Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless — Deactivating the gene for a brain protein called stathmin makes lab mice more fearless and less quick to learn fear responses to stimuli associated with painful outcomes. The protein destabilizes microtubule structures that help maintain neuronal connectedness. It is thought that such disruption is a basic prerequisite for learning, which occurs through the creation of new neural connections. Thus, mice that lack the protein do not learn to fear as easily. However, in case you were wondering about the obvious, the study suggests that they do not experience interference with other learning experiences because stathmin is largely restricted to the amygdala, where the fear response is thought to be controlled. The researchers said that the fearless mice were, for example, able to learn to navigate through a maze as well as control animals. How convenient to have a protein specific to the learning processes around fear. (There must have been some intelligent design, don’t you think??!! [grin]) (New Scientist)
There are evident implications for humans, if stathmin has the same role in our brain. I doubt, however, that other learning is so distinct from learning the fear response in humans. In the complex learning process that psychotherapy patients undergo in my field, for example, optimal learning is associated with an optimal level of anxiety. If anxiety is reduced too much, there is no motivation to learn, while if it is excessive, the organism is too overwhelmed to acquire, integrate and make available new information. Disrupting the ability to learn to fear certain experiences, I fear, would in humans disrupt overall learning efficiency.
Moreover, the brain’s fear circuitry is absoutely central and phylogenetically ancient. I would imagine we don’t have a clue how much else in CNS function would be disrupted if we found a way to disable stathmin in humans.
A fearless human being without much capacity to incorporate new learning might not be a problem for some, however. The military might very much like to fund some research into deactivating stathmin in humans, to prevent the fear response from paralyzing soldiers in combat. I imagine that Pentagon officials would not lose sleep at night if new learning — thinking for oneself — were concomitantly inhibited in its recruits. How much thought does one need just to follow orders? As the US’s wars get more and more dubious, it becomes harder to fight them with thoughtful people with even the slightest capacity for questioning authority. With the egregious futility adn duplicity of the invasion of Iraq, the Bush regime may have broken the bank at attracting recruits. (One can only hope.)
Some have worried since the ’50’s about the increasing efficiency and subtlety of mind control and the growing ability of powerful governments to turn their citizens into ‘a nation of sheep.’ Plausible deniability is being perfected. Since the Cold War, I have said that the US is not freer than, say, the Soviet Union was. It is just that its efforts to control its citizens (until the Bush dysasdministration’s transparent, egregious and clumsy lies, which rival those of the rather unsubtle Soviet regime) have been more subtle and refined, more difficult to counter, recognize or talk about.
But until now they have remained largely in the realm of propaganda and spin through media manipulation and co-optation of the educational system, etc. Except for small pilot programs like MK Ultra, we have yet to see it exercised on a direct neural basis, unless you believe the folks who walk around in tinfoil hats. And some say that even those are part of a government conspiracy!
