Alan Alda with Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University - EXTENDED

last time we talked we were talking about stress and now you're talking about the law how did you get involved in neuroscience and the law well it's one of those where you realize if you spend enough time sort of thinking about one neuron at a time and then 10 neurons and then 100 million at a time somewhere out the other end starts getting like real human behaviors and real human foibles and sort of you're trained and thinking about little bits of brain it's kind of hard to look at intact human behaviors and frankly begin to deal with ideas like free will is falling into the picture there and start going in that direction and you got to start thinking about law on the brain what about free will how much free will do you think we have well sort of the way i think of it these days is if there is free will it's in all the boring places like what oh maybe sort of how many buttons i closed on this shirt before i got wired or in other words there's free will about how you button your shirt well secretly i don't even believe there's much in that domain so if free will is not happening what is happening what's what is it we're all working in the background here and we don't uh it's any whatever comes up to consciousness is just um like a tv show oh coming from you i'm not sure quite what that's implying no i mean it's just sort of entertaining to find out what we're what decisions are being made that we have no control over well an awful lot of work suggests that a lot of what we're doing when we're ostensibly making moral decisions moral judgments is post hoc justification for things that subliminally our brain knew long before we consciously knew we were going in that direction i mean in a sense where the free will thing comes in and most of us can deal with determinism to a certain extent like you come out and you've just gotten a great new suit and somebody sees you and says great suit and you know most of us are trained to say thanks and a quarter second afterward to feel slightly sheepish because i didn't make that suit i didn't grow the egyptian cotton am i being congratulated on picking the right tailor am i being congratulated on earning enough money to pay it wasn't really me um we have a whole lot more trouble if someone says oh my god you're beautiful look at your cheekbones and we're not really trained to say well actually my zygomatic arch is the angle of it is such that no we're willing to somehow take credit for what our like facial structure bones we're seeing we had nothing to do with that we had nothing to do less than choosing and you know you begin to get into this realm and once you start seeing things like frontal cortex which i assume you've been talking about endlessly in the context through this program the stuff your mother consumed or didn't consume or abused or recreated with or whatever when you were fetus has something to do with how your frontal cortex works by the time you're six your socioeconomic status is a predictor of how active your frontal cortex is when you're given a task that requires you to like do some gratification postponement by the time you're that age the thickness of this part of the brain is already influenced by the mothering style and the number of stressors you had in childhood anyone who could sit there and look at somebody where they have had a failure of regulating their behavior at some critical juncture in their life and saying this is a domain that neuroscience has nothing to do with uh this is a domain where i we've got a free pass to talk about things like free will and soul and god help me things like good and evil it's it's as ridiculous as making a claim to like you're responsible for the shape of your like cheekbones okay well that raises a really good question we have a crime on this program where a boy who's just 18 goes into a shop with friends of his and he's carrying a gun there's a lot of yelling the clerk's wife comes through the door the kid turns in almost reflexively or maybe reflexively fires the gun now she's in a coma and so he has no responsibility for that you know after a while the word responsibility is irrelevant and that's not to do oh my god bleeding heart before you know if you're going to do it she really sounds like that would i mean oh just empty out the jails and sing kumbaya with everyone else okay okay now answer that because that was my next question okay you know it doesn't change in the slightest the need to protect people from people whose behavior can't be regulated often the need to protect the people themselves it doesn't change in the slightest the capacity to think about deterrence as a function of how you treat that person um but what it has to completely remove from the table is the notion that like there's concepts like evil or by the time you get at like there are types of brain damage where somebody can sit there afterward and tell you precisely what is the appropriate behavior to do whether or not it's the appropriate behavior of solving this little puzzle or the appropriate behavior of what you should and shouldn't do to your fellow human and yet they can't regulate their behavior and you take that into account and it's absurd to frame the criminal justice system in the sort of world of volition and blame and soiled you know soils and souls that we have at this point it's absolutely so when when you have them a body of law that assigns guilt and punishment or do you go all the way back in your thinking to the law not just how cases are settled in court but how the laws ought to be rewritten to take into account the fact that um it's it's not a right or fair to to put people in jail for things that they didn't decide to do um well my misunderstanding no actually i i think it needs to be torn apart from top to bottom which is not meaning that we do not have to restrain people and a car whose brakes are broken is a very dangerous machine and we have a societal responsibility to make sure it doesn't go rolling through the playground of a preschool um but the car was not sinful if it's brakes failed and but they don't send people to jail because they're sinful at least not usually in this country they send them because they committed an act that is told to them by law is not permitted and if you do it you get this punishment if if we decide you really did it and sometimes how they decide they did it is a little shaky but is that that's that called evil are they i think an awful lot of people in this country have no trouble invoking terms like that yeah i think most of the polls suggest um a majority if not uh you know more than that of people in this country and vote concepts like that in explaining human behavior and even if they do if they consider them evil you know the judge says you committed an evil act and it's reprehensible and there's no forgiveness or whatever he says goes on and on doesn't matter what he says the thing that the judge does is what counts which is to put the guy in jail for 30 or 40 years of the rest of his life and are you saying that that's useless what should we do if we don't put them away you know at the end of the day we may wind up putting as many people away for as long of a period of time and all of this is you know not quite naval contemplation because it really is a very meaningful thing if we wind up simply saying for reasons that started outside your control with when you were a three week old first trimester fetus things were already going against you in the frontal cortex that would have to deal with the world's temptation somewhere down the line um you know even if we're framing it that way and at the end of the day we still decide this is somebody who is too dangerous to be out on the streets we are doing the same duty to protect people but it's a very different way of thinking about what goes wrong in someone and how to frame what's done to them if you don't mind that we're a little too close to good and evil here these are the gates of hell let me just come over here oh there's iron here that's what's making me ask all those questions i i have a real question about what you said because it it seems to me it cuts both ways if you know statistically that people who were abused or had suffered a childhood of the kind you described tend to wind up doing things that we don't approve of although some of them may have the chance to reclaim themselves with maybe a little help if we decide that based on how we feel about them in general we put them away for a long time then we might be putting away people who could be saved and become useful helpful members of society oh absolutely um and not to make too much of a comparison but in the early 1950s the majority of hospital beds in this country uh were occupied with people with severe psychiatric disorders most of these hospitals where people were just warehoused in the backwards of the back of beyond kind of thing and classes of medications antipsychotics were invented and emptied out those hospitals obviously not a perfect parallel but the understanding of what goes wrong with behavior uh has to carry with the promise that something can be fixed and you know as one spin-off of this whole debate one of the things that can't be fixed is uh imposition of the death penalty yes once you do that that's it you know the big puzzle with this though or the big challenge is okay take even the crude example here that lots of people can kind of deal with massive damage to the frontal cortex my god this is someone who may know understand even be able to state the rules of appropriate behavior but nonetheless can't regulate it oh my god neurological damage they're out of control nonetheless there is not a whole lot of science at this point that would say this is the person who thanks to the frontal damage is going to be a remorseless affectless reptilian serial murderer whereas that one is going to belch loudly during wedding ceremonies and not realize like you really have to keep yourself from doing that what's the science i don't know i think the penalty for both of them is probably i gotta go with you on that one but still i mean there isn't there isn't a science at this point that would say for this amount of damage who's going to be holding up the convenience stores and who's going to be just beserkly and prudent in what they do with their rooks when they're playing chess i mean there's a first few hints for the same degree of damage you're probably more likely to be the one belching at the wedding ceremony than the maximum security potential if you had a stable loving middle class upbringing if you had no childhood traumas thrown in on top of your brain damage if you had adequate prenatal nutrition and weren't marinated in a lot of alcohol when you were a fetus if you were beginning to get a sense of the additional pieces and none of them so far are too surprising but there isn't a great science yet to say which one will be the surreal murderer and which one will just have really no right so i mean you don't put statistics on trial you put individuals on trial and you have to decide what you're going to do about this particular guy who did this particular act but if you put that individual on trial and you offer up the officer krupke defense which is based on statistics oh uh people with this kind of childhood tend to do this kind of thing so don't blame me aren't you sort of up the creek you are which is why there's got to be a bridge between sort of this great philosophical subject that keeps you know people like me fed danish during breaks at scientific meetings and like how it turns out what you do with actual people who have done actual appalling things and at this stage maybe all you can do is again if the end of the day the person is kept away from society for the same length of time as if you had some bewigged judge talking about the soul even if it's the same outcome at the end if your mindset is we may understand how to fix this you know the day after tomorrow through some breakthrough and it's going to show us we've been dealing with a damaged machine um and if we have a framework where we're not sitting there having a realm of judgmentalism that is absurd this counts as a lot of progress do you picture science supplying something to replace judgmentalism to replace punishment for the sake of punishment or even removal from society without some kind of amelioration some kind of rehabilitative effort you think you think is that what you look forward to oh i think rehabilitation is critical to aim for and it will be a terrific thing if science actually uh makes us better at it but the whole way in which it is framed has to change absolutely is rehabilitation possible now for the majority of people in prison would you say um i think at that juncture i have to cite my expertise with rats and say i don't want to go near that one there's you know there's got to be more i mean just a huge theme in neurosciences the brain is vastly more malleable than anybody ever thought has more of a capacity to respond to environment and experience 90 year old brains and making new neurons in response to stimulation the notion of a brain set in stone especially a damaged brain set in stone is just not terrible anymore nonetheless at the same time we don't know a whole lot about how to make those things better um and i think in a corruption-esque way uh more and more we see it should have been interventions preventatively beforehand do you see do you see the neuroscience that's at the stage it's at now being useful in the courtroom the way the laws are set up now in the way justice is done now yes is it going to help if it's brought in soon or will it be hurtful painfully i think most of what it can be doing at this point is just changing the conversation it's not there yet i don't think it's there yet until you deal with someone with massive damage to their frontal cortex for example someone where every aspect of their behavior just screams that this is someone who's not in control of what they're doing then you know organic impairment volitional control type issues i think neuroscience is ready for that but more subtle stuff it sure can't teach us you know you get someone who their frontal cortex was blown away in an accident okay this is a special case we sure don't have the neuroscience yet to deal with the fact that you might have 2.3 percent more synapses in your frontal cortex than i do or the other way around and does that tell us anything not remotely in that ballpark yet and if we can't use that neuroscience to tell us something about abnormal antisocial behavior in that realm we sure can use it to begin to explain why one of us might be more disciplined at studying for an exam than the other it's it's not remotely translated so what do you see as the the contribution of neuroscience at some point to the justice system does it does it start in the courtroom or should it start all the way at the beginning reframing our laws well you know we professor types state things in these very cautious qualified ways so i'll i'll do that here and just say the whole system has to go the modern criminal justice system is incompatible with neuroscience it simply is not possible to have the two of them in the same room okay okay all right okay now we have the boy in the room we got a psychiatrist there we have a defense attorney a judge a prosecutor what should happen to that boy and that should the boy bring to bear can he bring to bear any knowledge about his brain that neuroscience can give us to achieve a better kind of justice in that courtroom today now this in this trial well from my understanding of how this stuff works you know the yes no guilty innocent black white all known aspects of the law has one domain where you get a lot of room in there and that's the sentencing phase and that sure is where i hope um scientifically educated empathic intellectually adventurous judges uh can begin to deal with the notion that they're working in an outmoded model and try to take advantage of the wiggle room there so the kid is just 18 he turned 18 the day that he committed the crime so there's impulsivity to be considered his brain isn't fully developed he's he's had cocaine that day he's with his friends the influence of peers on him these are all things that have been studied by neuroscience and they should all be brought to bear to give him a sentence that does what that takes into account that with any luck things could be engineered so that kid won't be in that circumstance later on in life that this is a a a typical event this is an anomaly in his life with any luck recognizing that when the range of sentencing that a judge has available that doing things on the lesser side is probably the way to go with someone like that um what does the judge have in his tool box the ability to to condemn him to therapy i mean is he gonna get a nine by five jail cell or is he going to get maybe that plus rehabilitation is does that exist now i i've read that there's less and less concern with rehabilitation is that true that's my sense but this one is way outside my my my domain well me too so that's why i'm asking you right that's why i'm turfing it back you're the one who's been talking to the lawyers so neuroscience and the current justice system can't even get in the same room together this is what i hear you saying how can we make them compatible obviously more research is needed more public dissemination of how the stuff works blah blah the usual obviously or not so obviously perhaps a bit more humility on the part of the legal end of this debate in recognizing that science keeps overturning our notions of what makes us human and what is within our realm of control i mean we're only i don't know a half dozen centuries or so past the point of viewing epileptics as being possessed by the devil and treating them accordingly and we know that instead no it's actually not the devil it's often a mutation in a rectifying potassium channel in the nervous system oh that's a different explanatory model it's not them it's their screwed up ion channels in one part of the brain it's not the devil after all there's very little reason to think that science has gotten us as far as we're getting in saying oh it's not them it's their whatever i'm very impressed apparently there's a tradition in archaeology that when you uncover some mammoth wonderful new site that you're going to spend the next 20 years excavating the palace of whoever that good archaeologists don't excavate the whole thing they leave a big chunk of it unexcavated out of the certainty that one or two generations down the line the archaeologists are going to be better at doing it and causing less damage and that next generation when they do it they're not going to do the whole thing they'll leave a piece there's this sort of institutionalized humility of don't do anything irreversible and some of the biggest ways obviously in which the criminal justice system ignores near science is doing things that are not reversible how do you deal in your own head with the problem that there are a lot of people making laws in state legislatures that are made they're making these these laws out of anger and retribution hurt pain all kinds of emotions that are understandable but don't fit in with the plan you have for the justice system well what this plan um has to also incorporate is an obvious fact that we humans are not rational machines if someone did something unspeakable to a loved one of mine i would like take every damn article i wrote on this subject and set fire to the person with them and you know make their bonfire and it would you know these are issues that are just rife with viscera and part of what has to be calculated in is there's a neurobiology of a need for retribution there's a neurobiology of vengefulness there's a neuro but it sounds like you have to not only put the the criminals in in in scanners you have to put the legislators in scanners i mean there's this whole problem that you're not just dealing with people who do things that society doesn't accept you're dealing with people who punish those who do those things that cited society doesn't accept and um they're they're not going to be so quickly quick to change their minds about how they handle that because the satirical way you describe how it sounds is how it sounds to them you know a bleeding heart saying open the gates let them out the poor kids they didn't know what they were doing that's almost what you're saying uh well no no you're saying let them out are you there would be something wrong if a pseudo auto mechanic bleeding heart stance said let all those cars with breaks that don't work just go rolling down the block there i live in san francisco there's hills i would want a criminal justice auto mechanic system that would keep cars with broken brakes off the block i would want them locked up for as long as their brakes were broken and not allowed off on the streets and it sounds like you would also try to fix the brakes while they were locked up and if there was a way to do that was great and i sure would not talk about being something intrinsically wrong and wrong with a capital w and even invoke all sorts of judeo-christian thunderbolts to throw at that car's brake system even though it could roll down the block and kill my loved ones but it sure as hell needs to be kept off the streets though yeah it's just a totally different attributional model wonderful parallel i think it was pre-inquisition spain or somewhere around then someone is accused of being a witch woman is accused of being a witch and the criminal justice system is brought to bear on it which is uh the person is sat down and has told the story of christ's crucifixion and if she doesn't cry at the story of this she is obviously in league with satan and is promptly burnt okay so that's the way the law works and there is a remarkable bleeding heart liberal doctor at the time who wrote a small treatise on the fact that you got to remember one thing which is sometimes an elderly women their lacrimal glands where their tears are made they atrophy with age they dry up and there's some older women who simply can't produce tears so you need to remember that that could be an organic impairment problem that now and then when you've got someone who you think is a witch and they're not crying at the story of our lord's crucifixion check to make sure that the lacrimal glands are working because that's an extenuating organic impairment but as long as you got that one off the table they'll cry off they go send them to the bonfire that's what the current picture is when you say okay somebody had 99 of their frontal cortex blown all over the you know playground back when they were a kid and they have problems regulating their behavior okay keep that one in mind that's a special case it's got to move beyond a special case of saying okay just make sure they got a frontal cortex and their lacrimal glands are in two atrophy to cry and once you got that stuff sorted out you can go back to our standard system it's not terrible

Channel: Brains On Trial

Views: 157,144

Rating: 4.9129272 out of 5

Keywords: behavior, biology, incarceration, neuroscience, psychology, Robert Sapolsky

Id: Cx8xEUYrb74

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Orsonius]

Love this part. Anyone who works in neiroscience, behavioral analysis or psychology has a hard time accepting any relevant argument for the so called free will, which consequentially reflects on our justice systems which build on free will.

It's odd how humans seek justice and vengeance out of pure catharsis. I wonder how social attitude would be if we would get rid of retributive justice all together. It might actually cause some psychological issues in our current population.

[u/Srslyhammerd]

Can we grant at this point, that Allan Alda, while old and seems averse to the idea of any real structure change, is pretty much just an awesome fucking dude?

Am I missing something? Or am I seeing a genuine attempt at a real, informative discussion here? Does Allan Alda have some kind of scary conservative baggage? It felt legitimate to me. Sorry if this sounds dumb, but I've gotten too used to the "pov vs conflicting pov" diatribe, it's become the norm I guess. Having two people really try and understand the other and share science as they see it, is rare, and I feel uncomfortable lol