As a chronic and incurable muser, the sort who just sits and puzzles and pronounces his pontificates, it's always wonderful to find myself vindicated completely by those who slog through the fundraising and late-night datasifting of real world real research. Here today, courtesy of NIMH, that wonderful piece of the puzzle that clearly says that our notion of 'trust' is solidly neurophysiological ... and not something you can simply reason out from a resume or suss from a brochure.

The key, you see, is what some Swiss researchers last year reported as the Trust Potion, a neuro-inhibitor called Oxytocin, and it's action on trimming the propagation of fear and distrust from the amygdala down through to the other cognitive centers.

To test this idea, he asked 15 healthy men to sniff either oxytocin or a neutral control substance before receiving a brain scan with a technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging. The scans show which parts of the brain are stimulated by specific activities.

While in the scanner, the men looked at angry or fearful faces and threatening scenes, activities known to stimulate the amygdala.

As expected, the threatening pictures triggered strong amygdala activation during the scans without oxytocin, but markedly less activity with oxytocin, the researchers reported. The difference was especially pronounced in response to threatening faces, they added, suggesting a key role for oxytocin in regulating social fear.
[ How the trust hormone works ]

The study, by the institute’s Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues, appears in the December 7 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Deliciously apropos, while I might have accepted that a NLP/Hypnosis effect might be required to trigger the hormone modulation in the brain of the con's 'mark', it seems my metaphoric "sense of smell" disproof of Telework and singles-bars may not have been so very far from the reality: In the study, the subjects needed only a sniff of the hormone ... and what's to say that maybe some of us just naturally do or know how to emit oxytocin at will!

Something else interesting here from a Connectional Gestalt McLuhanist Rosicrucian sort of perspective is how what we call 'Trust' is factually a condition of it's complement, the relative dearth of fear and mistrust!

A corrollory result to ponder: I was musing on how I expected the military to seize on this effect and dope their soldiers with Trust Potion before battle, which prompted me to ask So how do we induce high levels of Oxytocin? and that leading me to the above result (is that why the ancient Romans, and Alexander if Hollywood is right, promoted homosexual behaviour in the army? Because the more recently 'satisfied' field troups would be 'braver'? Would they be self-selecting to senior ranks because of acts of battle valour accrued from the chemically heightened sense of trust and self-assurance?) and then found, according to the Oxytocin entry in WikiPedia where the substance is linked to maternal 'instinct' and higher levels induced through touch; May wondered on how we are seeing increasing levels of misconduct bordering on violence in our schools and this rise is co-existant with the rise in the notion that teachers must never 'touch' the students!

Perhaps a new better rule for "conflict resolution" might be not to "shake hands and forget about it" (odd, isn't it, that we should have that expression) but instead, maybe playground adversaries should be required to hug.

Another slice of a puzzle piece, it is said The Land of Punt was never invaded, and never at war, and further, the Land of Punt was historically renouned as the source of the perfume resin Frankincense, said to provide an ideal, ethereal token of appreciation ... perhaps an oxytocin (or similar neurochemical) stimulant?

Related to all this, here's an interesting twist to the Oxytocin angle from a Christian marriage councelling website with a very interesting thesis that advocates abstainance from pre-marital sex because the mind might become clouded by oxytocin released by the intimate contact and thus give an inaccurate assessment of this other person as a potential life-partner.

Nice sentiment, and it may have something cautionary to say about Singles Bars, but if you ask me, in my long experience with the subject, I'd say you far greater need to know just how that other person is going to behave after the oxytocin wears off, rather than base your decision on judgements made under the mind-distoring influence of an extreme hunger for the substance.

More vindication on Trust vs the Brain, this time applied to our sense of generosity towards others who may need a little empathy; this comes on the heels of a statement out of our children's school today that they have plans there to try and goad parents into parting with pocket cash towards some pet 'relief' project, having primed the kids first with all sorts of hard-luck tales that conveniently fail to mention how the developing nations don't really want our 'help', they just need our actions to be trustworthy.

But that's a whole other story, for the moment, we just want to ponder a bit on the chances of said school's request for yet more compulsory (impulsory?) 'donations' being questioned and/or turned down by the average affluent suburban parent ...

"Oxytocin specifically and powerfully affected generosity using real money when participants had to think about another's feelings," Zak explains. "This result confirms our earlier work showing that oxytocin affects trust, but with a dramatically larger effect for generosity."

In his experiments, Zak distinguishes between generosity and altruism by using tasks that involve one's innate motivation to give to others, and when another's plight must be considered. Oxytocin's effect on generosity is more than three times larger then his work from 2005, which demonstrated that oxytocin increases trust.

Zak's recent paper explains the brain mechanisms responsible for the substantial increase in generosity during the last 50 years. Zak and his colleagues cite annual giving levels up 187% since 1954. In 2005, over 65 million Americans volunteered to help charities. 96% percent of volunteers said that one of their motivations was "feeling compassion toward other people"
[ New paper on oxytocin reveals why we are generous ]

Some recent science on this neuro-cognitive 'trust' premise ...

"(...) subjects in the oxytocin group show no change in their trusting behavior after they learned that their trust had been breached several times while subjects receiving placebo decrease their trust."


That is extremely interesting. This suggests that oxytocin, a mammalian hormone neurotransmitter that is known to be related to maternal behaviour and bonding, also is modulating social trust.
[ Oxytocin: the direct route to altruism? ]

In other words, your 'acceptance' of the 'face-value' and observed reputation of this salesperson could be seriously tainted by something as simple as some judicious applied aromatherapy, and that pretty much changes the facetime trust game completely.

Then again, on a positive note, if the live in-person experience could be manipulated so easily through an incense, then conversely the online experience would be completely immune to such tinkering! ... unless, of course, oxytocin could be triggered by sound, or images, or both ... which it probably can ...