Repost: It's About Dopamine: Nasar's A Beautiful Mind"

It's about Dopamine: A review of Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" (1998), Simon & Schuster.
James Brody · Originally posted: 01/08/02 at 12:25 ET

The Structure:
Nasar wrote two short books, one about John Nash's mathematical genius and the other about schizophrenia. She then serrated and separated them and pasted a punched tape of 50 chapters on 388 pages. Her format could reflect her own preference for making collages, the fragmented social skills of Nash and of mathematicians in general, or the ability of her audience to concentrate, an audience perhaps selected by television, Game Boy, and the Internet. She tries to capture Nash and explain schizophrenia but winds up explaining both of them. As with a stamp collection: you have to stand back in order to find coherence. Nasar lectures about psychiatry like some of us do about evolution and with the same cardboard outcomes; she does somewhat better with the gossip of his affairs, arrogance, and abandonment...it might be an "adaptations" thing that she and I share.

The Story:
Nasar assembles Nash's quirks, his unfolding as a mathematician, and the many odd characters that he collected at MIT and Princeton. She includes his experiences at the RAND corporation, his several affairs with other men, the 4 key women in his life, his experiences in several mental hospitals, and his eventual return to mathematics.

Nash was 21 when he completed his 27 page dissertation on game theory. Game theory addressed the behavior of very large groups of players who each pursued their self-interest but was ignorant of the motives and plans of other players. Nash broke it down into fewer players and recognized that each player will seek strategies that defend him no matter what strategies are used by other players. He further recognized that players not only compete with each other but also share mutual interests as they pursue bundles of incentives rather than only one or two. Games can be "non-zero sum" in which it is possible for both competitors to achieve gains. Nash eventually made contributions to the theory of prime numbers, algebraic geometry, nonlinear mathematics, and mathematical models for the shape of the universe.

He next worked for the RAND Corporation, a government-funded hive that analyzed cold war nuclear strategies, but was fired after his arrest in a Santa Monica bathroom for indecent exposure. There is some basis to speculate that the stress and secrecy of the government projects and his firing triggered his bouts with madness. I doubt it. Nash put himself into that world, remained in it, and may have built a similar one if it were not supplied. Most of us are the prime movers in our disasters and victories, in our madness and our insights, magnifying whatever obsessions that we brought to the game. Thanks to insights from behavior genetics, blaming our parents, wife, children, job, or the government just won't fly any more.

Maternal Investment and Some Gossip:
As Gordon Paul noted in 1969, you need four qualities to be hospitalized: family abandonment, bizarre behavior, loss of self care skills, and poverty. Hold on to assets in any one of these domains and you could probably stay out of long term psychiatric care, even in the '60s. Nash used four women over two generations (his sister, mother, mistress, and wife) to buffer him from his social isolation, grandiosity, and eventual confinement in psychiatric facilities.

Eleanor, a nurse, protected him from marginal medical care during Nash's hospitalization for varicose veins. Nash pursued her but she soon became a convenience. Her pregnancy,blue collar origins, and even her Boston accent may have ended whatever obsession that he had for the moment. Nash abandoned both Eleanor and his son after he was pursued by a smarter, prettier, more ambitious, and better educated Alicia who also happened to be one of his MIT students the year before. Egads!

Alicia first took his arm in marriage but later committed him to mental hospitals. She, however, protected him from both electroshock and from medications much like a devastated rhesus mother defending her erratic son. Alicia supported herself and Nash's second son, rallied Nash's mother, his sister and even Eleanor. Alicia paid bills, cleaned house, and worked several jobs below her skill level and in difficult economic times but with little help from him. She eventually threw Nash out and divorced him but took him back when he had nowhere else to live. She must have become discouraged, frightened, and angry even though he became more considerate after she evicted him. Even genius learns from consequences.

Madness:
At age 30 Nash accepted himself as the link between a group of space aliens and humanity. Numerology became an abstract oracle but one he was helpless to translate beyond his obscure mumbling and scribbling on Princeton chalkboards. After all, what value is there in having the only cell phone? For nearly 30 years he passed behind the screen that once divided his obsessions as a scientist from those of a madman. Some of his torment surely derived from his conviction that he was right but we didn't believe him. His visionary ideas fed on his defiance and social isolation but crushed his mathematical coherence. He, thus, lost in his middle years the respect often given in mathematics to the older hulks that younger burning genius becomes. Mathematics later returned to his mind as the aliens left it, their departure anticipating just slightly the announcement of his Nobel prize. Would he have been more coherent if given respect as a seer? Or were the duration and the remission of his psychosis evidence of one more contest between John Forbes Nash and the rest of us?

Nash arranged his worlds in his profession, personal life, and delusions. Before he got sick, he made social contacts on his terms and with limited numbers of people at any one time. His peers found him selfish, rude, grandiose, and undependable, a walking problem solver's attitude that accepted few people and only on the basis of their utility. He was labeled as a genius while 21, a judgment that protected him immediately and in his mad 30s. His Princeton colleagues later tolerated his oddity just as they earlier forgave his arrogance. He likely would have been both bizarre, medicated, and abandoned in ordinary ways if he had remained in his boyhood town in West Virginia.

After his breakdowns, he showed pain and helplessness, humbled either by stress or by a retrovirus and earning our compassion, a biography, and a popularized, Ron Howard movie. He, in a later chapter, regains some of his earlier hubris, commenting that he cured himself when he decided to believe in some of his beliefs no longer. (In fairness, he also recognized, perhaps accurately if vaguely, the possibility of hormonal changes that come with age.) It's the sort of plot that the Greeks would have loved and a tough one for Nash. After all, he saw both his math and his madness with the same clarity. How was he to hold one and shed the other? He certainly wouldn't believe the rest of us fools any more than he believed us in regard to other matters.

Is it a requirement that genius be unstable? No. Even writers and scientists who experience bipolar disorder feel more creative between episodes or when suitably medicated. They may enjoy the first rush of ideas and lessened need for sleep but eventually recognize these gifts as emissaries for disorganization, confusion, forgetfulness, bankruptcy, and severed relationships. Korszybski once commented that "to be is to be related." Csikszentmihalyi and Howe remark on the need not only for original ideas but also for the capacity to build an audience for those ideas. Genius must advertise itself, otherwise Darwin, Feynman, and many many others would have remained obscure. Genuine creativity requires connections to other people, connections that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia erode and that mothers, wives, and other partners try to rebuild through healing sometimes by preachers and sometimes by doctors.

Psychiatry and psychology are miserable symbiotes, hostile dependency exists forever between them. Each needs but does not have a platform and pole to support the coat hooks for its special personalities and theories. Thus, Nasar in her text and with some of the chapter blurbs that quote psychiatrists, implies that psychiatry was and often is populated by madmen who treat other madmen. How natural that we, like mathematicians, attract one another. Nonetheless, psychiatrists prescribe unusual medications that sometimes do unpredictable miracles but for reasons that psychiatrists don't understand.

"Antipsychotic" medications are the chief reason that restraints and locks and long term hospitalization ebbed in the 1960s. Sometimes the voices either beneath or in front of panic and rage become silent, other times they are only muted. We have since tried, with limited success, to improve on the first antipsychotic, a histamine derivative called chlorpromazine. Unfortunately, it shuts down a lot of dreams besides the bad ones and medicated psychotic people (and manic depressives) walk a path between sedation and vigor, between oblivion and confusing, sometimes dangerous, glimpses of their alert self. Staff become emergent boundaries for that walk, sometimes advocating for the patient's return to alertness but also thinking that he "needs" medicine and should be grateful for it despite constipation, confusion, dizziness, itching, and bloating. The patient fights back with cheeked doses, caffeine in any form, and nicotine that paints their fingers yellow and black. "Did you take your medicine" elicits "Screw you."

Antipsychotics all manipulate our access to dopamine, a very old chemical that usually makes the connections between what we do and what we want. Lose your dopamine to aging or chronic schizophrenia or to genetics and you have trouble either initiating action or connecting it with results. Too much dopamine flow and you become manic; scramble your integration of competing ideas and goals and you may be agitated and acutely confused or even schizophrenic. Lower drive level and any failures of lateral inhibition between competing ideas become a smaller problem. Invest all of your dopamine in a few circuits and elaborate those circuits through endless rehearsals and you become a genius or delusional. Nash did both.*

Most scientists score positively on assessments that measure Aspergers, a developmental quirk often characterized by mild autism, driven scholarship in one or two domains, social clumsiness, preoccupation, and scattered learning. Thus, many of us dreamers will identify with Nash to the extent that we are able to identify with anyone. Just as "practice makes perfect," recursive explorations of any specialty, whether economics or photography, sometimes magnify even the smallest first genetic and epigenetic preferences that might exist in a child. Thus, mad or clear, famous or obscure, dopamine fires us up and then aligns or amplifies our quirks. Thank whatever gods may be if yours balances the former with the latter.

James Brody

*Paul Erdos, another genius in mathematics, took 20 mg of Ritalin (methylphenidate, MPH) several times per day. His friends once convinced him to skip the drug and Erdos proved no more theorems until he started it again. MPH is thought to slow dopamine reuptake after it is released from a nerve ending. It is commonly used for narcolepsy, attention deficit disorder, and "depressions" that don't respond to other medicines. Expect to see MPH used more often with the people on this list since most of us, starting in our teens, lose about 7% of our dopamine every 10 years.

References:
Nasar recommends: H. Kuhn (1997) Classics in Game Theory, Princeton; J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, & P. Newman (1987) The New Palgrave: Game Theory, Norton; A. K. Dixit & B. Nalebuff (1991) Thinking Strategically, Norton. Herb Gintis (2000) Game Theory Evolving, Princeton, has been praised but also tagged with a warning that you will need time, a pad, and several pencils in order to read it.

Also:
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi (1998) Creativity and genius: a systems perspective. In Steptoe, A. (Ed) Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament. NY: Oxford, pp 39-66.
Dunbar, R. (1996) Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Hoffman, Paul. (1999) The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth. NY: Hyperion.
Howe, Michael J. A. (1998) Early lives: prodigies and non-prodigies. In Steptoe, A. (Ed.) Genius and the Mind: Studies of Creativity and Temperament. NY: Oxford, pp. 97-110.
Maes, H., Neale, M., Kendler, K., Hewitt, J., Silberg, J., Foley, D. Meyer, J., Rutter, M., Simonoff, E., Pickles, A., & Eaves, L. (1998) Assortative mating for major psychiatric diagnoses in two population-based samples. Psychological Medicine, 28(6), 1389-1401.
Paul, G. (1969) Chronic mental patient: Current status---future directions. Psychological Bulletin, 71(2), 81-94.
Popper, K. (1984/1992), In Search of a Better World. Lectures & Essays from Thirty Years. Routledge, London.
Turner, J. Scott (2000) The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Wright, R. (2000) NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. NY: Pantheon.

copyright, 2002, James Brody, all rights reserved.

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