5 Personality Flaws That Science Will Cure in Our Lifetime
At least half of the bad people in the world avoid trying to change because they insist nothing is their fault. It's all due to their childhood, or their genes -- their temper, their weight, their bad habits -- all of it is outside of their control. It's bullshit, right?
Well ... not entirely. As we learn more about genetics, we find that more and more bad habits at least have their roots in our DNA. And once we find the right gene, it's entirely possible we can cure things like...
There used to be a time when a weekend hookup with a lady at the county fair might have life-changing consequences, e.g., her daddy showing up at your doorstep with a shotgun, a preacher and some Gone With the Wind commemorative wedding china. Those days are thankfully long gone, at least until the fathers of loose women and cheated-on wives get ahold of a hormone that forces loved ones to be faithful.
It'll be the end of tennis coaching as we know it.
Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen.
Cured By:
Scientists know that the hormone called vasopressin is integral to the formation of social bonds. In the male brain, vasopressin is released during sexual activity and encourages a guy to form an emotional attachment to his partner. But in a survey of 1,000 heterosexual couples, men who had a certain type of vasopressin receptor gene were twice as likely to report dissatisfaction with their marriages.
Imagine a future where being vasopressin negative was something you flaunted on your Match.com page. If you were a women, why wouldn't you want to know about a potential mate's "aptitude for monogomy," as the scientists put it. Hell, if there was a scientific test that could tell you whether the guy who just proposed to you is a ticking cheat bomb, you'd be stupid not to make him take it. Of course, the vasopressin receptor gene might not be terminal for its owner's sex lives. After all, if we can increase the number of vasopressin receptors, we might be able to cure cheating altogether.
Then we can deal with the other tell-tale signs of a mid-life crisis.
In an experiment conducted on prairie voles, males were injected with an artificial gene that boosted the number of vasopressin receptors in their brains. Then each male was paired with one female. Several hours later, a second female was thrown into the mix, because voles likes to party.
The males who received the vasopressin boost spent twice as much time with the original female they'd been paired with, while the males who did not receive the receptor boost spent equal amounts of time with both, presumably while attempting to proposition them for some hot three-way prairie vole action.
Or as they call it, "the vole-tron."
For some of us, getting our work done is just a matter of checking our Facebook news feed, playing a quick game of spider solitaire, updating our Netflix queue, running to the bathroom, pouring a second cup of coffee, doing something about that flappy hangnail on our big toe and then settling down for business. For others, getting work done is a real chore.
"No point in trying to be productive until I've stumbled around my local supermarket stoned as balls for a few hours."
It's easy to write it off as "you're lazy" or "duh, you just prefer not working to working," but there is a specific mechanism in the brain that causes us to delay a task we know we have to get to, and there is a way to get around it.
One reason we procrastinate has to do with dopamine, which is what allows us to draw the connection between the work we do and the reward for completing said work. In the carrot-and-stick analogy, dopamine is the carrot: It gives us the little high when we get close to the finish line, and the anticipation of that high.
A high that only shooting horse in an elementary school bathroom can top.
Here's the glitch: The closer we think we are to earning the reward, the more dopamine our brain releases, and the more we'll be motivated to work. But if we think the reward is a long way off, dopamine doesn't get released, our motivation is squelched, and we end up procrastinating.
Cured By:
If we can block dopamine receptors, we'll just work and work and work, with each task carrying the same weight. We know this because scientists injected a dopamine-blocking DNA construct into the brains of monkeys, as scientists are apt to do, and the DNA totally changed the way the monkeys worked.
This is the least-horrifying way we could illustrate it.
Before the monkeys got the worky juice, they learned to read visual cues that told them how many more tasks they had to complete, and their performance improved as they got closer to their monkey reward. But after they got a brain dose of special sauce, the monkeys' dopamine receptors were blocked, and they could no longer judge when the reward was coming. And that was when the monkeys got down to business.
So what could this potentially mean for us humans? Well, if we're anything like monkeys (news flash: we are) the results of the study suggest that gene therapy might totally cure procrastination. Trust us, we wish this wasn't true -- the day they cure procrastination is the day the Internet dies.
If you've never had an uncle who gambled away the family furniture, your favorite bike and your cat's virginity over a midnight game of poker, consider yourself lucky. Because compulsive gambling is actually a medically recognized condition, and the people who have it are as vulnerable to their vice as other addicts. Scientists have discovered that gamblers have lower levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Which is important, because that little baby is what gives the rest of us a "rush" when we're aroused, thrilled or stressed.
Russian roulette is the cheapest high money can buy.
So just like a crack addict has to keep smoking more and more to reach the same high, the gambling addict has to risk more and more money to get the same rush. And here's more bad news: If you've got a close relative with a gambling problem, you're eight percent more likely to develop one as well.
Don't believe us? Wanna bet on it?
Of course you do. You can't stop yourself.
Cured By:
By treating pathological gamblers like substance abuse addicts. Literally. With the same medicine and everything. In one experiment, researchers divided compulsive gamblers into two groups. The first group were people who said they had to gamble when they felt an "urge," and the second group was composed of people who weren't even cognizant of urges -- they just gambled all the time because they were impulsive addicts.
Each group was given different drugs to treat gambling. The first group got opioid blockers, which are the medicines also used to treat opiate addiction, and the second group got a drug that did a number on the prefrontal cortex, which actually gave them the capacity to just say "no" every now and then.
That's right. Science turned D.A.R.E. into a drug.
In other words, one group got their urges reduced and the other got their inhibitions increased, and both groups were able to control their gambling problems a little better. Sounds like a win-win to us!
Okay, the procrastination one seems backwards. I thought the problem was that when a deadline is a long way off you don't get the dopamine pre-high, thus you don't care, thus you procrastinate. If you BLOCK the dopamine that gives you the pre-high when you get close to the reward, wouldn't we then just procrastinate everything?
ReplyNo, because you wouldn't feel the difference, and you would eventually just adapt to getting s**t done for the sake of getting s**t done.
I was a women once.
ReplyTheirs some general faggery going on here..This tosser Walter Dong frigging of to pictures of his lack luster life and eclair voyant vision has seen enough to see his own miserable demise...Start at 1 then you would get a grade 6..i.e if you can suck your own dick you can kiss my Moon Red Rosey Red Ass...Wang...p.s ive got chicks all over me,like im a ardvark smothered in honey..all over me..
ReplyGene Ray, is that you?
I'm scared now, I think I'll take up magic instead
ReplyNo more gambling? SON OFF A BITCH!
ReplyPresuming we have health insurance.
Replynumber 4 would make me just not work at all. if there is no excitment of a reward there is no point.
ReplyAlso you guys should read the wikipedia article on vasopression. Doves naturally release this chemical the moment they start mating. The males always release this chemical when they choose a mate, but women will only release this chemical if they accept the mating process and vice versa. Sort of weird how humans do this too......
ReplyThe women doves?
You know what else will be cured in our lifetime? Psychologicial disorders in general. Trust me it's a f*****g myth.... mostly
ReplyJust take your pills Sir.
Boy, has Tom Cruise got a religion for you.
I can safely attest from personal experience, swallowing a few hundred mgs of both abilify and symbiax is a good way to possibly kill yourself, or if you're lucky just give you a massive fever for 2 days and feel like your brain just turned into liquified s**t (I have issues don't ask me why I did that because I won't have an answer for you), needless to say, I continue to marvel in awe at these medications remaining not only legal but being given for everything from mood disorders to sleep-aids, and I call bull on a chemical lobotomy being a good way to help yourself sleep at night unless your definition of a good night's rest is feeling like you were knocked out, having no dreams, and slowly but surely beginning to feel like you are a zombie..
ReplyThis seems more like an testament for why you shouldn't self-medicate than a testament for why you shouldn't take abilify or symbiax (not the lack of and in those last few words).
Dude if you become a zombie I have to do what I do best. Nothing personal.
I hardly consider them placebo's, they're responsible for my tardive dyskisnea which if you don't know what that is it means my limbs now jerk and lurch uncontrollably, they're also responsible for causing the very psychosis they were meant to treat in the first place and on top of that making it medicine resistant and aggrivated by treatment, something which to my understanding are connected phenomena both produced exclusively by, you guessed it, anti-psychotics, which if I'm not mistaken are the equivilent of a slow drawn out chemical lobotomy to your frontal lobe anyway, as it's been shown that they have toxic qualities towards brain tissue.
ReplyI wonder what else we can all universally agree are "personality flaws" (or even better, "diseases"). Dissent and questioning authority is a pretty bad disease. Imagination and emotions are mental illnesses; they distract the poor victim afflicted by them from focusing on their important work.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesBut seriously, has anyone actually heard the list of questions that psychiatrists use to determine whether someone is crazy or not? Interspersed with questions about whether the person thinks that they're getting special messages from God is stuff like: Do you feel you have any special abilities that others don't? Do you have any ideas that the majority of people don't agree with? Are you detail-oriented? Do you believe you can tell a person's mood by looking at them. For the mainstream, these are all indications that someone is a social deviant and should be medicated.
Wait. I'm confused. I mean, I agree with you for the most part, but are you just using this article as a segue to discuss something unrelated? Because these five things genuinely are personality flaws that make the lives of the sufferers (and those around them) worse.
I mean, if that's the case, then hell yeah: fight the power and all that. But if you're trying to say that alcoholism, anger issues, and infidelity are only bad because "the man" says so, I'm gonna have to disagree with you.
TJ, I might not have had the best segue going into my 2nd paragraph. My point was that the standards used across the board to measure what is called mental illness, or character flaws in this society are pretty fucked up.
And I find it disturbing that some people (I guess you would be included) can so summarily view the above examples as personality flaws that need to be stamped out. Do you honestly think that if someone were chemically changed to no longer be a "gambler" that such a change wouldn't also have far-reaching negative implications in other aspects of their personality? Contrary to what the ads on TV tell us, these brain candy meds are not that precise.
Also, do you honestly see things like procrastination and infidelity as definite negatives? Couldn't you entertain the notion that it's this society, and what is programmed into us as "normal," this is in need or reconsidering?
If someone is having sex with someone other than their spouse, might that be an indication that their marriage wasn't that good to begin with? Or maybe there's an inherent flaw in the ideal that two people must and should stay together for the rest of their lives. To summarily see infidelity as a "character flaw" that should be chemically stamped out... I mean, what's next? Is divorce an inherent character flaw too? What about being angry or sad? Thinking outside the box? Taking risks? Are these all bad things?
As far as procrastination goes, I would wager a good many creative people are considered "procrastinators." Maybe we should be asking ourself whether it's natural for someone to work a minimum wage job, 8 hours a day in a cubicle for the rest of their lives without ever becoming restless or yearning for better, more soul-nourishing things. I would argue that if someone *doesn't* daydream or procrastinate or try to find spiritual escape, that there is something deeply deficient in them.
i feel the thing with psychiatrist having a vested interest in making sure as much people as possible have a 'disorder' (without any kind of real outside control on those therapists) is at a point were on the whole psychiatry is doing more harm than good, with lots of people who are slightly outside of ill-defined 'social norms' getting treatment that ends up making them worse off.
in the better case they get emotionally and chemically (prescription drugs) dependent on their therapist and end up as functioning addicts.
in worse cases completely innocent people are locked up for long times 'for their own good', without even knowing how much longer they will be locked up. with no-one to trust and everything you say being used against you, you HAVE to turn into a calculating psychopath to get out.
@MaxwellHorse
"But seriously, has anyone actually heard the list of questions that psychiatrists use to determine whether someone is crazy or not?"
Many of the questions are simply questions that a large number of trials have shown that people previously diagnosed with such-and-such disorder largely give a certain answer to, while those without the disorder do not. The "Do you have special abilities" is used to ferret out people with narcissism, but it is also used to ferret out fakers, since answering "yes" is what most non-schizophrenics imagine a schizophrenic would say, while the truth is that schizophrenics usually answer "no." However, a question that schizophrenics overwhelmingly answer "yes" to is "Does all food taste the same?" Few non-schizophrenics answer "yes." Whether schizophrenics actually experience all food as tasting the same, or just all think for some reason that it's important to lie about this isn't clear, but statistically, the difference in the way schizophrenics and non-schizophrenics answer this question is so significant, and also so non-intuitive for fakers (who always claim to hear voices) that it's a good way of making distinctions.
There are also interspersed, meaningless questions to set a patient's anxiety level to baseline, after a question that might have gotten the patient stirred up. That's why the psychiatrist has meaningless-seeming side conversation about favorite TV shows, of whatever.
But a good psychiatrist would never make a diagnosis based on one question. If you think that happened, ask. Ask about the basis for a diagnosis. Get a second opinion, if you don't like the answer.
No. That is not how it works. At all. Answering "I have ideas the majority of people don't agree with." does not flag you as some kind of deviant. It's a thought that all kinds of normal people have. It's just also a thought that's ULTRA-common as a component of certain actual mental illnesses, along with others, above the general norm. Look at it this way: Coughing and sneezing both occur normally. The occasional cough/sneeze is meaningless for diagnostic purposes. Sore throats are a little more unusual but also pretty vague. But a cough AND sneeze AND sore throat, along with other symptoms, probably mean you have a cold. No doctor is going to say you have a cold the instant they hear you cough once.
The sheer presence of these items on this list doesn't mean it's some kind of insidious binary where everyone who answers yes is instantly considered mentally ill.
The only way to cure procrastination is to block dopamine and have no concept of rewards?
ReplyFigures.
wait, blocking dopamine? I was a little confused by the phrasing. With no rewards, why would we do anything?
My guess is that if we stop having the high of dopamine, we'll stop feeling low when we're lacking it, so we'll be clear-headed enough to do the work.
This is creepy. The way people's behavior can be manipulated. It's seems almost too easy. Imagine what it could be done with this power. (it's scary)
ReplyAs someone who used dexamphetamine for a year (a drug which releases a massive amount of dopamine) it's a dual edged sword. You are more motivated certainly, but it's easy to be distracted by trivial tasks and spend literally hours on them instead of more important things. For this reason, speed and meth addicts have the cleanest houses on the street
ReplyDex is also good for being a Midnight Runner.
I just went to the Renaissance Fair yesterday, and had a huge turkey leg. I do every time i go and i always have a great time. Now i know why. Thank you Cracked for changing my life once again.
ReplyWhat Renaissance was it where there were turkeys?
I fail to see how the first 4 are flaws...
Replygambling away all of your money, getting cheated upon and angry persons doesn't seem like problems to you. the thing with avoiding work is also a problem but without the dopamine receptors life would be boring.
the last picture made me google "drunk mouse" images. i suggest you do the same
ReplyHm, think I'm gonna go get a glass of wine now....
ReplySometimes I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't like gambling. Not even arbitrary bets like "Betcha $5 I can blah blah blah". I'm not a christf*g or anything, I just don't like taking risks like that where reward is unlikely.
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesFor years, I thought I was crazy. Now I know it's because I just have high levels of norepinephrine.
Or common sense.
Right there with you, hamsterjelly. I don't play games that are stacked against me; it just defies common sense. ;)
i don't really see the fun in playing a game that has nothing to do with any kind of skills one might have, just pure luck.
Common sense or not, some forms of gambling are just plain fun--like poker, or blackjack--so I would say aversion to gambling probably just has the chemical explanation. And not all gambling is luck--just look at poker champions!
"Christfag"?
Go back to 4chan.
Gambling is anxiety-provoking, and has negative fun levels for me. I'll never understand it. I believe people who like gambling are having fun, I just don't get it. I love playing games, I just don't like money being at stake-- fake money, like card games for beans, or points, or playing games like Monopoly, sure, but gambling money on a game is as much fun for me as losing money out of your pocket when you pull out your keys. Actually, less fun than that.