I just saw Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera. I am always blown away by the music and the sets, especially in a project of this magnitude coordinating of hundreds of individuals of talent. Running a hospital is a similar task but childsplay compared with that.  The premise of this incredibly beautiful production,  is that real men want a girl who has rejected 26 men and cut off their heads. At that point it is reasonable to stand in as number 27. That saintly though beautiful lady who loves you so much that she is more than willing to sacrifice her own life,  you throw aside. (Yes I know Liu is only a servant girl who falls in love with a man’s smile, while Turandot is daughter of the emperor,  so the more worth having.)  The woman you want declares not only that she will love no man ever, but dedicates her life to  the destruction of men one at a time. The intrepid main character has held onto his head by answering three questions, so I beg his pardon in asking one additional query from the audience. Once conquered at great cost and after revealing a cruel and icy streak in her personality, does he think his problems solved with this frigid woman, or have his travails only started? That is already answered. Having saved his head, Calaf must win Turandot’s icy heart.

It bears upon the changeability of humans, whether certain features of personality are altered by circumstance or are they characterological, fixed and unchanging. How malleable are humans once formed?   I predict disastrous love life for our Mogul hero Calaf. Of course, no one says he needs to mate with Turandot for life.

I am not the first to make the observation that in watching the debates and candidates behavior, handling media and so forth we are interviewing a person for a job. Employers have to do this. Some of them say their organization is no better than the people working for it. For the president, I happen to want a sober intellectual reflective person, not someone given to bravado but there are plenty to disagree with me.

For sure though, whatever it is you want in a person, such as your spouse, if you want one, there is wide enough variation to fit the bill. The question is how do you choose between people. I am not impressed that characters in opera are all that good at it.

Evidence is accumulating that persons bear personality variations and that many of these are arrayed as on a spectrum over a bell-shaped curve. Furthermore, personality characteristics are genetically determined, not that the relations are simple, they are complex which is why they have been debated for so long.

With the chemistry of genetic variation precisely known, someone may be able to assign certain individuals to specific jobs,  not by the color their skin, but the content of their character. One day we may dream of assigning only highly principled persons to high positions affecting a lot of lives, and ignoring opportunities to pollute decisions with considerations of personal gain, like the Federal Reserve or even FIFA.  This is not so much of an utopia as originally described by MLK, because it will turn out that character traits are determined, not made, certainly not by the person in question.  Instances of epiphany, the sudden change in your self of selves, are rare,  and when they do occur, epiphanies still turn on inner personality traits. The classic example is Constantine’s vision on the bridge in which he suddenly worshipped Christ. But this changed nothing of his inner self.  Constantine then and there applied his violent nature to a different cause, but never stopped putting people to the sword. The sword was what was basic in him.

One problem that fascinates me, is stages of development, especially of the mind. So many specialists have tried to study stages of mental development, and all of them have found the brain and thus the person unfolding over time, analogous to embryology of form. Psychologists like Freud, Fromm, Piaget, Erikson and others wrote of mental stages. Until recently this has been descriptive science, or chronicling, utilizing only the most rudimentary understanding of neurologic mechanisms that underlie these phenomena.

Anyone with children likes to revel in their mental development. We never tire of watching our own kids go through stages of development from the first signs of recognition and interaction with familiar adults, to the acquisition of language, mastery of concepts and physical abilities, culminating the emergent adult. Societies have always debated how to treat children for theirs and society’s mutual benefit. Certainly kids are not miniature adults. A hot topic is sentencing of juveniles. Should teenage boys committing rape or murder or heinous adult type crimes, be sentenced to death or life in prison?  We have enough of an anatomical picture of the juvenile brain, through imaging and neurological science, and in behavioral studies, that show that juvenile mind is a long way from the adult. Concepts of risk and reward, consequences of behavior, are very far from eventual adult form, and progress at different rates in children just as do other cognitive domains. These behavioral phenomena have anatomical concomitants seen in brain scans that track myelination and other anatomical processes. Should you catch a juvenile at a certain moment, who may have no remorse for his crime, you may merely be looking at a transitory snapshot in his development. You cannot make a firm statement about his risk to society as a fully formed adult. Taking as an example one well-studied aspect of personality, do we even know that a teen with a poorly developed conscience will turn into a remorseless adult?  Questionable.

I came across an article “The Power of the Infant Brain” in Scientific American that summarizes research of Takao K Hensch professor of Neurology at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital. Hensch is interested in critical periods of development. According to him, certain aspects of brain development reach a peak of plasticity at different stages, after which the prospects of later change are closed off. A model is the visual system. If you have blindness in one or both eyes, there is a certain critical period which you have to direct the brain, after which even if you restore vision to that eye, the brain will be unable to respond and blindness will be permanent. He is after identifying molecules such as known transmitters GABA and Acetylcholine that direct and shape these periods of development. Most fascinatingly some of the mechanisms of developmental fixations are now known. It seems regions of the brain are chemically encased in sugary prisons called proteoglycans. Part of his research is finding a way to break through these chemical prison bars.

More than that it speaks to basic concept of the personality or character. Once formed, as we all see everyday,  your character is mighty hard to change. Even fear or dread of certain things, is maybe permanently encased on proteoglycans in your amygdala.  So to Calaf son of Timur winner of Turandot I say, “Good luck with your icy prize.” And regards to those judging others by the content of their character.

Or don’t judge at all. Just as character is formed so can it degenerate as in with aggressive behavior that sometimes accompanies depression and personality change in frontotemporal dementia. Pity the young children who are made to play tackle football at very young age while critical parts of their brain are in development. Evidence is accumulating that kids are even more prone to have damage from concussions at a young age leading to terrible consequences. The formation of personality has little to do with factors under voluntary control and everything to do with changes in the brain.