The Goose, the Fox and Addiction - A Story Of Mental Disorder In A Healthy Brain

I have been using the phrase  "nostalgia factor" for many mental disorders and human incapacity to change their minds. To put it bluntly, most people kill animals and eat their dead bodies because that's what their families and friends did while they were growing up.

My favorite Neuroskeptic whom I have been following for over a decade ponders along the similar lines on the new paper by Jerome C.Wakefield:

Once there was a newborn goose, fresh from the egg.

This young gosling, like all geese, was born with a biological mission: to imprint on something. Imprinting is an instinctive mechanism by which hatchlings learn to follow the first thing they set eyes on.

Normally, the first thing a newborn goose sees is its mother. But our hatchling is unlucky. At the very moment our gosling first opens her eyes, a fox happens to be walking past. Our young bird immediately imprints on the fox.

The rest of the brood did not see the fox. They all imprinted on the mother goose, and follow mother and live long and happy goose lives. But our unfortunate fox-imprinted hatchling is different. She ignores her mother, and instead heads straight for the next fox she sees ... which is great news for the fox.

Wakefield introduces the concept of the fox-imprinted gosling to shed light on questions about the nature of mental disorder (including addiction). So let us suppose that we were a goose psychiatrist, trying to make sense of the behavior of the wayward hatchling.

The first question we might ask is this: Does the gosling have a mental disorder?

One view would be that, yes, there is a disorder. The fox-imprinted goose has an abnormal pattern of behavior. Unlike most goslings, she ignores her mother and approaches foxes. This behavior is not just unusual, it’s clearly harmful (leads to being eaten).

However, one could also argue that the gosling has no disorder. The goose’s imprinting on the fox was, after all, a perfectly normal response. The goose’s brain was functioning exactly as evolution intended by imprinting on the first thing it saw. In this view, there is nothing wrong with our gosling at all. The problem is that a fox was present in the environment.

Wakefield’s key point is that these two perspectives are not incompatible.

In Wakefield’s view, the fox-imprinted goose does have a mental disorder, because once imprinted on a fox, its behaviour will continue to be abnormal even if the environment is perfectly normal after that. Even if the fox-imprinted gosling never saw another fox, she would still fail to follow her mother (and probably starve). As Wakefield puts it, the fox-fixation is internal to the gosling, even though it originated in the environment. So we can justly speak of a mental disorder.

Yet Wakefield emphasizes that the unfortunate gosling does not have a brain disorder. There was nothing wrong with her brain at any stage. In fact, if a newborn goose saw a fox and did not imprint on it, that would be evidence of a brain disorder. Imprinting is part of the goose brain's function.

Great insight, right?

Now coming back to the "nostalgia factor" and reflect on the problem the young gosling faced which was - that a fox was present in the environment.

When a kid is born and grows up in an environment where the parents and the rest of the super-cuddly family eat animal dead bodies. The kid develops a disorder of eating animal dead bodies even if it is the root cause of a pandemic, even if it isn't good for self, even if it is the highest moral wrong to make animals suffer, and even if it decimates the environment.


When a kid is born and grows up in an environment where the dad, mom, or some "savvy" uncle watches Fox news all the time and happily relishes the opinionated bullshit. In turn,  the kid learns this is "fun",  this is important and "grown-up" stuff that they also should "believe" in and so on.  People grossly underestimate the effect of bringing these "grown men with make-up" into their living rooms every day. If this idiot leaves the White House, they will bring someone worse.

One can state similar nostalgia propagated effects for religion and any other ideological blinded beliefs.

No amount of distribution of facts, knowledge, and evidence can break this nostalgia. 

Plato knew this "problem of the fox" existed and proposed an idea in The Republic  (for obvious reasons, I am not a fan of that):

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. Quite true. And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? We cannot. Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only.

"Authorized ones only" - Right! We see that every day in North Korea.

We need to think of a different way to cure this mental disorder.

The correct problem definition of a problem should be decoupled from defining a solution to that problem. 

People often avoid that and use sarcasm and smirk to defuse the correct problem definition phase. I have often been on the receiving end of it with comments such as - so smart guy what we do about that or something along the lines of go solve it.

The story of goose, fox, and addiction is to help us define the problem correctly. We are not looking at killing animals to the decimation of journalism problems at their root causes.

It is about time we define these problems correctly. The right solutions will come in time.