The Domesticated Brain: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

Disinhibited party animals

The EFs are not only important for reasoning, but play a vital role in our domestication that enables us to coordinate personal thoughts and behaviour with the wishes of others. They become facets of our personality that reflect the way we behave. Given their central role in shaping how we behave, you might imagine that the slightest damage to the PFC would immediately alter our personalities, but impairments in adult patients with frontal lobe damage are not always that easy to spot. Their language is usually intact and they also score within the normal range on IQ measures. However, frontal-lobe damage does change people in profound ways. Patients can be left unmotivated, with a dull, flat affect. Others can become very antisocial, doing things that the rest of us find unacceptable because they no longer care about the consequences of their behaviour.²³

Frontal-lobe damage may mean living for the moment, but this state is not as appealing as it might seem. Imagine if you suddenly no longer thought about getting on in life or how other people viewed your behaviour. Forget planning for the future and avoiding things that might get you into trouble. You would become reckless with money and people. You would do whatever took your fancy, no matter what the consequences. It would be hard to trust such a person. Frontal-lobe-damaged patients may seem normal, but they are often irresponsible, lack appropriate emotional displays and have little regard for the future. They find it difficult to tolerate frustration and react impulsively to minor irritations that the rest of us would let pass.

The most famous case of a change in personality following frontal-lobe damage is Phineas Gage, a twenty-five-year-old foreman who worked for the Rutland & Burlington Railway Company. On 13 September 1848, he was blasting away rocks to clear the way for the rails. To do this, a hole was drilled into the rock, packed with gunpowder, covered with sand and then tamped down with an iron rod to seal the charge. On that fateful day, apparently Phineas was distracted momentarily. He dropped the rod directly on to the gunpowder, igniting it to create an explosion that shot the 6ft metal rod through his left cheekbone under the eye and out the top of his skull to land 60ft away, taking a large part of his frontal lobes with it.

Remarkably, Phineas survived but he was noticeably changed in personality. According to the physician that looked after him, before the accident Phineas was ‘strong and active, possessed of considerable energy of character, a great favorite with his men’ and ‘the most efficient and capable foreman’. After the accident, the doctor produced a report to summarize why the railway company would not re-employ him. Phineas was described as ‘fitful, irreverent, grossly profane and showed but little deference for his fellows’. He was ‘impatient of restraint or advice that conflicted with his desires’. In short, he had become a grumpier, ruder, more argumentative person, such that his former friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage’.

Due to the power of brain plasticity, Gage did eventually recover well enough to hold down another job as a stagecoach driver, but it is not clear whether his personality ever returned to that of the likeable fellow he had been before the accident. There has been considerable debate about Phineas Gage and whether his personality was permanently changed because the records at the time were poorly kept.²⁴ The story has been retold many times and something of a myth has been built up around this famous case. We have a much clearer picture with Alexander Laing, a former trooper in the British Army Air Corp, who is a modern-day Phineas Gage.²⁵ Following a skiing accident in 2000, Alexander suffered frontal-lobe brain damage that left him paralysed and unable to speak. He recovered quickly but on returning home became very antisocial, aggressive and unable to suppress his sexual urges. He is reported to have walked around his parents’ house naked and acted inappropriately to women in public. At the time, his stepmother said, ‘The damage to Alexander’s frontal lobes seems to have exaggerated his character, although experts aren’t sure if this is the case. I think the impulses were always there, but the lack of inhibition means he cannot control himself.’ Of the time around his injury Alexander recalled ten years later, ‘The frontal lobe damage was the worst. It meant I lost my inhibitions and did stupid things. It was like being permanently drunk. Afterwards I got into trouble of all sorts, I was even arrested twice. It was not a good time.’

Today, Alexander runs marathons for charity and seems to have got the better of his impulses, though his personality will probably never be the same as before the injury. During the 2011 London Marathon, he stopped after running 23 miles and began an impromptu dance in response to a Gospel choir performing at the side of the road to encourage runners, much to the delight of the gathered crowds. Only after the intervention of a medic assisting at the marathon was Alexander persuaded to stop dancing and return to the race. He believes that religion has kept him on the straight and narrow, showing that with the right social support, patients with frontal-lobe damage can experience considerable recovery. It also helps that we now have a better medical understanding of the importance of the frontal lobes in controlling our impulses. These cases reveal what happens to adults’ social behaviours following damage to the frontal lobes. Understanding the relationship between EF and the frontal lobes helps explain why young children often behave in a way in which they seem oblivious to others around them and the embarrassment they create for their parents. Their immature frontal lobes have not yet been tuned up by the processes of domestication in the ways of how to conduct oneself in public.

Temper tantrums

‘Daddy, I want it and I want it now!’

Who can forget Veruca Salt, the spoiled brat in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who got everything she wanted? She may have been obnoxious but she really was no different from many young children when they cannot get their way. Around the end of infancy, children enter a phase that parents refer to as the ‘terrible twos’. At this age, children have sufficient communication skills to let others know what they want but they are unwilling to accept no for an answer. It is a very frustrating time for parents because unless they give in to their child’s demands the child can throw a temper tantrum – often for the benefit of a full public audience in a shopping mall or theatre. There is no point trying to reason with most two-year-olds because they do not understand why it is in their interests not to have what they want immediately. That requires the silent manager of the PFC to speak up.

One way to think about the PFC is that rather than supporting just one type of skill, it is engaged in all aspects of human behaviours and thoughts. As we grow older, our behaviours, our thoughts and our interests change. Situations that require some level of coordination and integration will require the activity of the frontal lobe EFs which do not reach mature levels of functioning until late adolescence.²⁶ When adults have to learn a new set of information that conflicts with what they already believe to be true, there is heightened PFC activation during the transition phase, as revealed by functional brain imaging. One interpretation is that they are simply concentrating more, enlisting greater EF activity, but that activation depends on whether they have to contradict their initial beliefs. In this situation, the PFC activity is interpreted as reconciling incompatible ideas by inhibiting and suppressing knowledge that they previously held.²⁷ So rather than regarding any limited ability as being due to immaturity of the PFC, it is probably more accurate to say that changing behaviours and thoughts have not yet been fully integrated into the individual’s repertoire – they are still learning to become like others.

In many social situations, young children think mostly about themselves, which explains why their interactions can be very one-sided. Some of us never grow out of this type of behaviour. These are the selfish individuals we all have encountered who only think about themselves. They do not care about what others think and behave as if their needs and opinions are the only important things in the world. They lack the patience and understanding that is required to have a balanced social relationship.

What happens to children who lack self-control when they grow up into adults? Terrie Moffitt and her team followed up over 1,000 children who had been born in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in 1972–3 and studied them from birth to the age of thirty-two years.²⁸ Each child was assessed for measures of self-control from three years of age based on reports from the parents, teachers, researchers and the children themselves. The results were startling. Children with high self-control were healthier, happier, wealthier and less likely to commit crime. These effects still held when intelligence and social background were taken into consideration. However, this was an observational study so it is difficult to know exactly what aspect of self-control was responsible for the outcome. What aspects of EFs were playing a major role in the children’s entry into society? To answer that, we need a marshmallow, or possibly two.

Tempting marshmallows

In Germany, there was a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages that to determine whether a child was suitable for schooling you would offer them the choice of an apple or a coin.²⁹ If the child chose the apple, they had to remain in maternal custody. If the child chose the coin instead, they were considered ‘worthy of instruction in knightly arts’. The logic behind the test was that a child who chose the apple was simply attracted by the desire to eat the apple, whereas a child who chose the coin could ignore the immediate gratification of the apple in favour of the greater rewards a coin would bring later.

This capacity to delay gratification has become a famous measure of children’s self-control in a task known as the marshmallow test.³⁰ There are different variations of the test but they all involve presenting the child with a tempting reward. In the marshmallow version, children are instructed that the experimenter has to leave the room and that they can eat the treat now but if they wait until the experimenter returns they can have two – a much better deal but one that requires them to delay the gratification. This test has even entered popular culture as a UK confectionery manufacturer in 2011 ran an ad campaign using the same principle to demonstrate how tempting their products were.

Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel used the marshmallow test in the 1960s to measure how long children could delay gratification before giving into temptation. Around 75 per cent of four-year-olds failed to wait, with an average delay of six minutes. The most impulsive children simply gobbled the marshmallow up, but the others with more self-control resisted the urge. Not only did this measure indicate their capacity for self-control, but it predicted how well they got on with classmates and how well they performed academically when they were teenagers. It even predicted which males would later develop drug problems.³¹

All of these achievements of studying, getting on with others and avoiding drugs are components of domestication that require self-control. Studying can be boring and it is all too easy to find other, more interesting things to do. Getting on with others means that you have to be less selfish and more willing to share your time and resources. Avoiding drug use, a complex behaviour, requires at its heart the ability to simply say ‘no’.

The marshmallow test seems to tap into an individual’s natural impulsiveness. You might think that this self-control is all to do with the brain mechanisms for resisting temptation, but families also play a role. Different parenting strategies have been found to be associated with different self-regulatory behaviours in toddlers. In 1963, the famous child psychologist Erik Erikson wrote that ‘the gradual and well-guided experience of the autonomy of free choice’ will contribute to enhancing self-control, whereas over-control by the parent will produce the opposite effect.³² In the decades following that statement, toddler research has generally provided support for this view. When asked to tidy up their toys, toddlers are more likely to be defiant if their mothers apply an over-control strategy of anger, criticism and physical punishment to control the child.³³

One explanation is that children with strict parents have less self-control because they rarely have the opportunity to exercise their own regulatory behaviour, which is necessary in order to learn to internalize as a coping response. The process of domestication does not simply mean learning what the rules are, but when and how to apply them. This fits with classic studies that show that threats of punishment may work in the short term but persuasion is more effective when the potential threat is no longer around. Likewise, children of parents who use assertive persuasion exhibit more self-control because they have to develop self-regulation or suffer the consequences of being too impulsive. So the finding that less discipline leads to better adjustment runs completely contrary to the old saying that by ‘sparing the rod, you spoil the child’. However, children of indulgent parents like Veruka Salt’s also fail to exhibit self-control, indicating that allowing the child to run amok is also not a good strategy.

Of course, domestication strategies depend on how many children you are trying to raise. Clearly there is often competition between siblings and so single-child environments will be different from situations where there is more than one child. Whether such singletons differ from other children raised with siblings is controversial, but in China, which introduced a one-child policy in 1979, grandparents, teachers and employers believe that singletons are spoiled, selfish and lazy because they have been over-indulged by their parents. A 2013 study of these Little Emperors published in the prestigious journal Science found that children born just after the policy was introduced grew up into more selfish adults compared to those born just before.³⁴ They were also less trusting and helpful towards others.

The issue of trust plays an important role in our decisions to delay immediate rewards. After all, we are basing our decision on a promise that we will get something in the future. But what if a child is raised in an unpredictable environment where there is poor supervision as well as others who might steal their possessions or food? For these children, why should they take the risk if all they have known are broken promises? In this situation it would be foolish to wait. This reinterpretation of the delay of gratification finding is supported by studies on trust. If an experimenter promises but fails to give a sticker to four-year-olds in a drawing task, then these children are less likely to delay gratification on a subsequent marshmallow task.³⁵ It’s not just children who do this. Adults will also forego an immediate financial reward for the promise of a greater reward in the future if they are told that the other person is trustworthy or indeed nothing is said about them at all. We are more likely to trust someone if we know nothing about them. However, as soon as the promiser is described as untrustworthy, then adults do not delay and take whatever is on offer. Our decision-making is greatly influenced by who we think we are dealing with.

These findings with adults seem obvious but they do cast a new light on understanding the relationship between self-control and sociability in at-risk children. Psychologist Laura Michaelson proposes that the classic relationship between failure of self-control as a child and later delinquency and criminality as an adult may actually reflect the lack of trust experienced at an early age as much as the biological factors that enable us to delay gratification.³⁶ Children from broken homes who grow up in impoverished households do not trust as much as those raised in supportive environments. No wonder they will take what they can get because, for them, the metaphorical bird in the hand is worth more than two in a bush.

If domestication means encoding our early experiences as contingencies in the neural circuits of the PFC, at the very least our capacity to learn from experience and moderate our behaviour suggests that self-control and life events probably work together in shaping our capacity for trust. Trusted adults strengthen the child’s capacity for self-control. If a child has been told that they are ‘patient’ before the marshmallow test, they will wait significantly longer than children not given this label.³⁷ It may be a simple case of not giving a dog a bad name, as the old saying goes, but rather a good one. It is a simple nudge by an authority figure to help the child to strengthen its own resolve.³⁸

Another revealing facet of self-control is what children do to regulate their behaviour. While waiting for the marshmallow, children who performed best on the task did not necessarily show more self-control but rather they seemed to find ways of taking their minds off the temptation. Many of them used distractions such as not looking at the marshmallow or singing to themselves. They were adopting a strategy known as self-binding – an action that one takes now in order to secure a better future. According to the Greek story, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the Sirens but knew that their singing lured sailors to their deaths. To outwit them, he poured wax into the ears of his crew and had them bind him to the mast so that he would not leap from the ship and drown. Distraction turns out to be a better way of controlling urges because the act of resisting temptation by confronting it and trying to stop thoughts and behaviours can actually produce the opposite result in a psychological rebound effect.

Rebounding earworms and white bears

Rebound effects can happen when you least expect them and often can be very irritating.

Have you ever had that annoying experience where a tune gets stuck in your head – even one that you really hate? No matter how you try, it will simply not go away. The more you try to ignore it, the stronger the song becomes. Like some type of musical itch you cannot scratch.

This is because you are experiencing an earworm. Earworm is a direct translation of the German term ohrwurm, which means ‘earwig’. These are the tunes that we can’t forget, no matter how hard we try. It may be a catchy pop song or some advert jingle. Often we hate the tune but it simply will not go away. They intrude into our consciousness uninvited and, once there, overstay their welcome.

Around nine out of ten have experienced an earworm and diary studies indicate that most of us have an earworm episode at least once per week.³⁹ Most people find them annoying, but no matter how hard they try, these earworms just will not go away on command. And it is not just tunes that get stuck in our head; mental images can lodge in your mind as well.

You can assess your own mental-image suppression with the following test. Say out loud each thought or image that comes into your head over the next five minutes. Time yourself. You can say anything, but the only rule is that you must not think about a white bear. Remember that – anything but a white bear. Now try it.

Did the image of a polar bear pop into your mind? When my Harvard colleague Dan Wegner conducted this simple experiment, he found that participants could not help but think of a white bear and the more they tried to suppress the thought of a white bear, the more it rebounded back.⁴⁰ The reason for this obstinate effect is that in attempting not to think about the white bear, processes in our mind actively seek out white bears so as to monitor them and prevent them from entering awareness. However that monitoring in itself brings them into consciousness.

When people try to suppress unwanted thoughts, they come thundering back into consciousness with even greater strength. This failure of self-control can have implications for our domestication. Inappropriate sexual thoughts and racist stereotypes are both things that we would rather not think about, but in doing so, they become all the more vivid in our minds. In one study, adults were shown a picture of a skinhead and asked to write an essay about a day in the life of the individual portrayed in the photograph. Half of them were instructed not to use any stereotypes. After the essay, they were taken to a room with a row of eight empty chairs and told that the jacket on the end chair belonged to the skinhead they had just written about and were about to meet. Those who had suppressed the stereotype positioned themselves further away from where they thought the skinhead would be sitting than those who had not been given such instructions. This is the rebound effect in action. Even though these adults had not used stereotypes, actively suppressing the thoughts had altered their behaviour to make them even more susceptible to acting in a prejudiced way.⁴¹

Sometimes we cannot help ourselves, especially when our capacity for self-control has been compromised. After sustaining a concussion to his head, Basil Fawlty, the hapless hotel owner in the British classic comedy Fawlty Towers, was at pains not to mention the war when a group of German tourists came to stay. The more he tried to avoid mentioning the war, the more he let it slip during conversation. For children it may be marshmallows, but for adults it is all the thoughts and actions that we would rather not express in public because of the consequences they would have in terms of what others might think about us. Domestication means behaving in ways that are socially acceptable, something that requires sufficient self-control. Such self-control is difficult for young children, but for some adults, particularly those whose EFs are compromised by damage, disease or drugs, it continues to represent a considerable challenge.

Filth, harm, lust and Jesus

For some individuals, intrusive thoughts and behaviours completely undermine their ability to behave appropriately in social situations. Impulse control disorder (ICD) covers a variety of conditions acquired through disease and injury as well as those that arise during development. Phineas Gage and Alexander Laing had acquired ICD from frontal damage and there are various forms of dementia resulting from brain disease of the frontal lobes that produce syndromes where behaviour becomes inappropriate. However, for some individuals, they are born with ICD that impairs their social functioning.

One developmental disorder, named after French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, that has become synonymous with ICD is Tourette Syndrome (TS). TS is a condition characterized by involuntary thoughts and behaviours. These can be body jerks but they include vocal tics, from simple grunts to shouting obscenities in public or corporallia. This is often how they come to the attention of others, because strangers fail to understand that these individuals are unable to control their impulses. To someone who is not aware that an individual has TS, this can seem like the height of rudeness, which is why TS sufferers often end up in difficulty in social settings.

TS is a spectrum disorder that first appears around school age, increases during pre-adolescence but, for most, declines by the beginning of adulthood. The incidence may be as many as one in a hundred children, is more common in males than females and runs in families, indicating that it is a developmental brain disorder with a genetic basis. The typical symptoms relate to impulse control, which supports the idea that ICD must be related in some way to the PFC. This link has been confirmed by imaging studies that reveal that the connectivity of the PFC to an area of the brain that regulates behaviours known as the basal ganglia is altered in persons with TS.⁴²

Those with TS fight a constant battle to inhibit their tics, especially in public, which usually makes the condition much worse, just like Basil Fawlty trying not to mention the war. As the pressure to behave normally in a social situation increases, the urge to tic increases, which makes it build up like a sneeze. And just like a sneeze, it becomes involuntary so that they must tic in order to get some relief. As one boy, Jasper, with TS explained on a HBO television special, ‘When I try to hold back too much, you can’t think of anything except holding them back and you can’t think of anything except doing them.’⁴³

Similar intrusive thoughts are also reported in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), another ICD that affects around two out of every hundred adults in the West.⁴⁴ Obsessions are the tormenting thoughts whereas compulsions are the activities that the sufferer must engage in to counteract the obsession. If I am obsessed by thoughts of filth then I may feel the compulsion to wash my hands repeatedly.

Sir Aubrey Lewis, an English psychiatrist, described how obsessions generally fall into one of four categories: thoughts related to filth, thoughts related to harming oneself or another, thoughts about sex and the urge to blaspheme. What makes all these ICDs relevant to social acceptance is that all of these topics are associated with behaviours that need domestication. Inappropriate and excessive filth, harm, lusting and blasphemy would be frowned upon and so there is a need to keep such thoughts and behaviours in check. Currently the same inhibitory circuitry of the PFC and basal ganglia implicated in TS is also a prime suspect for OCD.⁴⁵ Like TS, there is a heritability factor, with OCD running higher in families, and it is more common in identical than non-identical twins. Not surprisingly, around half of those with TS exhibit obsessive-compulsive behaviours.

Many of us have intrusive thoughts from time to time or engage in peculiar habits. It could be our morning bathroom routines or it might be the coffee break that we always take at the same time of the day at the same coffee shop. Habits and routines are part of normal life, but we can happily switch or stop them should the need arise. They don’t get in the way of us living our lives. However, individuals with ICDs can be ostracized from normal social integration. For many ICD sufferers, the worst aspect of their condition is not the disabling nature of their thoughts and behaviours, but the stigmatizing shame and embarrassment they can feel in public.

It wasn’t me but the wine talking

Most of us lose control occasionally and, for many, letting go is part of being sociable. Otherwise we are uptight, too rigid and too inhibited. This is one reason why people drink alcohol. Contrary to popular misconceptions, alcohol is not a stimulant that turns someone into a party animal, but rather a depressant that weakens the inhibitory capacity of the frontal lobes, thereby unleashing the wilder, undomesticated animal with all its untethered drives. That is why we eat more, get into fights, lose reason and become more sexually active when we are drunk. After a night of misguided behaviour, many people wake up and explain that ‘I was not myself’ or ‘It was the wine talking’. Of course, wine doesn’t talk and if you were not yourself, then who were you?

As a domesticated species that has evolved to get on with each other, we must be careful not to insult or upset other members of our group. However, some of us harbour illicit thoughts and attitudes that are best kept to ourselves. If we care about what others think, then we try to keep all of these stereotypes, biases, drives and mistaken beliefs under wraps because we know that they are unacceptable. We may even understand that they are wrong but nevertheless they linger in our unconscious. However, just like white bears and earworms, the more we try to suppress these negative aspects of our self, the more they can rebound back despite our best efforts.

Whether we can suppress unwanted thoughts or not, it does call into question what our true nature is. Is it the inner secrets that we keep under lock and key in our mind, or the public persona we share with the world? Most of us probably would prefer to know about someone’s secrets because ultimately we would be suspicious that individuals were not being honest about their true self. Even though someone might successfully hold back unpleasant aspects of their personality, the danger is that they might not always be able to control them.

The cost of control

Have you ever come out of a stressful exam or interview and thought that you could devour a whole tub of ice-cream? Or maybe it was an emotional movie that left you drained. Why do many people who endure a stressful experience want a stiff drink or to raid the fridge in search of comfort foods that are high in fat and sugar? One intriguing idea is that when we succumb to these temptations, we are experiencing ego depletion.

Ego depletion comes from American psychologist Roy Baumeister, who believes that enduring something stressful exhausts our capacity for willpower to the extent that we give in to temptations that we would rather avoid.⁴⁶ In one of his studies, he made hungry students eat bitter radishes rather than delicious chocolate cookies.⁴⁷ Even people who like a bit of radish in their salad would find that task difficult. However, Baumeister was not interested in eating habits. He was really interested in how long the students would persevere on an insoluble geometry task. The students who had been allowed to eat the cookies stuck at the geometry task on average for about twenty minutes, whereas those who were forced to eat the radishes gave up after only eight minutes. They had used up all their willpower to eat the radishes so they were left with less reserve to cope with another situation of completing a difficult problem.

Performance on one task that requires effort can therefore have unforeseen consequences for a subsequent situation that is completely unrelated except that it requires effort. This is why Baumeister regards willpower as a mental muscle that can become exhausted. We apparently spend quite a bit of time avoiding temptations. For one week, German adults carried around BlackBerries that quizzed them once in every two-hour period what they were thinking about. They were found to spend an average of three to four hours of each waking day avoiding temptations and desires.⁴⁸

Just maintaining one’s composure can be ego depleting. Not being allowed to laugh at hilarious comedy sketches, firing employees, enduring others in crowds are all situations where we have to exert self-control that leads to ego depletion. We exhibit more ego depletion at the end of the day, which is when couples are more likely to fight, after a hard day at the office. We become less tolerant of others and blame our spouses for the problems that are really generated by work.

When we are ego depleted, we eat more junk food, drink more alcohol, spend more time looking at scantily clad members of the opposite sex and generally have less control over our behaviour. Not only do we give into temptation, but we have an increased desire for forbidden fruit.

There’s no one in control

Most of us believe that we are in control. We may dilly and dally about making decisions, but we still think that we are the ones making the choices. We feel the authorship of actions and ownership of thoughts. And yet we sometimes surprise ourselves when we do things that seem so out of character. It’s as if we have an inner scorpion determined to behave the way it wants to.

We must keep these beasts at bay. In order to be domesticated, we must be able to control ourselves and learn when and where behaviour is appropriate. This self-control is our capacity to regulate and coordinate competing drives and urges. It develops over childhood, supported by the executive control mechanisms of the PFC that act to suppress and inhibit thoughts and actions that may potentially sabotage our goals. By observing others and learning what is appropriate, children learn to engage their self-control. When these control mechanisms are impaired, individuals are at the mercy of automatic thoughts and behaviours. Moreover, they are unable to foresee the consequences of their actions and become impulsive, trapped in the moment of immediate gratification.

If impulse control emerges as the interaction between biology and environment, it would seem that it is wise to provide children with guidelines about what is socially acceptable but not try to enforce them by external pressure. Nor should they be left alone or indulged. One size does not fit all and strategies for domesticating children will depend on the individual child, the parents and the culture. This variation in impulsivity reflects both individual temperaments but also the social environments that foster strategies for shaping and modifying thoughts and behaviours. If our social interactions are to be successful, we need to maintain control in company but that comes at a cost. When we resist the temptation to act inappropriately or not say what is on our mind because we might offend or upset others, then there can be consequences. Rebound effects and ego depletion show that there can be a price to pay for maintaining a veneer of respectability and when disease, damage or drugs compromise our self-control, we become victims of unconscious thoughts and behaviours as the story of the coherent individual that we try to maintain comes apart. When someone loses control, they often end up in trouble since they break moral codes and laws that society has put into place to guide our domestication. But what if there were no rules? Would we still learn to live together or would all hell break loose?