, unproductive, stereotypic behavior – the same kind of behavior we associate with drug addiction.

Working with animals, researchers Schenk et al confirmed that “environmental factors play a major role in determining individual differences in the propensity to self-administer cocaine and that, as such, they should be considered more seriously by those interested in the basis and treatment of drug abuse.” 35 Likewise, Solinas et al performed a very carefully controlled study comparing mice raised in enriching environments to mice raised in barren laboratory cages. Their results clearly suggested that “exposure to positive environmental conditions during early stages of life can greatly influence brain functioning and can provide protection against the effects of addictive drugs.” They conclude that mice raised in rich environments “are protected against the effects of cocaine.” 36

Taken as a whole, such studies suggest that one way to generally enhance behavioral immunity is to provide rich and satisfying living conditions. We can generally “immunize” people from addiction by supporting their ability to lead good lives. This is a point that is often neglected in the literature on addiction.

3. Educate the public. In dealing with a disease process of any kind, a bastion of immunity is public awareness of the nature of the disease, its manner of transmission, and ways of handling it. In this context education is a critical part of general immunization against rogue habits. Education creates awareness. And awareness is like bug spray to a disease-carrying bug. Education is absolutely essential for creating that awareness.

4. Deal with environmental factors. Environmental factors include such things as readily availability of drugs and other addictive products, unsatisfying and hopeless lives, models for use, and disinformation programs created by addiction-based industries. We have noted that addiction is not possible without the Discovery phase, in which the user first experiences benefits. The incidence of Discovery can be reduced by decreasing the availability of addictive products, by making lives more satisfying without the addictive product, by increasing public awareness of dangers, and by holding accountable industries that seek to profit from the deliberate creation of addiction.

By way of illustration, consider the industry we call Big Tobacco. Addiction is the business model upon which the industry is based. In addition to deliberately being made addictive, tobacco products are deadly. Author Michael Rabinoff provides a graphic account of the situation in his exceptionally informative 2006 book, Ending the Tobacco Holocaust.

Person trapped in a cage made of cigarettes.
Big Tobacco’s business model involves the systematic cultivation of nicotine addiction.

Although it seems inconceivable, about 650 million individuals currently alive in the world will die from cigarette-related illnesses. That’s the equivalent of every single man, woman, and child in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Russia dead – a doomsday scenario more horrific than our worst nuclear nightmares. The World Health Organization projects that 450 million people will die from smoking in the next 50 years, and about a billion people in this century. That means more than 5 million people worldwide die each year from smoking—a number that will increase to more than 10 million a year by 2020. 37

That’s a death toll so immense that it’s hard to wrap one’s head around it. Within a single generation more lives will be lost than in a world-wide nuclear war. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 556,000 Americans die each year as a result of cigarette smoking. 38

Tobacco executives are killing more people than Hitler, with no meaningful change in sight. The absence of awareness or concern closely mirrors the denial so typical of addiction. Cigarettes are still readily available, and tobacco addiction is commonplace. Tobacco companies are still enormously profitable. A big environmental factor maintaining the status quo is the disinformation generated by tobacco companies themselves. In complete disregard of the facts, they continue to portray smoking as an individual lifestyle choice. The resulting illness and deaths are interpreted by the public as the fault of the consumer, who “should have known better.”

Such disinformation stymies our ability to expand our awareness to encompass the true problem. Expanded awareness is necessary for greater industry accountability, which would in turn reduce the availability of cigarettes and other nicotine-based addictive products, and stem the flow of industry disinformation. Of course, this principle applies to every other addiction-based industry as well – the alcohol, pharmaceutical, sugar, and pornography industries, to name just a few.

5. Immunize against specific addictions. We have noted that life satisfaction – the experience of personal fulfillment – confers general behavioral immunity. But it’s also possible to confer specific behavioral immunity. There is a good parallel here with inoculation, which protects against specific diseases. Just as we can teach our bodies to recognize and defend against specific pathogens, we can learn to recognize and avoid paths leading us toward specific forms of addiction.

In the past, tobacco companies tried to get children addicted to cigarettes as early as possible, 39 because they knew instilling the habit would be more difficult after they had learned the facts about nicotine addiction. It follows, logically enough, that awareness is enhanced by acquiring accurate information about tobacco addiction and its dangers. Absorbing this information can partially immunize potential smokers against adopting the habit. The same is true of any other specific addiction.

6. Strengthen immunity for recovery. The cornerstone of our resistance to addiction is the ability to become aware. Most effective addiction recovery programs strive to enhance awareness. They commonly call this “breaking through the denial.” 40 As we have seen, this amounts to reinvigorating awareness of the nature of the problem within which the addict has become enmeshed.

Certainly, invigorating awareness requires provision of accurate information about the addiction and how it came about. But often a restoration of attention and awareness involves activating a layer of attention that runs deeper than the addict’s superficial awareness that “I’m not happy.” This deeper layer is often experienced by the sufferer as a return to the wisdom of a “higher power.”

Although the addict’s superficial awareness can be manipulated by the addictive process, that deeper layer is not subject to corruption because it is based on inherited archetypes. The AA program, for instance, uses multiple techniques for re-establishing contact with one’s “higher power,” over time increasing awareness of the process into which the alcoholic has fallen, and absorbing information about recovery that others have found useful.


Notes and references

  1. National Institute on Drug Abuse (a division of the National Institute of Health) Understanding Drug Use and Addiction. Revised June 2018. Available online at https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/understanding-drug-use-addiction
  2. U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center. National Drug Threat Assessment 2011. Product No . 2011-Q0317-001. Page 1. Available online at https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs44/44849/44849p.pdf. Accessed 6/11/2019.
  3. Vaillant G. The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited. 1995, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Page 170.
  4. LaChance AJ. Cultural Addiction: The Greenspirit guide to recovery. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 1991. Page 3.
  5. In 1985 neuroscientist Candace Pert insightfully concluded that, “the conceptual division between the sciences of immunology, endocrinology, and psychology / neuroscience is a historical artifact.” [Pert C, Ruff M, Weber R, Herkenham M. Neuropeptides and their receptors: A psychosomatic network. The Journal of immunology, 1985, 135, 2, 820-826. Page 824s.]
  6. Fritjof Capra, in his insightful book The Web of Life stresses that immunity can’t really be separated from cognition. “Recent research,” he says, “indicates strongly that in the human organism the nervous system, the immune system, and the endocrine system, which traditionally have been viewed as three separate systems, in fact form a single cognitive network.” [Capra F. The Web of Life. Anchor books, New York, 1996. Page 176.]
  7. Schaler JA. Addiction Is a Choice. Psychiatric Times, 2002, 19, 10. Available online at https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/addiction/addiction-choice.
  8. Sack D. Does Willpower Play a Role in Addiction Recovery? Blog on Psychology Today website. Posted Nov 07, 2012. Available online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/where-science-meets-the-steps/201211/does-willpower-play-role-in-addiction-recovery.
  9. McLellan, AT; Lewis, DC; O’Brien, CP; Kleber, HD. Drug dependence, a chronic medical illness: implications for treatment, insurance, and outcomes evaluation. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000, 284, 13, 1689–1695.
  10. Hall W, Carter A, Forlini C. The brain disease model of addiction: is it supported by the evidence and has it delivered on its promises? Lancet Personal View, 2015, 2, 1, 105-110.
  11. Johnson, VE. Intervention: How to help someone who doesn’t want help. Johnson Institute books, 1986. “Incubation” is a medical term referring to the period between the time someone is exposed to an infectious disease and the time he or she becomes fully symptomatic. Although Johnson does not use the term Incubation himself, it fits his description of this phase. Johnson identifies sub-stages to each of the phases described here, but that level of detail is not required for this discussion.
  12. Chiba K, Lorbeer F, Shain A, McSwiggen D, Schruf E, Oh A, Ryu J, Darzacq X, Bastain B, Hockemeyer D. Mutations in the promoter of the telomerase gene TERT contribute to tumorigenesis by a two-step mechanism. Science, 2017, 357, 1416-1420.
  13. University of California – Berkeley. Two-step process leads to cell immortalization and cancer: Clearer view of the role telomere length and telomerase play in cell immortalization. Science Daily, August 17, 2017. Available online at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170817141528.htm.
  14. The telomerase enzyme is most critical in normal cells whose function requires that they frequently divide. These cells routinely need “extra life” to function as intended by nature. But acquiring this extra life abnormally and unnecessarily through mutation makes a cell pre-cancerous.
  15. James W. The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1. Henry Holt and Company, 1890. Pages 115-116.
  16. James W, 1890. Page 122.
  17. Edelman G and Tononi G. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. Basic Books, 2000. Page 58.
  18. Vissera JC, Rommelseab NJ, Grevenacd CU, Buitelaarac  JK.  Autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in early childhood: a review of unique and shared characteristics and developmental antecedents.  Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2016, 65, 229-263. Page 229.
  19. van der Kolk BA. Posttraumatic stress disorder and the nature of trauma. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 2000, 2, 1, 7-22. Page 7. Article is available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181584/
  20. van der Kolk BA, 2000. Page 19.
  21. The “road traffic” metaphor is one of many that we could use here. Another is the World Wide Web. The Web works well only because the vast majority of the computing is handled locally, on the computers receiving information through the internet. The page displays are created autonomously and locally. They are constructed on our own computers, attractively presenting the downloaded information in the form of “web pages.” There is nowhere near enough bandwidth in our internet connections to transmit complete graphical web pages to us from a central source. Because the pages are constructed locally, different browsers yield different-looking pages. Sometimes the pages don’t look good at all. This is a well-known issue for content creators.
  22. Bhatia A, Kumar Y. Cancer-immune equilibrium: Questions unanswered. Cancer Microenvironment, 2011, 4, 2, 209-217. Page 209.
  23. University of California – Berkely, 2017.
  24. Ridley M. The Red Queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature. Harper Perennial, 1993. Nick Lane’s book Life Ascending also deals adroitly with this topic: [Lane N. Life Ascending: The ten great inventions of evolution. W. W. Norton, New York, 2009]
  25. Martinez-Outschoorn UE, Pavlides S, Howell, Anthony, Pestell, RG, Tanowitz HB, Sotgia F, Lisanti MP. Stromal–epithelial metabolic coupling in cancer: Integrating autophagy and metabolism in the tumor microenvironment. The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology, 2011, 43, 7, 1045-1051.
  26. Huxley J. Cancer Biology: Comparative and Genetic. Biological Reviews, 1956, 21, 4, 474-513. Abstract available online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-185X.1956.tb01558.x
  27. Vincent MD. The Animal Within: Carcinogenesis and the clonal evolution of cancer cells are speciation events sensu stricto. Evolution, 2010, 64, 4, 1173-1183. Page 1173.
  28. Duesberg P, Mandrioli D, McCormack A, Nicholson JM. Is carcinogenesis a form of speciation? Cell Cycle. 2011, 10, 13, 2100-2114. Page 2100. Abstract available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21666415
  29. Interestingly, about 40% of tobacco smokers tell lies as part of their efforts to conceal their smoking.  [Christensen J, 2015.]
  30. National Cancer Institute (a division of the National Institutes of Health). Risk Factors for Cancer. Fact sheet, last updated December 23, 2015. Available online at https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk
  31. Currier MB, Nemeroff CB. Depression as a risk factor for cancer: from pathophysiological advances to treatment implications. Annual Review of Medicine, 2014, 65, 203-221. Page 203.
  32. Aldea M, Craciun L, Tomuleasa C, Crivii C. The role of depression and neuroimmune axis in the prognosis of cancer patients. Journal of the Balkan Union of Oncology, 2014, 19, 1, 5-14. Page 5.
  33. Lewis M, et al. Animal models of restricted repetitive behavior in autism. Behavioural Brain Research, 2000, 176, 66-74. Page 68.
  34. Alexander BK et al, 2008. Page 195.
  35. Schenk S, Lacelle G, Gorman K, Amit Z. Cocaine self-administration in rats influenced by environmental conditions: implications for the etiology of drug abuse. Neuroscience Letters. 1987, 81, 1, 227-231.
  36. Solinas M, Thiriet N, Rawas R, Lardeux V, Jaber M. Environmental enrichment during early stages of life reduces the behavioral, neurochemical, and molecular effects of cocaine. Neuropharmacology, 2009, 34, 1102-1111. Page 1108.
  37. Rabinoff M. Ending the Tobacco Holocaust: How big tobacco affects our health, pocketbook, and political freedom – and what we can do about it. Elite Books, Santa Rosa California, 2006. Page 12.
  38. Carter BD, Abnet CC, Feskanich D, et al. Smoking and mortality beyond established causes. New England Journal of Medicine, 2015, 372, 7, 631-640.
  39. The collection of internal company documents assembled by Bates and Rowell shows that some companies researched groups of potential smokers as young as five years. [Bates C, Rowell A. Tobacco explained: The truth about the tobacco industry… In its own words. Originally developed for the London-based organization Action on Smoking and Health. Adapted for an annual event sponsored by the World Health Organization, “World No Tobacco Day,” first observed April 7, 1988. Page 24.] In response to a question as to which young people the company was targeting, one RJ Reynolds executive allegedly quipped, “They got lips, we want them.” [Bates C and Rowell A, 1988. Page 36.] Document is available online at  www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf
  40. According to the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, denial is “the tendency of alcoholics or addicts to either disavow or distort variables associated with their drinking or drug use in spite of evidence to the contrary…” Penetrating the denial enables awareness of the truth about the havoc wreaked by the addiction. It is the first step in recovery. [Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. Breaking through denial is an alcoholic’s first step in recovery. February 1, 2015. Online article available at http://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/articles/breaking-through-denial-is-first-step-in-recovery-for-alcoholic. Retrieved 8/20/2016]

Real Zombies

A sad, puppet-like zombie.
A sad zombie

There are literally thousands of books and movies featuring zombies. In books and movies, human beings can be transformed by disease or curse into mindless horrors driven either to eat your brains, or – worse – to infect you so that you turn into a zombie yourself. The zombie theme is woven deeply into our culture.

We seem strangely preoccupied with these monstrously “undead” creatures. Why does this theme turn up so often in our fiction? Could it be that our obsession with fictional zombies reflects a real-world concern? Do zombies, or something like zombies, actually exist in nature? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. It all has to do with the influence of parasites. And that’s the topic of this blog.

Researchers have determined that parasites turn their hosts into zombies whenever they can. They do it for the most understandable of reasons – zombifying their hosts helps them to survive and reproduce. Parasites evolve ways to redirect host behavior so that it favors the parasites’ own reproduction. Almost all parasites cause their hosts to act in specific ways that support the parasite’s lifecycle.

Zombie mice

One better-known example – one that has been in the news a lot lately – is the parasite toxoplasma gondii. T. gondii is known to change the behavior of infected mice to make them more likely to be eaten by cats, their natural predators. The “zombified” mice are influenced to act in ways that directly threaten the mouse’s own interests.

Normal mice are terrified when they detect the odor of cat urine. Cats are their natural predators. So in response to the odor normal mice either hunker down out of sight, or run away as far and as fast as they can. But mice infected with T. gondii act very differently. They don’t seem to be afraid of the smell. Instead, they appear intrigued by it, and sometimes follow the odor to its source. In addition, in a very un-mouselike way they become more active, and so draw attention to themselves.

These behavioral changes clearly are not in the mouse’s interest; they greatly increase the odds that it will be eaten by a cat. But their altered behavior does suit the needs of the parasite. That’s because in order to complete its reproductive cycle this particular parasite must transfer itself from the body of the mouse to the body of a cat. So the parasite has evolved the means of converting the mouse into a zombie assistant that helps it reach this goal.

It ain’t magic

How in the world could T. gondii make a zombie out of a mouse? Though it might seem like magic, it’s really biochemistry.

T. Gondii forms cysts near neurons in the brain, excreting chemical that influence behavior.
T. gondii inserts a cyst into the brain

T. gondii forms cysts that nestle inside the mouse’s brain and excrete chemicals that redirect brain activity in a way that favors parasite transmission.

Responding to those chemicals, the zombie mouse is attracted to the smell of cats, is less fearful, and is more likely to move around actively. The upshot is that T. gondii changes the mouse into a different creature – a zombie that serves the interests of the parasite.

Although this zombie story is interesting, it may not at first seem relevant to our own lives. But it is indeed relevant. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of the humans on the face of this earth are also infected with T. gondii. The reason we are vulnerable to infection is that some of our closest animal relatives are the prey of big cats. In Africa, monkeys and apes are frequently eaten by large felines. In fact, primates constitute a large part of their diets.

One group of researchers looked at our closest relative, the chimpanzee. They found that infection does change a chimp’s behavior. For example, “Toxoplasma-infected animals lost their innate aversion toward the urine of leopards… their only natural predator.” Chimp zombies. 1

Your zombie neighbor

Humans are primates. So humans are subject to T. gondii infection. Studies confirm that a sizable percentage of the world’s population – about one third to one half – harbor the parasite. In fact, T. gondii has inserted behavior-manipulating cysts into the brains of up to half the humans on planet earth. Incidence varies with the country, ranging from 20% to 80%. The rate in the US is toward the lower end of the range. 2  But that’s still a minimum of one out of every five citizens.

It’s natural to wonder whether T. gondii changes human behavior, as with its other hosts? Once again, the answer is yes. Because our biology is pretty much the same as the rest of the primate group, it makes sense that the parasite would affect our bodies and our behavior in a similar way.

Image of disembodied hands grabbing a woman's head.
T. gondii influences humans too.

Research confirms that T. gondii does indeed impact many aspects of human life – an eye-opening reality that we are just beginning to appreciate.

In what way does T. gondii change us? The alterations in behavior provoked by T. gondii infection are in fact numerous, and are substantially different for men and women. 3  Personality changes are detectable with standardized tests such as Cattell’s 16PF. Researcher Jaroslov Flegr undertook a review of 11 studies, and concluded that

Consistent and significant differences in Cattell’s personality factors were found between Toxoplasma-infected and uninfected subjects in 9 of 11 studies, and these differences were not the same for men and women… The personality of infected men showed lower superego strength (rule consciousness) and higher vigilance (factors G and L on Cattell’s 16PF). Thus, the men were more likely to disregard rules and were more expedient, suspicious, jealous, and dogmatic. The personality of infected women, by contrast, showed higher warmth and higher superego strength (factors A and G on Cattell’s 16PF), suggesting that they were more warm hearted, outgoing, conscientious, persistent, and moralistic. Both men and women had significantly higher apprehension (factor O) compared with the uninfected controls. 4

Do these personality differences have any real-world consequences? Again, yes. Infection makes men more willing to take risks; studies indicate that infected men are nearly three times more likely than non-infected men to be involved in automobile accidents. 5  This effect is almost completely reversed in women, whose risk-taking declines.

Parasites. Zombies. It’s important to understand that the “zombie effect” is not unique to T. gondii. Every parasite will, if it is able to do so, influence the behavior of its host to favor its own reproduction.

Is every parasite that infects a host a different animal, a different species? No, and this is really curious. Some parasites spontaneously develop from within the host. Cancer, for example, begins when one of the cells in an animal abandons the animal’s interests and begins acting in its own interest instead. The cancerous cell is a cell that has gone rogue. Its own reproduction has become an end in itself. It becomes a tumor. Bizarrely, cancer can be interpreted as a parasite that has emerged from within.

Zombifying habits

Now here’s something really interesting: Habits can go rogue in the same way that the cells of our bodies can turn cancerous, coming to serve their own interests rather than ours.

A zombie gulping addictive drugs
The zombie-like behavior of the addict.

If we ask ourselves what human behaviors seem most zombie-like, we will invariably turn our attention to addictions. Addictive habits bear a striking resemblance to the zombie behavior of parasitized animals. The zombie-like addictive pattern doesn’t serve the interests of the addict. In fact it often destroys the addict. But the pattern does serve to perpetuate the addiction itself. It’s my belief that addictions can be interpreted as cancerous habits, parasitic behavioral patterns, habits gone rogue.

The zombifying influence of parasites is one of the topics in my latest book, Rogue Habits. If this strikes you as an interesting topic, you can read more about it in a somewhat more formal paper “Zombies Among Us.”

References

  1. Poirotte C, Kappeler PM, Ngoubangoye B, et al. Morbid attraction to leopard urine in toxoplasma-infected chimpanzees. Current Biology, 2016, 26, 3, R98-R99. Page R98.
  2. Henriquez S, Brett R, Alexander J, Pratt J, Roberts C. Neuropsychiatric disease and toxoplasma gondii infection. Neuroimmunomodulation. 2009, 16, 2, 122-33. Page 122.
  3. Flegr et al. Induction of changes in human behavior by the parasite protozoan toxoplasma gondii. Parasitology, 1996, 113, 49-54.
  4. Flegr J. Effects of Toxoplasma on Human Behavior. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2007, 33, 3, 757–760. Available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2526142/
  5. Flegr J et al. Increased incidence of traffic accidents in toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study. Biomed Central Infectious Diseases, 2009, 9, 72.