Happiness = Security

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January 01, 2006 — CSO — Patrick J. McGovern is the founder of International Data Group, the parent company of the business unit that publishes CSO. Pat is a lifelong idealist who believes that the world can be changed for the better by the free flow of reliable information. In the 40-plus years since IDG was founded, the somewhat raucously decentralized company has launched more than 300 magazines and complementary websites worldwide, with products in every continent (yes, even Antarctica). Pat was among the first foreign entrepreneurs to do business in China. He persists in believing that human differences of race, politics, religion, ethnicity and regional origin can be overcome by regular enlightened dialogue.

Several years ago, Pat and his wife, Lore Harp McGovern, bestowed a gift of $350 million on MIT, his alma mater, to establish the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. It is in the brain that the complex and still largely mysterious mechanisms of perception, interpretation and conversion into action occur. Pat believes that an institute that focuses relentlessly on better understanding the organic processes of brain activity will help eradicate disease and add to the sum of human happiness. It is certainly inspiring to imagine this new research center making a decisive difference in overcoming such scourges as Alzheimerâ¬"s disease, depression and schizophrenia, to name just three.

In early November, the McGovern Institute opened in a bright new building, with a daylong ceremony that included rounds of speeches by—besides Pat and Lore McGovern—a couple of Nobel laureates, television personality Jane Pauley (who suffers from bipolar disorder), Bob Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet) and Sen. John Kerry.

One of the Nobelists, Eric Kandel, discussed his research into the mechanisms of fear. Such work might eventually lead to better treatments for anxiety. (Later in November, a team at Rutgers University, working with Kandel and others, announced that it had identified a gene, abundantly present in the amygdalas of mice brains, that controls both learned and innate fear.) The research first conditioned mice to associate an audible signal with the administering of an electric shock. In time, the mice would respond to the signal alone, minus an actual shock, by cowering in corners. The latest research compared the behavior of two groups of conditioned mice: one group possessing the specific gene, and a second group bred to be deficient in the gene. The second group showed significantly less fear when subjected to the shock-associated signal.

In his presentation, Kandel included a slide that equated happiness with feelings of security. Since I am neither a molecular biologist nor a neuroscientist, my literal mind leaped past the particulars to the wholly metaphorical implications of such an equation: To be happy, one must be able to feel secure, free of the effects of an overactive amygdala. But, most intriguing and unexpected, I came away from the opening of the McGovern Institute wondering what powerful lessons advanced research in neuroscience might hold for the practice of security and the understanding of its human dimensions.