Radiolab - Revising the Fault Line

Episode Date: June 27, 2017

A new tussle over an old story, and some long-held beliefs, with neurologist and author Robert Sapolsky. Four years ago, we did a story about a man with a starling obsession that made us question our ideas of responsibility and justice. We thought we’d found some solid ground, but today Dr. Sapolsky shows up and takes us down a rather disturbing rabbit hole.  Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.      

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Maybe all of us can sit on the catch. I can rug and pull that chair over. So we're going to start with a story from our producer, Pat Walters, about a couple. Oh, my word. Okay, so I mentioned a couple episodes ago. By the way, this is Jad, Radio Lab, that. we'll be bringing back some episodes back into the flow from time and time,

episodes that we haven't stopped thinking about, that feel truer to us now than before or maybe the opposite. You know, episodes that we still end up getting to fights with people about. And a couple of years ago, we ran a story about a guy named Kevin, and a little bit more recently. Hello, Robert. Are you there? Yes. All right.

Chad will be here in just a sec. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, who Robert Crowich and I have had on the show, many times. He recently wrote a book in which he makes an argument that really tries to kind of just explode that story in a way that we found

sort of interesting. It was just my hunch that it plays near a lot of your buttons. Sure does. So what we did was we sent him that piece, had him listen to it. And actually what we'll do now is replay that piece and then at the end we'll come back

and a little bit of a fight about it. So we're going to start with a story from our producer Pat Walters about a couple. Oh, my word. That's the lady. I'm Janet. This is the guy. So I don't need you to introduce yourself.

That's usually the thing we do, but we're not telling people who you are. We're going to call him Kevin. Kevin, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my name. That's suspicious at all. It's not his real name. It'll make sense why we're not using his real name in a second. Okay, you know. So this one starts a few summers ago.

It was July 2006. Dan and Kevin were at home. And some people, you don't know, show up. And maybe I'll start with you. When they show up at the door? So we were, it was, we were getting ready to go down the shore. It was a Friday. So we're in the kitchen and they come to the back door.

I thought that they were fundraising. I thought they might have been firemen just by, you know, the blue shirt and then realized that they were law enforcement. Two women and I think two men. More came up from around the side of the house. And they show us their badges. Were they cops? They were Homeland Security?

They took me outside. And they kept me, and they asked me to stay in the kitchen. And they had a woman with me. I didn't know what was going on. Nobody said anything to me. What are they saying to you on the porch, meanwhile? When they showed up, and I got to the door, he said, you know why we're here?

I said, yeah, I do. I was expecting you. And I showed them where everything. was. This story about Kevin and his wife Janet inspired us to do the entire hour. Mm-hmm. Because one of the most basic things that we do as people is we judge. We judge one another. We judge what's right. We judge what's wrong. But this story and the two that follow, they will make you judge how you judge, or at least they had that effect on us. And we're calling our show, blame. I'm Chad, I boomrod. I'm Robert Crilwich and we'll go back to Pat.

Before we do, you should know that this show contains some graphic, difficult descriptions in a few spots. If you're not in the mood or if you have kids around, you might want to sit this one out. Okay, so what happened in that first scene and what happens next only makes sense if we go back a little first. About 15 years. It's just an ordinary day. Kevin's going home from work. And I was driving home, going about 65, 70 in the fast lane, when suddenly there was a thump in my chest. Then heat, just a heat burning.

After that, he said suddenly he had this thickness in my tongue, in my throat. Then a foul taste in his mouth. Then my hearing faded out. And he thought, it's back. When I finally did come too, he sees his car is smashed into the side of an apartment building. I do recall the officers telling, you know, you've been in an accident,

and he remembers one of them. Insisted that he smelled alcohol. And I was talking through clenched teeth because I had bit my tongue and my cheeks. I was saying over and over again, I had a seizure. I had a seizure. Kevin's got epilepsy. He's had it since he was a teenager. But two years before this all happened, he'd had surgery to remove the part of his brain that was causing the seizures.

And it seemed to have worked. He was doing great. Essentially wasn't having seizures anymore. Until suddenly, he was. Lost your license? I lost my license for a year. Things had kind of taken a nose dive. Like, here he is.

He's 35 years old. I'm living with my brother. I'm divorced. And I have to call my daddy and ask him now to drive me to and from work. And you think I need to do something? This is not sustainable. No, no, don't need that. So I walked into the office.

Asked the HR person where he works for a list of all the employees. Give me a list of everybody and where they're from. So she pulled it up. I go down the list and I get to Janet Woodruff Bloomfield, only when it's really close to me five minutes away. So I walk to her cube, knocked on the wall, and introduced myself. Like, hey, my name's Kevin. I also work here.

I've got this thing, though, it's kind of awkward. I can't drive. And I was wondering if you'd give me a ride. And she said yes. I really passed by his street, I mean, on the way to work. So it was... Like right on his street. Pretty much.

But I made it clear, you know, I'll do it when I can. And as they drove together, they... Start talking, finding out a little bit more about each other. Notice pretty quickly. We like the same music. And that was unique because I sort of like music that was probably more in his error. Kevin was seven years older than Jan.

What kind of music were you listening to? Jackson Brown mostly. A lot of Jackson Brown. James Taylor. Bonnie Rate. You know, Elton John. They found themselves singing along to the lyrics. You cannot sing with somebody day in and day out and not have something happen. We wound up as the spring came, you know, it's getting nice out. So now it's like, well, let's not go home.

Let's go out for a beer after war. We're becoming good friends. We liked each other. But for Kevin, it was a little more serious than that. I'm thinking about her, and I'm starting to wake up at night. And one day in May, as Janet is dropping him off, Kevin turns to her and he says, Hey, I really appreciate what you've done for me. Let me take it at dinner.

Just as friends. Just as friends. Janet says, sure. So May 30th, 1992. Highland Pavilion. Nicest restaurant in town. So your friends takes you to a four-star restaurant. You're thinking right away,

He thinks this is a date. I'm going on a date. Come on. So now I'm panic-stricken. We have our dinner. We leave. We had a wonderful time. She drops me off, and I handed her the poem.

What did the poem say? Do you still have it? Yeah, I do. Okay. This is a little slower. Each time we sing on the way home, I pray that traffic backs up so we can sing together just a little longer,

and the harmony can go on forever. And each time we reach my door, I feel robbed because we're. are always in mid-song or mid-thought. He gets out and goes inside and probably thinks, awesome, I gave her that poem, she's going to be so smitten with me, and you go home and what? I want to throw up.

I just thought, oh, God, you know. Next day. I just looked at him and said, listen, we got to clarify. This is clearly just going to be a friendship. He was seven years older than me. He had these brain surgery. He has epilepsy. He's divorced.

He has two children. Compassion. Are you catching the compassion here? I'm trying. And he's just like, I'm not asking you to marry me. I'm asking you to go out on a few dates. Exactly. If you go out with me like four times in the next six months, I'm ahead of the game.

He just handled it. And I don't think it was long at all. I can't even remember, but it wasn't long at all before we were like a couple. And Kevin? I'm dopey. Dopey in love. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's doing romantic things for her all the time.

Flowers, poems, and paintings. Illustration of the Jackson Brown. covered. And within a year? We were engaged. But all the while, Kevin is having seizures. Yeah. Since the car accident, more and more. There was a point where we were obviously dating. She was helping to make his bed.

And, um... He says she pulled off the pillowcase. It's covered with blood stains. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You can count the number of seizures that I had and bit through my tongue and bled. I knew nothing about epilepsy. I had never seen anybody have a seizure. In my past, those would have been big red flags that I would have just walked away, but I just went with it.

And they both went with it for a few years, until finally Kevin and Jan decide this is enough. I wanted to be done with it. I just needed to be done with it. So they schedule a brain surgery, which sounds like a big deal, and obviously it is, but they had every reason to think that this wouldn't change him.

I honestly thought that he was going to come out of it fine, better. Because that's what happened the first time. Kevin had actually gone through a brain surgery, much like this one once before, and he'd come out pretty much the same guy. He was still himself. In fact, he made sure of it. I was awake for the surgery. That's crazy.

It was, I had to be awake. It had to do with music. Kevin is a musician, and the doctors told him, they said that if I lost anything, I was going to lose my appreciation for music, that it would be like music would be white noise. I said, you know, no, for me, music was, you know, is, part of my personality. It was how I coped with my darkest moments in dealing with epilepsy and seizures. At 18 years old, I'd have a seizure. I'd take my harmonica, and I'd find a place with decent reverb

somewhere and be right where I needed to be. I didn't want to lose that part of me. So as the doctors were doing the brain surgery, they had his head open. They asked him to sing. Do you remember what you sing? Um, end of the innocence. Some James Taylor. And while he sang, they would tickle different parts of his brain. And if they ever touched the part that made him stop singing, they'd say, okay, that's a part we cannot take out. Wow. Yeah.

And in the end? I think they ended up taking out like four and a half centimeters. Like a golf, you know, a little bit bigger than a golf ball. Wow. But afterwards, as he was recovering... I had my keyboard in the room. And I tried playing right away. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

And it worked. The part of him that he really cared about was still. there. Exactly. Yeah. He was a man I fell in love with after the first surgery. So I thought, well, you know, now that they've got to do a second surgery. He's already been there on this road. We're fine. And after that second surgery, he did seem fine. Janet didn't have her brother sneak my keyboard up to the room again. He was very, very adamant that he wanted that keyboard. I played a little. Just noodled a couple of notes, played a couple of things. And it was like, okay, I'm there. Still me. I was ready to go. So you go home and, like,

It seems to have worked. Yeah. As far as seizures go, we thought, okay, this is it. We're home free. And I was just happy to have some normalcy. But then, in the winter... By beginning the middle of January. Kevin noticed he wanted to eat.

My physical appetite. A lot more than usual. Got, like, insane. This is a guy who didn't eat breakfast. He had minimal lunch, and he'd have a sensible dinner, maybe a snack. That was it. But now... I could eat the couch.

It just was odd. It was not him normally, but, you know, you're like, okay. She thought maybe it's just a side effect from the medication. But then? The piano. You'd play the piano for hours. The same songs they used to sing in the car together. If he had stuck on a piece, he would play it for hours.

Like how many hours? Eight. Eight, nine. And then there was sex. You know, we were happy, healthy couple. Kevin's nodding. Yeah, yeah, it was fine. But what was abnormal was it was, it was anywhere.

Clearly, it wasn't like, oh, we're in the supermarket, let's have sex here. I mean, it wasn't like that. But, I mean, it was like, I could just walk. in the kitchen from buying out of work and he'd be like, oh, let's go here. Which struck her as weird, but then again... We were thinking, you know, let's try to have a family. So the timing made things confusing. And more than that, it wasn't like any of this stuff was out of character exactly.

In fact, it was all stuff that she liked about him. Yeah. Except now it was all turned up to 11. All the things that were wonderful became chores. And that's pretty much where things were at. when those federal agents showed up in July of 2006. I was just completely blindsided. He said, you know why we're here?

I said, yeah, I do. I was expecting you. Kevin took the agents upstairs. I took him right into here where my computer was. And they arrested him for what was on that computer. I gave it up to him right away. Warning, this next passage contains some graphic imagery. I mean, I hadn't, I don't know if I had fully, like, I think I had just, like, let child porn be this kind of vague,

thing that meant someone younger than 18. But then I read some of the court documents, and they were like toddlers. They were picked videos of two, three, and four-year-olds. These sites had the most despicable, disgusting things you can imagine. Infants on through, you know, pre-teen and, you know, pre-adolescence. And you bought these things and put them on your computer.

Yeah. Yeah, it bothers me. It bothers me. Like I said, initially it was, you know, it was just your basic, you know, heterosexual, playboy-like penthouse-like sites. And then windows would just start to open up. Pretty soon he says he was going everywhere. There was gay sex.

They were, I mean, there was bondage. there was defecation sex, there was animal sex, xenosex. I went everywhere that a button came up to push. I still don't understand it. I still don't understand it. You say it disturbs you and you feel terrible, but I just like wonder, like, how do you tell yourself, like, that wasn't me?

Like, how do you explain it to yourself so that you can kind of, I don't know, not feel like you're, as bad as the person who goes there without a brain injury is, you know? Like, oh, I know, I, say that again. I guess I'm just wondering, I don't know, like knowing that that's a thing that you did, and it sounds like obviously you know that that was bad, it was a wrong thing and it was a terrible thing.

But it was you who did it or was it not? I don't know. You know what I mean? No, it was me who did it, but it was me with a complete lack of neurological control. You know, I mean, I know who I am. I did idiotic things that I couldn't stop myself from doing. I didn't want to do it. There would be nights where it would be four, five, six hours of going to the same site

and downloading one or two files and then deleting them, going back, A minute later, downloading the same files, deleting them, I would download those files a dozen times and delete them a dozen times because I didn't want to be there, knew I shouldn't be there, and couldn't help myself from going back. I'm not an idiot. I mean, I'm a smart guy. I'm not an idiot.

But I know I had no control. And that's what he would argue in court. Kevin Wood pleaded guilty, but at the sentencing hearing, he asked the judge to be lenient, arguing essentially that the person who did all those things, in some sense, wasn't him. It was some other part of his brain that he couldn't control. At the hearing, he called one witness. Orrin Davinsky, I'm a neurologist and epilepsy specialist at NYU Medical Center. He's been treating Kevin for decades. 20-20-some-odd years. And he says as soon as he found out what Kevin had been doing, he had a terrible sense of

responsibility. This is because of the brain surgery. The surgery Orrin recommended he have. And he argued in court that this was not Kevin's fault. I remember looking at the those agents right in their face and saying to them and to the judge, this could be anybody. This could be those agents judge. This could be you. This could be me. This could be anybody. And we would have no control over what we did.

And explain to the court what the biology was. That the way the brain is organized is that there are parts of our brain that are way deep down. That control like base desires. Like hunger, sex. Keeps us alive. But it's teeming with the nastiest thoughts. We all have these crazy thoughts in our head. Now, in most of us, those thoughts are kept in check because there are other parts of our brain that sit on top and act like a lid.

But in Kevin's case, the brain surgeon who did that surgery removed part of that filter. And suddenly... The cork was off. I mean, it was just no lid on his sexual desires. He says scientists have known about this condition for a long time. They first saw it in monkeys. In rhesus monkeys. When the monkeys would lose roughly...

the same part of the brain that Kevin lost. They became very hypersexual, males that would only previously be sexually involved with females. Now, we're 10 times more sexually active with both males and females. But it feels to me, feels to me like there's a,

there would be a brighter line before kids, you know? I think there is a line for, quote unquote, normal individuals, but in a brain disorder case, those lines get blurred. And he told the court,

That's what happened here. It was black and white. Kevin was sick, and his behavior was out of his control. Well, that's not what the fact showed in this case. This is Lee Vartan, who was the prosecutor. We saw no evidence of impulsivity. He says, if you're claiming that he had no control, that his brain made him do it, then how come he had all this child porn on his home computer?

I believe it was 52 videos and 125 images. And yet, on his work computer? There were zero images, zero videos of child. child pornography on his work computer. And he worked a lot. He held down a job. He was working every day. If he truly lacked impulse control, I would think, you would see child pornography on both computers.

And so what he argued back was what? Was the lid on at work and off at home? Seems to me to be an easy out. So the answer is that this is common with neurologic disease. They tend not to be 24-7. He says take something like Tourette's. Some people... When they're engaged in playing sports...

they tend not to have ticks. Whereas when they're sitting around bored or stressed, they do tend to have ticks. So you could say, well, Tourette's clearly isn't a neurological disorder. But no, Tourette's is a neurologic disorder. We understand some of the brain things that go on Tourette's. The prosecution didn't buy it. They just thought it was Hogwash. What was hogwash was his level of certainty.

The prosecution asked that Kevin B sent to prison for five years. Because in paying for child porn, he was supporting an industry that does terrible things to kids. Kevin hoped he'd avoid jail time altogether and instead be placed on house arrest. How is for Janet? Right after the arrest. I have to imagine that you were in shock a little. Yeah.

She'd gone to see a lawyer. And one of the questions he asked was, is this marriage going to survive this? And I said, I don't know. And at that point, understand, I didn't even know the level of pictures. But she says the moment she heard Orange say that this was a brain disorder with a name,

It's called Clue Verbussy Syndrome. Once I was able to get that for me, it clicked. You couldn't blame him. We have these experts saying that it was a disease, and I kept thinking they'll understand. Not to mention that after Kevin was arrested and got on bail, Orne gave him some medication, and Janet says it was like flipping a switch. That's exactly what it was. It was like I got him back. I was able to sit and watch a movie with her.

You know, normal. Janet actually says in a lot of ways, those few, months between the arrest and the sentencing hearing, they'd been the best months of a marriage. He now was just so much easier, calmer. You could just talk. The hearing took about three hours. And when it was over, the judge took a recess, went into her chambers. When she came back, she delivered her decision. And we'll hear that decision when we come back after a quick break. This is Amanda Darby calling from Rockville, Maryland. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Yay, I'm Chad Aboumrod. This is Radio Lab. We're revisiting Pat Walter's story about Kevin, and when we left, the judge was just about to render her decision. She actually wouldn't talk to me for this story, but I have the transcript from the hearing. And if you remember, the prosecutor Lee Vartan was asking for five years.

63 months. Orrin Kevin Janet were hoping for... House arrest. Meaning no jail time. There's no way they're going to put him in jail. This is clear cut. And here's what the judge does. She says, I do agree with Orne.

It is a neurological disorder. No question. So he can't be held fully responsible for his behavior. She was getting it. On the other hand, she said the prosecution did have a point. That he was very much in control of his impulses. At least some of the time. And so the question of...

with the judge was how does a legal system assign blame when a person is sometimes themselves and in control and sometimes not? Well, this was a crime, she said, a crime which ultimately leads to children being harmed and considering that you did have moments where you were in control, then in those moments you had a responsibility. You could have done something. You could have asked for help. You could have told the people around you what you were doing, so even if you couldn't have stopped yourself. They could have stopped you. She made it very clear that we have to do something here. His sentence?

26 months at a federal prison and 25 months of house arrest. And I believe that she was fair and I believe she was compassionate. And about a week before Christmas in 2008, Janet drove him to prison. How long was he in jail for? About two years. And she was, even though the judge said, you know, he is responsible, did that change her attitude toward him at all? No. They totally stuck together.

She visited him pretty much every weekend the whole time. I knew the route and I had my own little routine down. In between visits, she'd send up notes. And I'll never forget, he could send me mail. And they had a store where he could get some cards. Super hallmarky. And he would like alter them. And I remember the very first card I got, it was this very, you know, beautiful, supposed

supposedly, it's supposed to be beautiful, but it was like, you know, if you need anything, you know, anything at all, just let me know. And then he writes, of course, if it's pressing, you might want to ask someone else because, oh, well, you can wait 24 months. And I remember getting that and just laughing. And then that became our thing, like, listen, this is a horrible situation, but we're going to make the best of it. Tell me a little bit about, like, where things are at now. I think things are almost normal. Oh, you know, I, I am still on probation. But he's home.

He's working. Life is going on. We have our normal routines. Kevin still takes those medicines that keep the other part of him in check. I have no libido at all. But I know who I am. I know what I am.

I'm disturbed by that portion of my life. But I'm trying to move on. Producer Pat Walters. So, I know nothing about what your reaction to that will be. It was just my hunch. Back to neuroscientist author Robert Sapolsky. That it's sort of, it plays near a lot of your buttons.

Sure does. Yeah. And while we had always felt like at the end of the story, the sentence that Kevin gets from the judge was this kind of interesting and nuanced balance between, you know, the idea that he just had a brain disease and the idea that there's still some sort of personal responsibility involved, Well, right out of the gates, Sapolsky had a different reaction.

I'm appalled by that judicial decision and the underlying worldview. Really? Yeah, completely. And for him, it all centered around that sort of key argument that swayed the judge. That some of the time he can control these urges and some of the time he can't. The example there was that never once it worked, did he do anything like that? And yet he obsessively spent hours each night at home. and the fact that he could control it in other circumstances,

does that mean there is a separate me inside there that's able to get to the control panel some of the time, but not others, and thus that's punishable. Yeah, it's like he's in a kind of pitched battle with some inner urge that he has. Maybe it's a biological urge. But sometimes he wins,

maybe in the morning when he's had some coffee and he's like nicely sugared up. But then at night, we all know this. When we get to night, we're tired, our brains are tired, and we, the id comes out a tiny little bit. Well, let's translate what you just said into sort of nuts and bolts biology. Your frontal cortex, which is making you do the harder things

when it's the right thing to do, is one of the most expensive parts of the brain to operate. And when you're starting to get hungry or you're starting to get tired, your frontal cortex doesn't work as well. And that's simply why we have less regulation of our behavior at night than in the morning. And the perfect neurological example where nobody would invoke free will in this one is you look at somebody with Alzheimer's disease.

If they have early stage Alzheimer's disease, they show a sundowner syndrome, which is in the morning they can tell you what their name is. And by night they can't tell you. And the next morning they can tell you again. Whoa, are we seeing here sort of a choice? Okay, so they know their name. And if they're not telling you at night, they know their name.

They can tell you their name in the morning. And if they're not telling it to you at night, they're choosing not to. No. What happens at night is blood sugar levels drop and the brain is tired and the frontal cortex, which has to do the, like, what was my name again with three and a half remaining neurons,

can't do it as well. nobody looks at that and says there's volition ooh they can do it part of the day they should be expected to be able to do it no but that's because it's a different issue I mean this isn't what are you talking about memory okay so let me let me let me go through a sequence here that I

obviously prepared for the occasion in the in the Kevin segment they made mention of the syndrome that he has which is called the Cluver-Busie syndrome right and this was first shown in the 1940s, you go into monkeys and you take out the same part of the frontal cortex as they did with Kevin, and you get monkeys that eat themselves into obesity now. They can't stop eating. They're hypersexual males trying to mount everyone and everything on earth.

Okay, right off the bat, we see some broad similarities. Aha, you will say, though, but Kevin has a moral system. Kevin has meta-control. Kevin, as we saw could control it in some circumstances, but not in others. We've left the world of blameless monkeys far behind. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Goodbye. Hello, blame. We have not.

You've got a monkey there who's got frontal damage and now is hypersexual. He's attempting to mount infants. He's attempting to mount water bottles in his cage, completely out of control. But nonetheless, he doesn't try to mount the alpha male. Huh. Interesting. Obviously, what we have here, is a monkey who has free will, because in some circumstances,

he could not do this bad, inappropriate thing because he's got free will some of them? No, that's ridiculous. Okay, let's... Sobel's explain to us that it's not that he could control his behavior some of the time. It's that in this instance, he was under the influence of something else that he couldn't control. Fear, fear of the alpha male activation of fear circuits

override the feeble attempts of those four and a half remaining frontal. neurons, regulation in one circumstance, but not in others, not because there's free will or rotten choices or bad values. This biologically broken system manifests its brokenness under some circumstances, but not others. And there's a logical biological explanation for why you get those exceptions. Okay, but you're talking about monkeys in one situation. Okay. We're not yet talking about people. So let's take it closer to home now. Okay. So you sit down somebody, with damage to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, and you put the frontally damaged patient now in a circumstance

where they're in a situation where there's a smarter, more disciplined, better payoff thing to do. And they can do it just fine. But then you get them emotionally aroused over something, or you get them tired. They're horrible, terrible compared to regular folks. In other words, we've just progressed from,

okay, the monkey, if it's scared of the alpha male, okay, fear can override the neurons that it has remaining in there and they're swamped. Now we've seen in a human, more in general, strong emotions can override. But so far what you've told me, though, is sometimes I have the resources to choose and sometimes I don't, but it's about the resources. But the choice doesn't not exist. No, there's no choose in there. next step

closer in so for my money you really didn't prepare for this how many rounds are we going to do here I even have a clipboard here I've got a clipboard sitting in front of me that's how much I prepared for this okay

okay here's an example you take a judge and like this classic important study and you look at the single biggest predictor of whether or not this parole board judge and this was of a whole panel of judges, whether they will vote for somebody being paroled or not,

the single best predictor was how many hours it had been since the judge has eaten. What? You mean that a hungry judge will not give parole to someone, but a full and happy-tummed in the judge will make the judge more gentle? You look at this study, and right after a meal,

convicts had about a 90% chance of being paroled, and right before a meal, they were down to about a 10% chance and it was a virtually straight line going down. That's messed up. And you know the single biggest predictor of this. We actually looked to study up and it turns out if the judge was making the decision right after lunch

when they were full, the parolees had about a 60% chance of getting parole. So, okay, not as bad as he said. But if the judges were making the decision right before the next meal, like when they were hungry, the parolees had close to a zero percent chance of getting parole. What's interesting about that? Number one, the biology makes perfect sense. What are you doing there when you are a judge trying to judge somebody from a completely different

world from you to reach a point of deciding there's mitigating fact? You're trying to take their perspective. You're trying to think about the indirect ways that you're using your frontal cortex. And when you're hungry and your frontal cortex isn't working as well, it's easier to make a snap emotional judgment. This person's rotten. The second amazing thing, which exactly addresses this issue, is you get that judge two seconds after they made that decision. You sit them down at that point and say, hey, so why did you make that decision? And they're going to quote, I don't know, Emmanuel Kant or Alan Dershowitz at you. They're going to post hoc come up with an explanation that has all the pseudo-trappings of free will and volition. And in reality,

it's just rationalization. It's totally biological. No, no, that's why you lose me. You lose me on the word totally. Okay, so it's muchly biological, mostly biological. I might meet you halfway there, but totally, no. Why does it have to be entirely? Why do we have to go all the way?

Because if you're not going to go all the way, here's the things that you're asserting. I'm just going to jump in here because this part of the conversation got a little dance. and a little long, but Sopolsky's basic point was that you just have to look at the sort of arc of scientific discoveries. 500 years ago, we would have said the epileptic seizure was

like bad demonic possession. Nah, nah, nah, we learned that's biological. Up to the mid-1950s, if your, like, adolescent child suddenly started having hallucinations and hearing voices and being thought-disordered, and you would say, you, the mother of this child,

would say, this disease come from, and the best of science at the time had an answer. They would say, you, it's your fault. It was called schizophrenogenic mothering, a mothering style that generated schizophrenia. You caused your child's schizophrenia. And then in the mid-50s, the first antipsychotic drugs were developed, and it emptied out the psychiatric wards all over the country, and everybody in the field said, oh, my God, it's a biochemical disorder. And he says, same thing happened with dyslexia. We used to think it was just kids who were lazy. Oh, that's biological also.

And his contention is that this is just going to keep happening. Like, as science progresses one by one, all of the things that we think are under our control, that we should control, and that if we don't, we can be blamed for, one by one, all of those things are going to get chalked up to screw-ups in our biology. Screw-ups that we couldn't have controlled even if we'd wanted to. So what you're going to have to do at that point is either say, starting tonight at midnight, there will never be a new scientific force. finding pertinent to this area. We've learned everything there is. Or you're going to say free will is just the biology that we haven't learned yet. Do you, in your heart, deep in the deep in the center of your, like in that, do you really believe this? Do you really think? Not for a second. Not for a second. And that's the whole

thing. This is like my like huge conundrum. I have like zero belief in free will at this point. yet at the same time, I cannot for a second imagine what the world is supposed to look like with people believing there is no free will. I don't know how to imagine it. And I'm constantly this hypocrite. I'm this terrible hypocrite because I'll put on like my blue t-shirt instead of my gray t-shirt one morning and later in the day someone will say, oh, whoa, nice t-shirt. And I'll say, thanks. Oh my God, the hypocrisy of it. Here I am taking credit for it. In that circumstance, I'm not able to stop and say, well, actually, I have photoreceptors that, you know, because of this gene variant and that gene variant and my rhodopsin genes, so that I'm particularly good at noticing

color sort of combinations, and thus I can get the matching. And, oh, I pick the fresh fruit here because my olfactory receptors allow me to, like, be able to smell the pineapples that are fresh, and the luck of my socioeconomic status has me in, like, some, like, organic market and gives me that, like, ability to do that while listening to, like, fake Peruvian musac playing in the background. And no, you say, when they say, oh, wow, you really know how to pick good pineapples, and I say, thanks. Or when it happens to me, oh, this is, like, totally hypocritical. Well, doesn't this throw a little bit of shade?

on the intellectual side. I mean, if you believe that every behavior, not just of Kevin's, because what you're really saying is that the deep lesson of the Kevin story is that everyone is a Kevin. All of us are Kevins all the time. And that anything we... For our worst and our best behaviors.

Yeah. Yes. That everything we choose to do is in some sense chosen for us. That if you knew enough stuff about anyone, you know what they're about to do next. Yeah. No.

No. But I readily admit. I'm going to just plant my flag and say no. I do not get on board with this. At least we've done it in a few realms. So we are able to do it. When you look, I don't want you to be a futurist here, but when you look 500 years ahead,

let's say that the things keep progressing in the way that you imagine where we just keep etching, like sort of chipping away this idea of volition and will, free will. What do we do in that point? Do we not hold anyone accountable for anything, but we simply prescribe treatments? I mean, what does that world look like to you? Treatments and or constraints.

You fix the things you fix, and the ones that can't be fixed, you constrain things so the damage can't be done, but it's done in a, in a way a car with broken brakes is incredibly dangerous and it can't be on the streets and if you can't fix the brakes you put the car in a garage and you know you've intervened but you don't invoke a concept of punishment of the car in there and if at that point you say oh my god that's so dehumanizing to be that mechanistic that's a hell of a lot better than sermonizing

people into having free will over stuff that they have no control over. And we've done it. People with treatment resistant epilepsy, they're not allowed to drive. But you don't sit there and say they deserve not to be able to drive. You don't get like mobs of goiterous Yahoo peasants cheering as the driver's licenses are burned. No, it's not their fault that they have this thing called a seizure. Nonetheless, if it's uncontrollable, They shouldn't be driving cars. And we have a therapeutic intervention here that's completely outside the realm of blame, justice, deserved, anything like that. Let's go back to Kevin.

At the end of the story, Pat asks Kevin what sense he makes of his punishment. I assume, A, that you wouldn't have punished him. Is that right? Correct. Okay. But you notice what Kevin says. Kevin says, well, I thought the judge was a good judge and was... Fair.

Fair. He called her fair. So isn't it troubling to you that this person somehow was able to somehow feel blameworthy, I guess? But what this justice system is doing is it's sort of saying, you were bad. Maybe I was. I feel sorry. I've got remorse. That's okay.

And now we give you your freedom back. Like there's been a, there's been a conversation here about your morality, your inner morality, but you do not apparently want to have. I'm wondering whether that's a healthy thing. Healthy, mental, healthy, healthy, or societally healthy? Well, you feel bad by saying thank you to your shirt choice.

So there is some human need here. I don't know whether you might call it biological or not, but there is something that the justice system is addressing that you seem to be taking out of the system. Yeah. Punishment is pleasurable. It feels good to do the righteous thing. And it feels good to do that in a punishing, blaming way

if you're brought up culturally, as most of us are to have this notion of, like, agency. But I think I think what, right? Robert, this Robert, Crowich Robert, might be, I think, Robert, let me know if you, correct me if I'm wrong, is that it doesn't just feel good personally. It's good for society on some level. Like, do we want to live in a society where a concept of justice has been tossed out and we're in a mechanistic place? Well, how about taking it further? Don't we need to have belief in a moralizing and punishing God? Because why else would people be nice to each other? I don't need to take it all the way there. I'm going to go there. But we have laws.

Laws are sort of in their way Godlike and that they rule over us. So why not just say laws instead of God? You're right. They work better. As soon as you introduce the possibility of punishment into economic games, you evolve cooperation. You do cross-cultural studies, and the more there's a belief in a punishing hell in a culture, the more generous people are in economic games. Yes, that stuff works.

Yet, over and over, we've learned at least one domain where we've stepped outside of all of that, the epilepsy example, where nobody thinks of it in terms of it being like justice is being meted out when the driver's license is being taken away. Yet 500 years ago, somebody who would have been just as smart and just as introspective and just as reflective and maybe even had like a nice bleeding heart liberal NPR tote bag would have said it's real. sad about this, but you told them to... Have you forgotten what? No gram you're on? Never mind. Oh, my God. I thought we were on Fox. Okay. And that person nonetheless would have said this is tragic, and I feel so sorry for their family and all of that. But who told them to go sleep with Satan?

Well, wait, let me try it this way. Is there anything in the Kevin Pat Walter's story? Is there anyone in there who is being harmed or hurt by what you heard now? Well, he's paying a price. His wife paid a price. Shame, imprisonment, you know, a terrible price here for what was simply a biological problem. But it's still very hard to imagine a world in which you don't get pissed off at people who do like crummy things and where you don't feel vaguely pleased when somebody says, whoa, nice teacher. shirt. So what you just said is that the feelings that you have about the story, the loss to her of her husband's time, the shame of being put away for a while, you think that later on when the deeply biological explanation for this gets fully revealed in a hundred years say, people will be able to listen to the story we've just heard and think, if they only knew.

Absolutely. Big thanks to Robert Spolsky for chatting with us. His latest book is called Behave, the biology of humans at our best and worst, which has an extended argument about how there is no such thing as free will, definitely worth reading. It's called Behave. Thanks also to Pat Walters for reporting that story

and for Kevin, for allowing us to air it, again. And thanks to you guys for listening. I'm Chad Abumrad for Robert Krollwich and I. We will see you next time. Hi, this is Will Zogbaum. I'm calling from Sunny, Seattle, Washington. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrod. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design, Soren Wheeler, a senior editor. Our staff includes Simon Adler, David Gebel, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwan, Lateef Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariane Wack, and Molly Webster.

with help from Soham Pawar, Rebecca Chaisan, Niger Fatali, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.