Ambition + Desire = Trouble

NEW YORK—“I don’t know what I was thinking.”

So said Anthony D. Weiner in a news conference moments after finally admitting that he had sent naughty photos of himself to women he had met on the Internet.

The married former congressman, who resigned on Thursday, 10 days after that confessional press conference, might not know what he had been thinking—but scientists have an idea or two.

Scholars studied brain architecture and chemistry long before Weiner pinged photos of his unmentionables into cyberspace.

And their scholarly research— some of it subject to dispute— suggests that physiology played a role in Weiner’s digital dalliances.

“Most people who get as far as he’s gotten are high-testosterone people,” said Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist and a member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers.

“Along with that ambition comes a high sex drive. Testosterone’s linked with both of them,” Fisher said.

According to some scientists, seeking prominence is part of an inborn survival strategy.

“Men, particularly successful men, have an evolutionary history of polygamy,” said David C. Geary, a curators’ professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at University of Missouri at Columbia.

Men who pursue politics are also pursuing power, Geary said, and “from an evolutionary perspective, the whole goal of men striving for power is to increase their access to sexual opportunities.”

Why cheat, tweet?

But in an era of easily followed digital footprints, the chances of catting around and being caught are greater than ever. So why cheat and tweet?

One possible answer: There’s a correlation between testosterone and risk-taking.

“If you asked one of these guys ‘What are the chances of you getting caught?’ you would see an underestimation of the risks,” Geary said. “And the severity of the consequences is underestimated.”

Women, on the other hand, “tend to focus on the potential harm of the consequences,” he said.

(Studies about subjects other than sex—like money—have also reported a link between testosterone and overconfidence.)

According to Fisher, women have on average more long-range neural connections than most men.

Focus on the here

As a result, men tend to narrowly focus on the here and now instead of potential long-term consequences, she said.

A convenient excuse for philandering?

“I’m not going to excuse this guy or any of them,” Fisher said, referring to Weiner.

“But when he says ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ he probably literally was not seeing or evaluating or weighing properly all of the outcomes for this. He was focused on the short term,” she explained.

Gender differences

Gender generalizations are a dangerous area.

Men and women are more alike than different, and their neurological differences have historically been used to justify sexism.

Among the most notable: Women were once considered less intelligent than men when studies showed their brains weren’t as big.

Critics also contend that many neurological gender studies have too-small subject groups, or other design flaws.

And it’s not always clear how or whether neurological differences translate into specific behavior.

Our actions are shaped by other factors as well, like personal experiences, culture and genetics.

Grip of sex desire

Bianca Acevedo, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained in an e-mail: “For example, individuals that need to exert much control in their daily lives (such as powerful politicians) may have less cognitive resources to regulate their behavior in other life domains.”

That said, studies that have nothing to do with gender differences still underscore just how powerless someone—male or female—can feel in the grip of sexual desire.

Brain areas involving desire are activated in the blink of an eye—less than 200 milliseconds, according to research by Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology at Syracuse University and at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli, also of the University of Geneva.

Loss of control

Even before you realize that some detail about a person has caught your eye, be it in an online photograph or while passing on a sidewalk, your unconscious brain knows that person will activate your reward system, and your brain begins to anticipate the reward.

“People have this urge and there’s a loss of control,” said Ortigue, who studied desire and the brain by putting electrodes on the heads of college students and monitoring them while they observed photographs of men and women in swimsuits.

The urge washes over people in a moment between unconsciousness and consciousness, a moment that Ortigue calls the sexual zone, or S-zone.

Focus on reward

“There in the S-zone, at this moment in time, their attention is suddenly focused on that reward,” she said. “And everything else around them suddenly doesn’t exist anymore.”

In the S-zone, patients report losing track of time. The future (i.e. having to resign from your job as a congressman) is not a consideration.

Incidentally, when asked if this myopic euphoria happens with nonsexual cravings—like a yen for a buttery croissant—Ortigue said yes.

“You lose track of time, and there is nothing but the croissant in your life,” she said. “Afterward, you think about all of the bad consequences of that, and you regret, and you feel guilty.”

Past payoffs

According to scholars, the decision to act on a desire depends on past positive associations that a person has between a particular stimulus and a behavior.

For instance, after numerous online interactions with women, Weiner likely discovered that such encounters were guaranteed to deliver pleasure.

And those feelings are reinforced by the brain chemical dopamine, which is also triggered by novelty—which in Weiner’s case may have taken the form of new electronic liaisons.

(Some scholars say novelty is yet another evolutionary strategy: Varied genetic combinations are optimal for survival.)

Loving, cheating

Most people are capable of loving someone and yet cheating on them with someone else, according to Fisher.

Referring to Weiner, she said: “He’s probably deeply attached to his wife. He’s probably still in love with his wife. This is basically not about his wife.”

Women, mind you, don’t appear to be angels, either. Under the age of 40, women cheat about as much as men, according to Fisher.

There was a time, though, when scholars thought women were very different from men.

Consider the words of the neurologist Charles L. Dana, who in the early 1900s opposed women’s suffrage partly because of the structural differences between male and female brains and bodies.

Political initiative

As Dana wrote in The New York Times 96 years ago this month: “They point the way to the fact that woman’s efficiency lies in a special field and not in that of political initiative.”

Then again, perhaps he was on to something.

At a time when the nation’s politicians include the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newt Gingrich and Weiner, “political initiative” has an entirely new meaning. New York Times News Service</strong.