James W. Pennebaker’s interest in word counting began more than 20 years ago, when he did several studies suggesting that people who talked about traumatic experiences tended to be physically healthier than those who kept such experiences secret. He wondered how much could be learned by looking at every single word people used — even the tiny ones, the I’s and you’s, a’s and the’s.

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Dr. Pennebaker’s analysis shows the categories of words used more often by each side.

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One Measure of Words Used

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Computerized Text Analysis of Al-Qaeda Transcripts (PDF)

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That led Dr. Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, down a winding path that has taken him from Beatles lyrics (John Lennon’s songs have more “negative emotion” words than Paul McCartney’s) all the way to terrorist communications. By counting the different kinds of words a person says, he is breaking new linguistic ground and leading a resurgent interest in text analysis.

Take Dr. Pennebaker’s recent study of Al Qaeda communications — videotapes, interviews, letters. At the request of the F.B.I., he tallied the number of words in various categories — pronouns, articles and adjectives, among others.

He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years. By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often.

“This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr. Pennebaker wrote in his report , which was published in The Content Analysis Reader (Sage Publications, July 2008).

Kimberly A. Neuendorf, a professor of communications at Cleveland State University who has extensively studied content analysis, agreed with that assessment. Mr. Zawahri, she said, “is clearly repositioning himself to provide a singular platform for his opinion” and “reaffirming his status as an important individual in the dynamic.”

Because it is hard for the human brain to count and compare all the I’s, a’s and the’s in a sample of speech or writing, Dr. Pennebaker had to invent a software program to do it. The program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC, pronounced luke), contains a vast dictionary, with each word assigned to one or more categories.

There are social words (talk, they), biological words (cheek, hands, spit), “insight” words (think, know, consider) and dozens of other groupings. LIWC compares a text sample to its dictionary and, within seconds, provides a readout of how many words appear in each category.

To test-drive the program, Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises. The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study.

Health improvements were also seen among people whose use of causal words — because, cause, effect — increased. Simply ruminating about an experience without trying to understand the causes is less likely to lead to psychological growth, he explained; the subjects who used causal words “were changing the way they were thinking about things.”

Dr. Pennebaker, 58, has conducted numerous studies since then, all of them demonstrating that it’s not just what we say that matters but how we say it. Where traditional linguistics “is really more interested in context, how sentences are put together and what a meaningful phrase is,” he said, “our approach is simply counting words.”

In study after study, the articles and pronouns, which text analysts often call “junk words,” have proved crucial.

For example, Dr. Pennebaker has found that men tend to use more articles (a, the) and women tend to use more pronouns (he, she, they). The difference, he says, may suggest that men are more prone to concrete thinking and women are more likely to see things from other perspectives.

Jeffrey T. Hancock, an associate professor of communication at Cornell, uses word counting to study language and deception, particularly on the Internet.

Liars, he says, use more “negative emotion” words (hurt, ugly, nasty) and fewer first-person singulars. “These very simple dimensions have emerged again and again,” he said, “despite the fact that there were 40 years of research before this.”

Dr. Pennebaker says that because speech patterns are akin to a personal signature, his software might be used to identify authors of anonymous blogs and e-mail messages, and as supporting evidence in legal testimony. But he acknowledges that it cannot be definitive; too much depends on probability.

“In the language world, everything is probability,” Dr. Pennebaker said. “But in our legal system, we have real problems with understanding probability. Everyone has problems with probability.”

Still, the technique is drawing attention from a variety of sectors. Dr. Pennebaker has received a grant from the Army Research Institute to study the language of social dynamics, particularly how leaders use language. Joseph Psotka, a research psychologist at the institute, said that over time, this kind of study “could be very helpful for training and leadership development, but precisely how we don’t know yet.”

Dr. Pennebaker’s program has been translated into several languages, with an Arabic version in the works; Dr. Pennebaker notes that his Qaeda analysis was constrained by its reliance on English translations.

“Function words vary between one language and another and reveal a lot about another culture,” he said.

Dr. Psotka said counting and categorizing the words used by a foreign speaker could provide clues about “the subtle attitudes, not just the meaning of the words — to get a sense of whether or not negotiation or discussion is going smoothly.”

Dr. Pennebaker has also turned his word-counting machinery toward the presidential campaign (at wordwatchers.wordpress.com), and he likes to look at age-old questions like whether Shakespeare had a co-playwright, who wrote the Federalist Papers and even whether a couple will stay together.

“The more similar they are in terms of language,” Dr. Pennebaker said, “the more likely they are to be together several months later.”

Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.

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André A. Fenton studies spatial memory in mice and rats.

Brain Power

The Speed-Dial Molecule

For all that scientists have studied it, the brain remains the most complex and mysterious human organ — and, now, the focus of billions of dollars’ worth of research to penetrate its secrets.

This is the first article in a series that will look in depth at some of the insights these projects are producing.

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Focusing on a Memory Molecule

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Research by Dr. Todd C. Sacktor, above, and André A. Fenton has demonstrated a chemical’s effect on memory with potential implications for treatment of trauma, addiction and other conditions.

Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.

The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems.

So far, the research has been done only on animals. But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people.

The discovery of such an apparently critical memory molecule, and its many potential uses, are part of the buzz surrounding a field that, in just the past few years, has made the seemingly impossible suddenly probable: neuroscience, the study of the brain.

“If this molecule is as important as it appears to be, you can see the possible implications,” said Dr. Todd C. Sacktor, a 52-year-old neuroscientist who leads the team at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn, which demonstrated its effect on memory. “For trauma. For addiction, which is a learned behavior. Ultimately for improving memory and learning.”

Artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness and memory for centuries. Yet even as scientists sent men to the moon and spacecraft to Saturn and submarines to the ocean floor, the instrument responsible for such feats, the human mind, remained almost entirely dark, a vast and mostly uncharted universe as mysterious as the New World was to explorers of the past.

Now neuroscience, a field that barely existed a generation ago, is racing ahead, attracting billions of dollars in new financing and throngs of researchers. The National Institutes of Health last year spent $5.2 billion, nearly 20 percent of its total budget, on brain-related projects, according to the Society for Neuroscience.

Endowments like the Wellcome Trust and the Kavli Foundation have poured in hundreds of millions of dollars more, establishing institutes at universities around the world, including Columbia and Yale.

The influx of money, talent and technology means that scientists are at last finding real answers about the brain — and raising questions, both scientific and ethical, more quickly than anyone can answer them.

Millions of people might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory, for instance — but what if, in the process, they lost other, personally important memories that were somehow related? Would a treatment that “cleared” the learned habits of addiction only tempt people to experiment more widely?

And perhaps even more important, when scientists find a drug to strengthen memory, will everyone feel compelled to use it?

The stakes, and the wide-open opportunities possible in brain science, will only accelerate the pace of discovery.

“In this field we are merely at the foothills of an enormous mountain range,” said Dr. Eric R. Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia, “and unlike in other areas of science, it is still possible for an individual or small group to make important contributions, without any great expenditure or some enormous lab.”

Dr. Sacktor is one of hundreds of researchers trying to answer a question that has dumbfounded thinkers since the beginning of modern inquiry: How on earth can a clump of tissue possibly capture and store everything — poems, emotional reactions, locations of favorite bars, distant childhood scenes? The idea that experience leaves some trace in the brain goes back at least to Plato’s Theaetetus metaphor of a stamp on wax, and in 1904 the German scholar Richard Semon gave that ghostly trace a name: the engram.

What could that engram actually be?

The answer, previous research suggests, is that brain cells activated by an experience keep one another on biological speed-dial, like a group of people joined in common witness of some striking event. Call on one and word quickly goes out to the larger network of cells, each apparently adding some detail, sight, sound, smell. The brain appears to retain a memory by growing thicker, or more efficient, communication lines between these cells.

The billion-dollar question is how?

In the decades since this process was described in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists have found scores of molecules that play some role in the process. But for years the field struggled to pinpoint the purpose each one serves. The problem was not that such substances were so hard to find — on the contrary.

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Brain Power

The Speed-Dial Molecule

For all that scientists have studied it, the brain remains the most complex and mysterious human organ — and, now, the focus of billions of dollars’ worth of research to penetrate its secrets.

This is the first article in a series that will look in depth at some of the insights these projects are producing.

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Focusing on a Memory Molecule

In a 1999 paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience, two of the most prominent researchers in brain science, Dr. Jeff W. Lichtman and Joshua R. Sanes of Harvard, listed 117 molecules that were somehow involved when one cell creates a lasting speed-dial connection with a neighbor, a process known as “long-term potentiation.”

They did not see that these findings were necessarily clarifying the picture of how memories are formed. But an oddball substance right there on their own list, it turned out, had unusual properties.

A Helpful Nudge

“You know, my dad was the one who told me to look at this molecule — he was a scientist too, my dad, he’s dead now but he had these instincts — so anyway that’s how it all started,” Dr. Sacktor was saying. He was driving from his home in Yonkers to his laboratory in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, with three quiches and bag of bagels bouncing in the back seat. Lunch for the lab.

The father’s advice led the son, eventually, to a substance called PKMzeta. In a series of studies, Dr. Sacktor’s lab found that this molecule was present and activated in cells precisely when they were put on speed-dial by a neighboring neuron.

In fact, the PKMzeta molecules appeared to herd themselves, like Army Rangers occupying a small peninsula, into precisely the fingerlike connections among brain cells that were strengthened. And they stayed there, indefinitely, like biological sentries.

In short: PKMzeta, a wallflower in the great swimming party of chemicals that erupts when one cell stimulates another, looked as if it might be the one that kept the speed-dial function turned on.

“After that,” Dr. Sacktor said, “we began to focus solely on PKMzeta to see how critical it really was to behavior.”

Running a lab is something like fielding a weekend soccer team. Players come and go, from Europe, India, Asia, Grand Rapids. You move players around, depending on their skills. And you bring lunch, because doctoral students logging 12-hour days in a yellowing shotgun lab in East Flatbush need to eat.

“People think that state schools like ours are low-key, laid back, and they’re right, we are,” said Robert K. S. Wong, chairman of the physiology and pharmacology department at SUNY Downstate, who brought Dr. Sacktor with him from Columbia. “You have less pressure to apply for grants, and you can take more time, I think, to work out your ideas.”

To find out what, if anything, PKMzeta meant for living, breathing animals, Dr. Sacktor walked a flight downstairs to the lab of André A. Fenton, also of SUNY Downstate, who studies spatial memory in mice and rats.

Dr. Fenton had already devised a clever way to teach animals strong memories for where things are located. He teaches them to move around a small chamber to avoid a mild electric shock to their feet. Once the animals learn, they do not forget. Placed back in the chamber a day later, even a month later, they quickly remember how to avoid the shock and do so.

But when injected — directly into their brain — with a drug called ZIP that interferes with PKMzeta, they are back to square one, almost immediately. “When we first saw this happen, I had grad students throwing their hands up in the air, yelling,” Dr. Fenton said. “Well, we needed a lot more than that” one study.

They now have it. Dr. Fenton’s lab repeated the experiment, in various ways; so has a consortium of memory researchers, each using a different method. Researchers led by Yadin Dudai at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel found that one dose of ZIP even made rats forget a strong disgust they had developed for a taste that had made them sick — three months earlier.

A Conscience Blocker?

“This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities and raises huge ethical issues,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a neurobiologist at Harvard. “On the one hand, you can imagine a scenario in which a person enters a setting which elicits traumatic memories, but now has a drug that weakens those memories as they come up. Or, in the case of addiction, a drug that weakens the associations that stir craving.”

Researchers have already tried to blunt painful memories and addictive urges using existing drugs; blocking PKMzeta could potentially be far more effective.

Yet any such drug, Dr. Hyman and others argue, could be misused to erase or block memories of bad behavior, even of crimes. If traumatic memories are like malicious stalkers, then troubling memories — and a healthy dread of them — form the foundation of a moral conscience.

For those studying the biology of memory, the properties of PKMzeta promise something grander still: the prospect of retooling the engram factory itself. By 2050 more than 100 million people worldwide will have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias, scientists estimate, and far more will struggle with age-related memory decline.

“This is really the biggest target, and we have some ideas of how you might try to do it, for instance to get cells to make more PKMzeta,” Dr. Sacktor said. “But these are only ideas at this stage.”

A substance that improved memory would immediately raise larger social concerns, as well. “We know that people already use smart drugs and performance enhancers of all kinds, so a substance that actually improved memory could lead to an arms race,” Dr. Hyman said.

Many questions in the science remain. For instance, can PKMzeta really link a network of neurons for a lifetime? If so, how? Most molecules live for no more than weeks at a time.

And how does it work with the many other substances that appear to be important in creating a memory?

“There is not going to be one, single memory molecule, the system is just not that simple,” said Thomas J. Carew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and president of the Society for Neuroscience. “There are going to be many molecules involved, in different kinds of memories, all along the process of learning, storage and retrieval.”

Yet as scientists begin to climb out of the dark foothills and into the dim light, they are now poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not.

Look around you. On the train platform, at the bus stop, in the car pool lane: these days someone there is probably faking it, maintaining a job routine without having a job to go to.

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Tim Bower

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The Nonverbal Expression of Pride: Evidence for Cross-Cultural Recognition (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

Pride and perseverance: the motivational role of pride. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

Pride: Adaptive Social Emotion or Seventh Sin? (Psychological Science)

The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day.

“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine.”

The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ.

To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride, they say, this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times.

“If showing pride in these kinds of situations was always maladaptive, then why would people do it so often?” said David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “But people do, of course, and we are finding that pride is centrally important not just for surviving physical danger but for thriving in difficult social circumstances, in ways that are not at all obvious.”

For most of its existence, the field of psychology ignored pride as a fundamental social emotion. It was thought to be too marginal, too individually variable, compared with basic visceral expressions of fear, disgust, sadness or joy. Moreover, it can mean different things in different cultures.

But recent research by Jessica L. Tracy of the University of British Columbia and Richard W. Robins of the University of California, Davis, has shown that the expressions associated with pride in Western society — most commonly a slight smile and head tilt, with hands on the hips or raised high — are nearly identical across cultures. Children first experience pride about age 2 ˝, studies suggest, and recognize it by age 4.

It’s not a simple matter of imitation, either. In a 2008 study, Dr. Tracy and David Matsumoto, a psychologist at San Francisco State, analyzed spontaneous responses to winning or losing a judo match during the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic games. They found that expressions of pride after a victory were similar for athletes from 37 nations, including for 53 blind competitors, many of them blind from birth.

“It’s a self-conscious emotion, reflecting how you feel about yourself, and it has this important social component,” Dr. Tracy said. “It’s the strongest status signal we know of among the emotions; stronger than a happy expression, contentment, anything.”

In one continuing experiment, Dr. Tracy, along with Azim Shariff, a doctoral student at British Columbia, have found that people tend to associate an expression of pride with high status — even when they know that the person wearing it is low on the ladder. In their study, participants impulsively assigned higher status to a prideful water boy than to a team captain who looked ashamed.

The implications of this are hard to exaggerate. Researchers tend to split pride into at least two broad categories. So-called authentic pride flows from real accomplishments, like raising a difficult child, starting a company or rebuilding an engine. Hubristic pride, as Dr. Tracy calls it, is closer to arrogance or narcissism, pride without substantial foundation. The act of putting on a good face may draw on elements of both.

But no one can tell the difference from the outside. Expressions of pride, whatever their source, look the same. “So as long as you’re a decent actor, and people don’t know too much about your situation, all systems are go,” said Lisa A. Williams, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University.

The various flavors of pride may even feel similar on the inside, when the stakes are high enough. “She was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself,” wrote Edith Wharton of her tragic heroine Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth.” “Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed doors she did not open.” If you believe it, so will they.

A feeling of pride, when it’s convincing, acts something like an emotional magnet. In a recent study, Ms. Williams and Dr. DeSteno of Northeastern had a group of 62 undergraduates take tests supposedly measuring their spatial I.Q. The patterns flashed by too fast for anyone to truly know how well they did.

The researchers manipulated the amount of pride each participant felt in his or her score. They either said nothing about the score; remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone, that it was one of the best scores they had seen; or gushed that the person’s performance was wonderful, about as good as they had ever seen.

The participants then sat down in a group to solve similar puzzles. Sure enough, the students who had been warmly encouraged reported feeling more pride than the others. But they also struck their partners in the group exercise as being both more dominant and more likable than those who did not have the inner glow of self-approval. The participants, whether they had been buttered up or not, were completely unaware of this effect on the group dynamics.

“We wondered at the beginning whether these people were going to come across as arrogant jerks,” Dr. DeSteno said. “Well, no, just the opposite; they were seen as dominant but also likable. That’s not a combination we expected.”

Therapists say that in time, people usually do better when they come clean. “In some ways it’s easier to do this now, with so many people out of work,” said Michael C. Lazarchick, an employment counselor in southern New Jersey. “You may very well find out that others are going through the same thing, or something like it — ‘Oh yeah, I just took a big cut in pay.’ ”

But in the short term, projecting pride may do more than help manage others’ impressions. Psychologists have found that wearing a sad or happy face can have a top-down effect on how a person feels: Smile and you may feel fleetingly happier. The same most likely is true for an expression of pride. In a 2008 study, the Northeastern researchers found that inducing a feeling of pride in people solving spatial puzzles motivated them to try harder when they tackled the next round.

Pride, in short, begets perseverance. All of which may explain why, when the repo man is at the door, people so often remind themselves that they still have theirs, and that it’s worth something. Because they do, and because it is.

However much pride may go before a fall, it may be far more useful after one.

IN all the hue and cry that has surrounded Bernard Madoff since news of his preternaturally elaborate Ponzi scheme broke last December, we have chosen to concentrate our inquiry and analysis on the perpetrator and his far-flung world, as though we might thereby begin to answer the question of what made him tick.

Yet, as a culture that tends to look for black-and-white, reductionist explanations, it is doubtful that we will ever fill in the gaps in our understanding of a situation that is shot through with ambiguity. There is no single code word — no “Rosebud” — that will lead us to decipher the Madoff phenomenon, no eureka realization that will account for his strange and ultimately ruinous trajectory or the dissociative behavior that allowed him to believe one thing while doing another. What this intense focus has enabled us to do, however, is to skim over the psychology of the other participants in the drama: the ones who got taken.

Given the demonization of Mr. Madoff and the intense sympathy for the plight of those smaller investors who trusted him, it is easy to forget that he actually did bring something to the table. Indeed, what is lost amid the fury of some of those who handed their money over to him is that theirs was a voluntary — nay, eager — association. No one was holding a gun to anyone’s head, saying sign up with Mr. Madoff or else.

Far from it: people scrambled to find a home within his financial orbit, auditioning for the role of Madoff client the way you would try out for a place at an Ivy League college, nudging connections to put in a good word, calling in favors to get in on a piece of the Madoff action. (Although those who were duped are referred to in the press as “victims,” it seems to me it would be more accurate to define them as casualties. Victims are specifically sought out; casualties are an indirect consequence of some larger action.)

What Mr. Madoff brought to the table, I think, was a sense of mishpocha, of being part of an extended family, but one you carefully chose rather than being arbitrarily born into. He seemed to humanize the cold, frequently anonymous business of investing by giving it an avuncular face. By all accounts, he was the quintessential nice guy. (I did not know Mr. Madoff nor did I invest with his firm, but have a sibling who did business with him.) And, no small thing: he looked trustworthy. He has the sort of pleasant mien that makes you think he has your best interests at heart.

This is both the problem and the mystery of the man — and speaks to what so enrages people. If you’re going to be a con man, that is, you should at least look the part. No matter how much we’re told appearances are deceiving, we think we know better. Or rather, we think we’re exempt from the deception that ensnares others. In a way, Mr. Madoff and those he defrauded were co-dependent, the one offering a cover of benign paternalism and the other buying into the act. It’s interesting to me that institutional investors were the least likely to overlook the irregularities in his records; they weren’t looking to be part of a family, they were merely looking to make money.

At the heart of the matter, of course, are the complex feelings we all bring to the subject of money itself. We covet it but we are ashamed of overtly lusting after it. We know money is frequently a matter of luck or conniving rather than a just reward, yet we regard very rich people with no small amount of awe. How ever did they do it? Although a gift for making money may not indicate any larger sphere of talent, we willy-nilly ascribe great intelligence to financiers.

I remember attending a small dinner party where George Soros was one of the guests; it made sense to me that he held the floor when he discussed matters he was expert on, but I couldn’t figure out why all of his opinions, on whatever subject — be it interior design or the value of single-sex schools — were treated as equally valid. And then it occurred to me: he was much wealthier than the other dinner guests, which meant that everything he said was ipso facto of sovereign interest.

Meanwhile, the animus against the rich continues to thrive, especially among the chattering classes (has anyone ever been among a group of artsy types who had anything positive to say about the wealthy?), even as they are held up as exemplars of initiative and drive. Mr. Madoff must have originally represented some sort of de-tainting agent, the moneymaking genius who just happened to be someone your cousin knew or your dentist recommended. He took the edge off the harsh reality of making money and in the process gave filthy lucre a warm, haimish glow.

It helped rather than hindered his “Uncle Bernie” image that no one could figure out exactly how he achieved his gains, neither the people who presumably understood such things nor the people who didn’t. Whether you chose to keep your eyes averted from the actual process or tried to look closely into it didn’t matter much in the end. He imparted his own casual, low-key mystique to the inherent mystique that surrounds money — for many of us, money remains at the level of the magical, like coins conjured from behind someone’s ear — and it all added up to an impenetrable seduction.

When I think of Mr. Madoff himself, I am reminded of Geoffrey Wolff’s wonderful memoir of his con-artist father, “The Duke of Deception.” A small-scale operator by comparison to Mr. Madoff, Mr. Wolff’s father had “bluster in his voice” and lied about everything, from his religion to his college, for what appears to be no reason at all. At the end of Mr. Wolff’s examination of the parent he continued to trust long after he should have, we are left with the jigsaw puzzle of a personality in which the pieces don’t finally fit together. “I couldn’t ever seem to learn,” he writes, “where my father’s edge was; one step on terra firma, the next off and tumbling into space.”

Perhaps that is as good a definition of what it is to deal with a sociopath as any, but to call Mr. Madoff a sociopath isn’t really to explain him so much as to explain our failure to pick up on his scam. “Everything that deceives,” decreed Plato, “can be said to enchant.” Enter the sorcerer, the ganef, the man without qualities but with steady returns — and, I might add, a family man to the end. (Mr. Madoff has not implicated his family; even sociopaths have their loyalties.)

Enter us, the believers, the ones who signed on for the ride until it went off the rails, leaving wreckage as far as the eye could see.

The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait. The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected.

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Ken Cedeno for The New York Times

David B. Goldstein of Duke University is among the geneticists who are debating which path to follow in disease research.

Since the human genome was decoded in 2003, researchers have been developing a powerful method for comparing the genomes of patients and healthy people, with the hope of pinpointing the DNA changes responsible for common diseases.

This method, called a genomewide association study, has proved technically successful despite many skeptics’ initial doubts. But it has been disappointing in that the kind of genetic variation it detects has turned out to explain surprisingly little of the genetic links to most diseases.

A set of commentaries in this week’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine appears to be the first public attempt by scientists to make sense of this puzzling result.

One issue of debate among researchers is whether, despite the prospect of diminishing returns, to continue with the genomewide studies, which cost many millions of dollars apiece, or switch to a new approach like decoding the entire genomes of individual patients.

The unexpected impasse also affects companies that offer personal genomic information and that had assumed they could inform customers of their genetic risk for common diseases, based on researchers’ discoveries.

These companies are probably not performing any useful service at present, said David B. Goldstein, a Duke University geneticist who wrote one of the commentaries appearing in the journal.

“With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics,” Dr. Goldstein said in an interview. “The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”

Unlike the rare diseases caused by a change affecting only one gene, common diseases like cancer and diabetes are caused by a set of several genetic variations in each person. Since these common diseases generally strike later in life, after people have had children, the theory has been that natural selection is powerless to weed them out.

The problem addressed in the commentaries is that these diseases were expected to be promoted by genetic variations that are common in the population. More than 100 genomewide association studies, often involving thousands of patients in several countries, have now been completed for many diseases, and some common variants have been found. But in almost all cases they carry only a modest risk for the disease. Most of the genetic link to disease remains unexplained.

Dr. Goldstein argues that the genetic burden of common diseases must be mostly carried by large numbers of rare variants. In this theory, schizophrenia, say, would be caused by combinations of 1,000 rare genetic variants, not of 10 common genetic variants.

This would be bleak news for those who argue that the common variants detected so far, even if they explain only a small percentage of the risk, will nonetheless identify the biological pathways through which a disease emerges, and hence point to drugs that may correct the errant pathways. If hundreds of rare variants are involved in a disease, they may implicate too much of the body’s biochemistry to be useful.

“In pointing at everything,” Dr. Goldstein writes in the journal, “genetics would point at nothing.”

Two other geneticists, Peter Kraft and David J. Hunter of the Harvard School of Public Health, also writing in the journal, largely agree with Dr. Goldstein in concluding that probably many genetic variants, rather than few, “are responsible for the majority of the inherited risk of each common disease.”

But they disagree with his belief that there will be diminishing returns from more genomewide association studies.

“There will be more common variants to find,” Dr. Hunter said. “It would be unfortunate if we gave up now.”

Dr. Goldstein, however, said it was “beyond the grasp of the genomewide association studies” to find rare variants with small effects, even by recruiting enormous numbers of patients. He said resources should be switched away from these highly expensive studies, which in his view have now done their job.

“If you ask what is the fastest way for us to make progress in genetics that is clinically helpful,” he said, “I am absolutely certain it is to marshal our resources to interrogate full genomes, not in fine-tuning our analyses of common variations.”

He advocates decoding the full DNA of carefully selected patients.

Dr. Kraft and Dr. Hunter say that a person’s genetic risk of common diseases can be estimated only roughly at present but that estimates will improve as more variants are found. But that means any risk estimate offered by personal genomics companies today is unstable, Dr. Kraft said, and subject to upward or downward revision in the future.

Further, people who obtain a genomic risk profile are likely to focus with horror on the disease for which they are told they are at highest risk. Yet this is almost certain to be an overestimate, Dr. Kraft said.

The reason is that the many risk estimates derived from a person’s genomic data will include some that are too high and some that are too low. So any estimate of high risk is likely to be too high. The phenomenon is called the “winner’s curse,” by analogy to auctions in which the true value of an item is probably the average of all bids; the winner by definition has bid higher than that, and so has overpaid.

Dr. Kari Stefansson, chief executive of deCODE Genetics, an Icelandic gene-hunting company that also offers a personal genome testing service, said deCODE alerted clients to pay attention to diseases for which testing shows their risk is three times as great as average, not to trivial increases in risk.

Dr. Stefansson said his company had discovered 60 percent of the disease variants known so far.

“We have beaten them in every aspect of the game,” he said of rival gene hunters at American and British universities.

The undiscovered share of genetic risk for common diseases, he said, probably lies not with rare variants, as suggested by Dr. Goldstein, but in unexpected biological mechanisms. DeCODE has found, for instance, that the same genetic variant carries risks that differ depending on whether it is inherited from the mother or the father.

SOONER or later, someone is going to ask Bo, the 6-month-old Portuguese water dog who moved into the White House this week, if he knows the answer to a simple question: Who’s a good boy?

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One Obama Search Ends With a Puppy Named Bo (April 13, 2009)

The Caucus: The Bo Peep Show (April 14, 2009)

Times Topics: Bo (Dog) | White House Pets

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George Bush's Barney.

The question will of course be rhetorical, since Bo, whose raison d’ętre is to be furry and sweet, has significantly fewer performance expectations than his master. But it will by no means be idle, at least not to the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers and kissy-face dog owners who for centuries have pondered the mysteries of canine consciousness. What, they ask, does a creature that lives to chew shoes and chase tennis balls really know about himself and his surroundings?

These questions are intriguing enough when applied to household pets — do they know why they’re not allowed on the couch? That we are coming home again? That the houseguests do not like to be sniffed and jumped on? — but downright trippy when it comes to dogs like Bo. All of a sudden, photographers shoulder one another aside to snap his picture, and the president of the United States scampers behind him.

Does Bo wonder, in whatever way he might be capable, what all the fuss is about? Does he know he’s the most famous dog in the world?

Yes — or he soon will, said Cecelia Ruggles, a Connecticut dog breeder who owns Stump, the Sussex spaniel who won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show this year. She is also an owner of J. R., a bichon frisé who won Westminster in 2001, and several other champions.

“Oh, they know they’re famous, and they definitely get an attitude,” she said.

Like many people in the dog business, Ms. Ruggles takes a fairly anthropomorphic view of her animals’ cognitive abilities. “What distinguishes show dogs from other dogs is that they realize what’s going on, they know what they’re doing,” she said. “That’s what makes them who they are.”

J. R., for instance, knows how to make an impressive entrance at a press conference. “He waves his paws — it’s his signature,” Ms. Ruggles said. “It’s not something we taught him to do, it’s just something he does.”

But many dog owners are quick to tell stories about the precocity of their pets (often, long after the interest of the listener has waned), and skeptics chalk these tricks up to personality rather than brains. Even people who have studied the intelligence of dogs are doubtful that Bo has any clue he is an international media star.

“No,” declared Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the co-author of “What Do Dogs Know?” “Dogs don’t know fame.”

What dogs do know, said Professor Coren, is their position within their social group, whether they are at the top or the bottom of their pack.

“They know about comfort, and they know how much they can demand and get away with,” he said. So with the first family treating him like royalty for the time being, “that might be equivalent to fame. He might think he has groupies.”

By that standard, Bo’s perception of his surroundings won’t be all that different from any other well-pampered family dog, he said.

“I’m certain there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of dogs who are owned by blue-collar workers who really feel that they are extremely special,” Professor Coren said.

Based on the behavior of previous four-legged White House occupants, it is hard to draw too many conclusions. During the George W. Bush presidency, Barney the Scottish terrier had his own Web page on www.whitehouse.gov (which he shared with the Bushes’ other dog, Miss Beazley), and showed his gratitude by biting a Reuters reporter during the administration’s waning days. Socks and Buddy, the Clintons’ cat and dog, drew enough mail that Hillary Rodham Clinton assembled a book of letters, though Socks’s nastiness to Buddy got him gifted to Betty Currie when the Clintons left the White House.

Perhaps a better role model for Bo was Millie the springer spaniel, who not only “dictated” a book to her owner, Barbara Bush, but also gave birth to a camera-ready litter of puppies.

The idea that a dog could tell a red carpet from a housebreaking pad may sound far-fetched. For centuries, however, the mysteries of animal awareness have occupied some of mankind’s most respected thinkers.

Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Catholic philosopher, believed that animals possessed just enough consciousness that people should spare them outright abuse, if not the frying pan. René Descartes, who divided the world into two distinct substances, mind and matter, said that animals were purely mechanical beings that lacked an inner life (a classification that rings hollow to anyone who has heard the noise a beagle makes when you step on its tail). Darwin, Aristotle and Immanuel Kant also tried, unconvincingly, to wrap their heads around animal minds.

But canine cognition has become a serious science in the past few decades. More or less.

Starting in the late 1990s, Marc Bekoff, then a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, used his dog, Jethro, to conduct a landmark study he called “The Yellow Snow Project.”

“For five winters I collected piles of yellow snow on the path where I walk my dog in the mountains outside of Boulder,” he said. “Then I would move them along the bike path and watch what Jethro did.”

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Bill Clinton's Buddy.

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One Obama Search Ends With a Puppy Named Bo (April 13, 2009)

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Times Topics: Bo (Dog) | White House Pets

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FIRST PETS The Obamas’ Bo, joins an elite group.

“He basically spent a longer time sniffing the other dogs’ urine than his own,” Mr. Bekoff said.

Professor Coren, who has studied Mr. Bekoff’s work (animal psychology is a tight-knit field), said that the yellow snow experiment offered proof that dogs have a sense of themselves versus other dogs. “It’s the first level of consciousness, knowing that you are there and a separate entity from everyone else,” Professor Coren said.

His own claim to fame is a series of tests conducted in the early 1990s that measured how many sounds, signals and gestures dogs could comprehend. He concluded that the average dog had roughly the same cognitive abilities as a 2-year-old human, a finding that is now commonly cited among pet owners.

“It’s helpful because when dealing with a dog, you can ask yourself, ‘What would I expect of a 2-year-old kid?’ ” he said.

Still, no matter how many pointy-headed tests are dreamed up, there will always be pet owners who believe their dogs possess the magical ability to apprehend their larger place in the world.

“People love to humanize their dogs,” said Mathilde DeCagny, the Hollywood trainer who worked on “Marley & Me.” “But Bo is not walking in the White House right now thinking, ‘I scored!’ ”

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Some animal rights advocates have criticized the Obamas for adopting a dog from a private breeder rather than from a shelter. But the choice somehow seems less cruel once you remove the suggestion of Oliver Twist-like emotional despair. “I have gotten so many e-mails today from people saying it’s too bad they didn’t get a mutt from the pound who would know that he is special,” Mr. Bekoff said.

“But come on,” he laughed. “Bo doesn’t know that, and neither would a pound dog.”

Note: Why Do We Love Pets?

The presence of pets activates in us two primitive psychological defense mechanisms: projection and narcissism.

Projection is a defense mechanism intended to cope with internal or external stressors and emotional conflict by attributing to another person or object (such as a pet) - usually falsely - thoughts, feelings, wishes, impulses, needs, and hopes deemed forbidden or unacceptable by the projecting party.

In the case of pets, projection works through anthropomorphism: we attribute to animals our traits, behavior patterns, needs, wishes, emotions, and cognitive processes. This perceived similarity endears them to us and motivates us to care for our pets and cherish them.

But, why do people become pet-owners in the first place?

Caring for pets comprises equal measures of satisfaction and frustration. Pet-owners often employ a psychological defense mechanism - known as "cognitive dissonance" - to suppress the negative aspects of having pets and to deny the unpalatable fact that raising pets and caring for them may be time consuming, exhausting, and strains otherwise pleasurable and tranquil relationships to their limits.

Pet-ownership is possibly an irrational vocation, but humanity keeps keeping pets. It may well be the call of nature. All living species reproduce and most of them parent. Pets sometimes serve as surrogate children and friends. Is this maternity (and paternity) by proxy proof that, beneath the ephemeral veneer of civilization, we are still merely a kind of beast, subject to the impulses and hard-wired behavior that permeate the rest of the animal kingdom? Is our existential loneliness so extreme that it crosses the species barrier?

There is no denying that most people want their pets and love them. They are attached to them and experience grief and bereavement when they die, depart, or are sick. Most pet-owners find keeping pets emotionally fulfilling, happiness-inducing, and highly satisfying. This pertains even to unplanned and initially unwanted new arrivals.

Could this be the missing link? Does pet-ownership revolve around self-gratification? Does it all boil down to the pleasure principle?

Pet-keeping may, indeed, be habit forming. Months of raising pups and cubs and a host of social positive reinforcements and expectations condition pet-owners to do the job. Still, a living pet is nothing like the abstract concept. Pets wail, soil themselves and their environment, stink, and severely disrupt the lives of their owners. Nothing too enticing here.

If you eliminate the impossible, what is left - however improbable - must be the truth. People keep pets because it provides them with narcissistic supply.

A Narcissist is a person who projects a (false) image unto others and uses the interest this generates to regulate a labile and grandiose sense of self-worth. The reactions garnered by the narcissist - attention, unconditional acceptance, adulation, admiration, affirmation - are collectively known as "narcissistic supply". The narcissist treats pets as mere instruments of gratification.

Infants go through a phase of unbridled fantasy, tyrannical behavior, and perceived omnipotence. An adult narcissist, in other words, is still stuck in his "terrible twos" and is possessed with the emotional maturity of a toddler. To some degree, we are all narcissists. Yet, as we grow, we learn to empathize and to love ourselves and others.

This edifice of maturity is severely tested by pet-ownership.

Pets evoke in their keepers the most primordial drives, protective, animalistic instincts, the desire to merge with the pet and a sense of terror generated by such a desire (a fear of vanishing and of being assimilated). Pets engender in their owners an emotional regression.

The owners find themselves revisiting their own childhood even as they are caring for their pets. The crumbling of decades and layers of personal growth is accompanied by a resurgence of the aforementioned early infancy narcissistic defenses. Pet-keepers - especially new ones - are gradually transformed into narcissists by this encounter and find in their pets the perfect sources of narcissistic supply, euphemistically known as love. Really it is a form of symbiotic codependence of both parties.

Even the most balanced, most mature, most psychodynamically stable of pet-owners finds such a flood of narcissistic supply irresistible and addictive. It enhances his or her self-confidence, buttresses self esteem, regulates the sense of self-worth, and projects a complimentary image of the parent to himself or herself. It fast becomes indispensable.

The key to our determination to have pets is our wish to experience the same unconditional love that we received from our mothers, this intoxicating feeling of being adored without caveats, for what we are, with no limits, reservations, or calculations. This is the most powerful, crystallized form of narcissistic supply. It nourishes our self-love, self worth and self-confidence. It infuses us with feelings of omnipotence and omniscience. In these, and other respects, pet-ownership is a return to infancy.