to the spanish government. indeed, they read a little like get smart in the early 9th century because he's -- 19th century because he's secret agent number 13, and he writes them to el numero uno. and there's also documentation of the payments he received from -- >> [inaudible] >> the question is, did anybody know about wilkinson's treasury then? >> it was widely rumored, and i mean widely. when adams appoints him general in chief in 1797, he writes this astonishing letter. wilkinson, he says, you know, they say you're a spanish agent, but they say that about everybody out west. you know, just having people say that would probably disqualify, it seems to me. and there were a lot of reports that he was, in fact, the spanish agent. it is puzzling how he remained

in the job. the army was not very important in this time. it was tiny, it just policed the frontiers with the indians. but it is a great puz be l. puzzle. yes, sir. >> my question has two small parts. a, it was my understanding that in those days if you say, okay, we're going to have this duel, the winner of that duel is not going to be accused of murder. and yet he was. and second part, he was wanted in two states. when on the lam, what became of that? >> okay. duelists were usually not prosecuted for murder, you're exactly right, because the winning duelist has a spectacular self-defense argument. the other guy had a gun, and he was pointing it at me. what was i supposed to do? now, there were very few times they tried to prosecute a

duelist, and it was never successful. so you're right about that. the charge, criminal charges against him were really politically inspired, they were not intended as serious charges, to be honest. the charges in new jersey were finally quashed in 1809, a buddy of burr's got those removed. the new york charges seem never to have been removed. when he comes back from europe in 1812, he's not quite sure he can come to new york, and he sort of tiptoes in in the middle of the night and, you know, and then he doesn't get arrested. he never gets arrested, and we don't know what happened to those charms. sir? those charges. sir? >> i wanted to ask how close is the historical burr to the burr in gore vidal's book, and in particular i got the implications, if i remember, that the despicable behavior was

some kind of incestuous relationship between burr and his daughter, so i was bond everybodying what you could -- wondering what you could tell us about that. >> the question is how accurate do i think gore vidal's version is in his novel of 30 years. i didn't want to read it when i did the book because i didn't want gore i vidal polluting my mind. i admired the book then. my sense is from my recollection, i think he probably got burr reasonably well. the questional asked what about the -- the question also asked what about the element of that novel where he suggested that hamilton was implying that burr was sleeping with his daughter, that there was incest. and that's when he said he had an opinion still more despicable, that's what he meant. vidal has been very clear in interviews saying he made that up, he has seen no evidence to support it. i have seen no evidence to support it. i actually think that's a very smart hunch. because nothing would have upset

burr more than that implication. but we don't have evidence. yes, sir. >> so you mentioned one of his primary motivations was fame. did he have a particular ideology? >> the question is, did burr have a particular ideology? and that's a great question because that was hamilton's other complaint about burr, was that he didn't actually believe in anything. and that was, his concern was that burr would do whatever seemed to make the most sense at the time. he saw him as an opportunist. i actually think he was sort of a classic moderate, sort of the person that ends up being hated by both sides, and that is what happened the -- to him. the federalists didn't trust him, the republicans didn't trust him because he seemed to sympathize with the federalists. you know, the vice president casts the tie-breaking vote when there's a tie in the senate. he cast one tie-breaking vote, and he cast it for the federalists. now, this had to drive jefferson

nuts. but it is a measure, and he took great pride in this, that he was not a partisan. that was his view. and i think it was an element in his lack of political success, ultimately. one more. >> [inaudible] >> the election of 1800, my understanding was that the hamilton as leader of the federalists that told the party to vote for jefferson because he loathed burr more than he loathed jefferson. >> the question is, and it's a very appropriate one, that isn't hamilton the guy who shifted the federalist votes away from burr and towards jefferson? hamilton tried, like, as hard as

he possibly could to do that. and for many years the accepted wisdom in american history was that hamilton's the guy who won the election for jefferson. as people in the last 20 years have gone back over the record, this story doesn't hold. he wasn't in washington, he wrote a bunch of letters against burr two, three months before the house of representatives voted. and after they got his letters, all the federalists voted for burr. they didn't pay any attention to hamilton. and when they finally broke, it was much more this response to burr's own remark and to the fact that they had this terrible stalemate crisis. so i think although i remember learning that as a kid myself, i don't think it's true. it's one of those myths we're trying to get out from under. so thank you very much. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> david linden is next lye from the gaithersburg book festival. he explores the human brain in his book, "the compass of pleasure." >> surveys are available at the tent. enjoy the rest of the today at the festival. [inaudible conversations] >> good amp. welcome to the third annual gaithersburg festival. what i'm about to say you may have heard already today, but i'm going to say it anyway. [laughter] not this part though. my name is mike connection that,

i'm a member of the gaithersburg city council. gaithersburg is a vibrant, diverse city that celebrates and supports the cultural arts, and as a council member, i'm pleased and proud that we were able to bring you this event free of charge thanks to the generous support of our sponsors. before we start i have a couple of quick announcements. for the consideration of everyone here, please silence any device that makes any kind of noise n particular a cell phone. this is the third year of the gaithersburg book festival, and we want to continue to improve this event. in order to do that, we need your feedback, so surveys are available here, at the information booth and online at our web site. so, please, take a couple of minutes to fill one out and hand it to one of our volunteers or submit it online. our next author, david linden, will be signing books immediately after this presentation. copies of his books are on sale in the politics and prose tent. so our speaker, david linden, is a neuroscientist with an impressive record of

accomplishments and who has focused his research on identifying and understanding cellular processes in the brain involved in the creation, storage and retrieval of memories. he's a professor in the department of neuroscience at the johns hopkins university school of medicine and has been recognized for his creative and innovative approaches to studying the cellular basis of memory since he was a graduate student. david also has a longstanding interest in communication which he practices in part as an author about the brain and brain chemistry for the lay audience. a wikipedia article makes him understandable to nonscientific lectures across the country. his first book, "the accidental mind: how brain evolution has given us love, memory, dreams and god," attempts to explain

the working of the cobbled-together myth of the human brain to intelligence lay readers. it seems our brains have simply evolved that way. david's second book, "the compass of pleasure: how our brains make fatty foods, orgasm, exercise, marijuana, general rousety, vodka, learning and gambling feel so good," that's a long title -- [laughter] provides some answers to age-old questions about human behavior based on the newest research discoveries in neuroscience. so what makes an experience, a food, a chemical or a physical act pleasurable, and what brain processes are involved? what distinguishes a craving from an addiction? is there a biological basis for an addictive personality? do your genes, our environment, or our experiences determine what we find pleasurable, annoying or nauseating? and what is mona lisa's smile really all about?

so we've known about the brain's pleasure centers and circuits for decades, but we haven't been able to completely understand the biology of pleasure and addiction. david's book and david explains how these new tools and technological advances now allow neuroscientists to begin to answer these questions. as he begins to explore the implications of understanding the biology of pleasure, as he begins to explore the understanding of, um, biology of pleasure, he also addresses and presents some implications for that understanding. for me as a neuroscientist -- and that's what i do in my regular job -- it's exciting to see this aspect of brain science explained in a lucid and compelling fashion that is not oversimplified or con desending. the compass of pleasure is effective and, more importantly, an enjoyable piece of scientific literature, and i'm looking forward to hearing more from david. so, please, join me in welcoming david linden.

[applause] >> well, thanks, mike, for that kind introduction, and thanks to all of you for coming out on this beautiful day. i've never been introduced by both a human and a train before, so that's exciting. [laughter] so i would like to read a couple of small secs of the book but -- small sections of the book. but i'll begin with a reading from the preface to set the stage. bangkok, 1989. the afternoon rains have ended leaving the evening air briefly free of smog and allowing that distinctive thai perfume to waft over the streets. i hail a three-wheel motorcycle taxi and hop aboard. my young driver has a entrepreneurial smile as he turns around and begins the usual interrogation of male travelers. so do you want girl? no. i see. long pause, eyebrows slightly

raised. you want boy. uh, no. longer pause, sound of engine sputtering at idle. you want lady boy? no, i answer, a bit more emphatically. i've got cheap cigarettes, johnnie walker. no thanks. undaunted, he moves down to the next category of wares, now want gone ya? no. coke? no. yaba? that's thai for methamphetamine tablets. no. heroin, do you want heroin? no. his voice back to normal. i can take you to a cock fight, you can gamble. i'll pass. just a little bitter traited now, so, what do you want? those little peppers, i want tom tom -- some good, spicy dinner. my driver, not surprisingly, is

kiss appointed, and -- disappointed, and i'm left wondering aside from various shades of illegality, what do all his offers have in common? what is it exactly that makes a vice? now, there are lots of ways to approach this question of what makes a vice. you can approach it with cultural anthropology or social history, and these are valid and useful endeavors. but i'm a biologist, so what i'm looking for is a more cross-cultural, biological explanation, something a little blunter but perhaps more fundamental. and the key observation here is that we all have in our brains an anatomically and biochemically-defined pleasure circuit. we call it the medial fore brain pleasure circuit, medial just means it's in the middle of your brain, and fore brain means it's towards the front, and can this is a series of interconnected brain regions that use dopamine, and when the neurons in these regions are active and dopamine

is secreted, then you feel pleasure. so why do we have those? why do we need to feel pleasure at all? well, we can take one clue from the observation that this brain region is evolutionarily ancient. so we share it with critters like mice and frogs and lizards and snakes and even animals that don't have a proper brain at all, animals like roundworms that live in the soil have a rudimentary pleasure circuit of dopamine-using neurons. so a really good, pleasurable day for a roundworm, they eat down a clump of soil bacteria, and their dopamine neuron fired to reinforce that behavior. so what is the pleasure circuit for? it's there so that we'll find eating food, drinking water and having sex to be pleasurable, so we'll survive and have children and get our genes into the next generation. and that's the fundamental reason. so if we catch you at a point

when you're really hungry and bring you in the lab and put you in a brain scanner where we can measure the activity of various brain regions and we were to give you a bite of a food that you found particularly delicious while you were hungry, we would see a brief burst of activity within your brain's pleasure circuit chen you took that first -- when you took that first bite. and not only that, but as you continue to eat -- you know how when you're really hungry, the first bite of food is the most delicious? if you keep eating and keep eating, and maybe the very last bite you eat before you say i'm full is okay, but it's not nearly as good as that first one. so if we were to image your brain during this time, we would find the first bite has a big pleasure circuit, and the intervening ones show gradually decreasing activation. likewise, if we were to give you a food you really like, we see a big activation. we give you a food you're

indifferent to, we see a small activation. so the magnitude of activation of the pleasure circuit reflects your subjective experience in the world. now, i mentioned that it's also involve inside sex, right? -- involved in sex, right? so i know what you're all wondering, how do we know? the answer comes from experiments. most of these were actually done in the netherlands, not surprisingly. [laughter] and i know that because if you're here, you're a reader. and if you're a reader, you have good powers of visualization. so i'd like you to use your powers of visualization. now, as i describe to you what these experiments are like, right? how do we know that when you have an orgasm, your brain's pleasure center lights up and becomes active? well, imagine this situation. um, you're on your back, and your head is shoved into this giant, clanging metal doughnut that is the brain imaging

machine. and, of course, if your head jiggles, that will ruin the image, so your head is strapped down tightly, and your nether regions are sticking out into the room where there's a bunch of scientists standing around. now, among these scientists is your sweetheart, and he or she is then going to stimulate your genitals in an attempt to bring you to orgasm. now, this is a deeply unromantic situation, right? [laughter] because not only are you there in the lab with your head strapped down, but, um, well, there's an iv in your arm. because this form of brain imaging requires injecting radioactive water, and in addition no really polite way to say this, there's a rectal probe involved. and as someone who enjoys alien abduction studies, i can't tell you how much pleasure it's given me to even just say the words

rectal probe, and on television too. [laughter] why is there a rectal probe? well, it turns out that you want to know if orgasm is real, and in particular in the case of females who have been known to fake it, it turns out that there's one way for both maleses and females to know that an orgasm is real, and that is when you have an orgasm, the muscles of your rectum flutter at about eight times per second. and that's something you can't fake. so they didn't experiment. -- they did an experiment, people have real orgasms, and then they have them do their best fake, so if any of you are wondering if your partner is faking it when you're making love, you know the technology required. [laughter] so you're in there, you've got the probe, you've got the iv in your arm, you're being stimulated in whatever manner works, and then when you feel you're getting close, you tell the experimenter, okay, now inject the radioactive water in

my arm. [laughter] and the experimenter says, okay, good, now you have one minute in which to have your orgasm because that's how long the radioactive water will be of sufficient concentration in your brain for this imaging to occur. so no pressure, just let it happen. well, so what happens in the brain when you have an orgasm? well, i've already told you the punchline. the punchline is that this pleasure circuit, the medial fore britain pleasurer cut -- fore brain pleasure circuit becomes more active. it turns out that there are also regions of the brain that become less active at the moment of orgasm. and these include regions like the prefrontal cortex and the temporal quital junction, these are involved in things like reasoning, planning, decision

making, social cognition. so if there's one piece of advice i'm going to give you from brain research, that the moment of orgasm is not the time to, like, be picking the mutual funds for your 401(k) plan. save it for the next day. [laughter] all right. so we've got this pleasure circuit. it's evolutionarily ancient, and it's there so we find eating food, drinking water and having sex to be pleasurable. but clever us and clever other chrisers. we've figured out how to -- chrisers, we've figured out how to activate it artificially. we didn't evolve to take a tobacco plant and set it on fire in our mouth andinhale the fumes, but it turns out the nicotine can activate the pleasure circuit. as can alcohol and cannabis and heroin and cocaine and am fete mean. some of these drugs work directly on the dopamine

signaling mechanism. other ones work indirectly through more complicated electrochemical cascades. but they all have a property in mob, that they increase dopamine in the pleasure circuit and make your feel pleasure. you might think, well, that was a long list of drugs. i get it. any psychoactive drug is going to turn on your brain's pleasure circuit. but it turns out that actually isn't true. so drugs like mescaline and lsd, ssri antidepressants, antihistamines, these are all drugs that are psychoactive that don't activate the pleasure circuit. so some do and some don't. and it turns out, we'll return to the topic of addiction later, but only drugs that increase dopamine signaling wherein the pleasure circuit are drugs that carry some risk of addiction. if they don't, then it's not relevant. so we've figured out how to

artificially activate these pleasure circuits with these compounds. now, it turns out that this isn't solely a human proclivity, and it's also true that both us and critters have a drive to alter our brains both using compounds that activate the brain's pleasure circuits as well as using compounds that don't, like some of the hallucinogens that i mentioned. and here i would like to slip into my second and final reading -- it won't be the final art of the talk, just the final reading. lord byron, the poet of the early 19th century, wrote: man being reasonable must get drunk, the best of life is but intoxication. and he could well have been speaking to critters as well because intoxication with psychoactive drugs is not exclusively human. animals in the wild will also voluntarily and repeatedly consume psychoactive plantses

and fungi. birds, elephants and monkeys have all been report today enthusiastically seek out foods and berries that have undergone natural fermentation to produce alcohol. in one region of africa, we'res, elephants and gorillas have been reported to consume an intoxicating plant. imagine that as well as you did with the orgasm imaging. there's each some evidence that young elephants learn to eat the plant from observing the actions of their helderses in a social group. in the highlands, goats munch wild coffee berries and catch a caffeine buzz. but we've got to be critical. we're being scientists here. do we really know whether these animals like the psychoactivity effects of the drug, or are they willing to put up with them as a

side effect? after all, fermented fruit, for example, is a tasty and nutritious meal. while it's hard to dissociate these motivations, many cases suggest that the psychoactive. often only a tiny amount of plant or fungus is consumed, so the psychoactive effect is large. perhaps the most dramatic example of nonanimal intoxication is found among domesticated reindeer. the people of siberia who are reindeer herders consume a mushroom as a ritual sack concern, and their reindeer also indulge. having discovered the mushrooms, they gobble them up and can then stagger around, twitching their heads repeatedly as they wander off from the rest of the herd for hours at a time. the active ingreed especially in

the -- ingredient is an acid which is converted in the body to another compound which is the substance that actually produces hallucinations. what's interesting about the acid is only a fraction is metabolized in the body while the rest, about 80% of that consumed, is passed in the urine. and i think you can tell where this is going, can't you? the reindeer have learned that licking the acid-laden urine will produce as much of a high as eating the mushroom itself. in fact, this drug urine will attract reindeer from far and wide, and they will even fight over access to a particularly attractive patch of yellow snow. all of this has not gone unnoticed by the people who collect the urine of the mushroom-eating shamans for two purposes. the first is simple thriftiness. urine recycling can provide five doses for the cost of one fresh one, albeit with a severe aesthetic penalty. [laughter] the second is that the reindeer

are just as enthusiastic about human-tainted urine as their own, so they can be effectively rounded up with a bit of the stuff sprinkled in a can corral. clearly, siberian reindeer are not fighting over drugged urine for its knew thattive value. so we've got this evolutionarily ancient pleasure circuit for eating food, drinking water, having sex, and then we figured out how to artificially activate it with drugs. but in our primate lineage, a miracle has happened. and the miracle results from the fact that this ancient pleasure circuit has become very heavily anatomically interconnected with higher parts of the brain involved in reasoning, planning, emotion, motivation and memory. and the miracle that this allows

is that utterly arbitrary behaviors and stimuli, behaviors that have absolutely no evolutionary value whatsoever can become pleasurable in the right context through learning and through the sociocultural or milieu. and be so, for example, a mouse can take pleasure in eating food or having sex, as we can, but only a human can take pleasure in fasting or abstaining from sex if they have a particular set of political or religious or cultural ideas. so the sport of you recall can can -- the sport of curling, celebrity gossip, right? these are things that don't do us any good in an evolutionary

sense, but we take pleasure from them. and the fact that we can, indeed very many aspects of our human cultural life comes from this anatomical connection between our brains' higher centers and this pleasure circuit. now, i don't want to leave you with the notion that it's only vices that can activate the pleasure circuit. it turns out that there are virtuous pro-social behaviors that can as well. so, for example, if we have even the pleasure circuit -- i'm sorry, if we have you in the brain scanner, and we say nice things about you, if we say, oh, you are well regarded by your peers, you're smart, people look up to you, you're well respected in your community, this will cause activation of your brain's pleasure circuit. if you engage in intense physical exercise, that can

activate your brain's pleasure circuit. meditative practice and prayer can activate your brain's pleasure circuit. learning information, even if that information is useless and has no bearing on any future decisions you make or choices you fake your life, can activate your brain's pleasure circuit. perhaps most importantly, when a study was done at the university of oregon where they gave people real money and have them in the brain scanner, and they had the option of voluntarily donating a portion of their money to a local charity -- turned out to be a food bank in the community -- in about 70% of the subjects, donating to charity activated the pleasure circuit. well, you might say, oh, no, i get that. you already told he that being positively regarded by your peers does. so when you donate to charity, then people say nice things

about you, so isn't in the same thing? well, in this particular experiment, they wanted to dissociate that thing, so it was coated on a computer, and nobody knew. so i think this speaks to some important philosophical and religious ideas because in both eastern and western philosophical and religious practice, there is a notion that if you are to be truly good, if you are to be in buddhism, for example, or if you are to be truly enlightened in certain cultural practices, you must do good works and give to others in a way that doesn't bring you any pleasure yourself at all. and what the brain imaging would tell us is that that's a very high bar to reach. don't worry about it. be pro-social, do good works,

and it's okay if you get a pleasure buzz. so the last thing that i would like to talk about has to do with love. and i have a few minute left, i can either talk about addiction or love, addiction's a downer, it's such a nice day, i've got to pick love. so what's happening in our brains when we fall in love? well, lucy brown, a scientist at albert einstein college of medicine in the bronx, did a terrific study. she recruited some couples who were newly, madly, deeply in love, in the first six months of a relationship that was going really well. and she had them come into the lab, and she asked them to bring two pictures, one of their sweetheart and another picture of a good friend with whom they had never had a sexual or amorous relationship.

and then she had them look at the two pictures in the brain scanner with the idea that by looking at the differences between these two patterns of activation, she could determine what was particular to the new love, what was not just something about looking at a familiar face. and here's what she found. when you're looking at a picture of your new love when you're in that truly, madly, deeply state, you have a strong activation of the brain's pleasure circuit try. so years ago when the band roxie music sang love is the drug got a hook in me, well, basically, they were right. love shares some properties in this regard to drugs like cocaine and heroin. the other thing they found was that just like at the peak of orgasm, these higher reasoning centers were deactivated.

now, this tracks very well with our subjective experience of being in love, and it turns out this is not just something you find in the western tradition. when you send anthropologists around the globe to look at different cultures and ask people who have experiences of being newly in love, you get the same story. people have appetite suppression, they're irrational, they downplay their sweetheart's bad traits and play up the good ones. oh, that sore on his lip will clear up soon, and that time in prison, that was just all a big mistake because she's really so wonderful. [laughter] all right. so that's kind of interesting. but then the real interesting question happened. what happens with old married couples? she went back and did the study again with couples who had been together for 20 years, and she asked people, do you feel the same way about your partner now as you did when, a few months

after you first met? and most people, 19 out of 20, will say, no, i don't. it's not that same crazy passion, it's mellowed into a loving friendship, and it's really great, but it's not that. but 1 out of 20 says, yeah, it's just as intense, it's just as great, it's just as heart-stoppingly wonderful as it was when we first met. and when i heard that i thought, yeah, i'm sorry, i don't believe it. i think you just want to appear a certain ways in the eyes of people around you. what happened? you put the 19 out of 20 in the brain scanner, they're looking at the picture of their sweetheart, very little pleasure circuit activation and no deactivation of the reasoning center. those folks are seeing their partners in the cold, cruel light of day. [laughter] well, what about that 1 in 20? amazingly, those folks who reported still feeling as intensely in love still had a

strong pleasure circuit activation, and they still had at least a partial, smaller, but a partial disinhibition of these critical faculties. now, this begs the question how do those people wind up that way? is that because they were born that way? is it because they have particularly great relationships, particularly great skills, particularly great partners? we don't know the answer to that, and i hope that those experiments will be forthcoming and that i'll be able to explain them to you at some time in the future. i, at this point the talk will end, and i'd be happy to take a few of your questions. [applause] z yes. >> what do you say about those who contend that it's possible to become addicted to sex? >> what do i say about those who contend that it's possible to

become addicted to sex? >> i say that this is true. sex addiction is real, but it is also rare. in the course of addiction, all liking is transformed into wanting. it happens in gambling addiction, it happens in sex addiction, it happens in drug addiction or alcoholism. there are, in the course of addiction, there are physical and chemical changes within the brain's pleasure circuit that make it so that you are no longer feeling pleasure at the end, that you are only doing this behavior to avoid the negative feeling, to be able to not have a panic attack, to fall asleep at night, to concentrate minimally. there are people where sexual behavior can reach that criteria and where it can reach the criteria in where it severely disrupt their life, where they act unethically, they can't keep

their job or their family falls apart. merely liking a lot of sex doesn't make you a sex addict. there's nothing wrong with that. merely engaging in nonnormative sexual practices doesn't make you a sex addict. sex addiction is real, but it's rare, and if someone is a late-stage sex addict, they are no longer taking pleasure in sex anymore. >> you know, it's obvious that there's a direct correlation between the pleasure sir cute try of the brain and the evolutionary concept of continuing the species. now, so you talked about eating, drinking, having sex, that's obvious. but when it comes to those who take, who get addicted and the vices come in, that is just the opposite of what the pleasure circuit's supposed to do. because as we see now, celebrities who are

overindulging, they're dying in their, you know, 30s and 40s. and if this pleasure center is supposed to keep you going on and continuing the species, now, is this because you don't pass that on? that's why, for example, you don't see the obese elephant out there because they're just elephants, okay? they know when to stop eating. but is it was we as humans -- because we as humans do not pass down that vice that continues to get worse and worse as it is in this country? >> so that's a great question. if i can paraphrase it is, if there are such negative consequences to addiction, why isn't it just selected out? and there's two parts to the answer. one of them is that all evolution cares about is whether or not you're successful in getting your genes into the next generation. so if you screw up your life after you have children, it doesn't matter. evolution doesn't care if you have a fulfilling 50s or a fulfilling retirement. doesn't matter. so that's part of the answer. the other part of the an