Instant Genius - Sin: Why we do the things we shouldn’t

Episode Date: June 27, 2018

Whether it’s cheating on our spouse, slacking off at work, or eating too much junk, we all occasionally do things we shouldn’t. Jack Lewis talks to us about the neuroscience of sin, how we can resist it, and the wacky experiments that test our ability to behave. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. So there's an amazing bunch of experiments that come under the title of the Taylor Aggression paradigm. And I love this because psychologists are so devious. In a good way. In a good way, I mean. But they wired up to. different individuals and they give each of them a button and a dial and they can electrocute each other

in tip-for-tat fashion. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb, Southwell, the production editor of BBC Focus magazine. Christian teachings have laid down the idea of seven deadly sins. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. And to some extent, we all sin, whether that's eating more cake than we know is good for us,

or something more serious. This week, we talked to neurobiologist Jack Lewis, who in his new book talks us through why we sin, illuminating the neural battles between temptation and restraint, and helping us understand why we do the things we shouldn't, so we can make better decisions in the future. Jack argues that ancient religions have been studying human behaviour for millennia, starting well before science got in on the game. By taking these ancient religious teachings and examining them through the lens of neuroscience, he says we can take the best teachings from both the religious and the scientific worlds.

Here he is, explaining to editorial assistant Helen Glennie, how neuroscience interprets those seven deadly sins. There's seven discrete antisocial instincts impulses where if you act upon them, you'll have a tendency to kind of break social connections with other people in your community. But then you don't want to abolish them completely because a certain measure of those impulses are important. So lust, for example, if you abolish lust completely, our species would soon disappear from the face of the planet. So gluttony, you know, if we didn't overeat in the sort of Stone Age period where food scarcity was a major threat to life and limb, then you'd never get the fatty deposits under your skin that could help to help you to survive through the lean times. So each of these sort of instinctive behaviors that were dubbed by the Christian religion as sinful behavior, not just any sin, but but there's kind of the chief cardinal vices that leads. to sort of corruption of human communities. If you avoid those seven things, then, you know,

the religions would say you'd go to heaven. But I would argue if you avoid those seven things, you will have better relations with other people. So why is that important? Well, from a scientific perspective, if you are cut off from other people, if you are lonely and you're isolated, then that has severe negative impacts on your physical health and also on your mental health. Now, while science can explain why that is and it would probably lean towards an explanation involving cortisol, the stress hormone being designed for use in short spurts. A squirt of cortisol can release extra resources to help your body and brain deal with the cause of the stress. And then once that stress has gone away, those cortisol levels can come down again and then you can get on in a

more relaxed fashion until the next stressful thing happens. But if you're lonely and isolated, Those cortisol levels can be running at a chronically high level to the point where literally body and brain gets worn down because it's constantly in a high state of alertness. So science can explain why loneliness is really bad for our physical and mental health. But it's very, very bad at suggesting ways to improve the degree to which a person feels embedded in their community and well connected with people in that community. If you go to a science lecture, for example, and you're feeling lonely, you're likely to come out of that science lecture feeling just as lonely as when you went in. You might be better informed and you might have learned some interesting things, but you're unlikely to have developed a sense of kind of social bonding with the people around you because that's not the overt purpose of it. Whereas if you look at religions, anyone who's feeling lonely, who's feeling isolated, he doesn't have loved ones around them who they feel they can. can trust with helping them with their problems or sharing their darkest fears. Those people can walk

into one of many houses of God that are available. Say, I'm in London right now. There are many churches and temples and mosques and synagogues where, you know, I could walk in and say I'm interested to learn about this religion. And those people would welcome me in and they would, they would explain to me how their religion works and they'd invite me to come back on a regular basis. and after a number of weeks, I would feel embedded in that community and a valued part of it. Science can't offer that to people. So this is where the sort of baby and bathwater distinction is for me. I think religion is amazing at offering people a sense of connection with their local community,

and science is bad at it. Science is very good at, you know, gathering evidence to support one notion or another with regard to what makes the world go around, you know, how human bodies function, what's good or bad for human, physical and mental health. And so the purpose of this book was primarily to sort of shine the light of science on religion to find the good bits. But I found myself against all expectation having sort of dug out all of the neuroscience that's relevant to each of the seven deadly sins. I found that that ancient religious wisdom helped me to make sense of all of the neuroscience literature that's out there, which can sometimes be conflicting and very confusing. So in a very big coconut shell, that's the book.

Great. Now, you talk about sin being rooted in religion, but there are these antisocial impulses that break connections in communities. So do you think that if we didn't have religion, we would have developed. these idea of these sins because of the social systems that we live in, or is religion necessary for us to create these idea of sins? So I think instincts that humans might act upon to excess that can result in damaging relationships is a universal phenomenon. And whether you label it a sin or you label it a vice or you label it antisocial behavior, that's just a matter

of kind of what your preferences are in terms of, you know, the tradition you were raised in. I was raised an atheist. I tend to look for evidence-based instruction, so I would tend to think of those as antisocial behaviours. But I also sung a lot of hymns, you know, like quite often, you know, my schools were Church of England schools, and they didn't shove religion down our throats, but we'd have a religious assembly every morning where I found myself singing these songs. And so I would say that antisocial behavior is universal. How you make sense of that tendency towards antisocial behavior is dependent upon the part of the world you grew up in, the sort of belief system in which you were raised. I think that even if there was no such thing as religion, wise people would have observed certain behaviors that tend to end up in good circumstances in terms of physical and mental health for individuals.

and those which end up in bad results. And so the sort of the brush strokes you use to actually bring that wisdom into sharp relief for people can sometimes be a theological bent. It can sometimes be of a sort of, you know, more artistic narrative version of telling that same story. But ultimately, if we leave our impulses unchecked, we end up annoying everyone around us to the point where they reject us. What's happening in the brain when we do things that we know are wrong? Can you tell whether someone knows that they're doing something wrong just by looking at their brain? That's a very interesting question. And if you'd ask me before I'd written the book, I'd have said, no idea.

But the lucky thing, luckily for me, because when I embarked on writing it, I didn't know whether the same brain areas would crop up again and again, or whether it would be different brain areas every time. And so the first critical sort of link in the chain was that if you look at the brains of narcissists, and so narcissistic people are the closest you can come in terms of a scientifically evaluated type of personality, which is akin to the cardinal vice of pride, narcissists tend to be vain. They tend to be self-aggrandizing. They think they're better than everyone else. talk themselves up. They think that the world revolves around them. And they're like they'll even go as

far as to take other people's successes and claim them for themselves. So we're in the middle of a narcissism epidemic. Since the narcissistic personality inventory was invented in the 70s, it's been repeated again and again, mainly in the United States of America. But from decade to decade to decade, the average rates of narcissism, the average score in this one standardised test, has gone up and up and up. And that's interesting, particularly because Pope Gregory the Great said that pride was the queen of all of the deadly sins. So by that, I mean, well, I might as well quote him, seeing as I have it in front of me,

what he said was, when pride, the queen of all the sins, sins has fully possessed the conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to the seven principal sins. So once you're a narcissist, you know, once you are someone who thinks that they are just more important than everyone else, there's a tendency that you'll give in to all the other anti-social behaviours. So there's a big body of evidence looking at narcissists and specifically in the world of brain imaging, magnetic resonance imaging scanning. They took a large number of narcissists, people who scored high on the narcissism personality inventory. And then they also scanned the brains of people who scored low on the narcissism personality

inventory. And they compared these narcissists to non-narcissistic brains when they were playing a game called cyberball. So cyberball is basically a virtual game where a ball is being passed, like in the playground, three people playing with a ball, they pass it to each other. And what it does is at a certain point in the experiment, the other two players, which the person in the scanner is led to believe are playing from next door, a different room outside of the scanner room that the narcissist or non-nacist is in. And then those other two players start passing the ball exclusively between themselves. So we can all probably relate to that in the sense of when you're left out of something in the playground at school. How does it make you feel? It makes you feel horrible.

And why? Because you're being excluded. You're being socially excluded. that creates a sense of social pain. Now, there was a part of the brain where the activity was much greater when those narcissists were experiencing that social pain compared to when non-narcissists were feeling that social pain. And that area is called the D-A-C, the dorsal anterior singular cortex, which if you imagine pulling the left and right hemispheres of the brain apart, separating them down the midline, it's on that medial surface, that sort of centerfold of the brain, just above the corpus callosum,

which is the bundle of neurons that connects the left and right hemispheres. So this one discrete brain area, it's known to light up from other studies in pain when people are feeling physical pain, studies involved in looking at chronic pain syndromes. They'll see this brain area light up when someone's experiencing physical pain. We also know that it's involved when people are experiencing social pain. But it's also involved when people aren't experiencing pain at all, when people are processing conflict. So, for example, you may have heard of the phenomenon cognitive dissonance, where you're holding

two contradictory ideas in mind, and they don't sit together well. So except one, you'd kind of have to reject the other and vice versa. So, you know, there are many different circumstances when this brain area will switch on, if you look across all the neuroscience literature. But the one thing that seems to be common is there seems to be some level of of emotional distress involved, and there's some level of conflict. And that kind of makes sense. If you think about narcissists as being, from the perspective of being particularly sensitive

to emotional pain, their unpleasant behavior to the people around them, it seems to me on the basis of this result that it could be explained by their sense of social pain, their sense of inner turmoil, is potentiated. It's stronger compared to how non-narcicists respond to things like being socially. left out. And then when I went on to look into the other sins, this area kept cropping up again and again. This same brain area was different in the brains of people who suffered from dispositional envy, which means that they regularly feel envy when they compare themselves to other people or on a daily basis. Then in greed, whenever any of us across hundreds of

neuroeconomic studies find ourselves faced with a kind of economic situation. where there's two players playing a sort of a financial exchange game. And when your slice of the pie is smaller than the other person, this DACC area always lights up. It doesn't just notice that there's a disparity in what one person is going to get and what the other person is going to get. It always lights up when you're the one at a disadvantage. And again, you can see how that could be a period, a condition under which you would feel the distress of inner turmoil. when confronted with that predicament. Lust it cropped up, but amazingly, that was because people were being shown pornography

inside the brain scanner. And if you think about it, there's a sort of conflict there because under normal circumstances when people use pornography, there is a little bit of movement. And if there's one thing that is over-emphasized again and again when you're in a brain scanner, it is do not move. So I had to discount that as being a sort of a cause of the sin of love. It's more a sort of constraint of being inside the scanner. But basically, it's cut a long story short.

Like more than half of the seven deadly sins, you could account for through an excessive degree of inner turmoil caused by being put in a predicament that's relevant to those seven deadly sins. So I thought, it just made me, I started thinking differently about social interactions I had with people. Oh, sorry, Roth, my gosh, I can't miss that one out. Roth. So there's an amazing bunch of experiments that come under the title of the Taylor Aggression paradigm. And I love this because psychologists are so devious. So they basically,

in a good way, in a good way, I mean, but they wired up to different individuals and they give each of them a button and a dial, and they can electrocute each other in tip-for-tat fashion. And so one person electrocutes the other. So it starts gently. one person electrocates the other, and like, ow, that hurts. And then the person that got zapped can zap the other one back. But as with always in these situations, the person who got zapped always feels that the electric shock they received was more painful than the one they inflicted on the other. So like, ah, how dare you?

They'll crank it up. The other person will crank it up, we'll crank it up, we'll crank it up. And so what they did inside the scanner was they took as a measure of the degree of desired retribution for the perceived slight, as in that's, unfair, you zap me harder. They're getting more and more frustrated and aggravated. The degree to which they cranked up the voltage of the electric shock was commensurate, it was positively correlated with the amount of activation that was produced in the dorsal anterior singular cortex. So yet again, there's another sort of suggestion that this brain area could explain, could be the perhaps

even root cause of when we feel the urge to inflict an antisocial, behavior on someone else, it tends to arise from the inner turmoil generated in this brain area and the decision to act upon that impulse is a release of that inner turmoil. So it seems kind of tempting to imagine a world where maybe we could turn down the activity in this DACC and maybe not feel as much wrath and not feel as envious and as narcissistic. but would that produce some really bad effects? Would we all then be able to sin without feeling any kind of guilt? Yeah, that's interesting.

You should say that because there's some interesting studies that I mentioned in the sort of concluding chapter to do with how the response is in a brain scanner of very experienced Buddhist monks contrasts with normal everyday people being put in a similar situation. And the best example is when you're in that situation where it's a sort of neuroeconomic game and there's a split of the pie and you get to decide, you know, so let's say we've got a pot of 100 quid. And then the other person will say, okay, we're going to split this pot of money 70, 30. I'm going to keep 70.

You're going to get 30. And then the other person gets to either allow that deal to go through or to or to reject it and say, no, neither of us are going to get anything. Now, most of us, when offered that split, we'd rather have no money at all than enable that other person to get away with the cheek of taking more than twice the amount we're getting for themselves. We'd rather cut off our nose to spite our faces. And whereas Buddhist monks in this situation, they do not, not only do they not make that decision, they'll let other people make decisions which leave them at a huge financial disadvantage, but the brain, the neural correlates of distress, of emotional turmoil, are not there.

So the reason they allow it to go through is because they don't feel resentful that the other person has proposed such an unequal split. Now, there's two ways of looking at that. You could say that, well, all that meditation has made those Buddhist monks soft in the head, and they're letting people sort of ride roughshod over them and take advantage of and treat them unfairly. But, you know, or you could say that those Buddhist monks just have a completely different perspective that is orthogonal to the way most of us think about the world where we place a high value on money, you know, and it's sort of, it's kind of six of one, half a dozen of another. And I have to say that as I found myself earlier talking about in a

turmoil and, you know, it's suffering is inevitable. That is quite Buddhist. And, you know, I'm no expert in Buddhism. But, but a lot of the conclusions I came to just by analyzing the science that's relevant to the seven deadly sins. I found myself concluding things which I'd heard echoes of in my exposure to Buddhism over the years. So I'm starting to wonder whether, you know, of all the religions, for me, that's the one I'm finding myself leaning towards the most because there is the, the, the, Buddhism seems to give the most power to the human brain and what it can do, given enough time for self-contemplation. And it takes the attention away from more supernatural phenomena, which in my belief system is outdated in the 21st century. Since the Enlightenment, there are many more other, more realistic and convincing explanations as to how the world came to be, you know, where the Elan Vital comes from that produces human life and, you know, forces of life and death and so forth. I find the scientific explanation is much more convincing than the religious explanations, but hey, I'm biased.

So let's talk specifically about a few of the seven deadly sins. And the first one I want to talk about is a gluttony. Really big problem for at least the Western world at the moment. Now, yesterday, I had a busy day at work. I was really tired. So as soon as I got home from work, I ate pretty much a whole block of white chocolate. I didn't even think about chewing it with anyone. Can you explain to me why I did that?

by all means. So yeah, gluttony is different from greed, firstly. It's quite easy to get them confused because, you know, I can say, well, you're a greedy guts for eating a whole block of white chocolate. But really, you're a gluttony guts because greed is to do with, well, no, maybe you're greedy and gluttonous. No, I'm only joking, but you take my point. Gluttony comes from the word glutteer, which is Latin for to gulp down. So it's always with regard to putting stuff in your mouth with wild abandon, not having a moderate amount, but having more than you actually need, you know?

And so we've all been in situations where you go to, you know, let's say and eat as much as you want buffet, and your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and you end up sort of at the end of eating far too much with a food baby, where you can't think straight, you're falling asleep on the sofa or whatever. And so the reason that tends to happen towards the end of a busy day

are threefold. Firstly, our ability to make discipline choices, it starts off after a restful night's sleep, ideally eight hours of night. Sleep is the most important thing you can do for your brain. Always like to get that in there whenever I can. But you have a finite resource for making disciplined decisions,

by which I mean not just going for the instinctive easy choice, but thinking it through and making a considered decision as to what's best in the long term rather than what will give you immediate gratification. So I would argue that you probably, you forwent the opportunity to have a muffin with your coffee in the morning. You were tempted to have some crisps or chocolate or, I don't know, a Danish pastry at 11 o'clock because you knew you were going to have lunch a little bit later. And then you made some fairly disciplined decisions as to what you were going to eat at lunchtime. And then you'd had, you continued your busy day.

And then when you got to the end of the day, you just had enough of being disciplined, right? So our capacity to make disciplined choices does gradually erode over the course of any given day. On top of that, if your blood sugar levels are running low at the point where you make that decision, will, I won't, I eat that whole block of chocolate. And if you've got low blood sugar level, the part of the brain which enables you to exert control over your impulsive desires, doesn't have enough fuel to help rain in those impulses. And then thirdly and finally, that one and then that one. Oh, yeah, we are hardwired to favor highly caloric food.

Anything high in fat, anything high in sugar. When our brains evolved during, let's say, the Stone Age, our brains favored, they evolved to favor those very caloric foods because if you gorge yourself on that stuff, you can tuck away excess resources in fatty deposits under your skin so that in that time of food scarcity, if the hunt goes bad, if it's the middle of winter and you're stuck in your cave or whatever

for another couple of months before it's safe to go out or before there's any food out there that you could forage for or hunt, if you've got a month without food, anyone that's tucked away those extra calories is more likely to survive than those who do not overeat the highly caloric fatty and sugary stuff. So because this is a Darwinian phenomenon, we've still got the same brains now,

but it was a Darwinian survival of the fittest kind of scenario whereby those humans who didn't have that propensity to gorge gluttonously on fatty, sugary foods, they simply died out over the thousands of years between then and now. those that are left have a hardwired preference for those delicious fatty foods. Let's talk a little bit about envy. What's going on in the brain when we get jealous?

So envy has two very different forms. As with all the seven deadly sins, if you got rid of them completely, it would have a negative impact on humanity in one way or another. So the two forms of envy are benign envy and malicious envy. envy usually is triggered as an emotion it's a social emotion when you compare yourself with another person who is more or less the same as you but seems to be doing better in life they seem to maybe be more wealthy earn a bigger salary be enjoying more success or accolades from the people around them they are you know it doesn't even matter if they are doing better it all revolves around perception

If a person perceives that someone who's more or less similar to them, similar background, similar education levels, similar start in life, if they perceive that other person is doing better than them, envy will, they'll feel this envy and then it can kind of get to this bifurcation point, a fork in the road, and you can go down the benign route or the malicious route. The malicious route is to do everything in your power to pull them down from their pedestal, thereby removing the disparity between their lot and yours, or you can go down the benign, envy route, which is to work out, well, what are they doing that I'm not? How can I pull myself up by my boot laces and elevate myself to their position? Maybe I could do a course. Maybe I could

be more delicate in how I approach confrontation. You know, if you, envy is a force for good when you compare yourself to others who have what you want, who are doing better than you are, and it helps you to figure out what you need to change in yourself to match their level of achievement. envy is horrible and an incredibly destructive force in the world when it becomes malicious and that you desire to harm that other people because you can't bear the social distress you feel when you compare yourself to them. So envy is a really interesting one. And so, yeah, this dispositional envy thing that I spoke about right at the beginning. There are people who score high on the dispositional envy, people who score low on the dispositional envy and a really

interesting brain imaging study that came out of a lab in China showed that the dorsal anterior singular cortex is wide up differently in the brains of, I think structurally, it's larger in the brains of people who regularly experience envy compared to those that don't. And then the flip side of envy is schadenfreude. So that's literally harm joy where you, so to begin with, they tell people in the scanner about a rival, like a competitor, a friend of theirs who's doing better than them, and they stimulate envy. And then they tell them a story about how that person had recently had a downturn in their luck and had fallen on hard times. And then the surge of satisfaction that came up in the brains of those people that suffered from dispositional envy

was negatively correlated to the degree of envy. So the, I don't know, is that, did I get the correlation right? The more envy they felt, the more often, the more joy they'd feel when they hear about that person having a downturn. They also measured in this study that the people's emotional quotient. So that's like the idea of emotional intelligence as opposed to intellectual intelligence. So this is EQ instead of IQ. And they found that the people who were lower in dispositional envy had higher. had higher levels of EQ,

which suggests that that EQ is enabling them to sort of mitigate the level of envy that they feel on a daily basis, and that there was an area of the brain in the prefrontal cortex that was bigger according to the size, the score they got on that measurement of EQ. So these things could be teachable.

It could be possible to help people with this position or envy reframe the way they engage with other people on a daily basis to bolster their EQ levels, which presumably would enable this prefrontal brain area, to exert greater control over those feelings of distress from the comparison with someone perceived to be better in the DACC. Yeah, that is a really interesting study. So broadly, what can we learn from all of this? What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

So what I'd like people to take away from this book is that you don't have to choose between science or religion. You can get the best of both worlds. You can find the best aspects of science and the best aspects of religion and put them together in a way that's greater than the sum of its parts. And that is specifically with regard to the scientific insight that the more you feel connected to your community, and it doesn't matter whether you have one or two really close friends, that's often better than having 50 superficial relationships. But by feeling like you are a valued part of some community, whether it's two people, you know, in a partnership,

in a romantic partnership, whatever, or whether it's like your football team or your local hobby group or whatever, you feel that there are some people out there who love you, who value you. that is so important for your physical health and it's so important for your mental health. And the evidence is people who feel isolated have bad physical and bad mental health. And if you're trying to keep people connected in their communities, you need to do whatever you can to arm them with what they need, whether it's knowledge or strategies or places they can go to get help,

to help them reduce the impulses to be antisocial, to rein in those sort of antisocial desires, which will tend to eventually lead to people rejecting you from the social group for the sake, because friends aren't just nice to have. They are essential to our physical and mental well-being. So the religious insights as to what the seven chief culprits are in terms of ruining relationships, if you look at the science, the scientific evidence suggesting

that indeed all of those, well, not all of those, many of those seven things, the motivation to do those antisocial things, it comes from a place of inner turmoil, it can both help you to reevaluate other people's antisocial behavior and help you find clues as to how to better regulate your own. And then once you've got inner peace by managing your own inner turmoil, your own DACC activations. You can enjoy better relationships, which means better physical and mental health. That was Jack Lewis talking about why we do the things we know we shouldn't. His book, The Science of Sin, is available from Bloomsbury Sigma now. In the July issue of BBC Focus, which is on sale now,

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