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By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 11, 2005; Page C01
No doubt about it, there's a lot of good that can come from studying the brain.
It was good, for example, when scientists found the brain cells involved in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. It was even neat when speculative studies purported to find the neurological seats of anger, religiosity and homosexuality. It's fascinating to watch science trying to chip away at the ineffable stuff that makes us human.
But this time, They've Gone Too Far.
In the first experiment of its kind, scientists in California and Texas seem to have discovered the part of the human brain at the heart of feelings of trust.
Nothing good can come of this.
What the researchers did was have people play a gambling game in which trust is crucial. They watched in astonishment as a sophisticated scan showed a little part of the brain called the caudate nucleus lighting up like a Las Vegas slot machine. It happened whenever players made moves showing they trusted the other player.
Trust, of course, is crucial to the maintenance of the social fabric. In the unemotional words of the researchers in the April 1 issue of the journal Science: "The expression and repayment of trust is an important social signaling mechanism that influences competitive and cooperative behavior."
Well, duh. You don't have to be Richard Nixon, however, to ponder how this work could be misused. With something akin to a light bulb glowing brighter with every watt of trust being generated in a person's brain, how long will it be before used-car salesmen, telephone solicitors, Florida real estate agents and trial lawyers adapt their pitches to tickle that cuddly caudate?
How long will it be before our friends in Redmond, Wash. ("Trust me, I'm from Microsoft . . ."), develop a hand-held device to tell us when our story is flying? Whether we need to tweak the message a tad to land that deal, to convince the country that oral sex isn't sex, to justify that next war?
How long before that technology gets good enough for kids to use? ("Don't worry, Dad, I already practiced my piano. And the dog really did eat my homework. Honest!")
The ability to engender trust would be a windfall in Washington.
I called White House spokesman Trent Duffy to see whether the administration was, as I suspected, all over the new work.
"As you know, we're prohibited from discussing classified information," he said with a tone of sincerity I now found suspicious. "But I can think of lots of applications," he continued.
High on his list was to do something to make people believe that "Area 51" has nothing to do with UFOs, thereby eliminating in one stroke about half the phone calls he deals with each day.
An ability to manipulate and perhaps synthesize feelings of trust could have devastating effects on the economy. Arms control inspectors are out of business. If you trust, why verify? Who needs marriage counselors if you really do believe that that lipstick stain came from bumping into somebody on the Metro?
All this assumes, of course, that the caudate nucleus really is the seat of trust. Because when you think about it, a discovery like that would be worth a lot. If it were you who had discovered the essence of trust, mightn't you want to throw your competition off the trail while you get a jump on making that first portable scanner?
I called P. Read Montague, the Baylor College of Medicine scientist who led the new work.
"Why should I believe this article in Science?" I asked him, suddenly realizing that all this talk about trust was making me paranoid. "How do I know you haven't found out how to make people trust you and you are using that knowledge to write this very convincing research report, but that trust is really not seated in the caudate nucleus at all and you're just buying time while you file a bunch of patents on the real seat of trust? In short, how do I know you're not lying?"
"You mean," he asked, "aren't I empowering and giving unbelievably powerful tools to the nefarious corporations trying to make an irresistible product that sidesteps your capacity to say no?
"You can trust me," he said, unconvincingly.
Montague argues that once it's out in the open that trust can't be trusted, everybody will be better off. It'll even the playing field. But I'm not so sure. Once trust is on the table, everyone will have equal odds of being believed. Lobbyists. Weather forecasters. Budget analysts.
What next? Journalists? That would be bad.
You do believe me.
Don't you?
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