HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND
It is impossible to review here in detail all the facts accumulated
concerning the influence of the internal secretions upon all the
processes of mind, intellectual and emotional. A volume would not
suffice for their adequate consideration. Reflexes, instincts,
habits, tendencies and emotions are involved in their machinery. The
development and normal functioning of the intellect, the pure reason
as Kant called it, are controlled by them. Brain, without them in
solution, without enough of them in that wonderful solution, the
blood, sleeps or remains dormant like the butterfly in the cocoon.
The cretin, who has not enough thyroid or no thyroid, is an imbecile
because of his deficiency. Supply him with thyroid from outside
sources, feed him animal thyroid, be it of the sheep, the pig, or the
goat, and behold a miracle! he is restored to the level of at least
the relatively normal intelligence.
Acuteness of perception, memory, logical thought, imagination,
conception, emotional expression or inhibition and the entire content
of consciousness are influenced by the internal secretions. The most
ultramicroscopic activities of the molecules and atoms in the highest
nerve cells and nerve tissues are dominated. The speed of their
chemistry and their associations, and thus the speed of thought, are
regulated. Iodine has been shown to increase the electric conductivity
of the brain that is, the rate at which electrons will fly through it.
The thyroid may then be regarded as manipulating the amount of iodine
brought to play upon the brain cells at a particular moment of danger
or exaltation. Adrenalin increases the electric conductivity of the
brain. Nerve impulses, and with them sensations and ideas, travel
faster or flow more quickly through iodinized or adrenalinized brain
cells. In dangerous situations we think more rapidly and keenly, for
in emergencies the blood floods the brain with extra thyroid and
adrenal secretions.
THE BODY-MIND COMPLEX
Mind, still regarded by most of mankind as something distinct and
apart from the body, is thus exhibited as but part and parcel of it. A
deaf, dumb, and blind animal, deprived of tongue, and olfactory mucous
membrane, without sensations from the outside world can grow no mind,
in the sense of intelligence. The sense organs of the body mediate
the primary mind stuff. Without internal secretions and a vegetative
system there could be no soul, in the sense of complex emotion. Nor
those combinations of thought and emotion which synthesize attitudes,
sentiments and character. The internal secretions and the vegetative
system mediate the primary soul stuff. Mind is thus emulsified with
body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul was once a subtlety
of metaphysics. Now when mind appears soaked in matter saturated with
chemicals like the hormones, therefore woven out of material threads,
the independent entity created out of intangible spirit flies like a
ghost at dawn.
View the outlook. Mind, the slippery phantom, now becomes controllable
for the purposes of everyday life, because we can put our fingers
upon, touch, handle and change these material factors, the internal
secretions and the vegetative system. Through them we may affect the
very quality of the nerve tissue. The future of the race, the future
of human nature, depends upon the knowledge to be born of the
researches into the vast possibilities of this idea. Man, the
Adventurer, the prey of Chance and Luck, will then become, indeed now
becomes, the Captain of Fate and Destiny.
It is, of itself, a revolution in the intellect, to conceive of
instincts and emotions, suggestibility and contra-suggestibility,
initiative and imitation, volitions and inhibitions as chemical
matters. In all their relations, mutually reacting effects and
defects, excesses and deficiencies, the internal secretions set up
psychic echoes and reflections. When morbid and their equilibrium
dislocated, we may even have phobias and neuroses.
A man's nature is essentially his endocrine nature. Primarily, when he
is born, he represents a particular inherited combination of different
glands of internal secretion. They, constituting the inventory of his
vital stock in trade, start him in life. Afterwards, food, the routine
of his existence, the accidents of experience, education, disease and
misfortune, in short, environment, modify him because they modify his
ductless glands and his vegetative apparatus, as well as his brain,
depressing some parts, and stimulating others, and so rearranging the
system. In particular will he be transformed as the gland is affected
which is the centre of the system to which the others adapt and
accommodate themselves. The inertia of the system is very great,
almost absolute, and always tends to return. If he has children, he
hands on his constellation of endocrines, in spite of mishaps, not at
all or only slightly transformed. Sometimes, however, the experiential
transformation has been sufficiently deep, and shaken the very
constitution of his germ-plasm. So family dispositions and traits,
national and racial temperaments, are propagated, maintained and
varied.
THE SEX INSTINCTS
Hormone reactions, as we have seen, initiate the complicated forces,
processes and expressions of sex. The dictum of the founder of modern
pathology, Virchow, that Woman was in effect an appendix to the
ovaries, has long been taken to apply to her psychic traits as well
as somatic. Her mind, like her skin, her hair and her pelvis, is a
product of the ovarian endocrines. But these determinations are by no
means her monopoly. Man is likewise a creation of the chemical wheels
within wheels and springs within springs that are his glands of
internal secretion. That he is not so obviously an appendix to his
testes is due to two reasons. First, the male sex hormones have not
the instability nor cyclic rhythmicity of the female. Secondly, and
perhaps consequently, his sex instincts have become overlayered with
other more labile instincts, with habits and customs and necessities
that appear to oust the sex instinct into an altogether decentralized
position. Moreover, it is the function of the female to be the excitor
in the sex process: her subconscious, thoroughly aware of the fact,
sees to it that the sex instinct stands starkly central and dominating
in her life.
The moods of love, like the more stereotyped manifestations of sex,
are dependent upon a proper supply to the blood of the internal
secretions of the reproductive organs, the gonadal endocrines. If the
testes are removed from frogs, it is found that the clasp-reflex,
symptom of sex desire, is abolished. If, after an interval of several
days, the testes' extract is injected into the frog, the reflex
reappears for a few days. The hormone provoking this sex reflex is
present in the testes only during the breeding season. In birds,
the seasonal nesting and migrating instincts may be eliminated by
interfering with their ovaries. At the same tine there is a change in
their plumage toward the male type. Similarly, the males, when their
sex endocrines are cut off, will change their psychic nature as well
as physically. Besides owning his flag-waving comb, his spurs and
brighter feathers, the rooster struts to attract the female, and
fights aggressively with his sex competitors. When he is made a capon,
he loses his spurs and comb and distinctive plumage, and in addition
becomes retiring and submissive, in short, a pseudo-hen in his
instincts as well as in appearance. If the genital glands are
extirpated from a male before puberty, the wattles remain small, pale
and bloodless, no active, amorous or combative instinct emerges. The
creature maintains a demure silence, and may even be sought by a
virile male. So we may see homosexuality of a kind in the lowest
animals. On the other hand, hens deprived of ovaries tend to
metamorphose in the male direction, even to acquire the male spurs,
and to display the male attitudes.
All through the animal world, in the springtime, when the pituitary
awakens or increases its secretion, and so stimulates the sex glands
to augmented activity, emotions of sex and their expression are
provoked by the inner stirring. When the nightingale warbles
passionately and the mocking bird gurgles provokingly, when the robin
fills its scarlet breast and the starling floats in ecstasy through
the perfumed air, when the pigeon coyly woos its mate, and the
butterfly flirts with the dazzling multicolors of its wings, when
all the marvelous devices of sex attraction in nature, selection and
courting, mating and reproducing are pondered, who but must wonder at
the infinite possibilities of reaction of the sex hormones? All is for
love, and all is because of the love in the blood that is manufactured
unconsciously by a few hidden cells.
EXPRESSIONISM AND EXHIBITIONISM
We need a detailed examination of the various forms of expression
art has differentiated into, in its relation to exhibitionism and as
effects of the circulating libido-producing substance of the gonads.
Sex exhibition differs in man and woman because of the differently
combined internal secretions that are their substrates. The male's
attitude, aggressive pursuit, is instigated by the compound adrenal
and gonad endocrines. The female's various emulsions of coyness and
display are motivated by posterior pituitary and gonad hormones in
alliance.
It is a dogma to state that the internal secretions of sex do not
begin to function until after puberty. Some children manifest
exhibitionism with a certain independence of environment.
Before adolescence a good many girls act like tom-boys, and are
distinguishable externally from boys only by their clothes. But others
display signs of sex differentiation that are to be traced back to
an awakening interstitial gonad action. Some boys have no interest
whatever in sex. Others will show an intense curiosity spontaneously,
a curiosity which perhaps may be explained as a larval precocity,
dependent upon the minimum of sex hormone production by the gonads.
Close observation of the correlation of somatic and psychic
development in extreme examples of these children corroborates this
view. Jonathan Hutchinson has described full-busted children of
London already boasting of their affairs. Indeed, as education and
environment affect the body (in so far as they influence it as a
whole) by exciting or inhibiting the glands of internal secretion,
sex-arousing stimuli from without must be considered to evoke their
effects as stimulants of the latent puberty glands.
At puberty, when the sex glands bloom, and the complex of the sex
instincts is activated, exhibitionism manifests itself in a host of
guises and disguises. Femininity in a woman, the womanly woman, or the
eternal feminine, may indeed be defined by the degree of somatic and
psychic exhibitionism she presents. A woman who has a delicate skin,
lovely complexion, well-formed breasts and menstruates freely will be
found to have the typical feminine outlook on life, aspirations
and reactions to stimuli, which, in spite of the protests of our
feminists, do constitute the biologic feminine mind. Large, vascular,
balanced ovaries are the well-springs of her life and personality.
On the other hand, the woman who menstruates poorly or not at all
is coarse-featured, flat-breasted, heavily built, angular in her
outlines, will also be often aggressive, dominating, even enterprising
and pioneering, in short, masculinoid. She is what she is because she
possesses small, shrivelled, poorly functioning ovaries. Between these
two types all sorts of transitions exist, according as the other
endocrines participate in the constitutional make-up. But no better
examples could be given, off-hand, of the determining stamp of the
internal secretions upon mind, character and conduct.
INSTINCT AND BEHAVIOUR
The sex instinct, analyzed as an endocrine mechanism, provides the
clue to the understanding of all instinct and behaviour. If the
post-pituitary regulates the maternal instinct, then its correlates:
sympathy, social impulses, and religious feeling, must be also
influenced, and so is furnished another example of a chemical control
of instinctive behaviour. McDougall, once of Oxford, now of Harvard,
introduced into psychology the idea of the simple instinct as a unit
of behaviour, regarding the most complex conduct as a compounding of
instincts. The instinct itself he analyzed into three elements: a
specific stimulus-sensation, an emotion following, all ending in a
particular course of muscular reaction. Translated into endocrine
terms, what happens may be pictured as a series of chemical events.
When the activity of a ductless gland rises above a certain minimum,
its hormones in the blood sensitize, as a photographic plate is
sensitized, a group of brain cells, to respond to a message from
the outside world, with a definite line of conduct. There is a
registration by the brain cells of the presence of the specific
stimulus. Then there is communication by them with the endocrine
organs. As a result, some of them are moved to further secretion,
and others are paralyzed or weakened. In consequence of changes
of concentration in the blood of the various internal secretions,
tensions, movements and tumescences, as well as relaxations,
inhibitions and detumescences, occur throughout the vegetative
system--the blood vessels, the viscera, the nerves and the muscles.
Each wires to the brain news of the change in it. In addition, the
brain cells themselves are excited or depressed by the new hormones
bathing them. In their final fusion, the commingling vegetative
sensations constitute the emotion evolved in the functioning of the
instinct.
To lower the new tensions throughout the vegetative system to
the normal range, the instinctive action is carried out. This
superficially is regarded as the essence of the instinct. As a matter
of fact, it is only the endpoint of a process, the resultant of a
drive to restore equilibrium within the organism. It may all happen in
less time than it takes to tell about it.
The play of an instinct may therefore be analyzed into four processes.
They succeed one another as sensation--endocrine stimulation--tension
within the vegetative system--conduct to relieve tension. The dash is
the symbol of a cause and effect relationship.
This equation for an instinct, based upon an analysis of the working
of the sex instinct, is the model for the analysis of all instincts,
and therefore of all the compounded instincts that all human behaviour
may be resolved into. Conduct, that fascinator of the common gossip
and the great novelist alike, normal and abnormal, social and asocial,
in all their complexities, even unto the third and fourth generation,
the Freudian complexes, is governed therefore by the same laws that
determine the movements of the stars and the eruptions of volcanoes.
The most interesting factor in the instinct equation is the endocrine,
because that is the one that is most purely chemical.
ENDOCRINE CHARGING OF WISHES
It is _the_ distinction of modern psychology that it has established
the wish (craving, need, desire, libido) as the moving force in any
psychic process. The position of the wish in psychology as the force
within and behind the instinct may be compared to that of energy in
physics, when it was elevated to a central position in the explanation
of physical processes in the nineteenth century. The concept of the
_charged_ wish has illuminated all the hidden recesses and rendered
audible all the subdued murmurings of the mind. The truly novel in the
content of the idea is the recognition of the fact that the wish is
charged. Now it could never be charged in a vacuum. That means that
a wish could never be born in the brain alone. For the brain has no
power to charge itself with energy--it can only store and transmit. If
a wish is potential energy that must be transformed into kinetic, it
must have a source. That source is the vegetative system. Without the
vegetative system, the great complex of viscera in the abdomen and
chest, blood and its vessels, endocrines, muscles and nerves, the
brain would remain but an intricate cold storage plant of memories,
associations of past experiences. It would need no change and initiate
no effort. But when the wish enters upon the scene, it is as if a dead
storage battery has been refreshed with new current. Enriched with
billions of electrons there is a stir and a movement, dynamic mind.
But the dynamo is the more ancient possession of the animal, the
vegetative apparatus. In short, what must always be remembered is that
a wish is never cerebral, but always sub-cerebral, visceral, in its
origins.
The sub-cerebral makes the cerebral. Activities in the nervous system
below the brain and especially the vegetative system, force upon it
its function of the active verb. It has to be, to do, and to suffer,
and then to manipulate the environment to satiate the insatiable
viscera, insatiable because the local chemistry is continually raising
the tension of one or the other of them. A physics of human behaviour
becomes possible with the aid of these concepts of endocrine
regulation of intravisceral pressure, and intervisceral equilibrium,
an intramuscular pressure and an intermuscular equilibrium, with the
brain as the shifting fulcrum of the system.
The sensation of hunger, as we have seen, serves as good an exemplar
as any of this mechanism of the wish. Hunger is preceded and
accompanied by contractions of the stomach of increasing intensity.
Those contractions must be brought about by a substance acting upon
the nerve endings in the wall of the stomach. As it closes down upon
itself, waves pass up and down. With each wave, the pressure within it
rises. The exact amount of the pressure may be accurately measured
by means of a small balloon swallowed and then inflated. When the
pressure rises above a certain figure, the sensation of hunger breaks
into the consciousness of the individual. We infer that certain
sensory impulses sent up to the brain attain a strength that finally
forces itself into the conscious field of feeling. The sensation of
hunger varies from individual to individual because of variation in
the reaction throughout the vegetative system. Most often it is a
sense of movement or even an itch in the upper abdomen. Let some cause
produce a weakening or cessation of the movements of the stomach--as
fear and anger--and the sensation of hunger disappears coincidently
with the drop in the pressure within it. As the mathematicians
would say, the wish is a function of the pressure, and so of the
concentration of substance behind the pressure.
We have in hunger the wish reduced to the lowest terms, the most
primitive form of it. Yet we may resolve all wishes, even the most
idealistic, into the same terms. As the vegetative system becomes
habituated by repeated experience to react in the same way to the same
stimulus, permutations and combinations of wishes become possible
until at length the inscrutable complexities of the behaviour of
civilized man are evolved. We have to thank Von Bechterew, the
greatest of Russian physiologists, for these fundamental principles,
so important for the understanding of the control of human life and
conduct.
The associated reflex, aboriginal ancestor of the involved train
of associations that constitute the highest thought, conduct and
character, is the unit of the system. Recall the classic example
cited. If a piece of meat is shown to a dog, his mouth waters. If now
you proceed to ring a bell before offering the meat, his mouth will
water only when he sees or smells the meat. If, however, the ringing
of the bell precedes the meat a sufficient number of reactions, a time
comes when merely the sound of the bell will cause salivation, without
the presence of the meat. So it is with the associated reactions of
the internal secretions. A stimulus originally indifferent to the
endocrines may, by association, the laws of which are many, come to
act like a spark to the endocrine-instinct mechanism. Hence we can
account for the subtle play of instinct throughout all thinking.
Even objects resembling the specific excitant of an instinct only
remotely, or in some one quality, may start its mechanism and a host
of associations bound up with it. Thus the maternal instinct may
be excited by the sight of a baby. But because a baby is small and
delicate, anything small and fine, a tiny book, a toy, a miniature,
may arouse it. The object is then said to be appealing. The doctrine
of association of instinctive and so of endocrine reactions enables
us to understand the feeling--tone that at any moment pervades
consciousness as well as its content.
Choices, the psychology of selection of food, color, friends, mates,
amusements also become explicable rationally. For conflicts among
the different components of the vegetative system are continuous and
inevitable. If the pressure within a viscus has been heightened, and
persists, that is, is not disturbed by some other associated factor or
instinct, conduct results to lower the pressure to what it was before
the instigator of the tension appeared. But if another instinct is
sparked, or another associated factor comes into play, another focus
of increased pressure within the vegetative system is created, with
another stream of energy flowing to the brain and demanding an outlet.
This clash of instincts, the struggle between different foci of the
vegetative system competing for the possession of the brain, is a
common everyday process in conduct. Which will win means which will
will. And so we have an energetic basis for volition.
Which will win appears to depend primarily upon the kind of endocrines
that predominate in the make-up of the individual, secondarily with
his education. For it is the endocrines that are really in conflict
when there is a struggle between two instincts. And if one endocrine
system conquers, it must be either because it is inherently stronger,
its secretion potential, that is, the amount of secretion it can put
forth as a maximum, is greater (so explaining the term dominant)--or
because a past experience has conditioned it to respond, although the
opposing endocrine system does not. Fear and anger, respectively bound
up with the activities of the adrenal medulla and cortex, we shall
see, provide as good exemplars as any of this process.
The response of the ductless glands to situations varies with their
congenital _capacity_, and acquired _susceptibility_. Capacity is
a question of internal chemistry, modifiable by injury, disease,
accident, shock, exhaustion. Susceptibility depends upon the play of
the forces focusing upon them that may be summed up as associations.
In the ability of one endocrine system to inhibit another we have the
germ of the unconscious. Hence the modus operandi of the repressions
and suppressions, compensations and dissociations, which may unite to
integrate or refuse to integrate, and so disintegrate and deteriorate
a personality.
As the personality develops, the vegetative system becomes susceptible
to the manifold associates of family, school, church and society, art,
science and religion, and last but not least sex. All the different
nuances of personality are expressions of a particular relationship,
transitory or permanent, between the endocrines and the viscera
and muscles. Conversely, behaviour shows what a person actually is
chemically; that is, what endocrine and vegetative factors predominate
in his make-up.
FEAR, ANGER, AND COURAGE
Fear and anger are the oldest and so the most deep-rooted of the
instincts. An ameba, contracting at the touch of some unpleasant
object, feels fear in its most primitive form. And anger, the
destructive passion, must have appeared early upon the scene of life.
Certainly these two instincts were definitely developed and fixed in
the cells before sex differentiation and the sex instincts were born
at all. It is interesting to note this for our rabid Freudians.
Fear and anger involve the adrenal gland. How comes it that two states
of mind so contrasted should involve the same area? The answer lies in
the bipartite construction of the adrenal. All the evidence points
to its medulla as the secretor of the substance which makes for the
phenomena of fear, and to its cortex as dominant in the reactions of
anger.
When adrenalin is injected under the skin in sufficient quantity, it
will produce paleness, trembling, erection of the hair, twitching of
the limbs, quick or gasping breathing, twitching of the lips--all the
classic manifestations of fear. These are the immediate effects of
fear because they are the immediate effects of excess adrenalin in the
blood upon the vegetative viscera and the muscles. The perception
by associative memory of these effects of adrenalin, the sensations
arising from the organs affected, constitute the emotion of fear.
Flight follows by muscle prepared for flight, for the disturbance of
the inter-muscular equilibrium tenses the flexor muscles, the muscles
of flight, and relaxes the extensor muscles, the muscles of attack.
If, it would seem, the cortex secretion now pours into the blood,
enough to more than overcome the effects of the medulla secretion, the
inter-muscular equilibrium is disturbed in the opposite direction,
for fight rather than flight, and anger results. Or if the cortical
secretion pours in an overwhelming amount of its secretion from the
first into the blood there will be no fear, but anger immediately.
Habitually charging and fearless animals like the bison, bull, tiger,
or lion have a relatively larger cortex in their adrenals. Habitually
fleeing and fearful animals, like the rabbit, have a small cortex
and a wide medulla in their adrenals. The reinforcing action of the
thyroid is important. The adrenal medulla reinforced by the thyroid
makes for terror, the adrenal cortex reinforced by the thyroid makes
for fury.
Some people are not easily frightened, others are more readily
frightened, and still others are of an extremely fearful nature. It
depends upon the proportion of adrenal cortex to medulla secretion in
them. And their reaction to fear stimuli is a pretty good measure
of the ratio. These formulations apply more particularly to fear in
general and anger in general. But even in the least fearsome, i.e.,
an individual in whom cortex dominates medulla, there may be
fear--complexes, dating back to events and times when medulla
overtopped cortex, especially childhood. So in the coolest people,
certain persons, objects, episodes, may send a wave along an old line
of nerve cells and paths which lead to the adrenal medulla, and so
flood him with fear, terror or even panic before his usual cortex
response occurs. Impressions during the early years of childhood,
probing of the unconscious by various methods, have been shown to be
the most potent in this respect. Sometimes the episode goes further
back than childhood, and one must assume an inherited conditioning
of the vegetative and endocrine systems. An animal leaping upon an
ancestor in a forest during the night might account for the panic fear
some people experience when alone in the dark, that nothing of their
childhood history may account for.
In women, the adrenal medulla naturally tends to overtop the cortex,
because the latter makes for masculinity. Besides, the recurring
cycle in the ovary, making the corpus luteum, evolves an additional
stimulant to the medulla, through its irritating influence upon the
thyroid. Then the influence of the post-pituitary is anti-adrenal
cortex. So that, on the whole, a number of endocrines work to render
woman naturally fearful, as we say.
Courage is so closely related to fear and anger that all are always
associated in any discussion. Courage is commonly thought of as the
emotion that is the opposite of fear. It would follow that courage
meant simply inhibition of the adrenal medulla. As a matter of fact,
the mechanism of courage is more complex. One must distinguish animal
courage and deliberate courage. Animal courage is literally the
courage of the beast. As noted, animals with the largest amounts of
adrenal cortex are the pugnacious, aggressive, charging kings of the
fields and forests. The emotion experienced by them is probably anger
with a sort of blood-lust, and no consideration of the consequences.
The object attacked acted like the red rag waved at a bull--it had
stimulated a flow of the secretion of the adrenal cortex, and the
instinct of anger became sparked, as it were, by the new condition
of the blood. In courage, deliberate courage, there is more than
instinct. There is an act of volition, a display of will. Admitting
that without the adrenal cortex such courage would be impossible, the
chief credit for courage must be ascribed to the ante-pituitary. It is
the proper conjunction of its secretion and that of the adrenal cortex
that makes for true courage. So it is we find that acts of courage
have been recorded most often of individuals of the ante-pituitary
type. Photographs are obtainable of thirty-four winners of the
Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in the War
with Germany. Of these twenty-three exhibited the somatic criteria or
hormonic signs of the ante-pituitary type. A prerequisite for adequate
ante-pituitary function is a normal secretion of the interstitial
cells of the reproductive glands. Cowardice is said to be a feature of
eunuchs.
THE PITUITARY AND INSTINCT
We have seen that, more than any other gland or tissue of the body,
the post-pituitary governs the maternal-sexual instincts and their
sublimations, the social and creative instincts. A great deal of
evidence is in our possession concerning the disturbances of emotion
accompanying disturbances of this gland, and controllable by its
control. It might be said to energize deeply the tender emotions, and
instead of saying soft-hearted we should say much-pituitarized.
For all the basic sentiments (as opposed to the intellectualized
self-protective sentimentalism), tender-heartedness, sympathy and
suggestibility are interlocked with its functions. Its secretion must
act upon the great basal ganglia, at the base of the brain, which
contain the nerve cells and fibres that are the centers of emotional
control and co-ordination.
The ante-pituitary has been depicted as the gland of intellectuality
(to use that term for lack of better). By intellectuality we mean
the capacity of the mind to control its environment by concepts and
abstract ideas. The frontal lobes of the brain are the central offices
for higher thought. Their cells are the most complex, have the most
numerous branches and association fibres. They store the fruits of
abstract thinking, mathematics, for example. The anterior pituitary is
in the closest relation and contact with them. Its secretion is tonic
to them. Now the instinct that is the forerunner of intellectuality
is the instinct of curiosity, with its emotion of wonder, and its
expression in the various constructive and acquisitive tendencies.
Studies of intellectual men, and of those with a keen instinct of
curiosity and a constructive-acquisitive trend prove them to be
ante-pituitary dominant in their make-up. The administration of
ante-pituitary extract to some defectives increases intellectual
activity and self-control. The future of intelligence may expect
a great deal from the newer chemistry of the secretions of the
ante-pituitary.
Two most important instincts, therefore, which in the complexity of
their sublimations have created most of the institutions of society,
the maternal and the intellectual, are connected directly with a
proper function of the pituitary endocrines. So it happens that
disturbances of these instincts, reaching far into the normal and
intellectual spheres of the mind, are definitely connected with
disturbances of the pituitary. As we shall note in reviewing the
essentials of the pituitary-centered or pituito-centric personality,
the personality governed by the fluctuations of activity within the
pituitary, people with injured, diseased or mechanically limited
pituitaries (because of the smallness of the bony case enclosing them)
exhibit defects and perversions of conduct and intelligence directly
attributable to affections of the very instincts and functions
the pituitary governs. Children with small, mechanically cramped
pituitaries lie and steal, are bed-wetters, have poor control over
themselves, and a low learning capacity.
THE THYROID AND INSTINCT
The chemical mechanism of the instincts described: sex libido, passion
and jealousy in relation to the ovaries and testes, fear and anger in
relation to the adrenals, sympathy and curiosity in relation to the
pituitaries, suggests that a similar explanation will hold for the
dynamics of the other instincts. In the closest relation to the
thyroid appear the instincts first isolated, so to speak, by McDougall
as the instincts of self-display and self-effacement, accompanied
by emotions of pride and shame respectively. In certain states of
excessive thyroid activity there is an extra stimulation of the
instinctive display of the person which may go on to boasting,
mania and exhibitionism. On the other hand, in states of thyroid
insufficiency, depression is produced, which may go on to melancholia,
a desire to be alone, to hide, to sit apart and even a tendency to
accuse the self of various uncommitted crimes and sins. In the form
of cyclic insanity known as the manic-depressive psychosis, mania
alternates with depression, as if the personality were dominated
wholly in turn by one or the other of these two instincts of the ego.
There is a good deal of evidence that behind them is a corresponding
fluctuation in the amount the thyroid secretes into the blood. Among
the thyroid-centered attitudes toward the self gyrate more than in
any other type. Egomania and megalomania occur most often in thyroid
unstable individuals.
ENERGY AND SENSITIVITY
In his classic Inquiries into Human Faculty, Francis Galton laid down
some fundamental considerations concerning energy and sensitivity
as mental traits. Energy he defined as the capacity for labor, and
declared it to be the measure of the fullness of life or vitality.
Statistical study by him of men of genius and their ancestors showed
them to be endowed with a large amount of energy. It has been said to
be the absolute prerequisite of genius. Now if there is a single fact
that has been well established by investigations of the internal
secretions, it is that the energy quantum of an individual is a
function of and determined by his thyroid. The more thyroid he has,
the more energetic will he be--the less thyroid the less energetic,
and the lazier. The thyroid-centered individual, of the excess thyroid
type, actually burns up more food and produces more heat than the
ordinary organism. He burns himself up faster in general.
When the thyroid sends more secretion into the blood, more thyroxin,
it accelerates all the functions and activities of the organs. Tea and
coffee produce loquacity because they stimulate the thyroid. People
with thyroid dominant constitutions talk fluently, rapidly, and
continuously. Their energy makes them doers, actors rather than
spectators. They get up early in the morning, are on the go all day
without surcease or fatigue, go to bed late, and often suffer from
insomnia.
Thyroid deficients, however, are definitely the opposite. They are
quite conscious of the limited reserve of energy at their command.
Also that they need plenty of refreshing sleep. Early to bed and late
to rise remains the leading maxim of health for them. In addition they
find it necessary to sleep during the day. Forty winks or more in
the afternoon makes a good deal of difference to them. Taciturn,
inarticulate, lazy, slow, tired, are the adjectives applied to them
by their friends as well as by their enemies. All because of an
insufficient or inefficient supply of the thyroid's iodine to their
cells. The mobility of energy in an organism is a measure of the
amount of active iodine in it. The physiologic synonyms for "energetic
and lazy" are "well-iodinized" and "poorly iodinized."
Sensitivity, the ability to discriminate between grades of sensation
or acuteness of perception is another thyroid quality. Just as the
thyroid plus is more energetic, so is he more sensitive. He feels
things more, he feels pain more readily, because he arrives more
quickly at the stage when the stimulus damages his nerve apparatus.
The electric conductivity of his skin is greater, sometimes a hundred
times greater, than the average. Conversely the thyroid deficient type
has a low discriminative faculty. Galton has recorded that idiots
hardly distinguish between heat and cold and that their sense of pain
is so obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it
is. Cretins may moan but never shed tears.
Energy and sensitivity in an individual should direct attention to the
thyroid element predominating in his composition. Lack of energy and
insensitivity to the degree of thyroid insufficiency in their make-up.
MEMORY, JUDGMENT, AND POISE
In between sensitivity and energy, the sensation and the reaction,
comes a passage of the stimulus through the gauntlet of the stored
past experience of the individual known as memory. Many hypotheses
have been advanced by philosophers, psychologists and physiologists to
explain the phenomenona of memory. To conceive of memory materially
at all one must admit some sort of memory trace as the basis for the
persistence of memory. This memory deposit facilitates the occurrence
of the chemical reaction constituting the memory along the same path
the next time. Forgetting then consists in a disappearance of these
memory traces or deposits. Forgetting is greatest in the first hour
after remembering, more than half of the memory trace being lost in
that time. Comparison of the curve of forgetting, and the curve
of diffusion of a colloid like gelatine from its solution, into a
surrounding medium, shows them to be exceedingly similar. Forgetting
may be explained by some such loss of the memory trace or deposit into
the blood continually flowing by it.
The internal secretions influence the amount and duration of the
memory deposits. The thyroid appears to be essential to the _laying
down_ of the memory trace. Cretins have poor memories on the retention
side and so cannot learn. The memory of thyroid insufficients is
wretched. In the extreme grades, the memory for recent occurrences
becomes completely lost. Iodine and thyroid increase the electric
conductivity of the brain, so that the memory trace must be deposited
more easily in those who have an excess of thyroid. Removal of the
thyroid produces a degeneration of nerve cells and their processes,
and associative memory becomes difficult or impossible because
conduction from cell to cell is interfered with. If sufficient thyroid
is fed in excess, brain conduction may be so facilitated that epilepsy
may result upon slight irritation.
On the other hand, the pituitary seems to be related to _preservation_
of the memory deposit. In conditions of disease of the pituitary,
loss of memory for past experiences is more marked. As regards recent
experiences, they are better held, although in a sort of subconscious
manner, recoverable when the condition improves or is cured. But the
greatest difference between the thyroid and pituitary effects upon
memory exists as regards material: the thyroid memory applies
particularly to perception and percepts, the pituitary to conception
(reading, studying, thinking) and concepts.
Judgment is another mental process that often intervenes between
sensation and the energy-reaction. It involves memory and association
of experiences. Behind it is an attitude as much as there is in an
emotion or the arousing of an instinct. Beliefs and reasonings are
complex judgments. They form the units of the intellectual process.
There is an element of speed in judgment on reasoning as in perception
and memory. And as in the latter, the thyroid determines the velocity.
Quick thinking, as we call it, means good thyroid action, and slow
thinking deficient thyroid action. The other element in judgment,
accuracy, is influenced by the ante-pituitary. During adolescence
there is physical growth which consumes most of the secretion of the
ante-pituitary. After adolescence, after the early twenties, when
physical growth has ceased, the ante-pituitary secretion sensitizes
the cells of the brain to mental growth. The reaction potential of
the ante-pituitary, that is its inherent, latent ability to supply a
maximum of its endocrine for the nerve cells of the frontal lobes, is
the best-known chemical determinant of intellectual genius. It makes
for the greatest co-ordination of experience, knowledge, information,
tastes and problems into one harmonious whole. And curiously, not only
does it cause a fusion of intellectual material: it creates a desire
for and a love of such material.
We should expect to find extraordinarily well-developed ante-pituitary
action among eminent philosophers and men of science, and we do.
Adequate action of it is present throughout the range of normals who
evidence sufficiently ripened judgment as they progress through
life. The ability to profit by experience, and to make more and more
accurate judgments as one grows older implies at least a maximum
efficiency of it. This maturation is not at all universal. Even after
middle age, after forty and fifty years of reasoning, some individuals
retain the juvenile mind of their youth. Like the Bourbons, they
have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Their ante-pituitary
insufficiency often coupled with a post-pituitary excess, and other
instabilities and disequilibriums in the endocrine system, render them
immature morons, compared with what might be expected of them for
their years. They are the people who are old enough to know better.
For the same reasons, inhibition and emotional control are poor in
them.
Besides the ante-pituitary, in the evolution of judgment, and the
judgment faculty, due stress must be laid upon the influence of the
internal secretion of the testes or ovaries, the product of the
interstitial cells. Although the probability is that the effects
are indirect, through a stimulation of the ante-pituitary, the fact
remains that, in a child, memory may be marvelous and judgment poor
(such memory is possibly purely thyroid in its determination). With
the advent of the gonads upon the scene, judgments become the centre
of the play's plot undoubtedly. The intelligence of eunuchs and
eunuchoids is in general low. The skull and brain of castrates, animal
and human, is smaller than the average. Gall, the physiologist who
popularized ideas concerning the meaning of the protuberances and
depressions of the head in relation to faculty and character, early in
the nineteenth century, was the first to prove this. Among historic
castrates, eunuchs, not a single example of great intellect, of the
creative type, is known. On the contrary, the native gifts of the mind
were destroyed. Thus Abelard, who was punished with castration by his
uncle for his love affair with Helöise, never composed a verse of
poetry thereafter.
IMAGINATION AS AN ENDOCRINE GIFT
That brings us to the consideration of imagination as influenced by
the endocrines. The physical conditions of exercise of the imaginative
faculty have not been sufficiently investigated. Alcohol has long been
known to act as an evocant of strange images. The hallucinations of
delirium tremens are the results obtained in extreme intoxication. A
strangely imaged flow of consciousness, the imaginative state, may
also be evoked by morphine and cannabis indica. There is no doubt
that the brain cells may be made to combine in the fresh, novel, and
unfamiliar associations that are recognized as unreal.
Francis Galton, pioneer student of the conditionings of human faculty,
left an interesting study of the visualising capacity, so far as it
could be attacked by the statistical method. Two of his conclusions
are worth repeating for our purposes. One is that the power to imagine
is poor in philosophers and men of science. The other that it is
higher in the female sex than in the male. We have seen that the
philosophic, scientific, intellectual mind, the capacity to abstract,
and think in terms of abstractions, is definitely dependent upon
proper secretion by the ante-pituitary. In woman, the post-pituitary
is generally predominant over the ante-pituitary. Though we are in
need of a series of studies of the endocrine traits and composition of
men endowed with high imaginative qualities, and so are at a loss, we
have indications of an endocrine control of the state of consciousness
we speak of as the imaginative.
Most of the evidence accumulated in the examination and treatment of
morbid conditions characterized by a restless, incoordinate activity
of the brain cells points to excess of the post-pituitary secretion as
the cause, or as one of the most important causes. The thyroid and the
adrenal medulla also exert their influence. But the strongest appears
to be the post-pituitary. Phobias, fears which obsess the mind,
anxiety neuroses, suspicions, hallucinations, delusions, nervousness,
all expressions of what we may sum up technically as the imaginative
state of mind, occur and occur frequently, associated with other
symptoms of posterior pituitary overactivity. Persons in whose make-up
it rules are more liable to imagine disturbances of their mentality,
or exhibit a well-developed imaginative streak. Normal states of
overactivity of the post-pituitary such as occur in some women during
the menstrual period and pregnancy, and in some men as part of the
endocrine cycle of their everyday lives, are accompanied by increase
in the susceptibility and vigor of the imagination. Whether the
feeding of excess post-pituitary would lead to a stimulation of the
tendency or ability to imagine is still to be decided. But it is
known that quieting the post-pituitary by various means will cause
a depression of the faculty, and eliminate its pathologic
manifestations.
Psychologists distinguish between the constructive imagination that
expresses itself in an ordered activity and the unbalanced fancies
of the fearful neurotic for example. The post-pituitary confers the
lability of the underlying state of brain in all of these imaginative
tincturings of consciousness. The constructive imagination, one of the
few truly precious gifts of a personality, is probably the expression
of a certain balanced activity of the ante-pituitary and the
post-pituitary.
MOODS AND THE ORGANIC OUTLOOK
The lability the post-pituitary confers upon the combinations of
perceptions and conceptions, grouped as the imagined, extends to
the ruling mood that may be spoken of as the organic outlook.
Post-pituitary in excess, without compensation or balancing by one or
some of the other endocrines, is associated with an instability of
mood and the organic outlook. Concomitant is a defective self-control.
Typically, one sees the effects in the mental abnormalities of women
during the premenstrual period. A number of them have their pituitary
balance upset then, with an overtopping of the ante-pituitary by the
post-pituitary. Irritability, a sub-hysteria, or an actual hysteria
may emerge in the usually most placid characters. A quiet wife and
mother may go for her husband, curse and mortify him, even strike and
beat him. She may slap her children at that time and no other. It is
well known that most of their crimes are committed by women during the
menstrual period. So are the suicides. Deterioration of mentality and
character so often observed during the menopause, with its apathies or
excitements, melancholia or mania, the fits of weeping or gaiety, the
loss of grip upon reality, the complete change in mood and temperament
that reflect the transformation of the organic outlook, demonstrate
clearly the overwhelming influence of the endocrines upon the
attitudes of the self toward the self.
It is possible to speak of thyroid moods, adrenal moods,
ante-pituitary or post-pituitary moods, gonadal moods. Each of
these is the echo in the mind of cells stimulated or depressed,
by concentration or dilution in the blood of particular internal
secretions. Restlessness and excitement can be produced experimentally
by feeding thyroid. Vague anxiety, depressive fancies and fears,
imaginative overactivity can be removed by inhibiting the
post-pituitary. Hypersecretion of the ovary will cause a sexual
susceptibility and a mood of genital obsession, capable of the most
remarkable sublimations and perversions.