- [Andrew Huberman] Welcome
to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. - I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at
Stanford School of Medicine. Today I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Robert Sapolsky. Dr. Sapolsky is a Professor of Biology and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His laboratory has worked on
a large variety of topics, including stress, hormones, including testosterone and estrogen, and how the different members
of a given species interact according to factors like hormones, hierarchy within primate troops, and how things like stress, reproduction and competition impact behavior. One of the things that
makes Dr. Sapolsky's work so unique is that it combines
elements from primatology, including field studies
with human behavior, in essence trying to unveil how
humans as old world primates are controlled by different
elements of our biology as well as our psychology. Dr. Sapolsky is also a prolific
author of popular books, such as "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers", "The Trouble with Testosterone", and "Behave: The Biology of
Humans at Our Best and Worst". During the course of our discussion today, Robert also revealed to me that he is close to completing
a new book entitled, "Determined: The Science
of Life Without Freewill." And indeed we discuss the science of life without freewill during this episode. We also discuss stress and
how best to control stress and how stress controls us at both, conscious and subconscious levels. We talk about testosterone and estrogen and hormone replacement therapy and how those impact
our mind, our psychology and our interactions with others. As with any discussion with Dr. Sapolsky, we learn about scientific mechanisms that make us who we are. And today we also discuss tools and how we can leverage
those scientific mechanisms in order to be better
versions of ourselves. I should mention that
unlike most guest interviews on the Huberman Lab podcast, this one had to be carried out remotely due to various constraints, so you may hear the
occasional audio artifact, please excuse that. We felt that the value of a
conversation with Dr. Sapolsky was well-worth those
minor, minor glitches. And indeed the information
that he delivers us is tremendously valuable, interesting, and in many cases actionable as well. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is
separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero
cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the
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to this for a very long time and I appreciate it. - Oh yes, glad to be here. - There is an enormous range of topics that we could drill into,
but just to start off, I want to return to a topic that is near and dear to your
heart, which is stress. And one of the questions
that I get most commonly is, what is the difference between
short and long-term stress in terms of their benefits
and their drawbacks? And the reason I say benefits is that, obviously stress and the stress
response can keep us alive, but stress, of course, can
also sharpen our mental acuity and things of that sort. So how should we conceptualize stress and how should we conceptualize stress in the short-term and in the long-term? - Well, basically sort of two
graphs that one would draw. The first one is just all
sorts of beneficial effects of stress short-term, and then once we get into chronicity, it's just downhill from there. Short-term because it saves
you from the predator, short-term because you're
giving a presentation and you think more clearly
or your focus is better, all sorts of aspects of that. And what then winds up
being an argument is, how long does it take to go
from short-term to long-term? And that's somewhat arbitrary, but the sorts of chronic stressors that most people deal
with are just undeniably in the chronic range, like
having spent the last 20 years, daily traffic jams or abusive
boss or some such thing. The other curve that's sort
of perpendicular to this is dealing with the fact that sometimes stress is a great thing. Like our goal is not to
cure people of stress because if it's a right kind, we love it. We pay good money to be stressed that way by a scary movie or a rollercoaster ride. What you wind up seeing is when it's the right amount of stress, it's what we call stimulation. And the basic curve there is, here is an optimal level of
stimulation and too little, and function goes down with
what we would call boredom, and too much and function goes down with what we would call stress. And the optimum is what all of us aim for. - In terms of the benefits
of stress in the short-term, one thing that's really striking to me is, how physiologically the stress response looks so much like the excitement response to a positive event. And we can speculate that
the fundamental difference between short-term stress
and short-term excitement is some neuromodulator like
dopamine or something like that. But is there anything else that we know about the biology that reveals to us? What really creates this
thing we call valence that an experience can be
terrible or feel awful, or it can feel wonderful,
exhilarating depending on this somewhat subjective
feature we call valence? Do we know what valence
is or where it resides? - On a really mechanical level, if you're in a circumstance
that is requiring that your heart races and
you're breathing as fast and you're using your
muscles and some such thing, you're going to to be
having roughly the same brain activation profile, whether this is for something wonderful or something terrible with
the one exception being that if the amygdala is
part of the activation, this is something that's going
to be counting as adverse. Whether that's the circumstance, an adverse circumstance
recruiting the amygdala into it, and how much it's the
amygdala being involved, biases you towards interpreting
it as even more awful. The amygdala in some ways
is kind of the checkpoint as to whether we're talking
about excitement or terror. - Let's use the amygdala
as a transition point to another topic that you've
spent many years working on and thinking about, which is testosterone and other sex steroid hormones. I heard you say once before that among all the brain areas
that bind testosterone, that where testosterone
can park and create effects that the amygdala is among the most chockablock full
of these parking spots, these receptors. I realize there's a lot here, but how should we think about the role of
testosterone in the amygdala given that the engagement of
the amygdala is fundamental in this transition point
between a exhilarating, positive response and a
negative stressful response? Or maybe just broadly, how should we think about testosterone and its effects on the brain? - And pertinent to the transition from whether this is a stressor
that's evoking fear or revoking aggression in
terms of that continuum, also because the amygdala
is in the center of all four points on those axes. Basically, almost everybody out there has a completely wrong idea
as to what testosterone does, which is testosterone makes you aggressive because males, virtually
every species out there have more testosterone
and a more aggressive and seasonal measures
have testosterone surging at the time of year, they're
punching it out over territory. And you take testosterone
out of the picture, you castrate any mammal
out there, including us, and levels of aggression will go down. And the easy thing then tends to conclude that testosterone causes aggression. And the reality is testosterone
does no such thing, it doesn't cause aggression. And you can see this both
behaviorally and in the amygdala. What does testosterone do? It lowers the threshold
for the sort of things that would normally provoke
you into being [mumbles] so that it happens more easily. It makes systems that are
already turned on, turn on louder rather than turning on aggressive
music or some such thing. What does that look like behaviorally? You take five male
monkeys, put them together, they form a dominance hierarchy. Number one is great,
number five is miserable, number three is right in between. Now take number three and shoot the guy up
with tons of testosterone and he's going to be
involved in more fights. Aha, testosterone uniformly
causes aggression, but you look closely and
there's a pattern to it, is number three now
challenging numbers two and one for their place in the hierarchy. Absolutely not, he is brown-nosing them exactly as much as he used to. What's going on is he's
just a miserable terror to poor number four and five. And in that case, what
testosterone is doing is amplifying the preexisting
patterns of aggression. Amplifying the social learning, that's where it'd gone into there. Now on sort of the more reductive level, so how does that translate
into the amygdala? Does testosterone make amygdaloid neurons have action potentials? Does it cause those
neurons to suddenly speak about fear and aggression spontaneously? Absolutely not. What they do is, if the amygdala is
already being stimulated, it increases the rate of neuronal firing. What its worth? It shortens after-hyperpolarizations. So the theme there exactly is, it's not creating your aggression, it's just upping the volume of whatever aggression is already there. And once you factor that in, it's impossible to say anything
about what testosterone does outside the context of what
testosterone related behaviors, how they get treated [laughs]
in your social settings. - Mm-hmm, yeah. And in terms of status
and the relationship between individuals, either
nonhuman primates or humans, can we say that testosterone
and levels of testosterone? Or I should say, can we say that relative levels of
testosterone between individuals is correlated to status
within the hierarchy? - Yes, but in a way that winds up being totally uninteresting. Like you go back on
whatever number of decades, the endocrinology texts, and there were two totally
reliable findings in there. Let's see, I have a dog in here that's- - Oh, good, we like dogs at
the Huberman Lab podcast. - Oh, okay, it is jingling with that. - They are welcome, they are
absolutely welcome, yeah. - And there'd be two truisms, which is higher levels of testosterone predict higher levels of aggression in humans and other animals. Higher levels of testosterone predict higher levels of sexual activity. Whoa, testosterone causing both, and the correlation is there. And when you look closely, we've
got cause and effect stuff, sexual behavior raises
testosterone levels, aggression raises testosterone levels. Your levels before had
were barely predictive of what's going to happen, so it's a response rather than a cause. When you look at that though in terms of making sense
of individual differences, they don't matter a whole lot. You can spend an entire career
on the social circumstances that produce 3.5% more
testosterone in the circulation, and expect to see all sorts
of interesting implications. And that's not really the case, it's somewhat of a yes or no modulator of the much more subtle social
stuff that's already there. - Very interesting. I think that there are
a lot of misconceptions about human biology, but
testosterone seems to be one area where at least from what I
can find on the internet, it's sort of at the peak
of misunderstanding. Maybe we could just ask
a few more questions about testosterone and sexual behavior because there's an interesting story there about castration versus non-castration and the causality, again. But before you address that, I just want to highlight
something that you said that I think is so vital,
which is that behaviors, such as aggressive behaviors
and sexual behaviors can actually increase testosterone. Did I hear that correctly?
- Yeah. - And the reverse is sort of
true, but not in a causal way. Is that right? - The opposite direction
of the causality, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, so if I were to increase somebody's testosterone by 30%, male or female doesn't matter, their sexual behavior
may or may not change. - Essentially zero effect at all. Your brain is not that sensitive to fluctuations in testosterone levels. In terms of things like aggression, raising testosterone,
this is a great footnote. If you have the right type of willing to die on the trenches
devotion sort of thing, watching your favorite team play a sport will raise your testosterone levels as you sit there with the
potato chips in your armchair. So it's not the physicality of aggression, it's the psychological framing of it. So, yeah, testosterone
is not causing that. And a great way to appreciate that is, okay, so you had all these testosterone sexual behavior correlations, and you do the definitive
endocrine intervention, which is you do a subtraction study, you've removed the testes. And as I said before, levels
of sexual behavior goes down. Good, we've just shown that testosterone is
somehow have caused it. Critically they go down,
but not down to zero, whether you are a rat or a
monkey or a human, whatever. And what predicts how much residual sexual behavior is there, how much sexual behavior
there was before castration? What that's telling you is by then that's behavior that's being
carried by social learning and context rather than by the hormone, exact same thing with aggression. Drops after castration,
doesn't go to zero, the more prior history of it, the more it just keeps
coasting along on its own even without testosterone. - Very interesting. Can we say that there is an exception in terms of the early
organizing effects of hormones? Like, for instance, if a
developing animal is deprived of a testosterone or estrogen or aromatized testosterone into estrogen, there's a whole story there is, you know. But then I could imagine that
the circuits of the brain that are responsible for
initiating sexual behavior in the first place might not emerge, and therefore not be sensitive to the testosterone later in life. Is that right? Okay.
- Yeah, exactly. And a great way of seeing that is this totally nutty biological factoid, which is the second to
fourth digit ratio enhanced. - Oh yeah. - Totally obscure thing, the
ratio of one to the other in some way reflects
levels of testosterone, androgen exposure during fetal life. And I can't remember which
way it goes and it's minuscule and you need a thousand
people in your sample size to be able to see anything, but you see it in other primates, it's already there in fetal
sonograms, all of that. So that's a readout of subtle differences in prenatal exposure, and that winds up being a
predictor of a whole range of sort of stuff in adult behavior. So, yeah, at the fetal end, when you're still building everything, testosterone and the amount of that is making a huge difference. By the time you're an adult, it's just somewhat of
an old and a non-signal. - Yeah, I have a confession, which is that I was a
master's student at Berkeley in Marc Breedlove's arena, so
I'm an author on that paper, although I'm deep within the author line, and you got the description
of it exactly right that it's the D2, the index
finger to the ring finger ratio is more similar in females
than it is in males. In males, the index finger
tends to be shorter. And for people out there
who are listening to this who are now freaking out or measuring, that there is a proper way
to measure this, which is, eyeballing it doesn't work all the time unless at the extremes. And there's some very
interesting stories there. It actually has been replicated
no fewer than five times, Marc Breedlove tells me. But yes, in terms of these
early organizing effects, those seem very robust in most studies. These later effects are
sort of activation of neural circuits by hormones. I'm absolutely fascinated by this. And I do have a couple other questions, which is, we normally associate
testosterone with males, but of course, females
make testosterone as well from the adrenals and
presumably elsewhere too. I'm guessing if we looked hard enough, we'd probably find that
there were other sources of androgens in females. Can we say that these general contours
of effects on aggression also pertain to females? And I suppose I should ask in particular about female-female aggression, which does exist in many species, female-male agregression as
well as maternal aggression, which is a robust aspect of
our evolution, of course, that the mother will,
an angry mother animal of any kind protecting her
young is truly dangerous, in the best sense of the word. - And that type of post-parturition, period after birth aggression
is all about estrogen, progesterone, those sorts of things. Female aggression, the rest of the time has testosterone as a major
player at a much lower level on the average. On the average, one always has to say, but it's basically the same punchlines. In females, the lower levels
of testosterone are essential for typical levels of
aggression and sexual behavior. Nonetheless, they're not causing it, it's not sensitive to small
individual differences. Same exact thing. You can get way over-impressed with the importance of
androgens in females just as readily as in males. - So in line with that, how should we conceptualize testosterone? I realize there isn't a single sentence that can capture a
hormone in all its effects because hormones have
so many different slow and fast effects on the brain,
on other glands on their own, on the very glands that produce them. But as I've heard you talk
about testosterone today and over the years, I
start to get the impression that as the most misunderstood molecule [laughs] in human health in the universe, it's clearly doing
something very powerful. It's shifting the way that
certain neural circuits work, adjusting the gain on the
amygdala, as you described, and certainly other things as well. Is there any truism
about testosterone like, and its relationship to effort or its relationship to resilience, and in a way that maybe will
help me and other people to sort of think about how
to think about testosterone? - Yeah. Maybe three separate answers to that. The first one is, I think
it's a fair summary to think that when it comes to
motivated strong behaviors, what testosterone does is make you more of whatever you already are. And that to me, sexual arousal, libido, aggressiveness,
spontaneous aggression, reactive aggression, things of that sort. It's upping the volume of things that are already strongly there. Second way to think about it is, well, here's like my favorite
finding about testosterone. And this was some wonderful
work by a guy, John Wingfield, who's one of the best behavioral
endocrinologists out there. And about 20 years ago he
formulated what was called The Challenge Hypothesis
of Testosterone in Action. What does testosterone do? Testosterone is what you secrete when your status is being challenged, and it makes it more likely that you'll do the behaviors needed to
hold onto your status. Okay, so that's totally
boringly straightforward if you are a baboon. If somebody is challenging your high rank, the appropriate response on your part is going to be aggression. All right, so we've just got
in through the back door, testosterone and aggression, again. But then you get to humans, and humans have lots of
different ways of achieving or maintaining status. And all you need to do is go to like some fancy private school's annual auction, and you will see all these
half-drunk alpha males competing to see who can
give the most money away as a show of conspicuous like property that they have. And in a setting like that, I mean, I haven't been able to take urine samples, if there's times, unfortunately, but that shows the flip side of it. If you have a species
that hands out status in a very different sort of way, testosterone is going to boost that also. Okay, so that generates a
totally nutty prediction. Wow, take people in a circumstance, say playing an economic game where you get status by being trustworthy and being generous in your
interactions with the game. If you give people testosterone, does that make them more generous? And that's absolutely the case. Totally cool finding. I'm showing you, I don't know, basically if you took a
whole bunch of Buddhist monks and shot them up with testosterone, they'd get all competitive with each other as to who could do the most
random acts of kindness. And if we have a societal
problem with too much aggression, the first culprit to look
at is not testosterone, the first to look at is that we hand out so much
damn elevated status for aggression in so many circumstances. So I find that finding to be fantastic. Third thing about
subtlety of testosterone. Okay, so like some subtler
behavioral effects, you give testosterone to people and they become more confident, they become more self-confident. Well, that's good, people pay to take all sorts of nonsensical self-help courses that will boost your self-esteem. And that's a good thing unless testosterone
makes you more confident, that is inaccurate, and you're more likely to
barrel into wrong decisions. What's shown in economic game
play is that testosterone by making you more confident
makes you less cooperative because who needs to cooperate because I'm on top of this all on my own. Testosterone makes people
cocky and impulsive. And that might be great in one setting, but if and the other is, you're absolutely sure your army is to get over on the other
country in three days. So hell, let's start World War I, and you get a big surprise out of it. Testosterone altering
risk assessment beforehand probably played a big role in
that kind of miscalculation. - Super-interesting. I always think about testosterone and dopamine being close
cousins in the brain, not just because of their relationship through the pituitary and hypothalamus. That, of course, but also because
of dopamine's salient role in creating this bias
towards exteroception. When somebody takes a drug,
with it increases dopamine, or they're chockablock full of dopamine. They tend, I want to highlight 'tend' because this is, I'm
really generalizing here, but they tend to focus on outward goals, things beyond the
boundaries of their skin. And testosterone seems
to do a bit of the same, it tends to put us into a similar mode of perceiving the outside world in ways that we're asking questions like, how do I relate to this
other of my species? How do I relate to these goals? Is there anything that we can
do to better conceptualize the relationship between testosterone and dopamine and motivation? Or would that just take
us down the alleyways of, of neural pathways and the hypothalamus? Which is fine too. - Well, I think it's got lots to do with sort of this massive
revisionism about dopamine. Everyone, since the pharaohs
got brought up being taught that dopamine is about
pleasure and reward. It turns out it isn't, it's
about anticipation of reward, and it's about generating the motivation, the goal-directed behavior
needed to go get that reward. And before you know it, you're
using like elevated dopamine, your entire life to motivate you to do whatever is going to get
you like entry into heaven after-life kind of, it's
doing that sort of thing. So it's really about the motivation. And what testosterone
does even in individuals who are not aggressive and
why testosterone replacement is often a very helpful
thing for aging males is it increases energy, it
increases a sense of thereness, a presence of alertness
that increases motivation. So that's a whole aspect,
which then takes us into is your motivation to get up and like go, hand out lots of soup in a soup
kitchen for homeless people, or is it to get up and go
ethnically cleanse a village. It's got much to do with
what your makeup was before the testosterone got onboard. So it's activating in an energetic sense, testosterone within minutes
increases glucose uptake into skeletal muscle. You're just more awake
and alert and all of that, and that has a lot to do
with what dopamine does. And as one might predict then, getting just the right
levels of testosterone infused into your bloodstream
feels great to lab rats. They will lever press to
get infused into the range that optimizes dopamine release. So there is, you are absolutely right, they're deeply intertwined. - Yeah, such beautiful biology there. And I love the way you
encapsulate their relationship. I want to ask about estrogen, we don't hear about estrogen as often, and it's always
interesting to me now doing some public facing education, that testosterone is this
very controversial molecule, just to say it is almost
controversial. [laughs] [Robert laughs]
But estrogen doesn't seem to hold the same controversial weight, and yet estrogen has a
very powerful effects on both the animal brain
and on the human brain of males and females. Men do not want their
estrogen to go too low. Terrible things happen, they
will lose cognitive function, libido can drop. So men need estrogen as well, but perhaps maybe we can put
the same filter on estrogen as we did on testosterone. Are there any general themes of estrogen that people should be aware of or that you think that are
generally misunderstood? Is it really all about
feelings and empathy and making us more sensitive? I sense not. - No, and it's once again
very context dependent. And if estrogen after giving
birth is playing a central role in you wanting to shred
the face of somebody getting too close to your
kittens kind of thing, we know it's not just warm,
fuzzy, empathic kind of stuff. Estrogen in lots of ways
could be summarized by, if you've got a choice in the matter between having a lot of estrogen
in your bloodstream or not, go for having a lot of estrogen. It enhances cognition,
exactly as you said, it stimulates neurogenesis
in the hippocampus, it increases glucose and oxygen delivery, it protects you from dementia, it decreases inflammatory
oxidative damage to blood vessels, which is why it's good for protecting from cardiovascular disease
in contrast to testosterone, which is making everyone
of those things worse. This springs up this
minefield with a question, which is, so what about
post-menopausal estrogen? And all sorts of lab studies
with non-human primates suggested that you keep
estrogen levels high after a monkey's equivalent of menopause. And you're going to keep
brain health a lot better or decreasing the risk
of dementia, stroke, every such thing. Estrogen is a great
antioxidant, all of that. So in the 90s I think when Healy, I'm forgetting her name, but when there was the first
female head of the NIH, Bernadine Healy set up this
massive prospective human study, what was going to be the
biggest one of all times, looking at the pluses and minuses of post-menopausal estrogen. And tens of thousands of
women, and this was... And they had to cut the study short because what they were seeing was, estrogen was not only
doing the normal bad stuff that you expect in terms of
some decalcification stuff, but it was increasing the risk
of cardiovascular disease, and it was increasing the risk of stroke, and it was increasing
the risk of dementia. And this ground to a halt and everybody, they stopped the study and front page news and everybody panned at that point. And nobody could make sense of it who had been spending the
last 20 years studying the exact same thing in primates and seeing all the protective effects. And the explanation turned
out to be one of those things where like the law of
unexpected consequences. Okay, menopause in women, it lasts different lengths of time, that may be a factor that's going to come. You know what, let's not start
giving our study subjects more estrogen until they're
totally past menopause. And when you've got that
lag time in between, you shift all sorts of
estrogen receptor patterns, and that's where all of
the bad effects come from. - Wow!
- All of the monkey studies had involved just maintaining ovulatory levels into the
post-menopausal period. And you do that and you get great effects. Estrogen is one of the
greatest predictors of protection from Alzheimer's
disease, all of that, but it needs to be physiological. Just keep continuing what
your body has been doing for a long time versus let
the whole thing shutdown and suddenly like try to
fire up the coal stoves at the bottom of the
basement kind of thing, and get that going, there you get utterly different outcomes. And that caused a lot of
human health consequences when people suddenly decided that estrogen is in fact neurologically
endangering post-menopausally. - Wow, that's fascinating. And I never thought that these steroid hormone receptors
could by not binding estrogen, being devoid of estrogen
binding, I should say, could then set off opposite
biochemical cascades. Fascinating. I guess it raises the question about testosterone replacement too, whether or not people should [laughs] talk to their
doctor before too long. Men and women talk to your
physicians before too long to avoid these, whatever is
happening in these periods where there isn't sufficient
testosterone and/or estrogen. It sounds like could
cause longer-term problems even when therapies are introduced. - Two additional misery
slash complications. So, okay, you're trying to understand, you look at women with a history with or without post-menopausal
estrogen replacement where it's done great. And you're seeing 20 years later, estrogen is a predictor of a
decreased risk of Alzheimer's. Then you got to start
trying to do the unpacking prospective type studies. How much estrogen? At which times? Estrogen is a catchall term
for a bunch of hormones, estrone, estradiol, estriol. How much of each one of them? Natural or synthetic? Go try to figure all of that out. And the second complication is, it's often hard to say anything
about what estrogen does outside the context of
what progesterone is doing. And often it's not the
absolute levels of either, it's the ratio of the two. This is such a more
complicated endocrine system than testosterone. And because you have to
generate dramatic cyclicity that like no male hypothalamus
ever has to dream off. It's a much, much more complicated system, thus, it's a lot more
complicated to understand, let alone like figure out what
the ideal benefits are of it. - Yeah. I don't know what to
make of the literature on dropping rates of testosterone
and endocrine disruptors. I was at Berkeley when Tyrone Hayes published his data on these frogs that were drinking water
from various locations throughout the United States,
not just in California, and seeing very severe
endocrine disruption through blockade or, and of androgen receptors
and all sorts of issues. And you hear this all the time now that sperm counts are dropping, that there are all these
endocrine disruptors that there's birth control in the water, in the drinking water. It all starts to sound a little crazy, and yet I've also been fooled before by, I guess a good example would be, there's a lot of crazy
stuff in the world online about all the terrible stuff
in highly processed foods. And yet you've got very
respectable people, endocrinologists at UCSF
like Robert Lustig saying, yeah, a lot of these hidden sugars and these emulsifiers,
they're causing real problems. So I've become more
open-minded about the question. And so, are we suffering
from drops in sperm counts and testosterone and
estrogen and fertility as a consequence of endocrine disruptors in the environments and food, or because of social reasons? Is there anything that
we can hang our hat on like real data that you're confident in? Or is it just a mess? - No, the phenomenon does
appear to be quite real. Cross-sectional studies,
human populations, or I still don't understand why this was one of the first things
that Hayes spotted. Decreasing testicle size in crocodiles. [Andrew laughs] Go figure why that was one of the first contributions to this. And I think the phenomenon
is absolutely real. And what you're then left with
is two classic challenges, which is this is correlated with something broad environmental toxins. Which ones, how much, when, etc.? And the other one always
being, well, okay, dropping is a dropping
enough to make a difference. How big of an effect is this? And those are where the
juries are still out. - Yeah, it's an area that I know there's a lot of interest in, and you've got groups of people who won't touch a receipt at a store because of the BPAs that
are on the inks of the... And then [laughs] you've got people who don't care about those things. It is a fascinating area. I hope that more biology
will be done there soon. I'd like to briefly return to stress. You described a study once about two rats, one running on a wheel voluntarily, one who is basically
stuck in a running wheel, and it's forced to run
anytime, rat number one runs. So in one case the rat is
voluntarily exercising. [laughs] And in the other case,
the rat is being forced to go to PE class, so to speak, but really, and seeing
divergent effects on biology. And I'd like to just
touch into this and use it as kind of a case study for
stress mitigation in general. I'm rather obsessed in our
colleague, David Spiegel, Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford is obsessed with this question of, how humans can start to
mitigate their own stress? What do you think about stress mitigation and what should we do as
individuals and as families and as a culture to try
and encourage people to mitigate their stress, but in ways that are not going to turn
us into rat number two, where we're being forced
to mitigate our own stress and therefore it becomes
more stressful. [laughs] - And what you see is, rat number one gets all the benefits of exercise. Rat number two gets all the
downsides of severe stress with the same exact muscle expenditure and movements going on. Perfectly yoked, great example that it's the interpretation on your head. And I haven't kept up
with that literature, but I'll bet you, rat number two is having a whole lot more
activity in its amygdala than is rat number one. Okay, so stress mitigation. Anything I should say here
I should preface with, I'm reasonably good at telling people what's going to happen if they
don't manage their stress, but I'm terrible at actually
like managing stress or advising how to manage that. I'm much better with the
bad news aspect of it. But what you see is, by now
just a classic literature, half a century old, sort of showing what are the building blocks of stress. Not, ooh, you step outside and you've been gored by an elephant, and can you grow from your experience? And what doesn't kill
you makes you stronger. In that you could have a stress response, but you're in the realm of the gray zone of ambiguous social
interactions, that sort of thing. Some people have massive stress responses, others not at all, in between, enjoy it. Like what are the building blocks of, what makes psychological stress stressful? And the first one is exactly what is brought up by that running study. Do you have a sense of control? A sense of control makes
stressors less stressful. And the running wheel shows
that or studies where you, you lab rat or you
college freshman volunteer have been trained that
by pressing a lever, you're less likely to get a shock. And today you're at the
lever they're working away and unbeknownst to you the
lever has been turned off, and it has no effect on shock frequency, but because you think
you have some control, you have less of a stress response. If you were a rat and doing
this day-in and day-out, you're less likely to get an ulcer. So a sense of control. And related to that is a
sense of predictability. Rat get shocked, human
gets shocked, whatever, and the scenario either is
the shocks come now and then, or the shocks come now and then, and 10 seconds before a
little warning light comes on. And when you get the warning light, the shocks are distressful. You got predictability because if you're not
getting warning lights, any second you could be a half second away from the next shock. You get a warning light, and you know that if there isn't one, you've got at least 10
seconds worth of relaxation. You know what's coming, you can prepare your coping responses, and best of all afterward you
know when you're finally safe, when you can recover from it. And that's enormously protective. Others outlet for frustration, you take a rat who is getting shocked, and if it could run on a running wheel, that's a protective thing,
that's doing it voluntarily. If you've got a rat and he
can gnaw on a bar of wood, a stressor is less stressful. Unfortunately, if you have
a rat or primate or human and they're stressed, the
ability to aggressively dump on somebody smaller and weaker also reduces the stress response. And the fact that displacement
aggression reduces stress accounts for a huge percent
triggers like unhappiness. So all of those are variables,
get social support as well. That's a good one. Interpreting circumstances is being good news rather than bad. Hurray, so you've got this very simple sort of like take home recipe of go out and get as much control
and as much predictability and as many outlets and as much
social support as possible, and you're going to do just fine. And you go out and do that, and that's a recipe for total disaster because it's much, much
more subtle than that. In one great example, okay,
so you're getting shocks, you want a warning beforehand, get a little warning light
10 seconds before each shock, it's wonderfully protective. Get a warning light one
second before the shock doesn't do anything. There's not enough time for you to get the psychological benefits
of the anticipation. Now instead, gets the
little warning coming on two minutes before each shock, and it's going to make things worse because you're not going to
be sitting there like reveling and sort of your sense of predictability, and it's soon going to be, oh. You're going to be sitting
there for two minutes saying, damn, here it comes. Predictive information only
works in a narrow domain. Similarly, control. Do you want to have a sense of
control on the face of stress? And the answer is, only if it
is a mild to moderate stressor because what's happening then, your sense of control is
completely independent of the reality of whether
you have control or not, but in the face of mild
to moderate stressors, a sense of control gets interpreted as, wow, look how much worse
things could have been. Thank God, I have control, I'm on top of this to master my fate. In contrast, if it's a major stressor, all that arbitrary sense of control does is make you think, oh my God, look how much
better it could have been. I could have prevented it. And we all know that intuitively like we do that in the face
of people's worst stressors. Nobody could have stopped the car the way the kids suddenly jumped out. It wouldn't have mattered and if you had gotten them
to the doctor a month ago, instead of now, it
wouldn't have made any... You didn't actually have any control. And what you see is, you absolutely want to have
a huge sense of control over mild to moderate stressors, and especially ones that
result in a good outcome. Hooray, for me, and in the
face of horrible stressors, what you want to do is
like self-deception, and like truth and beauty
don't necessarily go hand-in-hand at that point. And that's why stress management
techniques impact control and predictability wind up
being far worse than neutral if you're preaching that
to somebody homeless or somebody with terminal cancer, or somebody who is a refugee. Tell a neurotic middle-class person that they have the psychological tools to turn hell into heaven. And there's some truth to that. Do the same thing to somebody who is going through a real hell, and that's just privileged heartlessness to do that because that doesn't work. More and more outlets, if
your outlets are damaging, that's not a good way to mitigate stress. Social support, if you're
confusing mere acquaintances for real social support, you're going to have the rug pulled out from under you at some point. If you're mistaking
social support for being, going and bitching and moaning
and demanding supportiveness from everyone around you
rather than you doing some of that reciprocally, that's not going to work very well either. It's not simple. It's not for nothing that
lots of us are really lousy. It, like being good friends
and things like that, and why it takes a lot
of work to do it right? Because you do it wrong and it may temporarily
seem like a great thing, but when it turns out to be
completely misplaced faith, you're going to be feeling
worse than before you started. - Interesting. These days, there's a lot of interest in using physical practices
to mitigate stress, trying to get out of the ruminating, and to some extent take
control of neural circuits in the brain by using exercise and using breathing and hypnosis. And, of course, hypnosis has
a mental component as well. What are your thoughts
on stress mitigation from the standpoint of, okay, so we don't want
to be rat number two, we want to select something for ourselves, so we have to take the
initiative for ourselves. Being forced into exercising is not, it could actually have
negative health effect perhaps. So we need to pick something that we like, we need to take control of it. In terms of supporting other people, you touched on that a bit. What is the best way to
support other people? Is it to talk about the stressful thing? I mean, I'm not asking you
to play psychologist here, but I find divergent data on this. We can spin ourselves up into a lather by ruminating on something. And language seems to me
like it's a wonderful tool, but it's also a fairly deprived tool because it doesn't really get into the core of our physiology like something like breathing would. So what are your thoughts on more, for lack of a better way to
put it, more head-centered, cognitive approaches to stress mitigation versus kind of going
at the core physiology. Cold showers now are even
a thing to some extent just to get people stress acclimated, voluntarily taking cold showers. - That makes some sense physiologically, preconditioning for when
the real stressors come. In terms of what you bring up, oh, transcendental meditation,
mindfulness, exercise, prayer, sort of reflecting on gratitude, all that sort of thing. Collectively they work on the average, they work in terms of,
they can lower heart rate and cholesterol levels and have
all sorts of good outcomes, but they compromise us. One is exactly the caveat that comes out of the
running wheel study is, it doesn't matter how
many of your friends swear by the stress management technique. If doing it makes you want to scream your head off after 10 seconds, that's not the one that's
going to work for you. So read the fine print
and the testimonials, but it's got to be something
that works for you. Another one is the stress
management type techniques that work, you can't save
them for the weekend, you can't save them for
when you're stuck on hold on the phone with
Muzak for two minutes. It's got to be something where
you stop what you're doing and do it virtually,
daily or every other day, and spend 20, 30 minutes doing it. And what you see coming
out of that is this like 80/20 rule from economics. 80/20, 80% of the complaints
in the store come from 20% of the customers, things like that. What you see is, if your
entire life consists of every single thing on your shoulders, that you can't say no to 24/7. If you've stopped that and finally said, my wellbeing is important enough that I'm finally get to
say no to some of the stuff that I can't say no to. And I'm going to do it
every day for 20 minutes, whatever stress management technique you then do in those 20
minutes sort of who knows what, you're already 80% of the way there simply by having decided your
wellbeing is important enough that you're going to stop every single day and have that as a priority. And that's exactly the same finding that you find people with
chronic depression untreated that merely calling and
getting an appointment to see a mental health professional, people start feeling better already because it's evidence that
you've been activated, and you matter enough to do this, and you could conceive
that this would actually have a good outcome rather
than a hopeless one. Just doing something meditative or reflective every day or so, and it hardly even matters
which one you're doing. And what comes out of that
is thus another warning, which is do not trust anybody who says, it has been scientifically proven that their brand of stress management works better than the other ones. Just watch your wallet at that point. - Yeah, amen. I think one of the core goals of my lab and David Spiegel's lab, and I know you've worked with David and published papers with David as well is to really try and find out what are the various
entry points to this thing that we call the autonomic nervous system and the stress system, and these systems that when gone unchecked really can take us down a dark path. And the idea that there
are so many entry points is really the one that keeps, what the data keep telling
us over and over again. So there's no magic
breathing tool or exercise, it's any variety of those or one of those. And, again, we come back to this idea that it's the one that you select and the one that you make space for, and it's the one that you hopefully enjoy that's going to work best
in terms of physiology. - And [mumbles] benign for those people who were stuck around you. - Right, right, absolutely. And that brings me to this question of, I find it amazing that
how we perceive an event, and whether or not we chose
to be in that event or not can have such incredible different effects on circuitry of the brain
and circuitry of the body and biology of cells. And in some ways it boggles my mind, like how can a decision made presumably with the prefrontal cortex, although other parts of the brain as well, how can that change
essentially the polarity of a response in the body. And, I mean, you've talked before about Type A personalities in there. We don't have to go into
all the detail there for sake of time, but it is interesting that the effects of endothelial cells. I mean, literally of the size of, [laughs] of the portals for blood
are in opposite direction, depending on whether or not somebody wants to be in a situation
as a highly motivated person. Maybe you could just give
us the top contour of that because I think it really illustrates this principle so beautifully. And then maybe if you would,
you could just speculate on how the brain might
have this switch to turn one experience from terrible to beneficial or from beneficial to terrible,
it's really fascinating. - Well, all you need to do is like tonight before you're going to sleep and you're lying in bed
and you're nice and drowsy and your heart's beating nice and slow, you start thinking about the fact that that heart isn't going to beat forever. [Andrew laughs] And imagine your toes
getting cold afterward and imagine the flow of
blood coming to a halt and all of you clotting. You're going to be doing
something with your physiology at that point that 99% of
mammals out there only do if they're running frantically. And you're going to be turning on your sympathetic stress response with thought, with emotions, with memory. And the measure of that is
just how much the cortex and the limbic system
sends projections down to all the autonomic
regulators in the brain. You can think autonomic
regulatory neurons into action in ways that only other animals can do with like extremes of
environmental circumstances. And given that and the autonomic rule, I mean, the other big
challenge in understanding it is gigantic individual differences. And that's, when you talk about the
optimal amount of stress, the counts of stimulation, and in general that stress
that's not too severe and doesn't go on for too long and there is overall in
a benevolence setting. And under those conditions,
we'd love being stressed by something unexpected and
out of control predictability like a really interesting plot turn in the movie you're watching. That's great, but you get
the individual differences that somehow has to accommodate the fact that for some people, the
perfect stimulatory amount of stress is like getting up early for an Audubon birdwatching
walk next Sunday morning. And for somebody else,
it's signing up to be like a mercenary in Yemen.
[Andrew laughs] And tremendous individual differences that swamp any simple prescriptions. - Yeah, the prefrontal cortex,
this thinking machinery that we all harbor, it's
such a double-edged sword. And what's remarkable to me is, how the areas of the brain
like the hypothalamus and the amygdala, they're
sort of like switches. I mean, there is context
and there is gain control. You talked about the gain
control by testosterone, etc., but they're really like switches. I mean, if you stimulate
ventromedial hypothalamus, you get the right neurons, an animal will try and kill even an object that's sitting next to it. You tickle some other neurons, it'll try and mate with that same object. I mean, it's really wild. I think there are probably
rules to prefrontal cortex also, but it sounds like the context plural from which prefrontal cortex can draw from is probably infinite, so
that we could probably learn to perceive threat in anything. Whether or not it's another group or whether or not it's science or whether or not it's
somebody's version of the shape of the earth versus another. I mean, it's like, you can
plug in anything to this system and give it enough data, and I think it sounds like you
could drive a fear response or a love response. Is that overstepping? - Or [laughs] a mixed
horribly ambivalent one that is changing by the millisecond, and then like could be
mutually contradictory. No, that's absolutely the case in the prefrontal cortex, I more than once have regretted
having like wasted 30 years of my life studying the hippocampus then I shoot him and studied
the prefrontal cortex because it's so much more
interesting what it does, and it's all this contextual stuff. It's all the ways in which it's not okay to lie in this setting, but it's a great thing in another. It's not okay to kill
unless you do it to them, and then you get a medal. It's not, all of this social context and moral relativity and
situational ethic stuff, that's the prefrontal cortex that's got to master that. And that winds up meaning
that's the place in your brain more than anywhere where you
say your perception of things can powerfully influence the reality of what's coming into you.
- Yeah. - I mean, a great example, just
harking back to testosterone. Okay, so exercise boosts
up testosterone levels. Does exercise and success do it more than exercise and failure? A literature back in the 80s or so looking at outcomes of marathons. Did testosterone rise more in the people who win than the losers? Wrestling matches. Things of that sort
with a simple prediction and the answer wound up being, you didn't see a simple answer. Okay, you win the marathon, that's not necessarily a predictor of increased testosterone. What's that about? And then you find like the
winner testosterone decreases, and you find out the guy who came in 73rd is having a massive testosterone increase. Whoa, what's that about? What's that about is
far more human subtlety. The guy who won the race has
a decline in testosterone because he came in three minutes later than he really, really was expecting. And everybody now is
going to be writing it up about how he's over the hill. And the guy who came in 73rd is having a boost of testosterone because he was assuming he'd
be dead from a heart attack by the third mile,
[Andrew laughs] and instead he managed to finish. It's this interpretive
stuff going on in there, and that's what prefrontal
cortex is about. - Amazing, it raises this
question of cognitive flexibility, Can we tell ourselves that
something is good for us even if we're not enjoying it? And can we wriggle around these corners of choosing the exercise or doing the... Personally I'm not a big fan
of long bouts of meditation, but I've benefited
tremendously from things like dedicated breathing and
shorter rounds of meditation. Can I tell myself that it's good for me and wriggle around the corner and get my physiology
working the way I want? Do we have cognitive flexibility? Can I be that third place
runner and tell myself, well, at least I came in,
I wanted to win so badly. That was my primary goal, but another goal was to
beat my previous time, and I did do that. And so, [laughs] I mean, it's... To what extent can we
toggle this relationship between the prefrontal cortex and these other more primitive systems? - Well, an enormous amount. For example, being low in a hierarchy is generally bad for health in
like every mammal out there, including us, but we do something special, which is we can be part
of multiple hierarchies at the same time. And while you maybe low
ranking in one of them, you could be extremely
high ranking in another, you're like have the crappiest
job in your corporation, but you are the captain
of the softball team this year for the company. And you better bet that's somebody who is going to find all sorts of ways to decide that nine to
five Monday to Fridays, just stupid paying the bills. And what really matters is
the prestige on the weekend. You're poorer, but you're the
deacon of your church here. And so we can play all sorts of psychological games with that. One of the most like consistent,
reliable ones that we do and need to use the frontal
cortex like crazy is, somebody does something rotten and you need to attribute it. And the answer is, they
did something wrong, hmm, because they're rotten. Always have been or always will be this
constitutional explanation. You do something rotten to somebody, and how do you explain it afterward? A situational one. I was tired, I was stressed
in this sort of setting, I misunderstood this. We're best at excusing
ourselves from bad things because we have access to our inner lives and we've got prefrontal cortexes that are great at coming up
with a situational explanation rather than, hey, maybe you're just like a selfish rotten
human, you need to change. And that's all prefrontal cortex,
and we do that every time, we don't let somebody merge
in the lane in front of us, even though you curse somebody who does the same thing to you and... Endlessly. - I love it. Your statement about the
fact that we can select multiple hierarchies to participate in. To me it seems like a particularly
important one nowadays with social media being so prevalent. I know you're not particularly
active on social media although you might be pleasantly, or I don't know unpleasantly
surprised to find out that there's a lot of
positive discussion about you and your work, so you don't
even need to be on there. We'll just continue to
discuss [laughs] your work. But what's interesting about
social media I've found is that the context is very, very broad. I mean, one could argue that
who one selects to follow and which news articles
you're reading, etc. can create a kind of a
funneling of information that itself can be dangerous. More verification of crazy ideas or even just less exposure to new ideas. But there's also this idea that social media is an
incredibly broad context. So as you scroll through
a feed, it's no longer like being in your eighth grade classroom or your office or your faculty meeting. You are being exposed to thousands, if not millions of contexts,
this meal, that soccer game, this person's body,
this person's intellect. YouTube is another example. It's a vast, vast landscape. So the context is completely mishmash whereas I'm assuming we evolved. I think we did evolve under contexts that were much more constrained. We interacted with a limited
number of individuals and a limited number of different domains, seasons tended to be constrain us all. Of course, then we got
phones and televisions, and this started to expand, but now more than ever, our
brain, our prefrontal cortex and our sense of where we exist in these multiple hierarchies has essentially wicked out into infinity. How do you think this might be interacting with some of these more primitive systems and other aspects of our biology? - Well, I think what you get is, in some ways the punchline of, what's most human about humans, which is over and over we
use the exact same blueprint, the same hormones, the same
kinases, the same receptors, the same, everything were built
out of the exact same stuff as all these other species out there, and then we go and use it
in a completely novel way. And usually in terms of being able to abstract stuff over space
and time in dramatic ways. So, okay, you're a low ranking baboon and you can feel badly because
you just like killed a rabbit and you're about to eat and some higher ranking guy boots you off and takes it away from you, and you feel crummy and it's
stressful and you're unhappy. We are doing the exact same
things with like our brain and bodies when we're losing
a sense of self-esteem, but we can do it by watching a
movie character on the screen and feeling inadequate
compared to like how wonderful or attractive they are. We can do it by somebody driving past us in an expensive car, and we
don't even see their face, and you can feel belittled by
your own socioeconomic status. You can watch like the
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or read about what Bezos is up to. And for some reason, decide
your life is less fulfilling because you didn't fly
into space for 11 minutes. And so you can feel miserable
about yourself in ways that no other organism can, simply because we can have
our meaningful social networks include like the party you're
reading about on Facebook that you weren't invited to because it's taking place in Singapore, and you don't know any of those people, but nonetheless, somehow
that could be a means for you to feel less content with
who you've turned out to be. Do you take steps in your own life to actively restrict the contexts in which you think and
live and contemplate in order to enhance your creative life, your intellectual life? Are those steps that you actively take? - Well, I very actively
don't know how to make use of anything [laughs] with social media. So I guess that counts as my having thus actively chosen not to learn how. So that's the case certainly
for the last year and a half, like lots of people, I've
gone through stretches where I've managed to sort
of enforce a moratorium on looking at the news, and
that was wonderfully freeing. I think in the larger sense though, in addition to me being a neurobiologist, I'd sort of spent decades
spending part of each year studying wild baboons out in a
national park in East Africa. And I'd spend three months
a year without electricity, without phone calls,
with going 12 hours a day without saying a word to somebody. And when I finally would,
it would be somebody nomadic pastoralist guy
in a different language. Yeah, I did 90% of my
like insightful thinking about anything in the laboratory during those three months each year, and not one in the lab, and
not when inundated with stuff. - Well, I think there is a shifting trend towards trying to create a
narrowing of context that... And I like what I see, I have
a niece, she's 14-years-old and she and her friends are very good at putting their phones away. They say, we're not
going to have our phones for this interaction, especially after... And I realized we're
still somewhat in this. It's unclear where it's headed, but 2020 was so restrictive and she was so separated from her friends. Now it's, let's really
focus on being together and not bring in all these
other elements from our phones. And that brings me great hope for that generation, [laughs]
maybe they will... Or who knows, maybe they'll
run off and study baboons, we need more field researchers. So along the lines of choice, I'd like to shift gears slightly and talk about freewill, about our ability to make choices at all. - Well, my personal way out in left field inflammatory stance is, I don't think we have a shred of freewill despite 95% of philosophers. And I think probably the
majority of neuroscientists are saying that we have freewill in at least some circumstances. I don't think there's any at all. And the reason for this is, you do something, you behave, you make a choice, whatever. And to understand why you did that, where did that intention come from? Part of it was due to like
the sensory environment you were in the previous minute. Some of it is from the hormone levels in your bloodstream that morning. Some of it is from whether
you had a wonderful or stressful last three months and what sort of neuroplasticity happened. Part of it is what hormone levels you were exposed to as a fetus. Part of it is what culture
your ancestors came up with, and thus how you were
parented when you were a kid. All of those are in there, and you can understand where
behavior is coming from without incorporating all of those. And at that point, not only are there all of
these relevant factors, but they're ultimately all one factor. If you're talking about what evolution has to do with your behavior, by definition you're also
talking about genetics. If you're talking about what your genes have to do with behavior, by
definition you're talking about how your brain was constructed or what proteins are coded for. If you're talking about
like your mood disorder now, you're talking about the sense of efficacy you were getting as a five-year-old. They're all intertwined. And when you look at all those influences, basically like the challenge is, show me a neuron that
just caused that behavior, or show me a network of neurons that just caused that behavior. And show me that nothing
about what they just did was influenced by anything
from the sensory environment one second ago to the
evolution of your species. And there's no space in there
to fit in a freewill concept that winds up being in your
brain, but not of your brain. There's simply no wiggle
room for it there. - So I can appreciate that our behaviors and our choices are the
consequences of a long line of dominoes that fell
prior to that behavior. But is it possible that I can intervene in the domino effect, so to speak. In other words, can my
recognition of the fact that genes have heritability, there is an epigenome that,
there is a hormonal context, there is a historical context. Can the knowledge of that give me some small shard of freewill? Meaning, does it allow me to say, ah, okay, I accept that my choices
are somewhat predetermined, and yet knowing that gives me some additional layer of control? Is there any philosophical
or biological universe in which that works? - Nah. All of that can produce the
wonderfully positive belief that change can happen. Even a traumatic change, even
in the worst of circumstances, most unlikely people,
and change can happen, things can change. Don't be fatalistic, don't decide because we're a mechanistic,
biological machines that nothing can ever... Change can happen, but where people go off the rails is translating that into,
we can change ourselves. We don't, we can't because
there's no freewill. However, we can be
changed by circumstance. And the point of it is, like you look at an Aplysia, a sea slug that has learned to retract its gill in response to a shock on its tail, you can do like conditioning,
Pavlovian conditioning on it, and it has learned, its
behavior has been changed by its environment. And you hear news about something like horrifically depressing going on, and refugees in wherever. And as a result, you feel
a little bit more helpless and a less of a sense of
efficacy in the world, and both of your behaviors
have been changed. Okay, okay, yeah, I guess that, but the remarkable thing is, it's the exact same neurobiology. The signal transduction
pathways that were happening in that sea snail incorporate
the exact same kinases and proteases and phosphatases that we do when you're having
mammalian fear conditioning, or when you're alert, it's conserved. It's the exact same thing,
it's simply playing out in obviously a much, much fancier domain. And because you have learned that change is possible despite understanding mechanistically that we can't change
ourselves volitionally, but because you understand
change is possible, you have just changed
the ability of your brain to respond to optimistic stimuli. And you have changed the
ability of your brain to now send you in the
direction of being exposed to more information that will seem cheerful rather than depressing. Oh my God, that's amazing, what Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther king and all these folks did. Wow, under the most
adverse of circumstances, they were able to do. Maybe I can also, maybe I can go read more about people like them to
get even more data points of change the neurochemistry, so that your responses are different now. And you're tilted a little
bit more in that direction of feeling like you can make a difference instead of it's all damn hopeless. So enormous change can happen, but the last thing that
could come out of a view of, we are nothing more or less
than the sum of our biology and its interactions with environment, is to throw up your hands and say, and thus it's no use
trying to change anything. - So we can acknowledge that
change is extremely hard to impossible, that
circumstances can change, and yet that striving to
be better human beings is still a worthwhile endeavor. Do I have that correct?
- Absolutely. Because simply the knowledge,
either from experience or making it to the end of
the right neurobiology class has taught you that change can happen within a framework of a
mechanistic neurobiology. You were now more open
to being made optimistic by the good news in the world around you. You are more likely to be
inspired by this or that, you were more resistant to
getting discouraged by bad news, simply because you now
understand it's possible. - Mm-hmm, yeah, somebody who spent much of his career working
on the hippocampus, I have to assume that you are
a believer in neuroplasticity, that neural circuits can change
in response to experience, and that some of the same
so-called top-down mechanisms of prefrontal cortex that
we were talking about before can play a role there, that the decision to try and change and the pursuit of knowledge
and the pursuit of experience can shape our circuitry, and therefore make us different
machines, so to speak. - Yeah. And not only can say
prenatal hormone exposure changed the way your brain
is being constructed, but learning that
prenatal hormone exposure can change the construction of your brain will change your brain right now, and how you think about where
your intentions came from. Wow, maybe that had
something to do with it. The knowledge of the
knowledge is an effector in and of itself. - That's such an important and
powerful statement to hear. I think that many people
think that if a tool, if it doesn't involve
a pill or a protocol, that it's useless. And certainly there
are pills and protocols that are very useful
in a variety of context for a variety of things, but
the idea that knowledge itself, whereas you put it, knowledge
of knowledge is itself a tool, I think is a very important
concept for people to embed in their minds. And, listen, I'm so
grateful for this discussion and for you raising these topics. I think that people, many people know your work
on testosterone, on stress, and we've covered some of that today, the work on freewill and this
idea that we are hopeless or that we are in total control. I think I'm realizing in listening to you that it's neither is true,
and that the solution resides in understanding more about freewill and lack of it, [laughs]
and also neuroplasticity. You're working on a book about freewill, are you willing to tell us
a little bit about that book and where you are in that process and what we can look forward to? - Yeah, it's going really slow. Title is, "Determined: A Science
of Life Without Freewill." And essentially the
first half of the book is trying to convince a reader, okay, if not that there's
no freewill whatsoever, but at least there's a lot
less than is normally assumed. And I'm going through all the standard arguments for freewill, and why that doesn't make sense
with 21st century science? And that has led to reading
a lot of very frustrating philosophers who basically
are willing to admit that stuff is made out of
like atoms and molecules. And like there's a physical
reality sort of world, they're not just relying on magic, but that they believe in
freewill for magical reasons, and where it doesn't make sense. Okay, so the first half of the book is to hopefully convince people that
there's much less freewill than we used to think. And then the second half
is this gigantic juncture built around the fact
that I haven't thought there's any freewill since
I was like an adolescent. And despite thinking that way, I still have absolutely no idea how you're supposed to
function with that belief. How are you supposed to
go about everyday life if anything you feel
entitled to isn't true? If any angers and hatreds
you feel aren't justified, if there's no such thing as appropriate, blame or punishment or praise or reward, and none of it makes any sense, and somebody like even
compliments you on your haircut, and you've been conditioned
to say, oh, thanks, as if you had something to do. How are we supposed to function with that? And so the second half
is wrestling with that, and what the punchline there is, is it's going to be incredibly hard. And if you think it's going to be hard to subtract a notion of freewill out of making sense of
like serial murderers, it's going to be a thousand times harder making sense of when somebody
says "good job" to you. [Andrew laughs]
And because it's the exact same on reality of sort
of our interpretations. It's going to be incredibly hard, but nonetheless when
you look at the history of how we have subtracted
the notion of agency out of all sorts of realms of
blame, starting with thinking that witches caused
hailstorms 500 years ago to the notion that
psychodynamically screwed up mothers cause schizophrenia, we've done it. We've done it endless number of times, we've been able to subtract
out a sense of volition in understanding how the
world works around us. And we don't have murderers
running amuck on the street, and society hasn't
collapsed into a puddle, and in fact, it's a more humane society. So the good news is it's possible because we've done it
repeatedly in the past, but it's going to be hard as hell. And it's hard as hell to try
to write about that coherently, [laughs] I'm discovering,
so it's going slowly. - Well, I speak for many,
many people when I say that we're really excited
for the book when it's done and we will patiently wait, but with great excitement
for the book, "Determined". You said it's the title, correct? - Yeah, "Determined: The Science
of Life Without Freewill". It seems like you can't
publish your book these days without a sub-title, so that's it? - Fantastic. Well, very excited to read the book. I'm very grateful to you
for this conversation today, I learned a ton. Every time you speak I learn, and for me it's really been a pleasure and a delight to interact with you today and over the previous years,
I should say, as colleagues. And thank you again, Robert,
for everything that you do and all the hard, hard work and thinking that you put into your work because it's clear that
you put a lot of hard work and thinking, and we all
benefit as a consequence. - Thanks, and thanks for
having me, this was a blast. - Thank you for joining
me for my conversation with Dr. Robert Sapolsky. If you're enjoying this
podcast and learning from it, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. In addition, you can leave
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information on this podcast. And last but not least, thank you for your interest in science. [upbeat music]
His lecture series on human behaviour is top notch stuff.
Damn. I got excited and thought Joe had a good guest on today.
He needs to go back on Rogan!
notice how careful andrew is not to challenge anything he says directly..
Thanks for posting, I had forgot about this.
I love my girl with testosterone.
People on this sub need more T, need to watch other podcasts, exercise, and chill out. Covid won’t kill you if you go to the gym. People who exercise are 50% less likely to catch it
His Rogan podcast one of my favourite ever, top 5 no doubt