'Huffing' Provides a Cheap Buzz for Teens
Bob Wagner, Ann Arbor News- 1/18/2006

When Erica Knoll's body was found by her sister in the : bedroom of their home in Bowie, Md. late last year, a can of Dust-Off computer spray lay beside her: Erica had "huffed," or inhaled, to get high. David of Indianapolis, took his last breath four years ago after he inhaled a generic computer duster. Manlove inhaled the substance through a straw while underwater in a pool because it was supposed to intensify the high. Jimmy Smith died at 17. He had been inhaling butane that powered a hand torch he used to make computers in the garage of his Avon Lake, Ohio home.
     Such deaths are part of an alarming trend among American teens who are searching for the easiest and cheapest way to get high. While computer cleaners like DustOff may be the inhalant of choice, experts say more than 1,000 household products can be used to get high, sometimes to deadly effect.
     Huffing isn't new, of course. In the 1960s, teens looking for a cheap high sniffed glue, and so-called inhalant abuse climbed steadily. Inhalant abuse peaked in 1995, when the Partnership for a Drug-Free America began an advertising campaign to educate parents on the dangers of huffing. For the next seven years inhalant abuse declined, until a recent upswing.
     Nearly one in five U.S. children have abused inhalants by the eighth grade, according to a 2004 survey conducted by the University of Michigan. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta lists inhalants as the second most commonly used drug by youths, after marijuana. What's more, technology is fueling the surge in huffing. With instant messaging and text messaging, new ways to get high can "spread like wildfire" among kids, according to Chris Cathcart, president of the Consumer Specialty Products Association.
     That may explain, the popularity of Dust-Off, whose sales to minors have been restricted by mass-market retailers like Wal-Mart. Dust-Off "is a very safe product under normal circumstances," said Phil Lapin, president and owner of Falcon Safety Products in Branchburg, N.J., the product's manufacturer. "We don't think statistically our product is any more abused than any other," he said, criticizing the sales restriction. In fact, the chemical propellant used in Dust-Off is common in the aerosol industry, and Dust-Off represents less than 1 percent of the aerosol industry's annual domestic sales of 3.5 billion units.
     Because products from Reddi-wip to Wite-Out correction fluid are accessible and cheap, they serve as an entry-level drug for kids who later gain access to marijuana or cocaine, said Dr. Lloyd Johnston, lead researcher of the University of Michigan survey.
     About 125 kids die from huffing each year, according to Harvey Weiss, executive director of the National Inhalant Prevention Coalition. "The real number is probably larger, because many inhalant deaths go unrecognized," he, said. Manlove, the teen who died while huffing in a pool, for example, was listed as drowning on the coroner's report, according to his father. Most huffing deaths result from a lack of oxygen flow to the brain, a type of suffocation, doctors say, which can afflict even first-time users. "It's really Russian roulette, said Dr. Maher Karam-Hage, an addiction treatment expert at the University of Michigan. "Kids are going after the knockout sort of experience," he said..
     Huffing produces a fleeting high - typically 10 to 15 seconds. So kids repeatedly inhale to keep the high going. "That's the danger of huffing," said Karam-Hage. "The lungs deliver the chemicals to the brain so quickly." Unlike alcohol,' in which impairment comes gradually, it's difficult to know how much you can tolerate with huffing, he said.
     Health hazards for huffing survivors also, are alarming; and often not fully understood by users or their parents. "A long-term abuser can literally end up with holes in the brain," said Karam-Hage, while some become trapped in a permanent psychosis or experience chronic paranoid hallucinations. More commonly, though, chronic inhalant abusers experience memory and attention problems, as well as damage to organs like the heart, liver and kidneys.
     Diane Stem of Old Hickory, Tenn., lost her son Ricky, 16, to huffing in 1996. "My husband and I were caught completely off guard" by his death, she said. Ricky, an all-state baseball pitcher for Friendship Christian High School, had no history of drug use and was the youngest of Stem's 10 children. "Ricky was from a very close family," Stem said. "He was a leader in the church youth group. Of course we warned our kids of the dangers of drugs, but we didn't know anything about huffing."
     To Stem, Ricky's death should be a warning to all Americans. Huffing is a hidden killer that can devastate "any family, in any walk of life," she said. Ricky died from inhaling Freon he extracted from the family's air conditioner. "I hear it over and over and over again," she said. "Kids from good homes die from huffing, and parents say they didn't know to warn them because they didn't know about huffing. "You can't get away from this," she added. "These products kids abuse are everywhere. They're products that make our lives easier."
     David Manlove's mother, Marissa, said she cautions parents to watch for danger signs in their teens' behavior. "When cleaning products start showing up in a teen's bedroom, you should be suspicious," she said. "Or if you smell air freshener, they might either be huffing the freshener or using it to disguise other smells." Medical experts say red eyes and sudden changes in temper are also telltale signs of huffing.
     Jimmy Smith, the Ohio teen who died from huffing butane fuel, was a very intelligent kid who talked about becoming a priest, his father, Jim, said. "He didn't use any drugs that we were aware of. He didn't smoke, he didn't drink" he said. "There's so many products that can be abused," he added. "What are you going to do? All you can do is minimize the risk by talking about it."
     In fact, parental warnings have shown to have a huge impact: The White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy cites studies, showing kids are 50 percent less likely to try inhalants if parents warn them of the dangers. Parental involvement is critical, said Weiss of the National
Inhalant Prevent Coalition, because many teens might see Dust-Off as just "canned air" and underestimate its harmfulness. "A much stronger approach is to describe the products as poisons, not drugs," Weiss said. "It's real easy to talk to kids about poisons. `Would you drink a can of gasoline?' you can ask them. Because that's what huffing is like."

When the Mind Conflicts with the Body
Jo Mathis, Ann Arbor News- 2/22/2006

When school starts next fall, one student in the junior class at an Ann Arbor high school may seem familiar to his teachers and classmates. And then again, not. "Cory,'' who has felt trapped in a boy's body most of his 15 years, will finally spend his days as the girl he believes he was meant to be. "I've never felt I was born the right gender,'' the teenager said while sitting in his family's Pittsfield Township home. "My first memory is when I was about 4 and wanted to be Alice in 'Alice in Wonderland.' I refused to be called anything but Alice.'' As he grew, he continued to feel and act like a girl and preferred playing with girls to boys. His father tried to get him interested in trucks, playing catch or football, but nothing clicked. A counselor suggested he be allowed to play with dolls if he wanted, and so he did. But as he got older, he became depressed, and he was teased at school for being a sissy. His parents, meanwhile, hoped he was gay. "We thought it would be an easier road,'' said his mother, a private person who wonders how she'll let people know about her child's transition.
     For the past year, Cory has been under a psychologist's care. Around his 15th birthday last April, he started taking anti-androgens, which reduce the signs of male puberty: the deepening of the voice, the facial and chest hair, the muscle development. And now every night after he washes his face and brushes his teeth, Cory takes an estrogen pill, the female hormone responsible for breasts, rounder hips and softer facial features. And he rubs estrogen cream into his thighs. Ever since he's been on estrogen, Cory has felt better, happier, relieved "My body's not going to make any more changes I don't want to make,'' he said. Cory wishes the process could have started at an even earlier age. "It would have been nice if it had been before puberty, so I'm not so tall,'' said Cory, who is 5 feet 10 inches.
     Sometime next summer, he will legally change his name and start wearing girls' clothes and makeup every day instead of just after school and on weekends. He knows that transsexuals have been taunted and even the victims of violence. He knows starting school next year will be tough. "But I think it's for the best,'' Cory said. "Every time I'm not at school, I'm a girl. So I don't want to pretend anymore.''
     About 25 people at school know about the transition. That includes close friends - mostly girls along with a couple of boys - and a few teachers and a principal. Cory's parents say it's been a long, difficult struggle to figure out what to do, but they're convinced this is the right road to take.

A medical condition
Core gender identity is a sense of oneself as male or female, said Antonia Caretto, a licensed clinical psychologist in Farmington Hills who is affiliated with the University of Michigan Health System's Comprehensive Gender Services Program. "Everyone has their own experience of their gender,'' she said. "I believe that there's an infinite continuum of gender experiences. Everybody has their own.''
      The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders notes that there is a dearth of epidemiological data on the prevalence of gender identity disorders. Data from Europe suggest roughly 1 per 30,000 adult males and 1 per 100,000 adult females seek sex reassignment surgery. Psychologists and medical doctors describe gender dysphoria as a condition in which a person with one physiological gender identifies with the other gender, said Sandra Samons, an Ann Arbor therapist who specializes in gender identity. It is a psychiatric term for what is widely known by terms such as transsexuality or transgender. The American Psychiatric Association first recognized gender dysphoria in 1980, describing it as an identity disorder. That troubles many transgender people who don't see themselves as mentally ill and point to the fact that homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder until the 1970s. However, the psychiatric definition remains. And despite the fact that American doctors and hospitals have been prescribing hormones and carrying out surgical procedures for patients for decades, some health professionals oppose such treatment.
     In 1965, Johns Hopkins Hospital established a Gender Identity Clinic and began performing sex-change surgery. The controversial surgery had been performed in Europe for 15 years and by a few American surgeons, but Hopkins was the first American hospital to give it official support. Hopkins University closed the clinic in 1979, after psychiatrist-in-chief Paul McHugh argued sex change surgery amounted to collaborating with a mental disorder rather than treating it. Samons, who holds a doctoral degree in human sexuality, said that move scared off other clinicians across the country. But major hospitals, including the U-M's, continue to provide a range of services to transsexuals. Those services include counseling, hormone treatments and sex reassignment surgery.
     Caretto, the clinical psychologist, said research shows gender dysphoria is developed at a very young age, probably 2 or 3 years old, and that it cannot be changed through socialization. The fact that scientists can't yet point to the cause of gender dysphoria leads some to doubt its validity. However, Caretto said, research studies do show certain events in vitro affect sex and gender. Caretto said she agrees with those who believe transition is a viable option for gender dysphoria. Still, she said, the trend to younger transitions is controversial.
     Although undertaking gender transitions earlier avoids the difficulty of reversing adult sexual characteristics later on, a UCLA study begun in the late 1960s that followed 100 effeminate young males for 20 years provides reason for caution. At the end of that 20-year period, Caretto said, less than a handful were identified as transgender. Two-thirds were, instead, identified as gay or bisexual. Some cite the UCLA study as good reason to wait, she said. Yet, for many gender dysphoria patients the effects of puberty are distressing and irreversible, Caretto said.

To start, hormones only
Samons said she's hopeful that Cory - who is not her patient - will be accepted next year at school. She said the fact that Cory has a close group of good friends should make it easier. Samons attributes the trend to seek earlier treatment to increased media attention to the issue. The Internet has also opened doors of information, sources and contacts to people seeking help, she said.
      Most therapists treating minors recommend prescribing only hormone-blockers to delay puberty, Samons said. The effect is reversible, so that if the client doesn't want to continue with transition, puberty would simply start late, she said. They haven't lost anything but time. "This keeps the options open until they're old enough to fully evaluate the decision themselves,'' Samons said.
     While a prescription for estrogen, the hormone Cory is taking, is "the wave of the future ... it needs to be a careful evaluation on the part of the therapist,'' Samons said. "If there's a long-standing history of gender dysphoria clearly defined over a long period of time, and the parents are OK with it too, there are times that makes sense,'' she said. "Many of my adult clients grieve that they never got to experience their socially formative adolescent years in the gender in which they identify.''
     Samons said 90 percent of her clients are transgender. Some have gone through the genital reconstruction surgery, she said, others have no intention of doing so and express themselves in other ways, such as cross-dressing. "Some are not clearly 100 percent male or female, and must find some middle ground for them in a society that wants them to choose,'' she said. "There's not a single answer for anyone.''
     Depending on the patient, the process to full transition can take from a little more than a year to several years, Samons said. Health insurance rarely covers the surgery, which can cost about $20,000 for male-to-female, and $40,000 for female-to-male she said. The female-to-male surgery is more complicated and the results are not as consistent, she said. Some insurance policies do cover the cost of counseling, she said.

Decades of repression
Another person rooting for Cory's successful transition is Andre Wilson, a 46-year-old Ann Arbor resident and U-M doctoral student who three years ago decided he could no longer continue living as a woman. He wishes he had made the change decades ago. Wilson said he grew up depressed and suicidal, certain that something was very wrong with him. "I could never - until now - think about what I wanted to do when I grew up. When I was a kid, I got asked, 'What do you want to be when you grow up, Annette?' The first thing that always came up was, 'I want to be me when I grow up. And I'm male.'''
     Wilson said that, by age 3, he knew he was male and yet he wasn't. He hid the feeling throughout childhood until adolescence, when he realized he was attracted to women. "I realized there was this other possibility, which is that I could be a lesbian,'' he said. "The two aren't really intertwined, but it seemed easier to change my mind than to change my body. ... If (as a lesbian) I could do all the things that were culturally associated with maleness, then perhaps I could accommodate being female, a different kind of female.'' So he spent decades living as lesbian, an activist in Ann Arbor's gay community and accepted by his family.
     But gradually, he found it harder and harder to function and realized that what he had done was suppress his transgender feelings. "Repression is like a box with a lid you're trying to nail down, and that lid won't stay shut,'' he said. "I spent an awful lot of my emotional and physical energy involved in that repression.'' He doesn't describe himself as a male, but that he's come out as an FTM, or a female-to-male transsexual. "What it means is that I'm going through the transition process; I don't know really where it ends up in some ways, but I'm not willing to hide,'' he said.
     Wilson will not discuss whether or not he's had sex reassignment surgery, saying that it shouldn't really matter, that it's nobody's business. He will say he had a double mastectomy and chest reconstruction - "top surgery'' - and that he was overwhelmed by what a difference that made to him internally. While the medical term for gender identity disorder is "gender dysphoria,'' he thinks of it as "body dysphoria.'' "I know what my gender is,'' he said. "But my body doesn't match itself.''

Early diagnosis can help
Child and family psychologist Steve Rubin has worked with transgender clients in his Ann Arbor office for 10 years. He said the sooner parents acknowledge and accept children's gender identity problems, the better off everybody is. Earlier diagnosis can reduce years of secrecy and shame, Rubin said. Most older transgender patients say they've had such feelings as long as they can remember, and that keeping the problem to themselves only added to the difficulty, he said. "I have worked with dozens of male-to-female clients who've spent a large part of life trying to be a man, denied who they were, pretended to be someone they're not, married, had children, got to a point (where they) couldn't do it anymore,'' he said.
      Developmentally, many preschoolers play at being the other gender, and it's something that often stops with time, said Rubin. Transgender kids never outgrow that because that's who they are, he said. While the outcome for preschoolers can't be predicted, even these young children show a difference between playing the other gender and expressing a strong desire to be or insistence that they are the other gender, he said. If that stated preference is consistent over time, parents might want to see a mental health professional experienced in gender issues, he said.

International standards
The U-M Health System's Comprehensive Gender Services Program has performed more than 35 sex reassignment surgeries in the past 10 years, according to program coordinator Alfreda Rooks-Jordan. About 150 people are now in various stages of treatment at the program. Not all seek the sex reassignment surgery.
      The U-M program - which includes endocrinological, surgical, mental and general health care services - bases its approach on international standards that have counseling as their foundation, Rooks-Jordan said. When appropriate, patients are referred for hormone treatment. Then, she said, if the patient chooses, there is a series of feminizing or masculinizing procedures, culminating in reassignment surgery. In the end, Rooks-Jordan said, patients' lives have changed for the good when their inner person matched their outer appearance. She said she thinks society is growing more accepting of transgenders. The number of queries from parents of children with gender issues has doubled in the nine years she's been with the program.
     It's important to respect young people who want to transition into the other gender, said Sandra Cole, a U-M professor, sexologist and gender specialist for 24 years. However, hormones are not to be taken lightly. "Hormones have permanent results that can't always be reversed,'' she said. "As we all know in the passage of our own adolescence, we have a huge pendulum swing of desires and experiences and risk-taking and fantasies and so on, which is part of the passage of transition from child to adult. And there's a lot of societal sanction for kids to try new things and to act out, et cetera. So we have to be extremely respectful for the people within that population who really and truly do need assistance and do need societal welcoming for their gender uniqueness and not fitting into the norm. But we have to be careful not to be so supportive of the kids who want to do something dramatic, profound and permanent just because they say they want to.'' There are many professionals who are not specialty-trained who - in an effort to help - would enable them to transition in a way that they couldn't easily reverse, she said. "We're trying to do our best with the shifting sands,'' Cole said. "Medically, I'd rather err on the side of caution than to be so well meaning that you've facilitated permanent transition for a child who's still in an experimental stage.''
     The mental health and medical professions have only turned their attention to young people's gender identity issues in the past 10 years, and universal guidelines have not yet been developed for youths, she said. Cole said the fact that Cory (whom she does not know) has dealt with these issues within a supportive, involved family since he can remember makes a big difference. In addition, the welcoming environment that is essential to mental health is increasingly present in schools, she said. "We are seeing much more of a trend in not imposing a judgmental response to someone who's gender variant,'' Cole said. "We know way too many stories of people who have lived in fear of discovery all their lives because of an unwelcoming society and sincerely fear harm, including violence. And now we're seeing little pinholes of change. "If the parents have been working with the principal of the school, that's such a good thing, because that then provides a platform for education for the entire faculty, and the entire student body,'' she said
     Cory's mother said the family has recently contacted staff at the high school, with mixed reactions. She said she's hoping that as school officials become further educated, Cory's decision will be respected.
     Restrooms, Cole said, are a big issue. And building a new, unisex bathroom "is not useful,'' she said. "It reinforces stigma. It further disenfranchises the person from swimming with the pool of people.'' All institutions have private bathrooms, she said, and Cory should be allowed to use those next year.

Role models needed
Lynn Conway, an engineering professor emerita at U-M, underwent male-to-female transsexual transition in 1968. Previously a researcher at IBM, she restarted her career as a contract programmer after transitioning and advanced professionally while keeping her past secret. She became well known as a computer scientist before joining U-M in 1985. There, she served as professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate dean of engineering before retiring in 1998. She now lives with her husband west of Ann Arbor. They've been together 18 years. Although she prefers a quiet private life, Conway uses her Web site (www.lynnconway.com) as a source of information about gender identity issues.
      Conway applauds the trend to begin the transition in younger years and wishes she had had that option herself. Had she transitioned earlier, she said, she could have avoided all the pain and expense of undoing the results of the masculinization process, which hurt her chances of being a pretty woman. Conway said she was fortunate to have fairly soft features and stand just 5 feet 9 inches tall. "It requires so much effort to undo.''
     The more role models who transition successfully, the more public opinion will change, she said. And as society becomes more understanding, it will become easier for transgenders to transition at younger ages with the support of their families and society. "This will make it very much easier for those who are highly gender dysphoric to successfully transition, without having to endure the suffering of being forced into full adulthood in an incorrect physicality - and then having to go to such great lengths to correct that physicality,'' Conway said. "They will also have many more years of life ahead in their new life - and be able to live a fuller life than if they had transitioned much later.''
     People are afraid of what they don't understand, Conway observed. And if they've never met trans women or trans men, they conjure up those images in their heads and have incredibly negative reactions to "transsexuals.'' "However, if more people actually meet and talk to any of the really successful transitioners out there, they will get a totally different picture of them,'' she said. "Many of these women and men are coming forward now and telling their stories - and with pride in what they've accomplished instead of the old fear and shame and embarrassment that most felt in the past.''

From son to daughter
Cory's father said it's been horrible watching his son deal with gender dysphoria his entire life, and that since Cory's been on estrogen, he's noticed a positive change. He said he and his wife used to wonder what they may have done wrong, but no longer think that way. "This is very difficult,'' he said, "but we want our child to be happy and functioning as a human being at the highest level.''
     Telling people what's going on is tricky, he said. "The kid is the most generous, giving person I've ever met,'' he said. "He's musical, artistic, a terrific writer. ... We don't want people to see him as a freak. "I know that father-daughter bond is special, and the whole 'daddy's girl' thing is something I never got to experience.''
     Doctors have told the family Cory will have to live full time as a female before he can have the sex reassignment surgery, and not before the age of 18. Cory doesn't buy the argument that genitals necessarily dictate gender, and believes he was born with a medical - not mental - disorder just as others are born with their challenges. "I wish the outside world could be more compassionate about it,'' said Cory's mother. "We truly believe we're doing the right thing. I didn't at first. It's been a long road. But I truly believe it now.''
     In some ways, it would be easier to switch schools. But Cory doesn't take the easy way. "I want to stay at (the same high school) because I have a lot of friends there and I like big schools,'' said Cory. "And I don't feel I'm doing anything wrong. Of course, I'm going to get harassed and teased, but I feel I can get through it.''
     Cory considers himself a heterosexual female. He's a member of his school's Gay-Straight Alliance but hasn't told anyone there he's transgender. "I'm there because I'm a straight ally of gay people,'' he said.
     The next steps include laser hair removal and a legal name change. He doesn't expect he'll want breast augmentation, but will be happy if the estrogen takes him to a modest A cup. Then, probably during the summer of 2007, just before he goes to college, he'll have the gender reassignment surgery. For the rest of his life, he'll continue with a low dose of estrogen.
     His mother said that on the one hand, she is trying to look forward to having a daughter. "But when I think back, I always had a daughter,'' she said, referring to the many interests the two have in common - shopping, movies, books and music. The couple are already trying to use the name Cory will formally adopt next year, and more and more, refer to him as "her'' and "she,'' which Cory prefers.
     Cory hopes one day to become a therapist who helps young transgender people, and in the meantime, looks forward to each new step in the journey. "I expect I'll be feeling more at peace with my body,'' said Cory, referring to the much-anticipated adulthood as a woman. "And I'll be able to look in the mirror and finally say, 'That's me.'''

The Animal Self
Charles Siebert, New York Times Magazine- 2/22/2006

A big-city aquarium after closing hours is an eerie, spectral place. With the lights turned down in the empty viewing galleries, the luminous dioramas of the different fish fairly swell against your senses, rendering you the viewed and startled captive, adrift in your own natural medium, in a literal suspension of disbelief. "Help yourself," Sal Munoz, a night-shift biologist at the Seattle Aquarium, told me one night this past fall, pointing to the huge 12-foot-high glass tank in which the subject of my specially arranged private encounter that evening resided: a 70-pound giant Pacific octopus named Achilles.
      I was first introduced to Achilles earlier that day by Roland Anderson, another scientist at the aquarium, and I was still having trouble with Anderson's description of him as "a young, pretty male." There are, as fellow life forms go, few as deeply alien - in both substance and appearance - as the giant Pacific octopus. "G.P.O." adults can weigh more than 100 pounds, and yet all of their throbbing, multi-tentacled mass can pass like water through a drain pipe no bigger in circumference than an apple, just wide enough to accommodate the octopus's cartilaginous beak, its only solid body part. These creatures look, at rest, like cracked leather discards from a handbag factory; in motion, like wind-swept hot-air balloons in severe deflation distress, with no one at home in the balloon's gondola but for a pair of unsettlingly knowing black eyes.
     It was those eyes more than anything that I had asked Anderson for special permission to come back and stare into on my own. Just me and Achilles. With no one else around to make me self-conscious for engaging in a protracted stare-down with an octopus. For reading impossible complexities into his muffled side of the conversation. For tapping my fingers on the glass in hopes of getting Achilles riled. For behaving, in short, in a way that even I, an inveterate lingerer before zoo enclosures and fish tanks, would have considered preposterous had I not heard Anderson's real-life octopus stories earlier that day.
     Anderson told me that he and his staff started naming the G.P.O.'s at the Seattle Aquarium 20 years ago. Not out of cutesy sentimentality. Anderson, a longtime marine biologist and the son of a sea captain, is not given to that sort of thing. It was, he said, because they couldn't help noticing the animals' distinct personalities. G.P.O.'s live about three or four years, and the aquarium typically keeps three on the premises - two on display and one backup or understudy octopus - so there have been a good number of G.P.O.'s at the aquarium over the past two decades. Still, Anderson had little trouble recalling them: Emily Dickinson, for example, a particularly shy, retiring female G.P.O. who always hid behind the tank's rock outcroppings, or Leisure Suit Larry, who, Anderson told me, would have been arrested in our world for sexual assault, with his arms always crawling all over passing researchers. And then there was Lucretia McEvil. She repeatedly tore her tank apart at night, scraping up all the rocks at the base, pulling up the water filter, biting through nylon cables, all the parts left floating on the surface when Anderson arrived in the morning.
     One particularly temperamental G.P.O. so disliked having his tank cleaned, he would keep grabbing the cleaning tools, trying to pull them into the tank, his skin going a bright red. Another took to regularly soaking one of the aquarium's female night biologists with the water funnel octopuses normally use to propel themselves, because he didn't like it when she shined her flashlight into his tank. Yet another G.P.O. of the Leisure Suit Larry mold once tried to pull into his tank a BBC videographer who got her hand a bit too close, wrapping his tentacles up and down her arm as fast as she could unravel them. When she finally broke free, the octopus turned a bright red and doused her with repeated jets of water.
     Just across from Achilles that night was another G.P.O. named Mikala, their two tanks connected by an overhead, see-through passageway, the doors to which were closed. Mikala was a recent replacement for Helen, who had just been released back into the sea after a failed attempt by the scientists to mate her with Achilles. Anderson told me that they had left Achilles and Helen together in the same tank for a week, but, he said, "there wasn't any chemistry." In the coming months, they would be trying the same routine with Mikala, to see if anything clicked.
     At one point I decided to absent myself from Achilles' stare and walk around to the far side of his tank to look at Mikala in hers. Standing in the narrow space beneath the overhead passageway, I found her sound asleep, mushed between her tank's outer glass and some craggy rocks. I thought about tapping the glass to see if I could stir her, but decided to leave her be. When I turned around, Achilles was right there behind me, bobbing against the glass, bright red, his black eyes opened wide. "How do we even define what an emotion is in an animal?" I recalled Roland Anderson asking earlier that day. "And why do they even have these different temperaments?"
     It was back in 1991 that Anderson and Jennifer Mather, a psychologist from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, first decided to undertake a joint personality study of 44 smaller red octopuses at the aquarium as a way to begin to codify and systematize what they thought they had been observing. Using three categorizations from a standard human-personality-assessment test -- shy, aggressive and passive -- their data would ultimately show that the animals did consistently clump together under these different categories in response to various stimuli, like touching them with a bristly test-tube brush or dropping a crab into the tank. "The aggressive ones would pounce on the crab," Anderson told me. "The passive ones would wait for the crab to come past and then grab it. The shy animal would wait till overnight when no one was looking, and we'd find this little pile of crab shell in the morning."
     Anderson and Mather's resulting 1993 paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, entitled "Personalities of Octopuses," was not only the first-ever documentation of personality in invertebrates. It was the first time in anyone's memory that the term "personality" had been applied to a nonhuman in a major psychology journal. Scientists are not typically disposed to wielding a word like "personality" when talking about animals. Doing so borders on the scientific heresy of anthropomorphism. And yet for a growing number of researchers from a broad range of disciplines -- psychology, evolutionary biology and ecology, animal behavior and welfare -- it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid that term when trying to describe the variety of behaviors that they are now observing in an equally broad and expanding array of creatures, everything from nonhuman primates to hyenas and numerous species of birds to water striders and stickleback fish and, of course, giant Pacific octopuses.
     In fact, in the years since Anderson and Mather's original paper, a whole new field of research has emerged known simply as "animal personality." Through close and repeated observations of different species in a variety of group settings and circumstances, scientists are finding that our own behavioral traits exist in varying degrees and dimensions among creatures across all the branches of life's tree. Observing our fellow humans, we all recognize the daredevil versus the more cautious, risk-averse type; the aggressive bully as opposed to the meek victim; the sensitive, reactive individual versus the more straight-ahead, proactive sort, fairly oblivious to the various subtle signals of his surroundings. We wouldn't have expected to meet all of them, however, in everything from farm animals and birds to fish and insects and spiders. But more and more now, we are recognizing ourselves and our ways to be recapitulations of the rest of biology. And as scientists track these phenomena, they are also beginning to unravel such core mysteries as the bioevolutionary underpinnings of personality, both animal and human; the dynamic interplay between genes and environment in the expression of various personality traits; and why it is that nature invented such a thing as personality in the first place.
     Animal personality studies are only the most recent manifestation of the inroads that science is now making into what has long been uncharted terrain: the very inscrutability of our fellow creatures that has, from the dawn of human consciousness, both begotten and bound us to our wildest imaginings about them. All sorts of research has been done in recent years revealing various aspects of animal complexity: African gray parrots that can not only count but can also grasp the concept of zero; self-recognition, empathy and the cultural transference of tool use in both chimps and dolphins; individual face-recognition among sheep; courtship songs in mice; laughter in rats. This is no longer merely the stuff of anthropomorphism or isolated anecdote. As Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist who first discovered rat laughter, has pointed out: "Every drug used to treat emotional and psychiatric disorders in humans was first developed and found effective in animals. This kind of research would obviously have no value if animals were incapable of experiencing these emotional states."
     Now, with the emergence of animal-personality studies, we are gaining an even fuller appreciation not only of the distinctiveness of birds and beasts and their behaviors but also of their deep resemblances to us and our own. Somehow, through the very creatures we have long piggybacked upon to tell stories about ourselves, we are beginning to get at the essence of that one aspect of the self we have long thought to be exclusively and quintessentially ours: the individual personality. The octopuses' garden is proving to be quite deeply and variously shaded indeed.
     Appropriately enough for a newly emerging psychological science, the world's first Animal Personality Institute, or A.P.I., is still more of a proposition than a physical place. Indeed, outside of a newly established Web site with a flashy bright blue logo, A.P.I.'s only visitable locale can be found on the third floor of the psychology-department building at the University of Texas in Austin, in the small, book-crammed office of A.P.I.'s founder, Sam Gosling, a London-born, 37-year-old professor of psychology. "This here is my collection of animal-personality literature," Gosling told me one afternoon in October, pointing to a long row of thick blue binders along the top shelf of his office's bookcase, including animal studies from fields as diverse as agricultural science, anthropology, psychology, veterinary medicine and zoology. "We're trying to scan them all and make them available, because part of. . . I mean.. . ."
     A tall, gaunt figure whose flowing locks, untucked striped shirt, slightly flared bell bottoms and ankle-high leather boots give him the appearance of a 60's-era British rock star, Gosling is given to switching gears midsentence, his active mind going in a number of directions at once. "Part of what we're trying to do here," he continued, "is create a field." Gosling, who often refers to himself as "a bit of a fraud," being what he calls "a personality expert who knows very little about actual animals," was a young graduate student in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, when he first came upon Anderson and Mather's paper on octopus personality. It was not at all an area of research he expected to be poking his nose into, having originally attended Berkeley to pursue a degree in human personality. But in the course of one of his first seminars, he suddenly found his thoughts going in an unlikely direction, what he now refers to as his "reductio ad absurdum moment." "It was a basic seminar in human personality," he recalled. "We were considering the question of what is personality. And I thought, O.K., let's try to push it to its limit. To find out what personality is, let's start by taking what's clearly outside that category and discover what's different about that. Let's take animals. They obviously don't have personality. So then I thought, O.K., if animals don't have it, then what is it that makes them not have it, and I couldn't come up with an answer."
     A standard answer, of course, is that animals do not, as far as we know, reflect upon and argue with their experiences, emotions and behaviors in the way that we humans do. They do not possess, in other words, that dynamic, self-reflective, internal dialogue the very outcome of which is, many scientists say, our personality. Of course, whether or not self-knowledge is truly a defining characteristic of personality is a question scientists disagree on, as they do about much else in the field. Indeed, the whole notion of personality is one that we only began trying to measure and codify in the past century. Personality theory started showing up in the writings of Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud as a somewhat vague, broadly drawn concept. It has only been in the last 60 years or so that the modern science of human personality began to emerge, a system of assessing distinct personality traits that has its roots in World War II, when the U.S. government assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of today's C.I.A.) the task of identifying which individuals had the right traits to be spies. A number of different personality-mapping methods and traits-assessment tests have been developed over the years, all of them pivoting around the principle that certain traits can be consistently observed in individuals across time and different situations. The most widely applied test today uses the categories defined by what is known as the Five-Factor Model (F.F.M.): openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Under each of these broad dimension headings are so-called clusters of recognizable traits: an extroverted person, for example, is more sociable, outgoing and assertive; a neurotic one, more anxious, moody and stressed. Gosling, however, was intent on exploring personality at its most rudimentary level -- below the radar, if you will, of human consciousness. Applying some of the very same personality assessments that we use on humans, he wondered whether we could observe in animals essential traits like fearfulness, aggressiveness, affability or calmness, traits that can exist outside of cognition and yet are clearly and repeatedly apparent in varying measures in different individual animals within a given species.
     Does one duck, in other words, behave consistently differently from another duck, over time and across situations? If so, why doesn't that meet the definition of personality as we apply it to ourselves, regardless of the presence or absence of self-awareness? In a sense, Gosling was posing a psychologist's rendition of that old philosophical query about whether the tree that falls in the forest, miles from anyone's ears, still makes a sound. That is, if an animal behaves in distinctly consistent ways but isn't fully cognizant of such behaviors, can the behaviors still be aspects and indications of its personality?
     One way Gosling set about answering that question was to focus on a colony of 34 hyenas being kept on the Berkeley campus by Steve Glickman, a professor of psychology. With Glickman's blessing, Gosling asked four caretakers of the colony to independently fill out questionnaires about each animal, using a modified version of the F.F.M. test. He soon found that the caretakers' assessments had the same level of agreement, or "convergence," as is found in assessments done on humans, with such distinct human dimensions as "excitability," "sociability," "curiosity" and "assertiveness" being repeatedly observed.
     Gosling then reviewed 19 different previous behavioral studies of nonhuman species through the same F.F.M. framework and found a similar recurrence of those dimensions across a surprisingly broad spectrum of species. Among the traits remarked upon were such things as "opportunistic, self-serving" behavior in certain vervet monkeys; "emotionality" in rats; "fear avoidance" in some guppies and "extroversion" in others; and, in Anderson and Mather's 1993 paper, both "boldness" and "avoidance" in octopuses. "The evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals suggests that some dimensions of personality may be common across a wide range of species," Gosling wrote in the resulting paper he published in 1999 in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. "Scientists have been reluctant to ascribe personality traits, emotion and cognitions to animals, even though they readily accept that the anatomy and physiology of humans is similar to that of animals. Yet there is nothing in evolutionary theory to suggest that only physical traits are subject to selection pressures."
     Gosling told me that his seminar adviser thought the whole thing sounded a bit "goofy" at first. Some of his fellow students, meanwhile, were irked at him for trying to bring the field of personality to disrepute, as Gosling put it, by studying silly, trivial, frivolous stuff. The major sticking point, of course, was his insistence on using the obviously loaded word "personality," a choice that he admits was purposefully provocative.
     In some quarters, the term still rankles. "Personality ratings have been done with chimps where you can see in them intimations of human characteristics," says Jack Block, an emeritus professor of personality psychology at Berkeley. "Now, where you want to take that, I don't know. Even with chimps, it is a big extrapolation from them to us. But personality in fruit flies or octopi? Heck, no. All living organisms do react to pain and seek what they have developed to want in terms of food or mating. But they cannot manifest the complexity of responses that human beings can."
     John Capitanio, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, who does extensive behavioral studies with rhesus monkeys, is more willing to extrapolate. "Animal behaviorists or behavioral ecologists are mostly interested in what the animal is presenting them with in terms of behavior," he told me recently. "And yet the behaviors exhibited are not dissimilar from our own, and that's what causes us to infer these personality characteristics. Now do they really exist in animals? I think the answer is yes, they do in some form."In many of his early talks, people would ask Gosling why he didn't use the word "temperament" instead of personality. His response was -- and is -- that temperament is always invoked as a purely biological, inherited quality, whereas personality is thought of as a "higher order phenomenon" that grows out of the interaction of our inherited temperaments and our experiences. If he used only the word temperament with animals, he would be dismissing the possibility that they may have some of the same personality processes as humans. "I don't want to rule that out," Gosling told me. "I also think the word personality is as appropriate for animals as it is for us. Of course, we still have to be suspicious. People will also rate the personality of a loaf of bread or a car. A colleague has poked fun at me about that: 'A temperamental car is difficult to start across time and situations. So why isn't that personality?' Well, the fundamental difference, of course, is that with an animal there is an underlying physiology and biology. Saying my car is temperamental is an analogy. And some people will rate dogs not only as friendly or fearful but as philosophical. Now, I do not believe dogs are philosophical, whereas I do believe in their fearfulness. So we have to be careful where to draw the line between what's reality and what's analogy."
     Dogs, in a way, offer the most obvious proof of the existence of animal personality. They have long been bound to us and bred by us precisely for their very particular physical and temperament traits, and, of course, even among specific breeds there are all kinds of variation in the personalities of individuals. Indeed, animals like dogs and cats point up what often appears to be a paradoxically prodigious "duh factor" behind this otherwise cutting-edge science. While scientists may tussle endlessly over the validity of applying the word personality to nonhumans, for people in the everyday world -- especially those who spend any time around animals -- the assertion that they have distinct personalities seems absurdly obvious.
     Not so very long ago, concepts like animal sentience, emotion and personality were not merely the stuff of anecdotes told by farmers and pet owners; they were wholly embraced by the scientific community as well. In the late 19th century, animal emotion and behavior were integral aspects of the newly emerging science of human psychology. Charles Darwin devoted much of his time after the publication of "The Origin of Species" to researching "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," published in 1872. Although that era's cross-species conjecturing and comparing was often naïve or intuitive, the impulse behind it went on to inform human psychological study well into the 20th century. Beginning with the appearance in 1908 of more sober, scientifically sound works like John Lubbocks's "On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals With Special Reference to the Insects" or Edward L. Thorndike's "Animal Intelligence," animal studies figured prominently in standard human psychology textbooks well into the 1940's. And then, steadily, the animals began to disappear.
     At one point in his Austin office on the afternoon I met with him, Sam Gosling pulled from his shelves the 1935 edition of "A Handbook of Social Psychology," a standard human psychology textbook of the time, and showed me the table of contents. More than a quarter of the textbook's chapters were devoted to studies of animals and other life forms, titles like "Population Behavior of Bacteria," "Insect Societies" or "The Behavior of Mammalian Herds and Packs." There is even a chapter devoted to "Social Origins and Processes Among Plants." But in the 1954 edition of a similar work called "The Handbook of Social Psychology," there is but one chapter devoted to nonhuman research. Titled "The Social Significance of Animal Studies," it is essentially a desperate last plea to social psychologists not to abandon animal studies, arguing at one point that "social psychology must be dangerously myopic if it restricts itself to human literature." The warning clearly went unheeded. The most recent edition of the handbook, from 1998, is devoted entirely to humans.The banishment of our fellow beasts from psychological literature can be blamed by and large on that branch of psychology known as behaviorism. The field's major proponents, eminent psychologists like B.F. Skinner, stressed the inherent inscrutability of mental states and perceptions to anyone but the person experiencing them. And even though the behaviorists were themselves major proponents of the use of animals in behavioral research, they sought to rein in subjective verbal descriptions of the animals' mental states, as well as the sorts of experiments that relied on such necessarily vague data. If the human mind was, as Skinner famously referred to it, "a black box," then surely the minds of animals were even further beyond our ken.
     "The great and enduring contribution of behaviorism," Gosling says, "is that it introduced the scientific method to the study of behavior. They said, 'Let's get rid of the fuzzy, sentimental higher-level descriptions.' And they did. They went to great efforts to record specific behaviors, things like how many times a chimpanzee scratched its head or nose. But it's hard to study higher-order phenomena, things like personality and emotion, in just those ways. In the end, what you're left with is this long catalog of meaningless descriptions. If I need to know whether I can go into that cage or not to clean it, it's not useful to tell me the chimp scratched its nose 50,000 times in the past year. Just tell me, Is it aggressive or not?"
     In their dogged pursuit of hard science and their strict avoidance of what Sam Gosling referred to in his first published paper as the "specter of anthropomorphism," the behaviorists, especially in the eyes of many who currently study animal behavior, greatly limited the field of psychology by ultimately outlawing things like intuition, inference and common sense. Now, however, the pendulum has begun to swing back in that direction, and it is a shift that has been impelled, somewhat surprisingly, by hard science. Advances in fields like genetics and molecular and evolutionary biology have lent to the study of psychology something that it really didn't have when behaviorism first came to the fore: a better understanding of the biological and bioevolutionary underpinnings of behavior. No longer is the study of animal behavior rooted in that inherently naïve and anthropocentric desire to see ourselves in animals or to project upon them our thoughts and feelings. Animal personality, along with such integral fields as animal behavior, behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology, all pivot now around what might be called deep analogies. The more detailed and specific our knowledge has become of the animals and of the many differences between them and us, the more clearly we can see what is analogous about our respective behaviors.
     Animal personality, in other words, is now redirecting psychology's focus in a direction the behaviorists would most appreciate: away from airy abstractions about personality and down to its very tangible and widely dispersed roots. It might be thought of as a kind of biological Buddhism or muscular mythologizing or armed anthropomorphism: a more disciplined and detailed form of that idle speculating we have all done in front of the head tilt of a dog or the sudden skyward shift of a flock of sea gulls or the comings and goings of ants around their respective mounds.
     "Now, those there I can almost guarantee you are females," Jason Watters, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Davis, told me one afternoon this past autumn. He was pointing to a cluster of water striders that had climbed up the side wall of one of the collecting pools in the artificial stream that Watters had erected at the far western edge of the Davis campus for a six-month study that he and his lab director, Andy Sih, recently completed on the role of genetic and environmental factors in the expression of behavior in water striders: those spindly black, surface-flitting wraiths whose indent on their tenuous native terrain is never more than four slightly concave, lunar-module-like landing cups.Watters personally reared several thousand water striders for the experiment and would come to know them about as intimately as any human can an insect. He knew each strider's parents and siblings. He photographed and marked each of them with paint-on numbers and then tracked them through more or less every circumstance and experience in their roughly yearlong lives: what and how they ate, their responses to new environments or to simulated predator attacks, their social interactions and mating practices out in the simulated stream.
     "I haven't gathered all the data yet," Watters said, grabbing one of the clustered striders and confirming his suspicion about its sex. "But what we do know is that these water striders express consistent behavioral types. Like in the presence of a predator some individuals will run and get right out of the water. Others don't seem concerned whatsoever. Just sit there. Others get out and then get back in after a little while. So there's a great deal of variation in what they do. Especially in a mating situation, here in the stream we've found among the males that there is the consistently more aggressive guy -- so that's his type or his personality -- and then there are these very active, hyperaggressive males. They're the ones who are always forcing females to have sex and driving them out of the water and really messing things up for themselves and everybody. We don't know yet if this is really the best way to be or what the point of it is. We're working on that. But I've got to believe there's going to be some circumstances where it's a good idea to be a really mean, brutish type of guy and others where it's not."
     A similar array of behaviors is now being encountered in other insects. In her current research at Davis, Judy Stamps, a professor of biology and animal behavior, has been looking into how early experience affects habitat selection in drosophila, better known to you and me as the common fruit fly. Stamps escorted me one afternoon to one of the biology department's "animal rooms," where she and her students have been conducting their experiments. The room was the size of a small walk-in closet, barely large enough to contain the 11-foot-long metal table before us.
     To a tiny fruit fly, however, the strange, artificial fruit-bowl habitats of upward twisting wire set at either end of the table are separate universes, the various fruit-shaped planets of which, Stamps has discovered, fruit flies approach and settle in a number of ways, some of which depend on early experience and some on their distinct personalities. Fruit flies born and raised on a plum, for example, will seek out the next plum to settle upon, as will the offspring that they raise there: a "no place like home" impulse. But in the course of their research, Stamps and her students have also encountered everything from overly shy, timorous fruit flies to bold trailblazers to downright feisty and ultimately self-defeating bullies. "You don't think of drosophila in that way," Stamps told me. "They can be very territorial, and some of the males are fairly aggressive. They tussle with each other. When we did our free-range fly experiments, we marked them individually. We put little colored paint dots on their thorax. The students loved it. They'd say: 'You know Blue? He's been attacking everyone this morning. He's on Banana A, and everyone else is on Banana B. He's the ruler of Banana A.' Of course, the other thing we've noticed is that individuals that behave like Blue get into trouble because, you see, they end up with nobody to mate with."
     Another member of Andy Sih's lab, Alison Bell, has done extensive studies of the three-spined stickleback fish, a tiny prehistoric-looking fish with armorlike outer lateral plates and serrated, lancelike spines protruding from the dorsal region. As well as finding the same spectrum of behaviors in sticklebacks -- from extremely bold and bullying sticklebacks to extremely shy and timid ones -- Bell has found groups of sticklebacks that exhibit a similar type of behavior: tribelike populations of bold and aggressive sticklebacks, for example, or of extremely timid ones. Their collective disposition seems to have been shaped by the respective environment in which they were raised -- whether it was predator-free or predator-laden -- and their physical appearance reflects their environment as well: the timid sticklebacks having far heavier armor and longer, more serrated spines.The questions that scientists are now beginning to address are why evolution has wielded such a variety of temperaments in animals and why it hasn't weeded out the clearly deleterious ones: the shyness and timidity that deprives some members of a group of food or mates or the overaggression and extreme risk-taking behavior that can often result in both the disruption of the group's overall reproductive success and the aggressors' becoming some other creature's food.
     Roland Anderson sees the diversity of temperaments as a manifestation of that most basic biological imperative of survival, an array of personality traits being kept in play in a given species because of the differing, shifting environmental circumstances that groups may encounter. "What happens," he asked, "if a big school of herring comes along and eats all the aggressive, fearless males in a group of smaller fish? Well, there will still be some of the more passive or shy ones hiding under that rock that can say: 'Hey, they're all gone now. There's a nice-looking female over there. I think I'll reproduce with her."'
     Andy Sih, like most of his colleagues at Davis, views personality differences in animals in a Darwinian context. He considers specific behaviors and preferences from an evolutionary perspective and tries to determine how various traits affect the long-term survival of a given species. And in the course of his research on everything from water striders to salamanders, Sih has become fairly obsessed with what he calls "stupid behaviors," ones that don't seem to make any evolutionary sense whatsoever. "You'd expect animals to be doing smart stuff," Sih told me one evening over dinner. "The whole tradition in most of evolutionary ecology has been to emphasize adaptation where organisms do smart things. But I've been making the case for a while that the most interesting behaviors are actually the stupidest."
     It's typically the males of a given species that seem to figure most prominently in the stupid-behavior department -- the militant, mayhem-causing water striders and sticklebacks, for example, or fierce male Western bluebirds, who spend so much time defending nests or courting females that they completely neglect their own offspring. But perhaps the most glaring instance of dumb-animal doings is to be found in the female North American fishing spider. Studies have shown that a good number of female fishing spiders are from a very early age highly driven and effective hunters. It is a trait that serves them well most of their lives, particularly in lean times, but it wholly backfires during mating season, when these females can't keep themselves from eating prospective suitors. "Now why would anybody, why would any organism do that?" asked Sih. "If you look at these female spiders just in the context of mating behavior, you would conclude that they're doing something mighty stupid here. But their behavioral type is very good for them for much of their life growing up in a highly competitive world where food is often scarce. They're so geared up, though, that when mating season comes around, they really mess up. And experiments have shown that even if they're given a reasonable amount of food, they'll still behave this way."
     These same hyped-up females have also been shown to be the most fearless in the face of predators. In simulated attacks, all fishing spiders retreated underwater. The overaggressive, ravenous females, however, were always the first to pop back up, giving them at once the greatest chance of getting available food and, if the predator was still around, of becoming its meal. Of course, a good proportion of female fishing spiders are able to make the distinction between sex and dinner and between finding and becoming dinner. But for Sih and others, the persistence in certain members of a species of these extreme behaviors and the inability of some to modulate that behavior give rise to a more profound question about the nature of personality types in general and how plastic or not they actually are, whether in animals or humans.
     In animals, it is now becoming evident, there is a certain degree of evolutionary inertia when it comes to their behavior, wherein the very behaviors that accord some members of the group a distinct evolutionary advantage in one set of circumstances can do them in in the next. They are stuck, to some extent, with their distinct ways of being. We humans, on the other hand, tend to think of our personalities as protean, mutable entities that, unlike our physical selves, we can shape to suit shifting circumstances. Sih disagrees. He says he thinks that our behaviors, no matter how complex the human social contexts that help to shape them, are not nearly as pliant as we believe them to be. "Behavioral ecologists actually tend to model animals and humans as both being very flexible, as being capable of changing their behaviors as necessary to do the right things in all situations," he said. But in our own day-to-day experience, he said, we recognize that humans don't really behave that way. "We all know that overly bold person," he pointed out. "We have friends like that. They do things that are just like: Hey, this can get you killed. What are they doing that for? And there are people that are shy, and they're missing out on opportunities they could have had."
     There is currently a paucity of human studies along these lines, but a recently published human-personality study of 545 people by Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in England shows a strong parallel with some of these recent animal studies. It found that the more extroverted and outgoing people were, the more sex partners they tended to have, an evolutionary edge that was mitigated by the fact that these were the same people who were most likely to end up in the hospital because of stupid risk-taking behaviors.
     Indeed, however elaborate an argument we humans may have with our own biology, we are each of us to some extent locked into a personality type, a consistent way of being without which we would each be, in a sense, unrecognizable to ourselves or others. The oft-heard comment "Hey, that's not like you" is a tacit acknowledgment of your recognizably consistent way of being. If, in other words, someone were to be entirely flexible and unpredictable in their behavior, were able to respond with any one of the full palette of behavioral responses in any given circumstance, they would be not only, as Andy Sih put it, "scary to be around," but they would also be someone of whom you could say, they have no personality.
     This set of ideas, Sih told me, suggests new questions that are rarely posed about humans. "Like why do we even have a personality?" he asked. "Why do we have a relatively narrow range of responses as opposed to a full range? Why can't we all be bold when we need to be and cautious and shy when we need to be? Then we'd have no identifiable personality, and that would free us all to become optimal."
     For Sih, the answer seems to be that our personality is a manifestation of a complex interplay between genetic inheritance and environment and early-life experience. Bold people, for example, are both naturally disposed to boldness and, further, choose to be bold, becoming ever better at it, building from an early age a mountain of abilities and tendencies that become a personality. It might happen, as well, that an inherently shy person is induced by an early-life experience to venture away from his or her natural disposition and cultivate a bold personality. But whether a person ends up building and climbing a shy or a bold mountain, it may become increasingly difficult to come back down and build another one. "It's not impossible," Sih said, "but it's not going to be easy. I'll give you another human example. It's always mystified me why anyone would be a pessimist. It seems to me like optimism has to be the way to go. But, in fact, there is some recent literature that shows that pessimists are good at being pessimists. And that when things go badly, they expected it anyway, and it doesn't hurt them. And so it's this notion that personality types build because of these feedback loops."
     In human beings, of course, as with other highly social species, the shaping of personality entails a complex web of influences and imperatives. It is not merely about the acquisition of food or mates but involves as well issues of group interaction, cooperation, deception and so on. It is a dynamic that, in an ever more complex series of evolutionary feedback loops, at once impelled the formation of larger and more sophisticated brains and the more nuanced emotional responses to social interaction -- feelings of embarrassment, guilt, empathy, confidence, etc. -- that such a brain allows.
     The attempt to parse that web of entanglements has for decades been a motivation of fields like psychology, psychiatry and sociology. What seems so promising about the field of animal personality is that in the course of allowing us to better understand and more effectively conserve the animals themselves, it is also affording scientists new pathways of understanding ourselves and our behavior, through the kind of experimentation that we are unable to perform on humans.
     "Do thrill seekers thrive in certain speculative business or military environments?" Sih asked. "I don't know. But I can do experiments to look at analogous situations in animals, can take different animals with different personalities and see how they do in different environments -- in a high-predation-risk situation, in a cooperative situation, during a courtship-mating situation. Along similar lines, we can test ideas like, Are animals particularly aggressive when they invade new regions because it is primarily the bold, aggressive individuals that tend to immigrate to new areas? How does the personality of the immigrant pool in humans differ from those who stay behind, and does that difference influence success -- and does this basic view apply to the melting pot of America?"
     Alison Bell has done related experiments with sticklebacks. It has long been clear to researchers that fish that have lived for many generations in the proximity of dangerous predators are less bold and less aggressive than animals that have lived relatively risk-free. What Bell discovered is that those cautious tendencies outlast the presence of risk, even by a generation. When she moved sticklebacks who had always lived in a high-risk environment into a low-risk environment, she found that not only did they retain their cautious tendencies, but so did their offspring. Even fish raised from birth in a low-risk environment behave more fearfully if raised by a particularly vigilant father from a high-risk background. "There's definitely the effect of genetic difference," Bell explained, "but there's also the effect of what is experienced as they grow up. Genotype and environment interactions make it difficult to detect the effects of genes, because you have to take the environment into account. This is annoying to geneticists." To scientists like Bell who are studying the interplay of genes and environment, however, it is of profound interest.
     In the coming year, the sequence of the full stickleback genome will have been assembled, which will open doors into all kinds of cross-species research on the relationship between genes and environment. Alison Bell will be looking at such things as risk-taking behavior in sticklebacks -- which may, by extension, give us insight into the behavior of humans. The same genes and hormone receptor systems associated with such behaviors have been conserved across a broad spectrum of species from sticklebacks to rhesus monkeys to us. John Capitanio has already done a number of experiments with rhesus monkeys that look into how the manner of their rearing affects what Capitanio (in a hedge on the loaded P-word) calls an animal's "biobehavioral organization" -- and how, in turn, that biobehavioral organization affects everything from gene expression to immune-system function against ailments like simian AIDS.
     What once seemed the hopelessly subjective pursuit of understanding human behavior and personality is now increasingly being tied down to and girded by the objective moorings of our own and other animals' biology. The very names of newly emergent fields like biological psychiatry, molecular psychiatry and, of course, animal personality reflect this trend. It is not, as Capitanio points out, a reductionistic concept but more of a holistic one, one that allows for an unprecedentedly subtle reading of the integrative influences - genetic, experiential and environmental - that shape each individual's personality.
     Capitanio is currently writing, with Sam Gosling, the first chapter on animal personality to be included in "The Handbook of Personality," a standard reference book of human-personality psychology. This week, he will be in Palm Springs, Calif., presenting a paper on personality in rhesus monkeys as part of an animal-social psychology symposium led by Gosling at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the first symposium of its kind at a human psychology conference. For Gosling, it is the realization of the very thing he envisioned when he first started pursuing the possibility of personality in animals at Berkeley back in the mid-1990's.
     "What really got me interested when I started exploring this," Gosling told me, "is I noticed that what the animal researchers were doing in practice was exactly what human researchers were saying would be the perfect study they could do in a perfect world. Like you ask a human personality researcher, they might say what we'd do is take a bunch of individuals, and we'd watch them from conception till death and record all the major events in their lives and know who mated with whom and who had a fight with whom. And if we wanted, we could give them frightening stimuli and so on. And a lot of my job is saying to those in human psychology: 'Hey, you should talk to these other guys. What they're doing is really relevant.' I'm like the middleman."
     Looking through some of the animal-personality literature in Gosling's office that afternoon, I came upon an intriguing paper titled "Microscopic Brains," published in the March 13, 1964, edition of the journal Science, in the midst of the great animal blackout from psychological literature. Written by a professor of zoology and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania named Vincent Dethier, the paper is at once a study of insect behavior and a remarkably prescient argument for a more intuitive, empathetic and integrative approach to the study of psychology. "The farther removed an animal is from ourselves," Dethier writes, "the less sympathetic we are in ascribing to it those components of behavior that we know in ourselves. There is some fuzzy point of transition in the phylogenetic scale where our empathizing acquires an unsavory aura. Yet there is little justification for this schism. If we subscribe to an idea of a lineal evolution of behavior, there is no reason for failing to search for adumbrations of higher behavior in invertebrates." Dethier concludes on a decidedly haunting note: "Perhaps," he writes, "these insects are little machines in a deep sleep, but looking at their rigidly armored bodies, their staring eyes and their mute performances, one cannot help at times wondering if there is anyone inside."
     We will never know, of course, one way or the other. And yet somehow, science, of all things, is rendering the empirical answer to such a question incidental to a more felt and intuitive one. Perched now, like entranced children, along the banks of their respective simulated streams, scientists are staring for hours at the least human of creatures -- everything from bullying fruit flies to ravenous, oversexed water striders and fishing spiders to perilously fearless hordes of armored stickleback fish -- and are beginning to see in them not just their distinct patterns of behavior but also something deeply and distinctly recognizable. Something, well, not altogether inhuman.