Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 134 | Robert Sapolsky on Why We Behave the Way We Do

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There's no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It's a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest's Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Stanford web page Wikipedia Robert Sapolsky Rocks (fan page) Amazon author page YouTube lectures on Human Behavioral Biology IMDb

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For plans starting at just $4.99 a month, go to homeserve.com. That's homeserv.com. Not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And let's say that you're faced with a difficult decision to make. Let's say you're wondering whether you should, you know, watch a basketball game on TV or listen to an old episode of the Mindscape podcast. And you think about it, you weigh the different factors, you come to a decision. And then someone asks you, why did you make the decision that you made? And you would offer some explanation, some reason. You know, I want this, I value that, and I made the decision based on these calculations. So today's guest, Robert Sapolsky, is here to tell you that you're wrong. No matter what you gave as explanations, almost no matter what.

I mean, maybe you're exactly right, but more likely you have simplified things and rationalized quite a bit. Robert Zupolsky is a neuroscientist, a neuroendocrinologist, I believe is the technical term, also studies other aspects of biology, psychology, anthropology, primatology. And is a very well-known researcher in the field of, human and broader primate behavior, the author of a book just a couple years ago called Behave, the biology of humans at our best and worst. And the thing that he tackles in this book, it's one of those books, every single reviewer refers to it as magisterial, which is a way of saying that it's both long and good. And the topic that he tackles is, why do we behave in the

ways that we do? And in particular, why do we make the decisions that lead us to behave in the ways we do. And his thesis, more or less, is that there's no one answer to that question. There's no single thing that explains why we do. It's a complicated set of factors from things that are operating on time scales of less than a second to things that are operating on timescales of thousands or millions of years. And what we do is we rationalize. We invent reasons that may have some relationship to the actual reasons that exist, but they're not exactly the same reasons. So what we're going to do in today's podcast is talk about all of that. It will touch on common mindscape themes like free will and plasticity of the brain and what you can do with it and also

the ability of humans to think about the future in different ways. And also we keep coming back to the question of what good this knowledge is. You know, if you really understand what's going on in all the different parts of your brain and your genome and your experience that go into making a decision, does that help you make better decisions in some definition of the word better? And at the end, we decide that you should buy Robert Spolski's books. Although, to be fair, that was my idea, not his, to say that, I am of the opinion that knowing more about what's really going on in our brains and our behavior helps us understand what we should do as well as what we do do. Maybe it'll help you. Let's see. And let's go.

Robert Sopolsky, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Oh, thanks for having me on. So you've written this wonderful book called Behave, studying how, why we behave, why we do, the things we do. And I think maybe for fun, it would be good to start, rather than with the true reasons for why we behave the way we do, surely everyone has a straw man idea in their head, right? People must think they know why we behave the way we do. So what is the wrong idea that you're sort of.

trying to fix that we all have in our minds? Well, basically that there's any discipline, which is it, which is it, which is the Holy Grail, which is the code of codes that explains everything. And this comes in different flavors, depending on what kind of scientist you are or what kind of consumer of science either. Everything in the world is explained by genes, or everything in the world is explained by brain chemistry or by hormones or by and you know in all these cases you get a very narrow interdisciplinary view as to what the behavior is about and where does it come from and the song

and dance that i just spent endless number of pages on in the book is you got to incorporate all the different influences that occur before a behavior starting what's going on your brain one second before, up to what sort of evolutionary forces have been playing out in the last million years, because they're all pertinent to why we do what we do. Well, it raises an interesting philosophical question. I don't know how familiar you are with the philosophy literature that is now bled over into sort of computer science and social sciences about causality and Bayesian networks and all this stuff, but what do you mean by what causes something like this?

Or what is the reason why? Do you personally have to worry about that question? On some level, although rather than like Bayesian stuff absolutely terrifies me in sort of everything that comes with it. And fortunately, I can figure out how to bypass it as to what actually counts as causal. Because what I think the most important thing to come out of studying the biology of our behavior is not highfalutin debates about. the nature of causality, it's getting people to stop thinking that people are the causes in a conscious will-filled, agent-filled way that people are responsible for their behavior. Right. Well, this is something, this is another philosophical issue that I'm sure we will get

into down the road here, but the free will issue, right? And something we've talked about on the podcast quite a bit. And I think hopefully none of us in the room, or at least presumably none of us in the room here are believers in libertarian free will and the idea that there's some spirit inside us that is not beholden to the laws of nature whatsoever. But many of us, many of my best friends, including myself, are compatibleists about free will. We think that it's a useful way to think about human agents, right, making decisions. So, but you sound like, I think I get the idea from your book, that you're more on the other side, that you're, you want to dismantled the idea that we should think of people as agents responsible for their actions?

Yep. I think I thus count as a hard incompatible as the label goes. You know, there's kind of a sense that it seems self-evidence from my perspective. If you spend enough decades, studying enough different ways in which our brain and behavior are influenced by stuff we had no control over, that put all those pieces together, and free will is just what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. So you think that as we understand more and more about the biology, the idea of some room left for human free will will will just go away? Yeah, basically, because if you look at, I don't know, the last 500 years of knowledge, that's been a theme over and over. And in some ways, the last half millennium, what biology and behavior is mostly consisted of is people saying, oh, I had no idea that had something to do with why that behavior happens. And what has occurred in the process is if there is free will, it's getting crammed into smaller and smaller places.

and, you know, if I'm trying to be a good house guest and not a jerk or whatever, I can usually leave it there and say, you know, you want to have some free will, go for it. If you want to cite free will as to why you floss your upper teeth this morning before your lower teeth, don't be happy, go for it. But in substantive ways, all that science has spent centuries doing is teaching us, oh, that's actually a biological phenomenon. That's actually stuff out of our control. That's actually stuff that was sculpted by issues that were sheer histories of luck or bad luck. All we are is the sum, nothing more or less, of what our biology and its interactions with environment have been.

Right, which is the perfect segue. Clearly, you've done this before into talking about what the reasons are that our biology has become that way. And in the book, you have this device of sort of going backward in time, right, of looking at things that work on very short time scales to affect our behavior and then going further and further into the past to look at other things that affect our behavior. And I'll confess, I was not able to do any better than that. So I figure we can just sort of rehearse that kind of explanation and that should give us an opportunity to cover lots of interesting ground. So what is going on in the brain immediately? Like, how should we think about our very quick reactions, our subconscious, our system one kind of behavior? Great. Well, one of the things we've learned, and we could be talking about a lot of different domains of behavior here, but the two that interest me are the ones that would be labeled our best behaviors and our worst ones.

Because that's like this hugely challenging thing about us as a species. We are simultaneously the most miserably violent species on Earth. while we are also the most cooperative and the most altruistic and the, and how do you balance those two and how do you make sense in them? And especially how do you make sense of the fact that the same exact behavior can count as wonderfully prosocial in one setting and like wildly antisocial in another. Now, as we begin to look at that, like somebody does one of these behaviors. And often when we say, why did that happen? Why did that person do that just now? The first passes, we're asking a neurobiological question. What went on in that person's brain a

second ago, a minute ago, that caused those muscles to get a command to pull that trigger or put your hand empathically on somebody else's or whatever the behavior was. And what we now know is there's all sorts of outposts in the brain, you know, the usual suspects, frontal cortex, amygdala, anterior, singular, ventral tegmentum, insular cortex. If these are not familiar, don't panic, they're not relevant. But mainly, there's areas in the brain that are really central to us deciding what counts as the right thing to do. And system one versus system two, what we see over and over is the elements that go into us making those decisions, the percentage of which, the percentage of those that we are conscious of and we believe that we were deliberating

between choices that we had the option to choose is tiny. Right. Instead, we are being run by subterranean neurobiological forces in our brain. And, you know, the classic way of demonstrating that is you ask somebody to, you know, write down what their favorite detergent is, and people are more likely to say Tide if they've just read a paragraph about the ocean. And when you ask them why, they don't say because I just read a paragraph about the ocean, they're going to confabulate some supposedly rational reason why post hoc implicit unconscious stuff brought them to the point. And when we look at us in our

sort of most impactful moments, people spent an awful long time thinking about like moral decision making. Do we think our way to our decisions or do we feel our way? And for a long time, thinking our way was the dominant model because that seemed oh, so much more brainy than like being some lizard going about its actions. What has become clear is an awful lot of the time we are feeling our way to our moral decisions, and we're coming up with justifications afterward for why that makes perfect sense what we just did. And is there some clean distinction between those decisions that are more cognitive? I mean, when we buy a house, I'm sure there's some emotional things that come into it

and some rational things that come into it. How well do we understand that? Well, depends on what level you're looking at. if you're sticking somebody in a brain scanner, you could see that if they give them a decision to make about something totally like soulless and bloodless and cold or whatever, do you want to open up this can of vegetables or that can of vegetables? You're just activating some not very exciting cortical regions. When you were now making a decision of like, do you give this person the death penalty or not for this unspeakable thing that they did, you're now actually

activating the cortex, but you're also activating emotional parts of the brain, the limbic system. But the thing that is most important about that is you can tell the decision someone is going to make by looking at the readout from their limbic emotional brain before you get a readout from the cortex. It's a better predictor. That's more likely when you're trying to figure out if somebody is guilty or not, and this has been done with brain imaging studies with mock jurors, you're using your cortex to decide on innocence or guilt. When you're deciding how much to punish them, it's all the limbic system. And so it's both that there's a lot of unconscious stuff going on below the surface, but also that we sort of shamelessly rationalize it into a more cognitive explanation after the fact.

Exactly. And one of the best ways of spotting when that's happening is when we're not yet able to do that job of rationalizing. When you've got somebody sitting there and they say, you know, I can't quite put my finger on it. I can't tell you why exactly. But when those people do that thing that's different from what we do, it's wrong, wrong, wrong. And in fact, it's morally wrong. I can't tell you why, but it's wrong. Trust me. Like, that is your. like red lights go off saying, this is somebody who was running implicitly on non-conscious decision-making about really consequential stuff. And they haven't gotten there yet in their cognitive rationalizations to say, aha, I just thought of it. This is why when they do that, it's totally wrong, because it's going to teach our kids bad values, because it's the same thing they did to our ancestors in the battle, whatever, in 1428, because Ah, that's the justification I've just come up with for the fact that I'm making those decisions predominantly emotionally and implicitly. And there's a couple of questions that immediately arise.

One is, do we have some sort of evolutionary explanation for where all these different systems come from? Do they serve good purposes? Yeah, and this is where you could easily get into a debate between the Mr. Spock types and the New Age, you know, hot tub just sort of folk contemplating their navels as to like wouldn't it be a so much better world if all we did was make decisions

based on rationality would say the Mr. Spock types and wouldn't it be a so much better world if we made our decisions based on feelings and feelings for our fellow humans say the hot tub folks and what you see is like big unradical surprise

you need both and when you get people who have damage to parts of the brain that are much more about one component or the other, you get totally different abnormalities, but you sure get abnormal behavior in both cases. Everyone wants to keep their home and family safe, whether it's from a break-in, a fire, flood, or a medical emergency. Simply Safe home security delivers award-winning 24-7 protection. With SimplySafe, you don't just get an arsenal of cameras and sensors. You get the best professional monitors in the business. They've got your back day and night ready to send police,

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Visit Simplysafe.com slash Mindscape for your free security camera today. that's SimplySafe, S-I-L-I-S-A-F-E dot com slash Minescape. You know, I did have Paul Bloom on the podcast. He wrote this wonderful book called Against Empathy, but I took the other side, and I take it that his idea was that if you put too much emphasis on empathy, you're sort of intentionally, or at least consciously, giving rein to those more emotional systems underground

rather than the cognitive, rational part of your brain, and therefore we should sort of give more emphasis to the rational part of our deliberation rather than our empathy. Where do you come down on that? Well, I think his stuff is wonderful, and like that book is great. I would not so much say that he is voting for rationality

in moral decision-making, as much as he's being a cautionary voice, saying, let's not get too carried away with all the bandwagon excitement about empathy, where that's just like the buzzword on everyone's lips, because as he very rightly points out, there's a temptation to decide that empathy is a virtue in and of itself. All you have to do is feel badly for the person,

and that's the danger of thinking empathy is so wonderful and the key to a much more peaceful plan and all of that. And the key issue is not whether you are empathically feeling, healing somebody else's pain and the nuances of that, but whether that empathy actually gets translated into doing something into a compassionate act. And the thing that he's good at pointing out is in a lot of circumstances, not only just empathy not lead you to actually acting upon it, doing the right thing when that's scary or grave or whatever, but that certain types of empathy make it even less likely that you're going to do something about.

it because you're so consumed with the pain of you feeling that other person's pain. Well, in one point he seems to make very effectively is that if we're not very good at empathy, we are empathic for people like ourselves, right? Like in the same position, in the same race, et cetera. And you sort of make similar points in your book, and you do use the phrase or the label the anterior singulate as part of the brain that is responsible for these decisions. Yeah, and here's one of these like all-time depressing findings.

Interior-singulate, obscure, but totally cool part of the brain, it's got something to do with empathy and pain. Pokes your finger gets poked with a needle while you're in a brain scanner. Your anterior cingulate activates. Ouch. Now, instead, watch the finger of your loved one gets poked with a needle. Anterior cingulate activates. You are literally, as far as those neurons are concerned, feeling that person's pain as purely as if it's your own. But where the depressing stuff comes in

is show people film clips of, say, somebody's hand being poked with a needle. And if that hand has a different skin color from your own, on the average, there's less activation of the anterior singular. In other words, you know, not everyone's pain is equal. And we bring all sorts of biases that are the outcome of everything that have brought us to that moment, many of which we have no conscious awareness of, and most of which we have no conscious control over. Right. I mean, my counterargument, and I'm curious to see what you think about this,

was simply that very often when we think we're being rational, we're just being empathic in a bad way. We're sort of not recognizing the pain or the experience of people who are very unlike ourselves. So rather than saying, don't listen to your empathy, or the slogan should be get more rational empathy in some sense. Is that even a reasonable aspiration?

Absolutely. Or the way, I mean, that's addressing one of the problems with who empathy is all you need is empathy, which is that you are bringing your own filters as to whose pain counts for more and people who are familiar, people who are local, people whose pains

are like ones that you've experienced. So that's where rational empathy helps. The other component where empathy is not enough is one that calls for what I would think of as detached empathy. One of the problems with empathy of feeling somebody else's pain is that pain is painful, whether it's like your pain or their pain that you're now feeling. And if the empathic pain is severe enough, the logical thing is to say, I can't take this anymore and I'm getting out of here. I'm going to turn the page. I'm going to decide it's really my problem. I'm going to decide somebody else is going to take care of it. The more viscerally

painful feeling somebody else's pain is, the more likely you are to wallow in how painful it all seems, rather than being able to go and act, let alone act in a reasoned rational way. And there's like a fabulous experimental readout of this. If you're sitting and you're watching somebody else going through something painful and your response is to increase your blood pressure like crazy, you're the sort of person who's sitting there saying, oh my God, what were this happening to me? This would be so awful. I can't take this anymore. I just have to look away. On the other hand, if you could empathically note somebody else's pain and your blood pressure doesn't go up a lot, that's a predictor of the ones who can actually act upon the other

person's pain rather than responding to how painful their own empathic pain is. And what that takes us to is, you know, on one hand, a version of like getting doctors sort of thick enough of scar tissue to not feeling the pain they're afflicting on their patients in order to do good. Another version of that is sort of a Buddhist detachment about what empathy is. Empathy is not because I am feeling your pain and it is so painful. Empathy is, you know, it's not a good thing. this is happening to you and I can do something to alleviate it. So it's self-evident that I should. And that's a version, which sounds much less exciting than heartwarming kumbaya sort of empathy. But if what empathy is mostly doing is making you like lick your own empathic wounds, it's not very useful.

Which brings me to the other thing that I thought that this discussion brings up, which is what is sort of the actionable intelligence here? How can we use this view of how we rationalize our decision making, both to make better decisions, but also to talk other people into changing their minds? Should we try less hard to aim at facts and reason and logic and go right for the gut? Or is it more subtle than that? Unfortunately, I don't think it's any more subtle than that. I think in lots of ways, if the last four years could be some done. as the main take-home lesson for rational, careful thinkers with a respect for facts, blah, blah.

One of the things that we've been taught over these last four years is you can't reason somebody out of a stance that they weren't reasoned into in the first place. If they got to where they are out of fear, out of anxiety, out of resentment, out of envy, out of a sense of being peripheralized, those things. Like, you can't talk to them about how what they're advocating actually is going to make things worse for them. You can't reason people out of stuff that is just based on the most visceral of emotions, because those emotions are usually coming from people who've gotten some crappy deal along the way. And presumably those people include ourselves, right?

Is there something that we can take away for our own decision making? Like presumably many of my decisions, which I perceive as perfectly rational, are secretly driven by my interior singular, or some equivalent organ in my body. Yeah, and that's where you get to, like, philosophers, God help me for quoting, but people like John Rawls, who basically said, if you're going to decide if, you know, a moral act is okay or not, you're not allowed to know who the actor is and who the recipient is.

And if it's you in it. Because the second, there's a me in it or someone who reminds me of me, conscious or otherwise, all of us have the same problems. All of us are suffering from making decisions in life that we think of this highly cognitive that instead reflect the tumult of viscera that have gotten us to this. And it's not just this or that organ in our brain, right? I mean, you talk in the book about the importance of hormones, of testosterone, oxytocin, et cetera, like where our brains are floating in this bath of chemicals

that have a huge effect on how we behave. And again, where we have no idea it's happening. Right. Here's, okay, here's one of my favorite sort of testosterone studies. where what you see is, you know, what does testosterone do? What makes you aggressive? No, it doesn't make you aggressive. What testosterone does is make you more sensitive to cues that would trigger aggression and you cues that you have socially learned.

So testosterone makes you more rotten to people who you've already learned socially. You can be rotten to and get away with. It doesn't make you take on, you know, Bill Gates or something. So it's more subtle than that, but it does perceptual stuff. So there's this longstanding dogma that testosterone will make people's analytical math, geometric skills better. And you give guys testosterone without them knowing it, and it doesn't make it better. However, they decide they think that they are performing better than they actually are. testosterone makes you less accurate at assessing risk and less accurate at accepting feedback about your own performances and it makes you cocky and bullheaded.

That's a very subtle effect because you're not going to sit there and say, you know, I'm feeling real confident right now and almost certainly that's because that's been doing something to potassium channels in my amygdala. No, you decide why absolutely your army is going to be at their capital within two days. So let's go for it. Let's invade by all means. And you can see why constant exposure to these kinds of ideas would erode someone's belief in free will. Yeah. And in some ways where I think it has to do it the most. And all of this is said, not only am I a free will.

will skeptic, I don't believe there is a shred of agency that goes into any of our behavior. So that puts me like out of the lunatic fringe of the range of philosophers and neuroscientists thinking about this. But in terms of this stuff, where this issue of there's more stuff going on than we think subterranean biological forces, ooh, I had no idea that had anything to do with it. It's out of your control. the realm where it is most important is when it comes to behaviors that we judged harshly, that we punish people for, that we condemn people for.

And the lesson that I like pound into the heads of my students over and over is 500 years ago in virtually every European country, if you had an epileptic seizure, the best doctors around had a diagnosis for you as to what caused the seizure. and the seizure was caused because you were consorting with Satan. And they had an absolutely clear neurological intervention, which was to burn you at the stake. And somewhere along the way people learned, oh, no, it's actually a disease.

And somewhere along the way, they stopped putting people with epilepsy in psychiatric hospitals. And somewhere along the way, people started developing laws that distinguished between who a person is and what a seizure might do to them in terms of the ability to drive only once the meds have kept you seizure free for a certain likelihood of time.

You sit somebody down today and say, wow, can you imagine somebody having a seizure and you're saying, yeah, that's because you're sleeping with Bielzebub. They'll say, oh, my God, that's ridiculous. Wow, people used to believe that. People are going to look back on how we think of people with bad self-control,

people with an inability to feel somebody else has problems, people who are remorseless, people who are cold-blooded this or that, and it's going to be as misplaced of attribution that we have now when saying these are attributes that are deserving of punishment as people saying that epileptics were consorting with Satan. And the levels of various hormones in your body,

if they do affect your behavior, which they certainly do, would be an example of something somewhat beyond your control, which has a big effect on what you do in the world. Absolutely. So, you know, what's happening in your hormone levels and the, you know, hours to days before, you have to make that decision of whether or not to pull a trigger, whether or not to make the sympathetic gesture or whatever, hormones are absolutely playing a role in it, not only in affecting your behavior, but in your ability to assess the outcome. coming with behavior, assess the feedback from it.

That's absolutely a case. Another thing as long as we're like still in the domain of, you know, the previous couple of hours to days before behavior is all sorts of sensory stuff, both the external sensory world and the internal one. If you are in pain, if you are tired, if you are hungry, related to that if you have low blood glucose levels, you're going to cheat more in an economic game. You're going to be less charitable. You're going to be less trustworthy.

You're going to be less generous. You are going to be more likely to punish somebody for their norm violations if you were in pain at the time. Or if you're sitting and you're playing some online economic game and for a tenth of a second, there's flashing up on the screen a pair of eyes staring at you where that's so fast you're barely even conscious if you saw something. you're less likely to cheat because you're being monitored. If somebody sits in a room and there's a bad smell in the room, a smell of garbage permeating in there, people on the average become more socially conservative in the decisions that they make because they're unconsciously being primed to feel a little bit disgusted.

Why am I feeling disgusted, says your implicit unconscious brain? I know it's because when those people do that behavior, it's wrong, wrong, wrong, and disgusting. There, I've just made a moral decision. And no one is going to sit there and say, oh, it's because the room smells badly and there's neurons and a part of my brain that processes gustatory disgust. That happens to also do moral disgust in humans and it can't tell the difference. So pay no attention to my assessment just now. Instead, we come up with a reason why, you know, I used to think it was okay when people do that, but it's just striking me. It's wrong. They do that. Look at how many hours it has been since a judge has eaten the meal and in one extremely well done influential study, that's the single biggest predictor is whether somebody, a judge is going to send somebody back to jail or grant them parole. Are you hungry or not?

I wonder if we could study my podcast episodes versus when I've had lunch and see whether I have different attitudes towards the guests. But I wonder, maybe you know, I once heard, and I'm not sure whether this is an urban legend or not, but I once heard that training as an economist makes you more rationally self-interested and less altruistic because you're taught that that's how people behave. Do you know if that's a true thing or just a legend? No, that's absolutely the case. It's one of the professions, or if you really want to do it elegantly, there's always the issue of, well, maybe the person became an economist because they were already a self-interested, rational, maximizing machine. You have somebody who's an economist, and either you prime them to talk about their family life, or you prime them to talk about accounting. And when you make them identify more with being an accountant, that's when they show more cutthroats. you know, game theory play. And the same way, you get somebody to play a version of the prisoner's dilemma, and if you describe it as the cooperation game,

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that it's all about aggression. And that's something you do over and over again. There's something you were taught is true, and it's not quite as simple as that. Does that whole sort of fact that those undoings are so common in this field make us worry a little bit about the implications we do draw from experimental data? I mean, the brain and behavior are very complicated things. How do we know when we've gotten it right?

Yeah, especially since, you know, I don't know, some version of Moore's law every decade, the amount of our knowledge about the brain. just judging by and the number of papers published that are actually not true that nobody knows yet. Yeah, I mean, it's why, you know, all of us with our show science detective badges and stuff say we don't find out facts. We have temporary assessments of how credible we think our, you know, current hypothesis is. And we better be willing to give it up without a fight if it's contradicted. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so we have processes in our brain that work on timescales of, what should I say, seconds? Is it as short as milliseconds? How many tens of milliseconds? Yeah. You look at, here's another set of those incredibly depressing studies. You stick somebody in a brain scanner, and you're looking at the amygdala, one of the, like, villainous parts of the brain. It's about fear. It's about anxiety.

It's about aggression. That's interesting. You can't understand the neurobiology of injuring other people outside the context of the neurobiology of being terrified out of your wits. But what you see is, you know, the amygdala is part of assessing is this friendly face? Is this a threatening face? Is this a threatening face? And it does it really quickly. But a study of finding that has been replicated a bunch of times now, which is so damn.

depressing is you stick somebody in a brain scanner and you're flashing up pictures of faces and they're each up for half second or something. And in your average person, you flash up the face of somebody of a different race and the amygdala response in 60 to 80,000ths of a second before you're even consciously aware of what you're looking at. Oh my God, that's the most damn depressing thing on earth. And furthermore, more studies show the most. more your amygdala reacts to the face of an other simply because their skin color is different, the more likely you are to mistake their cell phone for a handgun in all sorts of simulation games and shoot them, whereas you're less likely to do that of somebody of the same skin color as your own. Oh, God, that is so depressing. That is playing out in a fraction of a second. Yeah, is this hopeless?

No, because the statement that I said, for on the average most people do this. There's exceptions, like 30% of people don't do this. And all sorts of stuff that predicts that you're somebody where skin color is not going to be a tenth of a second us, them category by which you divide the world. And do you know if you can train yourself to change that in any way? Yeah.

And this is like a whole world of what to do with our implicit biases. When you look at the people who don't have those inygdalaid responses, who are they? People who grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood. Okay, skin color is not a irrelevant us-of-them-divider. My guess is they have their biases working in some other domain. People who had a close intimate relationship with somebody of another race along the way. That breaks down. All of those are okay, so here's your solution for your implicit biases.

is go back to your childhood, again, and be brought up in a different neighborhood. That's not very useful. Two things that are, though, and can work fairly rapidly, is one thing that comes out of this whole world of implicit bias tests, the implicit association test,

Harvard's psych department really arose from, you could go online there and find out just how scarily, implicitly biased you are about all sorts of stuff testing things that you cannot gain the system. But one of the useful things is when you make people consciously aware of the implicit biases that

they are showing. Does this make the implicit biases go away? No. It makes you put more conscious effort into slapping your hand over your mouth before you say something disastrous with the equivalent of. The other thing that is very reliably good at this, and this is work that was pioneered by Susan Fiske at Princeton is you get somebody in the brain scanner

and this is the circumstance where there's a picture of a face of an other and the amygdala activates and oh damn this is hopeless if you have primed the person beforehand to think of that face as being of an individual is this somebody who likes broccoli or not

is this somebody who likes Coke or Pepsi Like there's been a whole lot of like ethnically bloody wars fought over Coke versus Pepsi, like totally benign things, but force you to begin to unconsciously process that face as an individual and you blunt the amygdaloid response. And that's exactly what it is because bias is a heuristic shortcut for us to decide we know all about somebody because we think we know all about the class of somebody's that we have attached them to in our heads. I mean, maybe that's an important thing to emphasize both or two important things. One, that these biases we have, these heuristics, do serve a purpose.

They're not completely brain dead, right? They're actually functional in some way. But number two, they're not determinate either. Like, there is some room for System 2 and our cognitive capabilities to overcome that first initial unconscious response. great and here's here's an example of like system two in action so you take people um and you're doing the same routine in a brain scanner you're flashing up pictures of faces and you flash up an other race face and the amygdala activates and no god that really sucks and the person on some visceral level is feeling the aversiveness of that response and what you see is

is in a substantial subset of people, I don't know, maybe 50% or so, what you see is a second or two later, there's activation of a part of what is called the frontal cortex, which is about conscious regulation of behavior and of thoughts and of emotions. And every time you feel like telling somebody that the dinner they prepared at the dinner party is the most repulsive thing you've ever eaten, but you don't say it is because your frontal cortex is working properly. So what you see is two seconds later in about half of people, the frontal cortex

activates, what is that? That's you feeling bad, that that was your visceral response. That's your, oh my God, don't say that. Or that's not who I am, or that's not who I want to be. Who are the ones who activate their frontal cortex two seconds

after having an implicit racial bias people who categorize themselves as liberals? Conservatives don't show that. Because there's no dissonance for them. Two seconds later, they're not finding anything wrong if that was the visceral response. So it's not just, you know, the conscious sort of system to jumping in their, hey, don't think that way, sort of stuff. But the fact that we all differ as to when we engage those sorts of conscious, you know, executive monitoring sort of routines in us.

So we have these sort of sub-second timescale responses, which we can modulate or even override if we want to. And then what was this time scale you associated with the hormone system, with the endocrine system? You know, hours or a bunch of minutes to a few days or so, your testosterone levels this morning, if you're a male, are going to have something to do with how likely you are to decide that somebody with a neutral facial expression. actually has this threatening facial expression. Your oxytocin levels this morning will have something to do with how trusting you're going to feel in an economic game. So playing out in that sort of time course, but that's just a smidgen of what we have to take into account, because all we've gotten to is the biology of the last couple of days that have brought you to this moment.

Exactly. So let's go back in time further. I mean, let's just be ambitious here and talk about our. development during our lifetime, right? And one of the favorite factoids that you laid down to us in your book is that our frontal cortex, to which we just gave great props for overcoming our implicit biases, isn't even fully formed until we're 25 years old. So I'm shouting out to all of the Minescape listeners who are under 25 out there. And, you know, just think of how smart and cognitive you're going to be in just a few years.

Yes, although as can be seen, it's a double-edged sword. Frontal cortex, it is so cool. It does long-term planning. It does emotion regulation. It's the most recently evolved part of the human brain. We've got more of it than any other mammal out there. It's totally great. It's the last part to fully mature.

Some parts of your cortex are fully wired up when you're a month-old kind of thing. Frontal cortex 25 years. implication of that is that gets us into trouble when instead we're 16 instead of 25. Because the parts of your nervous system that are about thrill-seeking and sensation-seeking and risk assessment and conformity to peers driven by stuff like the neurotransmitter dopamine, that stuff is fully online by around puberty. And then the frontal cortex is still fuzzing with the like construction map. annuals for another dozen years or so. That's why juveniles act in juvenile ways. That's why

adolescence is about these excesses of emotion and all of that. And then your frontal cortex catches up. So you then say, wow, you can like fully, maturely wire up some of your cortex in your first year of life. And your frontal cortex takes 25 years. Is that just a tougher construction project, are you having to make fancier types of neurons than the rest of the cortex? Nah, it's the exact same kind of cortex as in the rest of the brain. Why is it a 25-year project? Because it better be a 25-year project. If the frontal cortex has the job of making you do the right thing when that's the harder thing to do, it's got to spend 25 years learning what counts is the harder thing to do

in your culture, in your peer group, and your whatever. I mean, we're all taught you know, thou shalt not lie, but here are the circumstances where you lie, and lie if grandma gives you a toy that you already have, tell her you don't have it.

Thou shalt not kill, but what we actually mean is you should not kill one of us. If you kill one of them, we're more likely to meet with you and give you an award afterward. You know, it's not trivial for your cortex to learn what the hypocrisies and what the rationalizations are of the social world in which you live. And genes can't specify that by the time you're 10 months old. That's got to have like a third of your lifetime spent learning what the, you know, spoken

and unspoken rules are of the world in which you're trying to navigate. And when we talk about the frontal cortex developing in this way, what exactly does that mean? more neurons coming online or is it rewiring the neurons that are there? This is one of the cool things about our brain development that like kind of transform you're thinking about it. Okay, a developing brain, a brain that's doing a good job at, you know, getting ahead of the pack just in time for the SATs when you're a teenager or whatever, you're just packing in neurons like crazy, you're packing in more synapses than anybody else out there, that's exactly the opposite of what you see. You do not have your most neurons and

most connections and most complex wiring when you were 25. You have it when you're about 12 or 13. Oh, no. You have more neurons then than what you're going to have as a young adult. What's adolescence about? It is not generating new circuitry. It's pruning out the circuitry that's sloppy, that's inefficient, that's turning out not to work with your benefit, that's not what you're doing is cutting away the excess. A fully mature brain in terms of numbers of neurons, what it's about is being lean and mean rather than being overflowing with its building blocks. So a lot of what's going on in adolescence is getting rid of the extraneous stuff and making the right decision as to what counts is extraneous.

I remember I was struck when I read about the neural system of C. elegans, of the little roundworm, right? It has, whatever it is, 300 and some neurons. Do you remember the number? Two, I think it is 302. 302, or 306. Depending on what gender it is. But so what struck me was not that number, but the fact that there was a specific number.

It was never, it wasn't like 300 plus or minus 10. right? Presumably the human brain, different human brains have different numbers of neurons. We have like 85 billion or something like that, or is it really, can we, can we sort of correspond each neuron to a particular kind of thing and everyone has exactly the same wiring at the beginning? No, absolutely not. And like one of the best lessons about how genes are not deterministic about how our brains function is you take identical twins and at their moment of birth, their brains are already doing gene regulation differently. Their metabolic profiles in a scan are already working differently because even if they've been in the same womb, they just had nine months of subtly different or not so subtly different fetal environments. And that's got something reducing variability. You know, the, like in some ways, the two key questions for making sense of any of this,

like biological patterning stuff is why is it that we all have brains that are similar? And why is it that we all have brains that have nothing else out there that's identical? And so that's it. I presume you have to tell us the answer to that question because this is a very complicated one and we're learning as we go. Yeah. But it does, for the question of understanding reasons behind our behavior, the lesson and presumably is that there are things that went on in the womb, in childhood,

as ongoing well past your childhood, well past puberty, that affected what your brain is and how it's wired and therefore who you are. Absolutely. And here's like two studies, both of which are outrageous and should have you like up screaming about how we can run a society with facts like this and ignore them. The first one is a sledgehammer one, which is about 25% of the people on death row in this country have a history of concussive head trauma to their frontal cortex. And when the frontal cortex, it's damaged,

you don't have somebody who is violently out of control because they've got a rotten soul. You've got somebody whose brakes don't work. And talking about punishment and retribution and evil and anything like that, it makes as little sense there as to talk about a car whose brakes have failed. So that one should totally upend one's thoughts about like criminal justice. The other one is just as much of a, are you kidding me? This is what the world is like, but it's a more subtle one at first pass.

So you look at what hormones have to do with brain development. And there's a class of hormones that are secreted during stress. They're called glucocorticoids. They do a bazillion things in your body. And one of the things they do is they screw up development of neurons in your frontal cortex. You have a lot of stress early in life, and your frontal maturation is going to be impaired. Sufficiently so, this finding replicated top people in the field where by the time a kid is five years old, if they have been stupid and foolish enough to have picked the wrong family to have been born into,

if they're being raised in poverty, on the average, the levels of gluca corticoids in their bloodstream are going to be higher than kids of higher socioeconomic status. Their frontal cortex is going to be thinner than the more lucky SES kids. It's going to have a lower metabolic rate. And it's already predictive of a frontal cortex later in life that's going to have a harder job. of doing the tougher thing when it's the right thing to do. By age five, people should be rioting at the barricades because early life adversity has a hell of a lot to do with how you are sculpting the nervous system you're going to have for the rest of your life, as does early life

stimulation and early life love and early life security and early life insecurity and all this variants, all of them are affecting how your brain is constantly being wired and renovated and upkeep, and they all leave a footprint. And unlike some of the results that you've been talking about, in some sense, this affirms what you might think, right, that how we treat kids has a very lasting effect on who they grow up to be. Well, it affirms how we think about it. It certainly runs counter to how people thought about it for a lot of.

a long, long time. In the 1930s, if you had a kid go into a pediatric ward in a hospital, well, the father would never be allowed to set foot in there, and the mother would be allowed in like, you know, 15 minutes once a week or so, because mothers aren't useful. What they do is they provide nutrients, and we've got the nursing staff to do it, and touch and holding and care and comfort. And then like 1950s, people learn stuff like that matters, and then, you know, And people learned like, are you growing up in a neighborhood being surrounded by bars or surrounded by libraries? That's going to wire up your brain in different ways. Like all sorts of stuff, people are constantly learning much, much more subtle factors in early life are having to do with how the whole system is being wired up.

I think that's fair. I think that I'm sort of taking certain things as just given an obvious one. In fact, even just a few years ago, they were not obvious at all. So good for you for being a little bit more accurate there. But let's keep going backward in time. So we have our childhood and our subsequent development. We have our hormones and our amygdilic and so forth. And there's stuff going on even before we're born that presumably we can't be blamed for,

but that goes into our genetics and the rest of our heritage that also affects how we behave. Yeah, because environment doesn't begin when we're born. Environment starts as soon as you start in somebody's womb. And by the time you're born, you've just spent nine months having a very intimate relationship with the bloodstream of your mother, the nutrients in there, the hormones, the toxins, the environmental carcinogens, who knows what, the whole long list. And what your fetal life is like has something to do with. how your brain is wiring up because it's getting some hints as to what the world out there is going to be like.

The flagship observation of this is one, which is just in every textbook out there. And, you know, we're accustomed to you learn something about lab rats and then you learn about it in monkeys. And then maybe you could see the same thing with humans. This was an observation that started with humans. 1944 Germany, Nazis occupying the Netherlands and during that winter there was an uprising of the Netherlands

that was crushed by the Nazis and as part of the punching for it during that winter all of the food in Holland was diverted to Germany and for three months basically everybody was starving what is known historically

as the Dutch hunger winter and like 30,000 people starve to death And up until that point, people had an okay diet, a wartime diet. And then at the other end, the Allies came along and liberated the Netherlands. And suddenly people go back to having a decent diet and you've got three months of starvation. And it turns out if you were a third trimester fetus during the Dutch hunger winter, your body forever after decided, you know what, there's not a whole lot of food out there. So any food I get, I'm going to store away.

And any salt I get, I'm going to retain. And what happens is everything else being equal, 60 years later, you have almost a 20-fold increase likelihood of having diabetes and obesity and hypertension. If you were a second trimester fetus, that wouldn't happen. That's not when your body was deciding, okay, how much food is there out there? If you were a newborn, that doesn't happen either. If you were a second trimester fetus during the Dutch hunger winter, you have a greatly increased risk of suffering from schizophrenia in adulthood. If your mother was depressed during the time that you were a fetus, you have an increased risk of depression for the rest of your life because it's got something to do with how reward pathways in your brain will wire it up.

fetal environment is very, very relevant to our notion that environment shapes us. And so we all differ as to how lucky or unlucky our fetal environments were that we happen to stumble into by chance. I spend a lot of time writing about difficult technical subjects, subjects where it's important to be precise, but also to be alive, to not fall into the same cliched structures over and over again. And that's why I enjoy Grammarly Premium. Grammarly Premium is not just about catching spelling mistakes or offering you grammar tips. It gives you real-time insights and guidance, on tone, on word choice, on clarity, so you can communicate more clearly and confidently. To me, the most important thing about using Grammarly Premium is that it keeps you from falling into the same ruts

over and over again. It can make sure your prose is concise, clear, and crisp, making new suggestions for vocabulary words so you don't rely on your old favorite. over and over again. And you can harness the power of Grammarly on every platform with their desktop editor, browser plugin, and mobile apps. So elevate your writing with 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at Grammarleek.com slash Mindscape. That's 20% off GrammarlyLeague Premium at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash Mindscape. And what about the environment environment? I mean, like our ancestors growing up in different parts of the world, different climates, different cultures. To what extent do those sort of differences in the selection of people from whom we've drawn our genes end up affecting us today?

Well, what you see is, like one of the dictums out there is genes co-evolve with behavior, co-evolve with brains, co-evolve with cultures, and they're all influencing each other. And what you see is some, like, really amazing stuff out there. I love this literature just because it's one of those where, like, it's got to stop you in your tracks with the, oh, my God, I had no idea. Biology had something to do with that. If your ancestors were nomadic pastoralists wandering deserts or grasslands with cows or camels or sheep or something, versus if your ancestors 400 years ago were farmers, If you were a descendant to pastoralists, you were much more likely to murder somebody today over a perceived honor violation. You were much more likely to have a clan vendetta. You are a descendant of a culture of honor.

People who are pastoralists invent cultures of honor. How come? Because if you're a farmer, nobody can come and steal all your crops one night. If you're a hunter-gatherer, they can't come. and steal your rainforest, they can come and steal your cows at night. And as like some bedwind saying, like classic nomadic pasturists, if they come from my camel and take it and I don't do nothing, tomorrow they're going to come for the rest of my camels and the day after they're going to come from my wife and daughters. What you do is you have maximal retribution when you think

there was an honorific violation. And if you're a descendant of those cultures, you are more likely to have honor-related acts of violence. If you were a descendant in modern China these days of people who two generations ago were wheat farmers rather than rice farmers. Rice farming is this huge collectivist thing where you have 10 villages that have been maintaining the same irrigation system

for the last thousand years and everybody works collectively. Wheat farming is much more individualistic. You find wheat farmers, up in the north, you find the rice farmers in the southeast, the sort of monsoon patty, rice paddy areas. If your grandparents were wheat farmers, you were more likely to be divorced than if your grandparents were rice farmers. You're more individualistic. You're more likely to have filed for a patent. If your ancestors lived in a desert, you were more likely to have a monotheistic religion.

If they were from the rainforest, you were more likely to be polytheistic. Just lists and lists of these. My God, how does this like happen? How does what was going on 400 years ago translate into things like this? Because culture affects child rearing practices, and child rearing practices affect the brain you wired up. And that will affect the cultural practices which you value and then propagate to the next generation.

And you see stuff like, how's this for as trivial as it gets? You take mothers from collectivist cultures, and most of their studies are people from Southeast Asian, where there's a tremendous group mentality. And you take people from the most extreme of individualist cultures in the U.S., of course, or the, like, poster children for that. and within minutes of birth, mothers from these two cultures on the average sing lullabies to their newborn at different decibels. Mothers from collectivist cultures sing softer than mothers from individualist cultures. And that's just the first step. You're seeing differences between those two on the average between how much of each day you're in physical contact with your kid. What's the average lag time before you pick your kid up when they're crying?

At what age do you wean them? At what age are they sleeping in a room by themselves? All you're doing from the very first step there up until, you know, in adulthood and seeing what your culture is handing out awards for, every step of the way you are propagating the cultural values you were raised with that were passed on and that leave an imprint into your brain and your behavior and your genes and what do you then pass on to the next generation? Well, you slipped in there and your genes. So I'm wondering, you know, to the extent that these kinds of behaviors are passed down through societies or groups of people,

I could imagine that's happening either completely culturally, through memes, if you like, in Dawkins's sense, or I could imagine that there's different selection pressures in different parts of the world for different kinds of genomes, right? Are we able to disentangle that kind of thing? With a great deal of work and a great deal of controversy and a great deal of people who rush in were angels fear to tread, mainly because they have some ideological acts to grind. What you mostly see is if you're thinking about genes determining a lot of stuff about your behavior, your decades out of date as to the gene. genetics, the behavioral genetics that you know, over and over and over genes are about our

potentials. Genes are about our vulnerabilities. Genes are not about our inevitabilities. And you see this, for example, okay, there's this one gene variant. It's got something to do with this neurotransmitter serotonin. And there were all sorts of reasons to think this gene comes in a couple of different flavors. Animal studies suggested if you had this flavor instead of that flavor, you were more likely to be violent, and that's because the animal studies show that.

Let's study thousands of people from birth up into adulthood and track their genetics, and are you indeed more likely to have had a history of violence as an adult if you had that scary gene variant? And the answer was, yes. Yes, uh-oh, are we looking at genetic determinism? The answer was yes, comma, if and only if you were abused. a child. In other words, genes and environment interacting and like the same traits that will give you like a very well-developed frontal cortex and with great emotional regulatory abilities,

depending on one setting, what that's going to mean is you're just going to work on a frontline EMT, life-saving person around the clock and suppress all your exhaust. or in another setting, it means that your brain is going to make you be really good and disciplined at being like a genocidal warlord. I guess for the, there's also, but there's also the question quite closely related to this of looking at differences in our ancestors 400 years ago, which is the number you just mentioned, versus 20,000 years ago. If there were a difference 400 years ago, my bet would be that still affected our behavior today, my bet would be that most of that transmission was cultural, whereas if there's a major difference 20,000 years ago, there's sort of more room for evolution to work and our actual genomes to change. Absolutely.

I mean, that's getting to the range. I mean, dog, we used to be 20,000 years. That's a blink of an eye from evolutionary standpoint. 20,000 years is enough for significant changes in gene distribution. in different populations, genes having to do with melanism of skin color, genes having to do with whether as an adult you can digest milk products, genes having to do with your vulnerability to skin cancer, genes that, you know, just a whole array of that,

genes having to do with developing modern capacity for language, those are all genes that have developed really fast under a lot of selective pressure. So yeah, that's getting into the time range. So when you begin to look at, you know, where evolution has got us to, the obligatory, like, soundbite at this point is you got to remember the last 20 years and even the last 20,000 years are a blink of an eye and hominid history. Right. We've been around for a couple of million. And we evolved under circumstances very different from that thing we invented like yesterday, which is agriculture and material culture. and we were just hunter-gatherers forever.

And 99% of our time we evolved under those circumstances, and that makes for a brain which in many ways is not terribly well adapted for the present. And if I had to say the single biggest way in which that's the case is the vast majority of human history, we've spent surrounded by people that we know and have known for a long time and in fact are often third or fourth cousins.

And it's really only in the last 10,000 years with like hamlets turning into settlements, turning into proto-states kind of thing, that it's possible for humans to live surrounded by strangers and to do something anonymously where no one will know you did it. For 99% of human history, there's no such thing as doing something

where no one will know that you did it. And all sorts of regulatory control evolved into those circumstances. I did have Joe Henrik on the podcast recently, who's been talking about the weirdness of the West, and he has this new theory that a lot of it can be attributed to the church telling people not to marry their cousins, and that opened them up to sort of mingling

and free associating with different groups of people, which created Western culture. Is that compatible with the kind of story you're telling here? Absolutely. He's great, and in fact, I was just about to cite him in the next sentence. Not that branch of his work, but a related one. There's lots of different kinds of religions. There's lots of different gods who have been invented out there. I don't know, six, seven thousand to hundreds. And one of the variables is whether or not the god or

gods your folks have invented care about what you humans are doing. And what he and a collaborator at University of British Columbia sort of first demonstrated is in hunter-gatherers, all over the planet, the god or gods they make up have no interest in human activities. They could care less what human doing. It's not until you get people living in large settlements. It's not until you get societies where people can interact anonymously, that you start inventing what are called moralizing gods, gods who are watching, gods who know who've been good for goodness sake.

God's dull out punishment because as soon as you get to arrange where you have a society where people can get away with stuff with anonymity, you've got to invent supernatural forces of constraint. And that's incredibly important in terms of making sense of the values we have about why are we here on Earth and are we sinful or not or beautiful or not. And is there an afterlife and what counts as a good life? and that reflects all sorts of ecological, biological, evolutionary, cultural, all intertwined influences that have got you to the point where you are. Well, I think it's one thing to do as you've already done to sort of locate a population some number of years ago and follow it through time and say that compared to this other population, they behave differently, and they're,

Maybe their genomes are different depending on the timescales. But then there's another layer we add on that, which is this explanatory story, right? The reason why you get honor cultures from pastoral societies is because cattle are vulnerable to theft. That part seems a lot harder to be scientifically skeptical about and really get right. Absolutely, because it's kind of tough to do a 400-year experiment on, Let's take these folks and dump them in the goby desert for the next four centuries, whereas these folks go to the Amazon and let's meet at the end and see how things you can't do the type of science that lab scientists respect, which is experimental stuff. You do more descriptive, you do sociological, you do what winds up being the gold standard is if it winds up being predictive.

Here is the first time this hunter-gatherer culture has been studied, and do they indeed show these traits at a higher than expected chance? That's the best you can do. And sometimes that's great, and teleology is something that like all scientists like to think with, but never like to admit to. Because things happen for a reason. and if you could think what those reasons are, that gives you a lot of insights. But some of the time you're just making up just so stories. Here's why the zebra got its stripes. Here's why most cultures on Earth have male domination.

Here's why it's natural. It got selected for. And yeah, you got to be really careful that notions, explanations, causal stories that you've come up with can be falsified and are actually supported by data rather than being ideological. Well, you said, speaking of being ideological, maybe there's harmful and helpful ideologies. I mean, you started out at the beginning by saying that human beings, in some ways, have some of the worst traits in the whole animal kingdom, but in some other ways, have some of the best. I mean, given all of this better understanding that we have now about behavior than we ever did, how does this help us become better? How do we turn this into an optimistic picture for the future of humankind?

Well, we learn about the ways in which we are just like every other animal out there with the same blueprint and the same hormones and the same enzymes and the same transcription factors and incredible conservation. And we see it's the same parts of the brain and the same hormones involved in violent behavior, involved in affiliate of behavior while we're just like all the other animals

and what we then have to be trained to do as well is say but hey we're secreting the same exact oxytocin when we're reading about the pains of the character

in a novel we're reading that a mother chip would secrete when her infanticine we can do it about stuff that doesn't really exist

we can do it for movie characters we could do it for refugees on the other side of the planet who we're never going to meet where we don't even know what their pheromones smell like or we can extend that. We have the basic wiring of violence of like half the other primates out there. But we could use it to kill someone whose face we have never seen. Or we could use it to kill someone because they have different notions of what happens to you after you die than you do.

We have the same basic blueprint lots of the time. and then we use in ways that are totally novel. And I think that's where we have to be very conscious of when we're using stuff that's been around for 20 million years of primate evolution, 70 million years of mammalian, 300 million of vertebrate evolution. And we're using it in a way that just got invented last week. And to be very on guard on the ways of which that will set us off the rails. Right.

And so the thing that I think you've said this, but it's, I can, I have trouble understanding what other people said when I have an opinion already that is very close to that. I ended up just putting into my own words here. So this ability of human beings to conceptualize the future, especially sort of counterfactual, hypothetical future scenarios, seems to be, if not unique to humans, at least much better developed in human beings than elsewhere. I've talked to various people in the podcast, including Carl Friston, about this and Malcolm

McIver. And so is that what you're suggesting we take advantage of? Is that our secret to making ourselves better? That's one of the ones. Another one is to be aware, one version of the future is the certainty that people in the future are going to look back at us and be as appalled as we are when looking at it, value systems medieval peasants, so be very cautious before you decide you know what's going on. Another thing we should be aware of, if I had to pick the single thing that is conserved

and how our brains are constructed that's in line with every other social animal out there that is the cause of more human misery than, like, one can imagine, it's the fact that, like every other animal out there, we have automatic, implicit, you know, lightning-fast classifications of people as to whether they are an us or a them. And we have automatic lightning-fast conclusions that we like the us is a whole lot more than the thames. We're like every other primate out there, all this. But where are we different? We have multiple us-them categories in our heads at the same time.

And while it may be inevitable that we as primates make us them dichotomies, it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to which dichotomy seems most important to us at any given point. And the guy walking towards you on the street at night who's, uh-oh, one of those and scary, and maybe I should be all anxious and your amygdala is firing like crazy, if the next day you're sitting next day in a sports stadium and you're both chanting the same idiotic chant in favor of your team that you'd give up your life for your brother-at-arms kind of thing.

We are just like other animals until the ways in which we are very different and what culture is often provided is ways to manipulate the hell out of us as to exploiting those uniquenesses for better and an awful lot of the time for worse. You know, I just saw a video online, one of these nature videos where a lion, a lioness, female lion, was hunting and was able to

separate out a newborn water buffalo from the pack. So, you know, a perfect, weak little snack to snack on. But then rather than snacking on it and finishing off its prey, the lioness adopted it, started taking care of it. And the explanation, obviously given after the fact, no one interviewed the lioness. But the idea was, well, maybe she had just lost her own cubs and her maternal instincts overwhelmed her hunger instincts. And maybe that's a paradigm for how, you know, we can switch back and forth between different ways of conceptualizing others, even within the constraints of our biological responses. Yeah, because if you work hard enough, you could find the commonalities. Oh, my God, that thing does not look like Simba at all when he was first

giving birth to. But you know, still for a buffalo, they're kind of cute and their forehead is kind of all rounded and they got a short muslin. Oh, look at those big eyes bulging out. I just want to take care of this one because I'm a peri-adolescent female and my hormones are making me all confused as to who I should feel maternal about. Absolutely. And the minute you can have instances like that, it's showing that we are not alone in doing other animals versions of contributing money to a conservation group to save some other species instead of our own, let alone members of our species who are close relatives. So let me close, wind things up with a completely unfair question.

Do you think, given that it's a very complicated story of why we make the decisions we do, how we behave like we do, all of these different causal factors going all the way back, and you emphasized over the course of our chat how many of the... the experimental findings were kind of depressing in one way or the other. So do you think that people would be better, that there will be a better place if everyone read your book? If everyone knew more about the actual causal factors that go into our behavior than they typically do.

Oh, man, I could not have asked for a better question to set me up to try to flog more books. And the answer is no. Yep. Like, it wouldn't help if everyone read like that book or listened to a lecture about how the amygdala develops or some such thing. Because once again, most of human misery is not due to rational decisions. Most of human misery is due to rationalized ones. Again, you can't reason somebody out of a stance. They weren't reason to you in the first place.

Once again, not a whole lot of human misery is due to some. somebody saying it's okay to rob, it's okay to steal, it's okay to plunder, it's due to people who say it's not okay to do those things, but here's why I'm an exception today. Here's why my people are. Here's why my background makes me exception. Here's why it really doesn't count with me. You know, we are running on the means by which we could make rationalization seem rational, thanks to our emotions to such an extent that, I don't know, if everyone's should go buy my book and use it as a doorstop. It's certainly not going to bring in world peace. Well, you know, I want to be more on your side of people buying your book here. I mean,

but I don't have any empirical data to back me up, but something makes me think that if more people were aware of how much of our everyday behavior was not completely rational, rule-based, cognitive and how much of it was automatic, visceral, driven by heuristics that we've inherited from thousands of years ago, it would cast our decisions in a slightly different light. I think a lot of people stick to their guns about their decisions because they're convinced that they're rational even if they're not. And maybe sowing a little bit of doubt in that conviction would be a good thing. The psychologist, Josh Green at Harvard, you stated it really well that when people say,

we have a right to do that. What they are saying is, I can only rationalize why I want to do that. I don't actually have a rational reason why I can't tell you why I want to do it, but I want to do it so much that I am going to declare it to be a right. That's exactly a circumstance like this. You know, in an even broader sense, if you accept that we are nothing more or less than our biology, incredibly complicated biology from one second ago to a million years ago and interacting with environment, blah, blah, blah, if we are nothing more or less than our biology, and those are biological influences over which we had no control that brought us to this point. If you really, really, really believe that, you can never feel justified in thinking you are entitled to

anything more than anyone else, because whatever it is that you have done, which you believe has earned you praise or entitlement, you had nothing to do with. And if you really, really believe this stuff, you have no rational grounds for ever hating anyone because they didn't have a damn thing to do with whatever it is they did no matter how horrific and hurtful it was. And if you really think those ways, this could be a very different world. And at the same time, like I can think those ways for about three and a half seconds at a time before I fall back into the much more inquiry stuff. But if you really believe this stuff, those are the only conclusions you can reach. Well, couldn't you just say I really like being a bundle of visceral heuristics? I'm going to

just go with it. I'm going to lean in? Yeah, except you then have to ask, so what are the circumstances that brought you to the point of liking bundles of heuristics? Fair enough. The legal system is deciding that somebody intend to do that or not, and if they intended to, ooh, you're in trouble. The legal system never says, where did that intent come from? That came from the combination of these seven gene variants, this thing that happened during second trimester, these cultural values during childhood,

and the day that they got exposed to that like toxin when they were 18 and then got hit in the head. Well, you know, I do appreciate your uniquely optimistic version of existential anxiety and dread. So Robert Sapolsky, thanks very much for being on the Minescape podcast. Thanks, Sean. This has been a real pleasure. And I shop Ashtro. At Astro, I find statement dresses, powerful suits and Afrocentric styles made for my life. Church, celebrations, date nights, moments that matter.

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