Wes Burgess

Personal history

Wes Burgess was born in Dumas, Texas, of engineer and artist parents. In high school and college, he performed music and displayed his artwork in national and international shows. Dr. Burgess earned his bachelor's degree at Purdue University, his PhD in Zoology at North Carolina State University, and his M.D. from the University of Miami School of Medicine, where he was president of his medical school class. Dr. Burgess completed psychiatry training at Stanford University Medical Center, where he was Chief Resident in Psychiatry.

Awards and recognition

Dr. Burgess received the Purdue University Literary Award, the Mead Johnson Award for Excellence in Writing, and the Southern California Psychiatric Association Appreciation Award for his writing.

Career

Wes Burgess was awarded fellowships at the University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford University, going on to do medical research and teach undergraduate and graduate school courses at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the UCLA School of Medicine, the University of California, Davis, Department of Psychology, and other universities. Dr. Burgess has maintained an active private practice in neuropsychiatry for over 20 years. He consults for the State Bar of California and the Los Angeles Superior Court, and he has been a frequent guest on National Public Radio, television, and films. Currently he devotes most of his time to writing and private consultation.

Scientific contributions

Wes Burgess was the first United States scientist to discover social spiders, which he described in Scientific American and other journals. Social spiders challenge theories of social biology because spiders are usually cannibalistic and would not be expected to form social groups. Dr. Burgess showed how social spiders modify their environment to be able to live together. For example, Mexican spiders called Mallos gregalis spin a web that amplifies the sounds of the flies that they eat and dampens the vibrations made by other spiders, allowing Mallos spiders to live in colonies containing hundreds of thousands of individuals. Another spider called Metepeira spinipes, spins two-part spider webs: individual orbs to catch prey, and vibration-damping tangled webs where spiders coexist peacefully. Dr. Burgess also described Oecobius civitas spiders who exchange individual webs with each other as part of a unique prober/retaliator social strategy (see evolutionary game theory).

Dr. Burgess compared the biological forces that produce social groups in shoaling and schooling fish, flocking and territorial birds, monkey colonies, and human social groups; developing techniques of measuring and displaying proxemic distances between nearest neighbor individuals in a social group.

For example, fish derive mainly passive benefits from forming social groups, including physical protection from predators and better detection of food and danger from the combined awareness of many group members; these ecological benefits increase with the size of the group. Dr. Burgess' measurements showed how fish simultaneously monitor the position and activity of many speciesmates simultaneously to create large, geometric group patterns. Bird flocks and territories are similarly organized.

In comparison, we derive active social benefits from interpersonal interactions. At UCLA Medical School, Dr. Burgess measured species-typical organization of human social groups. Although people can attend to and discriminate seven groupmates simultaneously, humans tend to focus on just a few other individuals and form small subgroups. At the University of California, Davis Department of Psychology, Dr. Burgess demonstrated that social subgroups have a typical developmental pattern that begins in early childhood and continues throughout adulthood. Social grouping is deficient in children with developmental disorders such as autism and mental retardation.

Dr. Burgess found similar subgrouping patterns in rhesus monkey colonies in Puerto Rico, while working at the North Carolina Department of Mental Health Research. These patterns change if only a few members receive psychoactive drugs.

Social stress, especially from overpopulation and crowding during early life, can cause brain damage and impair behavior development. Although they normally live in large groups, Dr. Burgess found that fish crowded in early life develop permanent changes in their brain and behavior that mimic the effects of drug exposure during early development.

Dr. Burgess’ studies revealed how the dendrites of brain neurons grow during development. Together with Dr. Richard Coss at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Burgess was the first to show that sensory stimuli, including social stressors, can cause long-lasting changes in brain cell anatomical structure in just a few minutes. Together with Dr. Jaime Villablanca at UCLA, Dr. Burgess discovered that early brain injury resembling childhood congenital disorders and adult traumatic brain injury can heal naturally and that rehabilitative exercise improves brain healing. He helped clarify the rôle of the caudate nucleus in aggression and found that, without input from this nucleus, usually aggressive cats are friendly and affiliative. Dr. Burgess also contributed to our understanding of how the nervous system responds to morphine, especially during early development.

As a psychiatrist and medical doctor, Wes Burgess studied personality disorders and other mental illnesses that impair social relations. Working at the Stanford University Medical Center Department of Psychiatry, he showed that the pathology of borderline personality disorder, including chronic depression and self harm, is linked to impaired neurocognition—the ability to perform normal thought processes. He published numerous freely-available neuropsychological tests to measure human cognition, violence, and self-harm, and to improve the accuracy of medical diagnosis, including the Card Test and the Personality Inventory Scales. He has written books for individuals with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, their caretakers, and their families; as well as books and clinical articles on DSM-5 and ICD-10 diagnosis, cognitive testing, and psychotherapy and psychopharmacology treatments for use by internal medicine doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and mental health counselors.

Dr. Burgess believes that modern psychological stress and crowding impair our mental processes and worsen mental illness and physical disease. He advocates the use of relaxation techniques, meditation, and contemplation of art to reduce the stress response and clear the mind, and he has published a collection of these exercises. He associates the state of clarity achieved with meditative techniques with spiritual enlightenment and his books on Taoism and Zen explain these beliefs.

Personal life

Wes spends his free time in his nationally registered butterfly garden, supporting coastal endangered species, marine habitats, and snorkeling. His writings on snorkeling promote this environmentally friendly water sport. Wes can often be found flying sport kites at Half Moon Bay, California.

Books