Energy expectations and the psychology of hard landings.
The American Way of Life has been claimed to be "non-negotiable," but that was said in desperate anticipation of America’s falling off the energy cliff. Energy is The Coin of the Realm in the Kingdom of Life, whether you are an individual, a species, or a nation. The very thought of going hungry can be rattling, in much the same way that a sudden realization of having gone broke makes investment bankers jump out of windows, even before they actually feel the misery of poverty.
That said, not many have started jumping yet, so I’d like to take a brief moment to give a little shout out to the hapless Don Rumsfeld of Wall Street, Emperor Hank Paulson:
FUCK. YOU.
Harsh? Listen to Nouriel Roubini:
The combination of the global interbank lending freeze with the collapse of the speculative, leveraged commodity price bubble have undermined both the confidence of banks in the ability of a far-flung peer bank to pay an obligation when due and confidence in the value of the dry cargo as security for the credit if liquidated on default. The result is that those with goods to export and those with goods to import, no matter how worthy and well capitalised, are left standing quayside without bank finance for trade....
Everyone along the supply chain should worry about their jobs. Many will lose their jobs sooner rather than later.
If cargo trade stops, the wheat doesn’t get exported. If the wheat doesn’t get exported, the mill has nothing to grind into flour. If there is no flour, the bakeries and food processors can’t produce bread and pasta and other foods. If there are no foods shipped from the bakeries and factories, there are no foods in the shops. If there are no foods in the shops, people go hungry. If people go hungry their children go hungry. When children go hungry, people riot and governments fall.
While the very thought of going from the good life to the bad life can be unbearable, good and bad remain relative through a large range of values, because people never having experienced the good life can be quite content, provided basic needs are met. However, having experienced and grown accustomed to the good life, a sudden transition to the bad life still can be psychologically disconcerting, evoking entire suites of innate desperation responses. In America’s case, we got our freak on by choosing to open multiple wars to save the former good life, and to prevent the crushing of our otherwise high national expectations. Epic FAIL!
There are many, many ways hope can be crushed, as when your ideals are brutally violated or betrayed, but one thing that violations of positive expectancy appear to have in common is that the violation hurts most when the need to have positive expectations confirmed is urgent, and when the highest expectations are met with pitiable outcomes, that is, when the violation is severe, sudden, and consequential, even though the consequences may not yet be physically manifest, that is, when the psychological disparity between hope and disappointment is greatest. (I’m looking at you, Barack Obama. And I’m looking at you, America.)
For present purposes, I’ll stick to the thwarting of energy expectancies in individuals, because (a) I’ve studied it a lot in rats, and (b) the processes of acquiring expectancies, being incredulous and disappointed at their violation, and subsequent recovery processes appear apt and analogous to our own soon-to-be-thwarted national economic prospects.
From the Supreme Court decision in 2000 to 9/11 to pre-emptive wars to the torturing of innocents at Guantanamo to the economic meltdown, we have had innumerable high expectations betrayed precisely due to pitting other higher expectations (hope!) of energy resources against the dreaded thwarting of that particularly important hope. Energy ROOLZ, to the exclusion of all our vaunted ideals. So, before we take the final economic plunge, let’s take a look at losing The American Way of Life from the perspective of rats who have become accustomed to and perhaps even physically dependent on preferred energy sources.
Setting them up to put them down
The first step in manufacturing incredulous disappointment is setting high positive expectations. What is true in love is also true for energetic fluxes: The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The set-up is key. Many species have an innate sweet tooth, as sugars indicate high caloric value, so sugar is especially valuable in setting high expectations in rats, just as oil is important in setting high expectations for Americans. Compounding that innate preference for high energy with a true hunger for energy and a source of high energy is how you set the table for high expectations.
Often, when buying 20 lbs of table sugar at the market, the cashier will ask if I’m baking lots of cookies, and to their surprise I reply that I’m going to feed my rats. Rats like sugar? Oh, yes. They love it, especially more so when hungry. And like love, 20 lbs of sugar is 20 lbs of happiness, until it becomes 20 absent lbs of misery. Hope and misery are complex phenomena, intervening variables that are not directly measurable, but they do express themselves in complex suites of motor outflows, such as behavioral, autonomic, and neuroendocrine outflows, so there are multiple ways to measure them indirectly.
Here’s the 24-h profile of the average, freely-feeding rat’s core body temperature waveform in the top panel:
Being nocturnally active, the rat’s body temperature, activity, feeding, drinking, etc., are highest in darkness (represented by the gray area), and lowest in the daytime. This standard circadian profile is, of course, reversed for humans, who are active in the daytime, but is otherwise much the same along most physiological variables as a standard mammalian design.
After taking multiple baseline measures to assure their health, we reduce their evening meal (chow) to bring their body weights to 85% of their final baseline weights and hold them constant. While this may seem cruel, the animals are quite active and healthy, and such food-restriction actually increases longevity in every species tested, including humans, by around 20% of the lifespan. While cutting calories does indeed increase stress hormones that would otherwise be thought to indicate poor health, in this case it is primarily a homeostatic adjustment aimed at increasing caloric efficiency in the body, while increasing motivation for calories in the brain.
(Several years ago, in a review article on stress, we felt obliged to address all of the bad health outcomes associated with high stress, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, drug abuse, etc., but then concluded that those were temporary problems of an over-fed, affluent society, and that the protean stress molecules would probably stand us in better stead under more dire scenarios of the impending doom of economic collapse and food shortages...I was surprised, but glad they were willing to publish such speculation...anyone who scoffed at the idea of collapse then can no longer be scoffing seriously.)
So, having set the table for high expectations by putting a sweet-toothed rat in a state of hunger, we then present them with a once-daily concentrated sucrose solution (32% w/w) for about 5 minutes, for anywhere from 10-14 days, usually at around 3 or 4 hours into the light cycle.
Now, look what happens to their body temperature rhythms after about one or two weeks of drinking the 32% sucrose (bottom panel):
Compared top panel that showing high temperature at night and low temperature by day, the very same animals in the bottom panel have completely re-organize their metabolism around feeding times. Their temperature is high when chow meal arrives at lights out, but crashes thereafter. The vertical arrow in the light cycle shows when sucrose arrives. Here, the animals again ramp up their temperature several hours in anticipation of sucrose. Anticipatory increases hold true for activity levels and stress hormones, as well, reflecting the circadian entrainment of multiple foraging-related physiological events in all major motor systems, including autonomic, behavioral, and neuroendocrine outflows, to two distinct mealtimes by the food-entrainable clock.
Thus, physiology is entirely re-sculpted to anticipate and redirect energy the two most important events of the 24-hour day: Getting more energy. If you want to stay warm, you literally have to bring wood to the fire. Getting energy requires energy expenditure. Think about that as we burn fuel at 43 bucks a gallon at 3 mpg in Iraq: Price is no object when it comes to energy acquisition, the rate-limiting factor of all economic activity.
So, circadian clocks are one form of energy expectancy, but there is at least another, more traditionally defined form of expectancy, the psychologically imprinted or learned, higher order type of associative expectancies, the highest orders of which are spatially and temporally organized and encoded in the neocortex.
As the body warms up via circadian clocks, the brain also warms up and begins processing memories as the animal stirs to the rising titers of stress hormones that kick-start the liver for energy production and autonomic outflows that quicken the heart and breath. And what do you suppose they are thinking about? NASCAR? No. While their engines are certainly roaring, they are waiting to hear the sound of the outer door open and close, because that’s their cue that good times with sapid solutions are imminent. They are waiting for me to bring them their precious sucrose. And they understand the importance of the routine after Day 1.
The chart below shows sucrose intake across days for two different groups of animals: one that drinks a 32% solution for 12 16 days before being unexpectedly shifted to a 4% solution, and one unshifted control group that only drinks 4% sucrose (This is a composite graph of various similar experiments to avoid copyright issues. I obviously extrapolated the asymptotic drinking of the 4% group for illustrative purposes only).
On the first day, neither group drinks much, but then they both rapidly increase intake to asymptote over days. That’s a lot of sucrose to drink in 5 min and 30 sec, about 30% of their total daily calories, enough to grab their circadian clocks and reset them. Notice that the group drinking 4% sucrose (the "bad" stuff) drinks almost as much as the group drinking the 32% sucrose (the "good" stuff). In other words, they find the 4% solution perfectly acceptable and almost as rewarding. The 4% rats don’t show circadian anticipation, but they do show cued Pavlovian excitement when the experimenter enters the room.
There are several things to note about the rapid acquisition phase. First, Jared Diamond and colleagues (yeah, that guy’s all over the place) have shown that there is rapid induction of absorptive capacity of gut tissue after high carb meals, which may explain some of the increased intake at a physiological level. That anticipatory increase in body temperature also probably helps absorption and processing. Another factor is that as the rat drinks ever more sucrose, his supplementary chow meal in the evening is progressively reduced to maintain a steady body weight (analogous to the US economy increasingly preferring empty financial calories over nutritious manufacturing calories).
While these physiological adjustments certainly increase capacity for intake, the rats have to want to drink the sucrose for any of that physiology to make a difference. Wanting and liking are quintessentially mental acts that drive subsequent physiological adaptations as a consequence of ingestion. In a complementary fashion, however, hunger drives up the production of stress hormones that act in brain to increase wanting and liking. And boy, do they want and like. By the final days of training, the little bastards are practically going out of their minds with anticipation, and they literally grab or bite the cup in order to wrest it away, because they simply can’t start drinking fast enough.
Now we pull the rug out & heads explode
Once we entrain the rat physiologically and psychologically to expect 32% sucrose, we unexpectedly yank the rug out from underneath them and give them the 4% sucrose. I didn't bother to indicate where in the graph above this happens, because it's rather obvious. Keep in mind, 4% is perfectly acceptable, unless they are expecting the good stuff. It is the memory and expectancy of the good life that makes the bad life so bad. Notice how the drinking of the high expectancy group utterly collapses upon receipt of 4% sucrose. Not only do they not merely regress to the level of the unshifted 4% control, they vastly undershoot that level, actually suppressing their previous habitual asymptotic rates of intake. What little of the 4% solution they do drink is purely exploratory. They taste, pull their head from the cup, taste again, dig in the cup with their paws, taste their fingers, and maybe taste again before the real panic strikes.
Then, as panic takes hold, they frantically search in, around, under the cup, run around the cage and back, taste again, the whole time testing the reality of the situation. Sometimes, they will slam the cup against the wall. When you remove the cups after this session, you really have to watch your fingers, because now when they bite, they are biting not in anticipatory glee, but in rage.
If you do the training and testing on a radial maze, they criss-cross that maze multiple times, zipping around as if they are late for a very important date, as if they are certain they are constantly in the wrong place, though they reliably return to the target location the most, because that is where they "know" the good stuff is supposed to be, and can’t believe it’s not. This place preference for the target location indicates that the search behavior is directed, and that this is not just random agitation. Positive expectancy has now rapidly turned into incredulity and panic.
Aside from the panic reaction, the underlying physiology and metabolic situation has not really changed substantially from one moment to the next—taking into account the panic reaction, blood glucose is improved. This is a purely psychological reaction to having one’s cliff-high energetic expectations shattered on the rocks below.
Interestingly, as positive expectancy rapidly recedes, a complex panic-like stress response quickly unfolds, as if this bad reaction had been surreptitiously dragged along into the original conditioning process along with the positive expectancy itself, an opponent process, always lurking beneath the surface that is spontaneously released as a complex, multi-motor system reflex as the positive expectancy vanishes in the face of Reality’s facts.
This is akin to the state of mind occupying our political ruling elite: Dependent on oil, high expectations of victory (American Exceptionalism), low on Federal Reserve Fat (food-restricted), having just spent our wealth in an anticipatory burst of activity attempting to realize increased future energy gains, and trying to process the complete failure of purpose, having had those very high expectations utterly thwarted. And very much like rats, they are panicked, incredulous, angry, and disappointed. If you clicked on my big FUCK YOU to Hank Paulson above, you’ll see this psychological phenomenon is also relevant to reactions on Main Street, where the psychology of dashed expectations is just beginning to hit hard. You’d think we humans would be smart enough to avoid this type of predictable catastrophe, but the evidence militates against that kind of hopeful thinking.
Food riot! All hands on deck!
The realization of collapsing energy futures starts in the highest areas of brain, including the entire prefrontal cortex, when low-level gustatory input repeatedly fails to match the established gustatory memories, and then pancakes down through the other lower structures of the brain, setting off alarms and signaling and recruiting system-wide brigades of motor outflows aimed at managing the crisis. This picture shows cortical tissue about an hour after a head explosion. The black dots indicate reactivity to c-Fos, an indicator of recent activity in neurons.
Massive cortical activation upon receiving the unexpected 4% solution stands in sharp contrast to the minimal brainstem circuitry activated by an expected 32% solution. The cortex of animals getting the expected solution showed very little, if any activation, relatively speaking. This activation forms the basis of a massive learning episode that guides later recovery.
As noted above, the behavioral limb of the response is a complex of consummatory sampling of the now relatively repellant 4% solution and the calling forth of search behaviors to find the "missing" 32% solution. These include focal search around the sucrose container, and more global search if the apparatus allows systematic whisking locomotion to examine the substrate, rearing and orienting to examine contextual clues, and outright running between potential sucrose locations. There is also some evidence that the animals find the abrupt thwarting of expectancy emotionally aversive, as they may also seek to escape entirely from the situation. Any escape behavior is likely an irruptive migratory response. Evocation of agonistic behavior is also not uncommon, an angry type of "who stole my cheese?" response, wherein animals attack other dummy animals or the experimenter who may be treated as guilty food competitors. Such outbreaks of aggression are partly due the the reduction in thresholds for aggression by acute stress response.
This next graph shows what happens on three distinct days in the immediate aftermath of drinking various sucrose solutions in terms of autonomic activation. The blue line shows body temperature after drinking the final 32% sucrose (a mild thermogenic effect of calories, with a long lasting rescue of temperature), whereas the pink line shows even greater activation after the first unexpected 4% solution, and the yellow line shows the loss of this activation after the second receipt of 4%:
Autonomic arousal rapidly ensues after detection of the now relatively repellant 4% solution, at least as rapidly as the behavioral responses. While there is no data to my knowledge, this almost certainly includes increases in heart rate and breathing, and sympatho-adrenal responses (adrenaline) to promote perfusion of skeletal muscle and glucose homeostasis. In addition, there is a marked burst in core body temperature that lasts for hours, and which is psychogenic in origin, very much like the psychogenic fevers people get prior to exams or when watching exciting movies. This is evident because the temperature excursion greatly exceeds the thermogenic effects of 32% sucrose, the 4% solution has insufficient calories to promote thermogenic effects, and they drink very little of the 4% solution anyway. Increased brain temperature likely improves chemical trafficking and mental arousal, activity, and memorial capacity.
While the circadian clock has already elevated stress hormones to anticipate sucrose, upon receipt of the unexpected 4% solution, an acute neuroendocrine stress response ensues that further increases plasma stress hormones two- or three-fold higher (not shown). These stress hormones have multiple functions. For example, in the body they act to promote glucose production that serves muscle in search behaviors, whereas in the brain they are critical in stimulating those very search behaviors, as well as helping to consolidate memories of this critical event for future reference. This stress response is also critical to the ability to mount the psychogenic fever mentioned above, as when the acute stress response is blocked, so too is the fever. Thus, all three major motor systems are mobilized in an integrative fashion to meet the demands of the psychological crisis.
Gradual Recovery
The first day is the toughest part of "withdrawal." While the psychological "trauma" of the initial encounter with the unexpected 4% sucrose is largely insensitive to all kinds of drugs seeking to mollify the response, on subsequent days it becomes more amenable to various tranquilizers, suggesting that something has changed in the brain between the first and subsequent encounters with the 4% sucrose. It takes around 8 days for the high expectancy animals to gradually increase their intake of the bad stuff to the levels of the unshifted controls. Over that same recovery period, circadian anticipation slowly dampens, massive cortical activity disappears, and various motor outflows habituate at various rates, until they finally superficially appear to be like the unshifted control animals who never drank the good stuff in the first place. Keep in mind that the animals are recovering in the context of maintaining steady body weights, as their supplementary chow must increase at night when their sucrose concentration is reduced. Under actual starvation, the physiological situation and the ensuing psychological profile and behavior become increasingly desperate.
It’s not that the animals that have gone from the good stuff to the bad stuff have forgotten the good stuff. They have merely learned to gradually inhibit their bad reactions to the comparison of good and bad. The original memory of the good stuff remains intact, as it can be retrieved or disinhibited by various manipulations, resulting in the re-evocation of some of the original reactions.
While this sucrose paradigm is clearly not a perfect analogy to our addiction to foreign oil, it bears certain resemblances. Our energy-based economy and lifestyle bring with them vast incentives to keep it going at all costs, whereas losing or downgrading it is clearly going to increase psychological, if not actual physiological trauma. The suddenness and extent of various expectancy wipe-outs, withdrawal syndromes and recovery events are variables to be determined, but it will all require revising our once high expectations downward. I suspect we’ll learn that a lot of our consumptive expectations were crap to begin with, and we’ll become a little sharper in our thinking.