Isegoria

A single letter in your genetic code determines whether your COMT enzyme is hardworking or lazy, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing explains, and thus whether you are a Warrior or a Worrier:

The hardworking ones are precisely four times faster than the lazy ones. The hardworking enzymes are built with valine, the lazy enzymes with methionine.

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In people of European descent, 50% have a combination of both slow and fast enzymes; 25% have only fast enzymes; and 25% have only slow enzymes.

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For people whose enzymes work fast, their brains can handle the stress, because the enzymes can get rid of the extra dopamine.

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People whose enzymes work slowly can’t handle the stress, because their enzymes can’t clear the dopamine. Their brains become overexcited, and they become overwhelmed.

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The fast enzymes work so rapidly that when someone is not being stressed — when conditions are normal, and there’s just a normal dopamine turnover — the enzymes clear out too much dopamine.

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They actually need the stress (and the dopamine) to get up to the optimal level of mental functioning.

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On most days, having slow COMT enzymes is actually a good thing. But under stress and pressure, with that extra flood of dopamine, they crack.

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The COMT gene for the fast-acting enzymes is one we share with chimps and apes — it’s been in human DNA forever. But the COMT gene for the slow-acting enzymes is ours alone; it’s a more recent entrant in the survival-of-the-fittest contest.

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While you might think the Warriors are the aggressive ones, that’s not accurate. With higher levels of dopamine, the Worriers are always near the threshold for an aggressive response. It’s easy to set them off; they’re very temperamental. They get angry more easily and act out. But their aggression isn’t necessarily successful. The meaning of “successful aggression” is correctly reading and interpreting other people’s aggressive intentions, and matching them. Worriers tend to see aggression when it’s not there, and they miss it when it is. The Warriors are ready for the real thing.

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For those with the “Warrior” gene, a majority had recovered from their PTSD. And after the researchers had reconstructed their history of trauma, the scholars learned that the Warriors had only developed PTSD after experiencing a number of traumatic incidents. For those with the “Worrier” gene, it was a different story. It had taken only a single traumatic event to cause severe PTSD symptoms. And the majority of the Worriers still had PTSD related to the trauma of the genocide. More than a decade later, they had not yet recovered.

The gene that has been most studied for its involvement in pain modulation, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), is the COMT gene, which is involved in the metabolism of neurotransmitters in the brain, including dopamine:

Two common versions of COMT are known as “Val” and “Met,” based on whether a specific part of the gene’s DNA sequence codes for the amino acid valine or methionine.

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In both mice and humans, the Met version is less effective at clearing dopamine, which leaves higher levels in the frontal cortex. Cognitive testing and brain imaging studies have found that subjects with two Met versions — both animals and humans — tend to do better on and require less metabolic effort for cognitive and memory tasks, but that they are also more prone to anxiety and more sensitive to pain.

(Anxiety, or “catastrophizing,” is a strong predictor of an individual’s pain sensitivity.)

Conversely, Val/Val carriers seem to do slightly worse on cognitive tests that require rapid mental flexibility, but may be more resilient to stress and pain.

(They also get a better boost from Ritalin, which increases dopamine in the frontal cortex.)

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David Goldman, chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, coined the phrase “warrior/worrier gene” to describe the apparent tradeoffs of the two COMT variants.

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In the United States, Goldman says, 16 percent of people are Met/Met; 48 percent are Met/Val; and 36 percent are Val/Val, leading him to suggest that both warriors and worriers are needed in every society, so there is widespread preservation of both forms of the gene.

I didn’t remember this passage from my original reading of the hardback edition back in 2013 — because it wasn’t in there:

So, I’ve included a relevant passage that didn’t make it past the first draft of this book.

It is about the BDNF gene, which codes for its namesake protein: brain-derived neurotrophic factor. The gene comes in two common varieties, known as “val” and “met,” and a National Institute of Mental Health study found that individuals with the met version performed more poorly on tests that asked them to recall scenes they had been shown. Follow up studies suggest that BDNF may also impact the kind of “muscle memory” involved in sport skill acquisition:

Researchers at the University of Trier, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing explains, had young adults give a speech about why they were the best candidate for a job — either with or without their boyfriend or girlfriend there:

The scholars had entirely expected that having a supportive partner there would diminish the stress of giving a speech. And that did happen for the men; having their girlfriend or wife there calmed them considerably.

But to the researchers’ surprise, it was the exact opposite for the women.

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[S]ometimes when you’re performing or competing, it really helps to have a loved one there to support you. And sometimes it doesn’t.

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The workplace has its version of this same conundrum: sometimes, employees’ effort level goes up if a boss frequently monitors them. But it’s also true that being monitored can stress out employees and become a distraction, causing them to lose concentration and be less productive.

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In 1965, Robert Zajonc, then at the University of Michigan, resuscitated the question. He noticed a dividing line in all the research, a consistency that explained when being watched helped or hurt performance. He theorized that the key variable was whether people were in a learning phase or had already mastered the skill. If they were learning the skill, the presence of spectators hampered performance. If they had mastered it, the presence of spectators improved performance.

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The idea that novices and experts respond to an audience divergently is consistent with other work that shows that novices get the most out of positive feedback, but experts benefit from criticism — they need that discerning scrutiny in order to improve.

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Jack Aiello of Rutgers University has shown that simple tasks improve under supervision. But the more complicated the job, the worse people perform when being monitored.

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The short answer is that Aiello and his team have found that intermittent supervision works even better than continuous supervision.

The home advantage is an evolutionary one, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing explains, rooted in territorialism:

University of British Columbia professor Graham Brown once asked pairs of college students to take part in a mock contract negotiation. But he staggered the arrival of the students, taking early-arriving students to an unused office. There, Brown handed the early bird a key to the office, told her she was free to use the computer, even encouraged her to hang up a poster or two as decoration. Then he gave the early bird 20 minutes to get comfortable in the space. Once the other student arrived, they proceeded with the negotiation. It wasn’t even close. The students who made themselves at home in the office got everything they wanted, and more.

Brown concluded that those who are on their home turf receive a huge windfall. Their takeaway may be worth up to 160% more than what the away-team opponents will bring home.

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When two teams at a firm work together on a project, the team hosting the coffee and bagels in their conference room is more likely to take charge of the entire endeavor.

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[T]he home team in a NBA game wins about 63% of the time.

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In studies of collegiate and professional basketball teams, the home teams are led by centers and forwards. The home teams are better at blocks, steals, turnovers, and have more successful field-goal attempts. The away team is led by guards’ defensive tactics: they are better at assists, three-point shots, rebounds, and intentional fouls.

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Statistician Richard Pollard looked at the win-loss records of 37 professional teams that moved to shiny new stadiums across town. You’d think that the new and improved facilities help the teams, but Pollard’s results show that, at least at first, teams are actually less likely to win in the new stadium than they were at the old park.

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A few years ago, violence in the stands of Italian soccer games became so pronounced that some teams chose to play in empty stadiums: not a single fan was allowed in to watch the game. But the home teams still kept winning.

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Given findings such as these, researchers have increasingly come to the conclusion that the home advantage is an evolutionary one, rooted in territorialism — a deeply rooted, innate need to control one’s own space. And once this sense of territorialism is activated, you become more competitive; you’re more willing to challenge potential intruders. You’re more confident, more motivated, and more aggressive when you perceive a potential threat. You have a higher sense of self-efficacy, controlling the environment in a way that best suits your needs.

In video game experiments, if a player arrived at the game’s target destination just ten seconds before his opponent, he was more likely to win the game.

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People accept others’ sense of ownership just as quickly: late arrivals accept that they are the visitors and usually defer to this prior residency. Latecomers are the ones more likely to flee than stand their ground. Territorialism explains why pedestrians naturally say, “Excuse me,” when walking past a perfect stranger. On a subconscious level, it feels as if the other person already “owns” the sidewalk in front of him, and someone needs permission to take the sidewalk away.

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If another car was waiting for the space, people took twice as long to exit.

The inflammatory ageing clock (iAge) is based on the idea that as a person ages, their body experiences chronic, systemic inflammation because their cells become damaged and emit inflammation-causing molecules;

To develop iAge, a team including systems biologist David Furman and vascular specialist Nazish Sayed at Stanford University in California analysed blood samples from 1,001 people aged 8–96 who are part of the 1000 Immunomes Project, which aims to investigate how signatures of chronic, systemic inflammation change as people age. The researchers used the participants’ chronological ages and health information, combined with a machine-learning algorithm, to identify the protein markers in blood that most clearly signal systemic inflammation. In particular, they pinpointed the immune-signalling protein, or cytokine, CXCL9 as a top contributor; it is mainly produced by the inner lining of blood vessels and has been associated with the development of heart disease.

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After developing it, the researchers tested iAge by collecting the blood of 19 people who had lived to at least 99 years old, and using the tool to calculate their biological age. On average, the centenarians had an iAge 40 years lower than their actual age, according to a press release — aligning with the idea that people with healthier immune systems tend to live longer.

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When examining CXCL9 as a biomarker of systemic inflammation, Furman and his colleagues grew human endothelial cells, which make up the walls of blood vessels, in a dish and artificially aged them by letting them divide repeatedly. The researchers saw that high levels of the protein drove the cells into a dysfunctional state. When the team silenced expression of the gene that encodes CXCL9, the cells regained some function, suggesting that the protein’s harmful effects might be reversible.

A recurring note in Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing is that there are two kinds of people: those who need to avoid stress to do well, and those who actually need stress to perform their best:

If you go back to the first published research ever done in the field of social psychology, the year was 1898, and the author was a 37-year-old high school teacher named Norman Triplett, who had returned to Indiana University to pursue his master’s degree.

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He concluded that competition against other cyclists took off five seconds per mile compared to racing alone against the clock.

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He found a 50%/25%/25% split [when he tested children on his "competition machine"] — half the kids benefitted a lot from being made to compete. Another quarter of the kids were largely unaffected, barely lowering their times over the three competitive trials. The last quarter of the kids did not handle the competition trials well at all.

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Competition facilitates improvement. But the tradeoff is that competition doesn’t benefit everyone.