Conversation with Dr. Jaak Panksepp on the neural foundations of Incest Aversion

Jaak Panksepp

A response to the article: Incestuous Science: Evolutionary Psychology, Behaviorism, and the Incest Taboo

Panksepp: …Of course, your incest question cannot easily be answered at an empirical level. As you might suspect, my own thinking would tend toward a neuro-ethological emotional systems perspective. All of the ingrained emotional systems of the brain have sensitivities that fluctuate as a function of experience, and the more a system has been repeatedly stimulated naturally by a single type of stimulus, the more it habituates to further arousal. On the surface, I agree this strong psycho-behavioral tendency may be encapsulated in the concept of "blocking" but a deeper understanding would, of course, require consideration of the underlying neural issues. . . which perhaps no one has yet attempted.

Marr: I agree that an answer to the incest question cannot be easily answered from a integrated behavioral (molar or overt behavior) and neuro-psychological (molecular or covert behavior) level, but the point is that an attempt to provide an answer from such a comprehensive empirical perspective has never been made. In my opinion, this is because of a pervasive neglect of neuroscience by social science, and an equally common neglect of applying the metaphors of neuroscience to explain (however imperfectly) key behavioral traits of humankind, of which incest is one example. To wit, there is no literature in learning theory or neuro-psychology that explores the actual neuro-behavioral mechanics of incest aversion, and for the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology), neuroscience is generally neglected as an informing discipline, and thus explanations for incest are based on simplistic ‘blank slate’ concepts of conditioning, or teleologically inferred instinctive brain states or circuits that have are equally uninformed by neuroscience. So arguments of nature vs. nurture regarding ‘incest’ are inherently unresolvable because neither of them are grounded to our knowledge of our organic brain.

Secondly, as I read the relevant literature, ‘blocking’ and ‘habituation’ are two different things that differ in their behavioral and neural instantiations, and both must be considered as variables that simultaneously come into play to influence sexual aversion, or on the flip side, sexual anticipation. Whereas habituation refers to a diminution of sensitivity to primary unconditioned stimuli (US’s such as food, sex, alcohol), blocking refers to the reduction in the associative strength of redundant discriminative or conditioned stimuli (CS’s such as sounds, visual cues, etc.). There are many neurally based hypotheses for blocking that are being researched empirically and debated in the research literature, but none involve habituation per se.

Panksepp: With respect to incest-avoidance, I have tended to think in terms of opioid modulation of social affect. It is well established that both sexual and non-sexual social pleasures have substantial opioid components, and it is also known that opioid pleasure is self-limiting (i.e., tolerance sets in, which helps to make new patterns of stimulation more attractive/salient)—yielding perhaps, the time tested result that "exotic is erotic." If one assumes that opioids in the brain are state-control rather than information-control systems, and hence have widely broadcast effects in the brain, I could imagine that continuous social exposure will desensitize opioid fields in the brain to sexual arousal by those same stimuli, yielding diminished erotic desires toward those habituated inputs. In other words, one would need new perceptual inputs to arouse sexual appetitive arousal. Very similar processes happen in feeding with stimulus-specific satieties, but they appear to have different time-scales, with dishabituation being perhaps more rapid for gustatory rewards than sexual ones (although I can’t remember anyone ever contrasting them directly).

Of course, there are bound to be many more relevant brain chemistries involved than just endogenous opioids, but I think this type of view could almost be seen as a compromise between the type of behaviorist view you are advancing and a more teleological evolutionary view that is coupled to real neural-systems analysis. I agree that the traditional social-psych evolutionary psychology view is off the mark, but one can imagine a teleology being built into a relevant emotional system at a neurochemically controlled neuro-affective level (e.g., the time-courses of tolerance in different appetitive and reward systems). In this view "blocking" become a multi-dimensional conceptual category that needs to be cashed out in neuroscientific research programs that pay equal respect to traditional learning theory and neuro-ethological approaches that do not neglect basic affective constructs.

Marr: Any rewarding experience, from a day on the beach to a roll in the hay represents a multiple array of stimulus events that may be experienced in full or experienced in some attenuated form. For example, I may daily drive past the beach and daily see an attractive coworker, but experiencing a day at the beach or an affair with that coworker introduces many more stimulus events than can be otherwise anticipated or modeled. So can habituation occur to an entire experience if only the shadow of that experience is perceived? Common experience at least suggests not. That is, attenuated experience (continually seeing a member of the opposite sex) does not habituate the entire experience (continually having sexual relations with a member of the opposite sex). This is not true from practical experience (we can have obsessions for the girl next door that are actually fueled by casual contact) nor would I gather from experimental evidence.

Essentially, incest aversion, or more appropriately, incest apathy represents a decrease in the affective state that is embodied in the anticipation of having sex with kith or kin, and the neurological events that underscore that anticipation (namely the activity of midbrain dopamine systems). Anticipation (or cognitive modeling or fantasy) may be rapidly suppressed by the sudden realization of the strong negative implications of the very act of fantasy (which explains the rapid sexual disinterest that follows when we are for introduced to kin folk such as first cousins, adopted children, in-laws, etc.), and it may be slowly suppressed by ‘blocking’ mechanisms that represent the interference of prior learning with new experiences that logically should elicit sexual response. Of course, anticipation may be indirectly reduced through the habituation of a goal state that habituates with experience, but because we do not truly experience a sexual experience that reduces the salience of a stimulus object (e.g. the girl next door), habituation to my mind is not the primary cause of incest aversion.

Finally, your comment on the necessity to ‘cash out’ blocking concepts through neuroscience is on mark, and current research on blocking integrates neuroscience with learning theory and ethology. However, I believe teleological reasons have little or no bearing on the neurological data that are used in current research on the phenomenon, mainly because teleological reasons are untestable in principle. For example, I see little or no evidence of teleological reasoning common in evolutionary psychology in any of the literature of learning theory (although such reasoning is often used to preface scholarly articles in learning theory) but the primacy of ethological and neurological perspectives is commonly granted.

Pankesepp: It does seem that your approach is respecting such levels, as is Kent Berridge’s adaptation of our own expectancy/SEEKING view, but I don’t see much of such rational blending of ethological and neural analyzes in modern bio-behavioral approaches. For instance, Wolfram Schulz, with his wonderful recordings from primate DA cells, seems to be forcing an associationist type "reward-prediction error" view onto a brain system that is fundamentally a core motivational/emotional state-control system. He is using correlative data about the many converging inputs to the dopamine system to generate a causal argument as to the outputs of the system, while ignoring a mountain of data about the ethological behavior patterns the DA system promotes. That strikes me as a fundamental error (mistaking correlates for causes), but one that seems to be rapidly assimilated by the robust and lively neuro-behaviorist community.

Marr : I agree in principle with your comments, but I think that problems you cite are a matter of neglect rather than representative of a fundamental disagreement (after all, neuroscientists are far more constrained by the empirical facts of behavior, neural or otherwise, than any other group of psychologists I know). Call it if you will a sin of omission rather than commission, a sin that (and I say this with respect) you too may charged with making, since in your book ‘Affective Neuroscience’ learning theory was not emphasized. Let me clarify my position with a more fitting example than Shultz.

Shulz’s ‘prediction error’ conceptualization of reinforcement finds a much more comprehensive representation in the work of the neuropsychologists (and Skinnerian behaviorists) John Donahoe and David Palmer (available in selected pdf re-prints- 1997- on the website of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior). In 1993, their book ‘Learning and Complex Behavior’ posited a unified reinforcement principle that closely approximates Shulz’s later work. The URP applied to both respondent (Pavlovian) and operant (Skinnerian) behavior, and reinforcement is grounded to dopamine activity. Thus reinforcement occurs when a ‘discrepancy’ is perceived on a behavioral level, and on a neural level when dopamine is liberated between the synaptic clefts between neurons. As such dopamine contributes to anticipatory processes necessary for preparing voluntary action by focusing attention, increasing synaptic efficiency, and on a conscious level, is reported as an affective state. However, the role of dopamine as a critical constituent of affect, and as one of the biochemical bases of other critical emotional systems (fear, attachment, play) of emotion, is entirely ignored in D and P’s work, and in private correspondence David Palmer admitted as much, claiming that space would not allow a full integration of emotion into their analysis. Neglect of course is not a research strategy, but the continual refusal to comprehensively understand the ramifications of an organic brain is far more of a problem among social scientists in the large such as sociologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. I have no easy answer for this problem, save for my own private effort from my own drmezmer website to satirize and expose this shameful state of affairs that has made psychology more of a failed science than a mind science.

Panksepp: I like the way that you emphasize the need to blend ethological and learning-theory perspectives, but I do not see that synthesis emerging robustly in the neuro-behaviorist literature that I read. For instance, the amygdala-fear-learning community almost completely ignores the evolutionarily provided FEAR system of the brain which descends from the amygdala. Hardly a soul on the Anglo-American scene is willing to even entertain that such an evolved emotional system does elaborate some experiential aspects—-rather, envisioning it as a psychologically vacuous motor-output system. From my perspective, the many intrinsic emotional/action tools that evolution provided so that learning mechanisms could work efficiently are still being largely neglected (if not actively marginalized). Am I missing something? Has an explicit consideration of affect and other aspects of consciousness become mainstream in the bio-behavioral approach? Is there a literature that you would recommend getting in touch with? You might also note such a literature, if it exists, in your essay. If that literature really does not exist, what needs to be done to help shake the system toward a coherent psycho-evolutionary-ethological-learning systems synthesis? I think only an even-handed blending of such views could reverse the tide of fairly shallow (i.e., teleologically modularized) evolutionary psychology thinking that has captivated so many brilliant minds.

The literature that you are seeking does not exist, since psychological research is fragmented into separate data languages and methodologies that are rarely seen as interdependent. Consider the ethologically informed mind sciences of learning theory (e.g. Pavlov, Tolman, Bolles, Skinner, etc.) and affective neuroscience (Panksepp, Berridge, Damasio). Ultimately, affective neuroscience is integral to learning theory (and vice versa), but such interdependence requires an integration of disparate sets of metaphors, from the contingency and associational language of behaviorism to the molecular language of neuroscience to the molar language of expectancy, emotion, and affect. Such a pluralistic yet neurologically grounded point of view is not within the purview of journalistic literature, which as a matter of course is far more restrictive in the data languages and methodologies that are permitted. But it is within the domain of explanatory models that are more literary in scope and can be constructed with both academic and popular audiences in mind. To my knowledge only the neuro-psychologist Kent Berridge has attempted to merge learning theory and affective neuroscience in his admirable synthesizing perspectives, yet his work is not well known and its practical and philosophical implications unplumbed. The only ‘popular’ literature that advances such an explanatory frame work is provided from of all places, linguistics. Cognitive linguistics (the work of Lakoff, Falconnier, Turner, etc.) demonstrates that language and comprehension is rooted not in a disembodied logic, but from embodied processes that are not digital, but are emerge from an organic brain.

My derivation of an explanation of incest avoidance from learning theory (blocking) and affective neuroscience is a case in point. Incest aversion is a topic of interest primarily to evolutionary psychology, sociology and anthropology, whereas blocking derives from learning theory and neuromodulator (dopamine) based accounts of incentive motivation come from neuroscience. Where does one begin to find an academic audience that knows all these disparate subject matters and cares to explore the new directions they may lead both philosophically and psychologically? At present, like Diogenes, I am continuing to look for an honest answer to that question.

The Problem of Incest: A Debate with Dr. Sandra Leiberman

Incest Wars

A Debate

Arguably, the most fixed and inexplicable behavioral artifact of human nature is the near universal predilection towards incest aversion. The fact that we are disinclined to be sexually drawn to kith and kin certainly doesn't stand to reason, namely the rationalistic mental calculus that informs our common sense. Lately, evolutionary psychology has adduced it all to an inborn neural circuit, activated by growing up in close proximity, that allows us to instinctively detect kin, and thus to avoid sexual relations with them. But are we like turtles and finches, and possess an imprinting mechanism, or is there another process at work, at once more subtle and plainly in sight? That mechanism is learning, or how experience shapes behavior. However, what common sense informs us learning is like and what the modern science of learning tells us are quite different things, and engage at once not common sense but insights from our animal cousins and the quirky mechanics of our own brains. So how do these arguments shape up? I offer two different theories on the matter, an explanation based on learning theory, and an explanation based on evolutionary psychology. Which one is right? That I leave to the reader to decide. I do offer however a debate on the issue between me, the modest author of the learning theory argument, with Dr. Sandra Leiberman, the primary author and exponent of the evolutionary psychology or EP position.

A learning explanation for incest avoidance.

An evolutionary explanation for incest avoidance.

The Debate

Marr: I enjoyed your article on incest. Your data, methods, and conclusions are very clear, and I concur in general with your conclusions. My take however on operative and neural explanation of incest avoidance course is different, but as I am sure you agree, an explanation of incest must be based on neuroscience.

Leiberman: No, I would suggest that the neurophysiological instantiation of programs for incest avoidance is ONE level of explanation required for a complete understanding of incest avoidance behaviors. It is not necessary for the explanation to be based on neuroscience. Other levels of explanation include considerations of the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and the types of cognitive programs expected to exist to solve each problem. Any Tooby and Cosmides article should spell this out loud and clear.

Marr: For issues regarding behavior and motivation, a hybrid discipline has recently arisen called ‘affective neuroscience’. Practiced and espoused by psychologists such as Jaak Panksepp, Gerald Edelman, and Kent Berridge, affective neuroscience mixes and matches a behavioral language such as response rate, affect, etc. with neurological language such as dopamine, nuclei etc. to arrive at explanations for behavior that require behavior to be informed by the data language of neuroscience, but not necessarily to be reduced to neuroscience. Thus a statement that behavior need not be explained by neuroscience is a bit disingenuous, since neuroscience or the metaphors of neuroscience are always part of the equation, much like our common mixing and matching of metaphors of pain and suffering with biological metaphors of viruses and infection allows us to understand our bodies and how to care for them.

In the past ten years, affective neuroscience has demonstrated that human ‘drives’ for such things as food, sex, etc. are not singular processes, but may be bifurcated into processes that are different psychologically (i.e. behaviorally) and physiologically. Thus ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’, anticipation and consumption are two very different things that correspond to different behavioral laws and different physiological processes. For the sex drive in particular, sexual anticipation is different from sexual attraction, and the hypothesis necessarily follows that sexual anticipation is amenable to the same behavioral principles such as ‘blocking’ that have been demonstrated to inhibit similar drive like behavior such as approaching food, avoiding shock, etc.

Regarding incest, the question is whether proximity or predictability is the key to sexual aversion. That is, if sexual predictability is experimentally altered by changing expectations (as in Oedipus’s predicament) or incidental expectations (as in a child growing up and not historically expecting sexual relations with kin), will the 'habit' of sustained expectations block sexual anticipation if those expectations are logically removed in the future? For example, would Oedipus see his wife again in the same light if it were revealed a few weeks later that she was not indeed his mother? (I may add that proximity or associative learning was a key principle in early Pavlovian models of learning, but this has since been superceded by present day interpretations of Pavlovian conditioning that see predictability as key, not proximity. For example, a bell (CS) is associated with food (US), and an animal subsequently salivates upon the solitary introduction of the bell. Present day learning theory attributes this behavior to the value of the CS as a predictor of food rather than due to its mere association with food. It is thus ironic that EP conceptualizations of incest avoidance as due to a pairing of stimulus events --brother and sister in pre-adolescence- entail de-facto Pavlovian mechanisms that have been long been discredited in learning theory!)

These are hypotheses that do not have to engage evolutionary psychology, but in a general discussion must do so because in my opinion the teleologically informed principles of EP block the consideration of alternative hypotheses such as these. For example, it was because of the teleological principles of a God creating the universe and man that stopped a serious consideration of Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the universe, and for Darwinian evolution, it impedes consideration of evolution to this day.

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Marr: Blank slate explanations for behavior can be attributed to Skinnerian methodological behaviorism, but must not be extended to behaviorism itself, which has long recognized the influence of innate or nativistic influences on behavior. Indeed, the data language of Pavlovian conditioning is commonly used in conjunction with neurological data to provide explanations of behavior that are far removed from the Skinnerian point of view. A case in point of course is the concept of blocking that I briefly discussed in the small article I sent you. The web site of Kent Berridge is an excellent starting point for knowledge of this bio-behavioristic perspective. If you posit an evolved neural architecture or module to explain incest, you must have a program to test that hypothesis. That of course involves neuroscience.

Leiberman: Not necessarily. It is possible to generate TESTABLE HYPOTHESES regarding the design of an information processing circuit for kin detection and sexual aversions. You do not need to rely on neuroscience. It will be important to look for neural circuitry in the brain to have a complete understanding of how this system works, but as I said above, a neuroscience level of explanation is compatible with other cognitive explanations of behavior.

Marr: If you are going to design a testable hypothesis regarding the design of an information processing circuit for kin detection, you must rely on neuroscience, and would if you were testing the design of an information processing circuit of silicon or biological cells. For example, if I were to deduce the circuitry that is embedded in the microchip of my computer, the inputs (keystrokes) and outputs (readouts) tell me nothing about its design, or whether the design is digital, analog, parallel, sequential, built on silicon, or built on neurons. To find out how computer circuits work, I therefore have to constrain my theorizing by actual facts about how microchips are built. Many cognitive explanations for behavior do indeed ignore the workings of the human brain, and that is a failure noted by many neuroscientists. In the words of the distinguished neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, "it is a mistake to believe something is biologically real simply because one can computationally simulate the shadow of an end result…. it is certainly premature and unwise, for any science of mind to neglect the brain, as is still too common in evolutionary psychology, and most of psychology, in general."
(p118, Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology).

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Marr: Neuroscientific perspectives on evolutionary psychology however take a very different route than that espoused by > EP practitioners. I strongly recommend you peruse Jaak Panksepp's article on the ‘7 sins of evolutionary psychology’ to note ‘corrective’ suggestions to EP that I espouse as well.

Leiberman: I am sure there is misunderstanding here too.

Marr: When Panksepp wrote his article on the Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology, he invited distinguished evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker, David Buss, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby to respond for a follow up article that appeared in the Journal Evolution and Cognition entitled Seven Sins for Seven Sinners. They refused comment. So much for resolving misunderstanding if they cannot contribute to a distinguished journalistic forum to achieve this end.

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Marr: Your data and conclusions fit almost exactly (in my opinion) with a Pavlovian explanation that in turn maps to neurological events that have been well observed in the current literature. The difference is that incest aversion is due to the recruitment of many different morphological structures in the brain, from the neocortex to the hippocampus. Some of these structures evolved from hunter-gatherer days, and some are far more ancient (particularly the dopamine system). It is my strong belief that incest avoidance is a spandrel from their integrated activity and is not an adaptation. This I am confident can be demonstrated theoretically and empirically.

Lieberman: As for the brain regions, this all sounds fine to me. However, I am not going to argue whether incest avoidance is an adaptation -- there is clear evidence from humans, non-human animals, plants, and other more simple creatures that avoidance of sexual reproduction with individuals having a high probability of sharing genes by virtue of common descent would have been advantageous. The fact that an incest avoidance system might use some of the same neuro-chemicals to regulate attraction that are used for other purposes does not mean that it is not an adaptation. Again, you are confusing levels of explanation. The same building blocks can be used to have extremely different effects computationally.

Marr: Incest of course has deleterious effects, and I agree with you that there are sound logical grounds for its avoidance. But you cannot impute mechanism from logical necessity. In the natural world incest avoidance is also due to the unintended consequences of behavioral tendencies that occur for reasons that have an entirely different logic. For example, animals usually disperse into the environment shortly after birth, thus making it practically impossible for kin to interbreed. But, as any farmer will tell you, keep a litter of bunnies/pigs/puppies etc. together, and incest will occur as a rule. So although dispersion occurs for certain evolutionary reasons, the unintended practical consequence or spandrel of incest avoidance follows because animals are dispersed into a larger group.

I also fail to see how levels of explanation are confused, since affective neuroscience uses converging methodologies, and does not conflate them. That is, I can use neurochemistry (e.g. dopamine systems and the behavioral processes that they influence) to inform avoidance behavior just as I use neurochemistry (adrenaline) to inform why other primary behaviors such as anger and fear. That an incest avoidance system may use neurochemicals presupposes that you have a neurally based theory for such a system to begin with. EP does not have this, and is thus unconstrained by any neurological facts.

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Marr: You use information processing metaphors to explain incest avoidance, but much of the brain works in an analog rather than digital manner, and these metaphors simply cannot apply. Blocking of course is a case in point.

Lieberman: Last I checked, the brain is a computational device that processes information. This is a level of explanation that allows one to think through the kinds of information required to solve a particular problem.

Marr: If the last time you checked the brain was a computational device, may I suggest you check again. According to modern neuroscience, the brain is far removed from the computational picture so commonly portrayed by EP. To pursue this argument let me quote the distinguished neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp from his article "The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology" .

P116-117

"Although there is increasing talk of neural circuits for cerebral modules, especially since evolutionary psychology became a compelling view in cognitive neuroscience, none of the proposed sociobiological modules have coalesced with establish neural realities. … Instead of a solid confrontation with the brain, there is abundant talk of computational representational views that ignore the fact that many neuroscientists are not convinced that such information processing metaphors provide much that resembles an accurate perspective of how the brain creates meanings. Perhaps the higher cortical systems are ‘computational’ by some stretch of the digital information processing metaphor, but the subcortical reaches that mediate emotions and motivations are not. ….We should never forget that the capacity to simulate certain brain functions in a digital processor does not mean those computations reflect physiological realities…. Evolutionary psychology, as most other forms of cognitive psychology, has been inspired by computer science rather than the molecular biology/neuroscience revolutions of the past three decades. Indeed, at times, it seems that practitioners of evolutionary psychology have an active aversion to organic perspectives. They talk about the brain simply as a modular computational device. Although that view has also been pushed forward by many cognitive neuroscientists, an equally fundamental alternative is rarely discussed: mental life is fundamentally organic."

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Marr: Ultimately, an explanation for incest is an empirical question, not a theoretical one. Presently, we have the tools and the data to arrive at an explanation for incest aversion that will demonstrate how evolved structures account for the behavior, but this explanation will be constrained by neuroscience, a constraint that EP has scarcely acknowledged and has never tested.

How we disagree:

The brain is not a computer, sexual anticipation as a ‘behavior’ is not controlled for experimentally in any research on incest (thus your work is incomplete and conclusions premature), and the metaphors and evidence of neuroscience is a critical and integral part of the psychological enterprise, and are wrongly not considered by EP and much of cognitive science (that is, contrary to what you say, cognitive science is not compatible (or integrated) with neuroscience because generally it’s not informed or constrained by neuroscience to begin with!). As for incest, my hypothesis is clear. It must be tested empirically rather than be dismissed or even confirmed logically. That must be the enduring challenge of your work as a psychologist and a scientist.

Kissing your Sister, The Spandrel of Incest

It's something you would never anticipate, which ironically is the origin of the problem. It may be said that anticipation is half the pleasure, though at times it may be thought of as all the pleasure. We know this from anecdote and experience. Consider poor Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke on the aptly named Dick Van Dyke TV show) eating a chocolate cake while absorbed in conversation with his wife. Pausing in midphrase he said: "By the way, what is this, its delicious!" "You should know", she said, "That's your favorite dish, chocolate cake." Rob looked at the cake and cried out in horror: "Why didn't you tell me, I love that dessert!" It may be argued that forgeting to anticipate a chocolate cake has a lot in common with learning not to anticipate it. After all, it may permit us to go about our lives undistracted by the myriad diversions of the world. Consider your kid sister, or your kid cousin, or the girl kid next door. Doubtless you would not want to kiss any of them or anticipate kissing any of them because you are not in the practice or 'habit' of doing so. But is habit or the incidental correlations perceived while growing up enough to overwhelm the sexual 'drive' that makes no distinction between kith and kin?

Awful Kissing Act

Sure, providing of course you realistically define the concept of 'drive'. By realistically I mean of course the real circuitry, as in the wiring of our cerebral noggin that accounts for the incentives from food to sex to sexy cars that get us from A to B. When we think of drives, we think of indivisible mind states, hardwired circuits, or chemical imbalances that are present from the time we expect something to the time we get something. That is, looking forward to a pie in he sky is similar to eating that pie, wanting is the same as having. Both are driven by the same processes, and if the having is instinctive, the wanting must be equally so. This is a commonplace and commonsensical reasoning by layman and academic alike. It is also wrong.

Pie in the Sky = Pie in a Plate?

In the last ten years neuroscience has demonstrated that 'drives' are bifurcated into two parts that are different psychologically and physiologically. That is, wanting is different from having (or liking), and each aspect represents different processes and corresponds to different laws. For the 'wanting' part, we feel alert, attentive, and pleasurably primed for action and sustaining action. The 'having' part, where we imbibe, engorge, or otherwise consume the object of our appetite feels good in a different way, and does indeed represent a different thing. The neuropsychological differences between them both are strikingly clear. The 'wanting' part reflects the activity of 'neuromodulators', brain chemicals such as dopamine that control alertness, attentiveness, and because they have affective value (i.e. they feel good), keep us us on course. The having or 'liking' part engages neurotransmitters (opiods) that reflect gustatory, sexual, or other pleasures. Ironically, liking something or merely being aware that it tastes, smells, or feels good is not enough to spur behavior, one must also 'want' it. So how do you want? To wit, you must learn how to. An interesting aspect about our wants, from food to sex, is that we want certain things at certain places and times. We don't want to eat ice cream before our main course, or pasta for breakfast (usually). And we don't for that matter want to kiss our sister, or any other playmates of the opposite sex either. And why not? Simple, because we never learned to, or more succinctly, never learned to anticipate or 'want' to. When we are young, we hang around siblings or playmates in a decidedly non sexual context. Unfortunately, when we come around eventually to recognize that sex is quite nice, contextual relationships or habits get in the way, so we don't get primed to anticipate a hot date with the girl next door. In short, we don't 'want' to because sexuality was something we learned to 'un' anticipate. Having to learn in effect to 'want' to do nothing seems like a self defeating thing. After all, shouldn't the prospect of having something be enough for motivation? Well, no. The conundrum of motivation, and the inspiration for motivational speakers, is that objects alone do not motivate unless we learn to anticipate them. But anticipation can be a seemingly mindless thing. We nonconsciously infer meaning and motive from the simplest correlations, like a chair made favorite because we sat there often. And like a behavioral currency, such correlations can be tendered to new situations, giving them a new perspective that can dampen and reverse desire. Oedipus learned that the hard way. Having discovered that he was married to his mother, he put out his eyes. As another literary example, Moll Flanders became instantly disinterested in her husband when she learned he was her long lost brother, and subsequently abandoned hearth and home. As literary sense would have it those events that you never anticipated would lead to never more anticipating! To want without having is a necessary and pleasurable part of our lives, as our dreams keep us awake and aroused.to the pleasures of the world. However, to have without wanting is to be listless, without material or sensual desire. Like a spandrel or superstition, it's an unexpected side effect of learning that innocent correlations can dull one's very desires. It's a better explanation for habits, good and bad, and when writ large to include the chaste experiences of youth, a reason for you to never, never, expect to kiss your sister.