Joe Rogan Experience #965 - Robert Sapolsky

the Joe Rogan experience strain my day Joe acaba yeah one night all day all right first of all thanks for doing this I really read it I found out about you several years back I heard something about toxoplasmosis and Cynthia yeah and I had seen a speech that you had given on it where you were talking about how many people had been infected by this camper so I cast my whole life and I even had feral cats and I've always wondered I should probably get tested and I'm worried about the result yeah well it was just fascinating to me that literally I mean what is the number that you estimate in an Americans alone that might have been invented it's on the order of I'm not sure with Americans but worldwide it's something like 50% of humans is the best guess 50% of humans love one thing on that scale a couple people they never heard of this would you mind explaining what this parasite is and how it affects rats and then catchment people okay totally bizarre so it's this protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii and it's got one of these weird parasitic lifestyles the only place on earth where it could reproduce sexually is in the god of a cat I don't know why there are people who know this but so it reproduces there comes out in the cat feces feces are eaten by rodents and now toxins evolutionary challenge is to get that rodent into a cat stomach so what toxo has evolved is this ability it slowly migrates to the brain of rodents and basically wipes out the innate fear that rodents have of cat smells like you take a lab rat who's been like the descendent of lab rats for like a thousand years and never seen a cat and put like a little puddle of cat pee in this cage and the rats good to go when the other side of the cage just hardwired instinctual aversion to cat pheromones and then put talks of in a rat and it loses that aversion and in fact it was subset of rats they like the smell so how in the natural setting you now go and approach a cat and soon the rodents inside the cat stomach and toxin was completed its life cycle well I'd heard that it was a so it's a subset of rats that actually are gravitated towards it because I've heard it actually rewires them sexually right yes that that's actually work that we did in my lab that it basically crosses some of the circuitry in the brain and hypothalamus so that cat pheromones that used to be activating every alarm circuit in your point limbic system in these rodents now instead sort of taps into sexual arousal pathways and in male rats when they smell cat pheromones they increase testosterone production so toxo has just figured out the muslim' brilliant way of doing it it makes cat pee smell sexy do is there any understanding at all of the mechanism of how a parasite can figure out how to rewire an animal's sexual reward system the fear of predators like how does that work well that's something my lab spent a bunch of years on trying to figure out when you look at some of these parasites this taps into this whole world of behavioral manipulation of hosts by parasites and turns out take like evolves unbelievably brilliant mechanisms for manipulating hosts for their own benefit I mean think about it you get rabies you've a rabid dog and what that's about is a virus that has affected the nervous system of that dog so that it's now rabbit and more likely to bite somebody with viral particles in its saliva which it now passes on to the next individual like you take 10,000 neuroscientists and stick them in the Convention on the neurobiology of aggression and rabies knows more about the neural watering of aggression than we do Wow and talks oh no loose quotation marks something about fear and aversion and the neurobiology of attraction part of what it seems to involve is talk so somewhere along the way has picked up a gene that is pertinent to the dopamine system in mammals dopamine is this neurotransmitter it's about pleasure there's no protozoan parasite for doing years that's have any use for this stuff except it's part of how toxic seems to be manipulating the reward system in rodents and then a couple years ago there's paper showing that in chimpanzees toxin makes you less afraid of the smell of leopards so this appears to be a parasite that just has evolved like this spectacular insight into fear circuitry and attraction circuitry and it's all for its own benefit to the wind up my cats got so it's specifically Catholic it did to the chimpanzee still of aversions to snakes and other things you can tell them yep yeah and at one point my lab was full of like all cat key and wolf key and is actually like a company you could buy a year and from I don't know why anyone would want it except for us but they sell urine from actually what these four is you can go spritz it around your garden to scare the deer without our knowing needing that stuff so there's I don't know where they get the urine from but it's like comes certified it and all of that um and yeah it's remarkably specific so like other and they were done tests where they test like wolf urine or anything like that around the chimps do they have any aversion to that as far as I know the chimp study is only then with big cat urine but the rodent studies exactly that showing it's a fair specificity the rodents lose a little bit of their general skittishness they get a little bit disinhibited behaviorally so just in general they're out warm works for return more likely to evening but the most selective laser in effect is they're not scared anymore of cat pheromones now what's fascinating to me is that I've also read that there was a disproportionate amount of successful soccer teams that are in countries with high rates of infestation of Toxoplasma okay that one's that one's new to me but that that sounds like exactly the sort of epidemiological studies that are popping up the back humans okay so what about humans there's two branches and interesting stuff with talks in humans one is a literature that's been around for quite some time showing that top so seems to increase the risk of schizophrenia there's a higher rate with schizophrenia of individuals who have antibodies against talk so in other words sometime in the past their body was dealing with it who had cats growing up whose mother had cats during pregnancy and like anybody who gets pregnant there was you immediately get all anxious about cat litter boxes because of ultimately they've toxoplasmosis it can attack the feel nervous system do all sorts damage and a subtle version of it seems to be a sleeper effect of increasing the risk of schizophrenia the other realm is toxin infected humans get subtle changes in personality neuropsychology to neuropsychological profiles they get a little bit disinhibited if your talk so infected you are more likely to die in a car accident involving reckless speeding if you're toxo infected and clinically depressed for the same severity of depression you are more likely to impulsively kill yourself in other words tox is doing something kind of similar if you're a rat one of the hardest wired scary things in the universe out there is melodye cat if you're human it's hurtling through space really fast and jumping out of windows and tops of seams to blunt a lot of those effects they're in this the speech that I saw you give you were talking about your time working in a hospital and that there was a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims this was actually something I heard from a clinician that a Noll sort of parasitology infectious disease doctor who served when I was first telling him about this sort of emergent toxin story he had like one of these moments of memory saying my god I remember back when I was a resident there is this old doctor saying you know if you're ever harvesting all organs from an accident victim I don't know why I don't know why but if it's from somebody who was in a motorcycle accident make sure you check to see if they have toxoplasmosis I don't know why that there's a high rate of that 55 in organs from people who were killed driving motorcycles recklessly totally anecdotal N equals one kind of thing but nonetheless this this was a guy who moved like studies infectious disease in toxoplasmosis and had not heard about sort of the behavioral findings before and that I wouldn't recesses of his memory so what initially seemed like okay this parasite that's very selectively developed this lifecycle between cat stomachs and rodent brains and completing his lifecycle and weird when it gets into humans I have some behavioural effects also that's just kind of evolutionary spillover but then you see if it's doing something similar between chimps and leopards suggesting that that life cycle manipulation has been selected for primates as well very strange it's a very strange and for me the strangest thing is the certainty with which there's a gazillion viruses and bacteria god knows what else out there that manipulate host behavior in ways we just haven't figured out yet always have this right way I'm discovered the particular yeah what is it do to women the similar fact seems to have less severe effects on neuropsychological profiles of women again the literature on this is pretty scanty in humans but it seems that some similar effects but not as extreme however the story now gets a little bit more complicated and this is actually this fabulous on it just on TV us who's my postdoc who's now a professor in Singapore's continue to study this okay so normally one of the things animals have evolved to be really good at is picking up signals that somebody else is unhealthy like a potential mate is unhealthy there's sickness behavior there's very olfactory cues if you're a rodent makes perfect sense the last thing you want to do is to be meeting with somebody who's like rancid and infectious and wrote an equivalence of STDs so normally sick animals parasite infected animals and such are detected by other rodents and avoided toxin does something different you get a toxin infected nail and now he smells more attractive to female rodents and when mating toxin gets into the sperm and B cage can be transmitted to the female whoa so suddenly we've got a different story here we start off with a parasite story where toxin was just ruthlessly exploiting the poorer rodents birds only like reproductive benefit and its own evolutionary selfish gene will be but now instead it's got elements of instead of parasite ISM symbiosis so your male rat infected would talk so down side you're more likely to get eaten by a cat up side you're more likely to pass on copies of your genes increased sexual selection so it might be in fact more of a balance the symbiotic relationship between male rats and talk so you know more research is needed blah blah it's just like cool survival energy out there it's crazy and is it is it transferred sexually with men and women too as well as with rats I don't know I don't think it's been looked at Wow it seems of something that one looked at right away yeah what about organ donors other than again pure anecdotal ISM that one the elderly Doc's somewhere back when saying watch it when you're getting organs from like people killed motorcycle accidents beyond that I don't know I mean people are looking at it I'm sure do they even test like say if you've got a liver and you know like you needed a liver transplant but they suspect they do and sort of in the clinical world of people who worried about talk so talk so low pregnancy scary alarms going off talk so anything else after an acute period infection you have a latent Toxoplasma infection in other words the agreed-upon sort of notion there is talk so has gone late and with its form sort of these cysts that are inert and you got nothing to worry about them but the whole notion that meanwhile of the nervous system there's effects happening there you know infectious disease people are thinking about inflammation outside of the body or for them chronic toxic infection is not something you worry about a whole lot but if it's some passing behavioural effects up there in the nervous system it is something to worry about well it's just it's to me it's unfathomable how this little thing figures out how to hijack a whole whole body whole biological system and work it to its own desires it's very it's very hard for me to grasp well if you think of it in terms of I don't know toxo has had like a hundred thousand more generations to evolve its ways of exploiting mammals and mammals have had ways of fighting it off what's most remarkable in terms of this is like a whole world of parasites that do bizarre manipulative things to their hosts most of its not in the realm of mammals instead there's like some parasitic something or other that gets into barnacles and takes over their reproductive system so that the barnacle digs a hole for them that is not the barnacle but the parasite to lay eggs into there's the aquatic worm that infects the grasshopper makes it commit suicide exactly that one's bizarre that one's bizarre there's this wasp that gets into cockroaches and takes a lot of intimacy I'm fascinated by parasites but beyond that it's just it's so confusing to me how something I mean obviously you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of generations for it to get to this this current state but like how something evolves to be so effective against it it's so confusing it's remarkable um you know just to flip to the the other end of the spectrum in terms of what like coevolution between two different species could be like over the last twenty thousand years look at what we've done we've taken wolves and turned them into these creatures we put Halloween costumes on and like a finding a couple of years ago which like floored me whose hormone oxytocin which is totally trendy oxytocin is completely cool mother-infant bonding is mediated by oxytocin pair bonding in monogamous species oxytocin makes you more trusting and expressive and generous and economic games and oxytocin has all these pro-social effects within a species but then it turns out that this hormone that has spent the last I don't know 100 million years having mothers and infants connect to each other emotion um when you and your beloved dog sit there and stare into each other's eyes you move secrete oxytocin and if you pump up oxytocin levels and your dog it will stare at you longer and you will stare longer back that's not could be more oxytocin this is like an inch ancient hormone having to do with mother-infant bonding and in 20,000 years which is like a blink of an eye evolutionarily suddenly we're doing this weird oxytocin tango thing with another species and other species who we feed and take care of and they like manipulate us wildly into like giving and like good like dessert treat bones and stuff like that and they in turn do all sorts of one for stuff for our self-esteem because they like Wicca so unconditionally where'd that come from like just 20 thousand years and you'd like hijack this ancient neuroendocrinology about like parental behavior and now it's got to do with this weird symbiotic thing we and wolf has worked out somewhere back home what does it have any effect on friendship like human beings staring at each other do that if anybody ever tested that I would assume people have looked at that it for example it strengthens monogamous bonds and there's a literature by now looking at oxytocin has its effects by binding to an oxytocin provider there's a gene for the oxytocin receptors comes a number of variants and if you have one particular variant that's associated with oxytocin having less effective of a new in your nervous system that's associated with less stable relationships so you know none of the stuff is deterministic your your your sex life in your romantic life is not being determined by this one gene like nothing remotely resembling that but that's just part of the mix in there I just wonder if that makes applies to a platonic friendships like two male bonding and stuff I wonder if there's when guys are out having a good they're also getting a good jeez of oxytocin my guess is when you have here your basic like pathetic male sociality just like that you've like talked about sports for five minutes with some guy and as a result you're willing to give up your life for him because like you know this is male male boy I bet that's got something to do with oxytocin yeah I mean it only makes sense I mean how many of these different factors are there in manipulating human behavior I mean this is essentially your specialty right because yeah okay so switching over to this part of the brain the frontal cortex which is just like the coolest part of the brain it's the most recently evolved we've got more of that or it's more complicated in us than any other species once the frontal cortex do it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do self control long-term planning gratification postponement emotional regulation all this sort of stuff and frontal cortex its function is totally amazing how it does this okay so another way of stating that is over and over in life we come to splits in the road where we've got temptations and we've got impulses and we've got yeah go for it right now you know you want it and the frontal cortex is critical at that juncture as to whether we like do the inane and pulses self-indulgent thing that we may perhaps regret for the rest of our lives or if you tough it out and do the right hand like what your frontal cortex does a critical junctures is like one of the most consequential pieces under a biology we've got so you ask what kind of things affect how well your frontal cortex is working in that one second where you have to decide if that person is holding a cell phone or a handgun until you pull a trigger or in that one second where you decide to you take this thing and run or those temptation get resisted and so what sort of biological things affect what your frontal cortex is doing how hungry you are if you're hypoglycemic how tired you are if you're in pain all of this make the frontal cortex work not as well if you're male what your testosterone levels are at the time no surprise testosterone makes your frontal cortex all sluggish and stupid but your stress hormone levels were if you've been traumatized over the previous five months because sustained stress will atrophy the frontal cortex but wait what versions of the number of genes you've got how much stress hormones you were exposed to from your mother when you were fetus how this led there was in the water when you were kid if your ancestors were nomadic pastoralists and developed a culture of Honor what your nutritional status was when you were getting everything in between all of this coming down to whoa there's just biological forces shaping what we're doing to an incredible extent it's the exact same story about any other part of the brain but this is just like one of the most dramatic ones Oh a moment of agency and free will and volition whether or not I'm going to resist this temptation or not by age five for example a kid's socioeconomic status is already a predictor of how much frontal development there is in this part of the brain because if you've been foolish enough in this country that changed the wrong parents to get born and singer and you're being raised in poverty on the average your stress hormone levels are higher and as a result of that on the average your frontal cortex is thinner and not developing as fast and on the average we're ready at age five you're not as good as on average Anthony hold out relieve me you're going to be glad you held out for this long term reward thing Wow now is toxo have an effect on the frontal cortex um almost certainly that's that's a hot area of research we were originally hoping to see that oh toxin was just going to like laser in on just some key parts of the brain that are absolutely essential to this behavioural effect seems to wind a more wattage spread so that was sort of makes a tougher story but in some ways sort of impulsive behavior here is either due to a stronger biology of impulsiveness which has much to do with a limbic system dealing or a weaker biology of hold on a second are you sure this is such a great idea the hold on a second this is such a great idea is the realm of the frontal cortex so that could very readily be half of the equation right there Wow now the final cortex is not fully online until you're what 2025 it's like it's a boggling thing so you just live your life like an ape and until you're I mean you're deep into your adulthood you're responsible for yourself over seven years and you're yeah which has some like stupefying implications and not just for like explaining why your freshman roommate Mississippi was a uniform with male women yeah a female development maturation of the frontal cortex configures fast with of course any males of course but nonetheless it is very delayed match that should that has to do whether you're talking about with testosterone impeding it um seems to be a different mechanism there are motorists in general so compounded rain so it was it so that the testosterone impedes it and then there's some ties as well sure does not help but it's completely well it's basically the explanation for why adolescents are adolescent they have a brain that's going full blast especially the dopamine system with reward and sensation seeking and novelty seeking anticipation and a frontal cortex that's like half-baked at that point and is not very good at controlling impulses that's why adolescents are the way they are so to sort of really interesting implications with that first one is sort of in a kind of big picture legal implications realm this fact that the frontal cortex is not fully developed you're in your mid-20s was implicitly the main driving force around the Supreme Court's on the interns ago saying you can't execute somebody for a crime they did before age 18 and you can't put it behind bars from the rest of life without a chance of parole because their frontal cortex isn't quite there yet of course the flaw with that thinking is the presumption that magically on the very morning of your 18th birthday you certainly have a spanking new frontal cortex that like has memorized all those Sunday morning sermons and can like get you to do the right thing but at least the courts have implicitly recognized that brain maturation parentheses frontal cortex is such of that adolescent impulse control that not what you see an adult son has to be judged differently the other issue that sort of fascinates me on a neurobiological level you know most of your cortex is doing just fine by the time you're three four or five years old and there's the frontal cortex taking another like 20 years to get there so you say so is the frontal cortex just a tougher construction project then the rest of the brain does it have like fancy type neurons you don't see elsewhere that take amazing wiring or like unique neurotransmitters like what is it just like a tougher construction project is that why you get the delay and you look closely and no it's not it's not implicitly a tougher project you don't get delayed frontal maturation because it's so hard to water up you get the delay because we've been selected to have the delay you want a frontal cortex that spends a long long time learning okay how come because by definition if this is the last part of the brain to wire up it's the part of the brain that's most sculpted by experience and environment and least constrained by genes and this is the part of a brain that does social appropriate context learning and that's incredibly tough stuff like every society every culture on earth you think about it every culture on earth celebrates some types of murder and is horrified and punishes other types some get medals some get damnation some get like simply that one every culture has some sort of strictures against lying yet in some circumstances expect you to have socially appropriate lie in certain circumstances of protection or so on and every culture does this differently every culture has cultural specific mores and situational ethics and things like and that's like fancy complicated stuff that takes a long time to learn that's what you're doing is an adolescent as a young adult your lettering all the subtleties appropriate behavior that's your frontal cortex learning not just how to get you to do the right thing that there's a harder thing to do but all those complexities of what actually counts is the right thing and all the things that make us human above all the other diamonds above all others because we're the species that in some cultures can say we strongly believe in monogamy and build our theologies around that yet at the same time have incredibly high rates of people failing to remain monogamous yet condemned that we have cultures where like you're not supposed to lie yet at some point you have to learn like okay it's okay to lie in a circumstance of so tell us are you harboring there's refugees in your attic no no of course not situational ethics like that it takes a very strong frontal cortex to keep you for lying and since the technique circumstances but once you decide you're going to lie it takes a strong strong frontal cortex to do it right to do it effectively because you gotta regulate your voice and your facial expressions and where your eyes are looking whoa so this is a part of the brain that's got to incorporate your society's rules as to when is okay to light and in fact the sort of thing that we view is heroic but when it's not okay to lie but once you decide you're going to lie how to do it effect this is like complicated neurobiology it can't just come with a genetic program of lawyers it up it's got it be totally sculpted by learning all those subtleties Wow and is there another animal other than humans that does delay reward yeah I mean the dopamine system the reward system the interactions with the frontal cortex happening in a rodent like rodents the glare it's a master ok if I press this lever once I get one reward but if I do two leather presses I work twice as hard to get three rewards whoa that's the way to go it can master that monkeys can master that but it's just implicitly a different thing like a monkey could do a delayed gratification tasks where it's gotta wait a couple of minutes for the reward and it's the exact same you're a bottom aji OVA as us doing delayed gratification except we do delayed gratification like you study hard to get a good SAT score to get into a good college to get into a good grad school to get a good job to get into the nursing home of your choice uses delayed gratification that takes 60 years depending on your theology we do delayed gratification where the rewards not going to karma supposedly until the afterlife so like yeah a monkey can have its frontal cortex - delayed gratification for Wow on a scale of the minutes then we go and we've like do it for 70 years it's we're just in a different league in that regard Wow so essentially maybe even some religious rules or some ethical guidelines that we follow could almost be like a scaffolding for the frontal cortex absolutely the rule of what counts as the right thing and what counts as the harder thing Wow it's very very culture specific and that's a tough neurobiological draw to master do we have any idea when this is Devi said this is the most recent thing developed in healings or the most recent we understand well it's them it's the most recently evolved to the brain which is to say like lizards another tech sunrise I must to write home about but they've got like primitive cortex it's not too you get to mammals and that you start getting fancier cortex that does more abstract stuff and it's not to get to mammals that you start seeing the first hits of frontal cortex so you know recently evolved the last 50 to 100 million years so in other words the frontal cortex is like spanking new and it's not till you get to primates that can get a big frontal cortex and spectacularly large in Apes and then proportionately it's particularly large or complexly wider than us now I know you spend a lot of time studying baboons and I listen to that radio lab podcast that you did where this baboon he called the troop yeah baboon troop that was next to the place that was dumping human ways or human garbage yeah and that these baboons became accustomed to eating this human garbage and the unprecedented change in their behavior when the males that dominant males got sick from tuberculosis yep okay so as you said that I've been studying baboons how did you study them by the way like how does that work we do oh it's been 33 summers I spent out there going back to a single every year it took about eight years ago they've been essentially 33 straight summer Slough of like you go back to the same animals and you camp under the same tree and this is in a national park in eastern Africa and you go back to the same animals and so the particular area I focused my work on over the years is stress and health and what stress does to the brain and and with the baboons it was trying to make sense of what does your social rank and your personality and your patterns of social affiliation have to do with which baboons have the rotten cholesterol levels which baboons have the high blood pressure who's healthy who's not so these are animals where you go do your basic games we've all seen just like watching men lessly and knowing all about their personal lives and in addition I would dart anesthetize the baboon's easily got a blow gun system which was totally fun to do but anesthetize them and when they're down to basically the same clinical workouts you would give them a human sort of okay asthma's body's immune system working this year how they're just working that the last time I was out I had a portable electric cardiogram machine for looking at cardiovascular cardiac function these guys so you keep them there for a day you do various tests and you know let them go back to their bodies and we have a sense of how is their bodily function their health their diseases their stress physiology related to aspects of behavior for the first 10 years out there I thought when I had learned was if you want to be a healthy baboon with a minimal number of stress-related diseases and you get a choice in the matters you want to be high ranking took me about 25 years and almost certainly that had to do by having to grow up a little bit on my own to realize that there's much more interesting stuff going on if you got a choice between being a high ranking by word or a baboon with a lot of stable affiliative relationships translated into English friends friends are going to be even better for your health like that's even more protective how often do you sit in a room with somebody else how often you're sitting in contact how often you playing with infants turns out that's much more of a buffer for good health and simply what your dominance rank is so these baboons they started eating food from a resort and it changed their behavior to the point where they were no longer getting up very early and foraging they knew when the food was coming so they just wandered down to this dump and then they would basically essentially fight over dominance of the thumb and a few strong powerful males had control over that until they got sick great yep so this was the truth next word Ahmad mr. logs in their territory and thus had a garbage dump and like national parks everywhere I have this issue of having a controlled wild animals access to so this garbage dump true as you said taken to basically just living in the trees above the dump waddled down each morning just in time for the like food junk leftovers from the logs to be dumped there and you know I did a few studies on this troop they got high cholesterol levels they got borderline diabetes they put on like subcutaneous fat they were you eating as I thought yeah yeah we've got tooth decay they got different like parasites in their stomachs so they're they're just fine living off of a good life they're like three now desserts from this tourist log and in my troop a couple of kilometers away I don't know how this works but in some babbling way some my mails got word of this feast being going on up there like they smelled it I don't know but it evolved that in the mornings about half the mails from my troop would pick up and we run those couple of kilometers to go punch it out with the guys there to get access to some of this garbage the key thing was that it wasn't random which of my baboons would go over there so you're a guy from like an outside troop and you show up at this garbage dump then there's a bad bruise like feasting there and you're an outsider no one from my troop would like drink going near the garbage unless he's a big aggressive guy the other thing is mornings when baboons do most of their socialising stuff pieces around the groom and they gossip before they go out and they do today's foraging so if you are willing to pick up and instead spend each morning fighting with strangers of the garbage that means you're not very socially affiliated so in other words the males from my troop we're going to anything are 'bitch were the most aggressive least socially affiliated guys so this is going on for a couple of years and then there turns out to be a tuberculosis outbreak among the baboons over there because there was tubercular Mead in the launch um meat inspector who's being bribed I mean all sort of horrifying things and you know human gets tuberculosis and they can sit around and write thousand page novels about for the next ten years while they slowly waste away TB kills other primates like over the course of weeks it's like wildfire and non-human primates so there's an outbreak of TB from the infected meat in this launch dump and it basically kills all the bat wings in that route and it kills all of my baboons who have been going over there every morning for food so now what you have is half the number of males as usual so you got a to the one female to male ratio which is pretty atypical for a babbling troop and the key thing is the baboons who were left are the nice guys they're socially affiliated they're the least aggressive what's that we an aggression about you're having a bad day you find somebody smaller and weaker to take it out on they were dumping on weaker animals they weren't having displaced aggression and it turned into just to be technical here like a much nicer troop they were at much higher rates of grooming less aggression more sitting and contact male baboons would groom each other which you don't see male babblin screwing each other in this troop they would say that of itself that's totally fascinating so okay you get rid of 50% of the males through the jerks and you have a commune merica or not what was most interesting the thing that just flattened me was ten years later the truth is still like that ten years later all the males who were there during the TB outbreak who survived it not sure then sort of the commune there they're long gone so who are the new males male baboons pick up at puberty they leave their home troop and they go wander and enjoying some adult troop somewhere else and spend the rest of your life there hierarchy in other words by ten years later all the males in this troop who are still being less aggressive and more socially affiliated they had all grown up someplace else and some other true and transferred as adolescents into this troop and somehow or other learned even though they grew up in the normal big bad baboon world out there somehow they learned we don't do crap like that here cut it out Wow and I did a ton of work so they've seen what that was about and it takes about six months once these new males show up for them they're less subject to resident males dumping on them because there's less of this displacement aggression females who are getting dumped on less by males and thus are much more relaxed lower stress hormone levels are more willing to be affiliated with them you're some new adolescent male and you show up in your typical babari troop and it's like 80 days on the average before some female forgives you and this troop it was like three days everyone because everybody is much more relaxed because no one's being miserable to each other and it turns out you take a jerky adolescent male because these guys were just as jerky as any transfer males or to any of the neighboring troops and like you treat them nicer and they kind of calm down over the next six months and literally what you had what social anthropologists would be forced to define as cultural transmission non genetic transmission of a style of behavior from one generation to the next this was culture being transmitted a culture of high affiliation and less aggression and these baboons are essentially living a natural lives and not getting food from people yep they're just living to out in the Serengeti in East Africa going about normal back in life for me what was most striking about this is like baboons are like as high rates of aggression as you find in any non-human primate male dominance highly hierarchical structured societies since the early 60s they've not just metaphorically but they literally been the textbook example of primates evolved for aggression and male dominance hierarchy and stratification and all it took was one generation of a radically unique circumstance and you see a pattern of babbling behavior that had never been seen before so in a sense what we see in human beings we see big differences in cultures in the way people are treated the way women are treated the way we they cohabitate with each other the way just whatever the communities they live in there's difference in the way we behave but with most primates would you essentially say like most chimpanzees and most bonobos that you can kind of uniformly say but no bows behave this way chimpanzees behave this way yeah is this the only time you've ever seen like a complete variation of the standard behavior of a primate um as far as I know this is the only example of something like this that's been seen but other ecological extremes and you get some radical shifts but in lots of ways this is the biggest cultural shift that anyone has seen in sort of the social milieu of a baboon troop and for me what the biggest take-home message that is exactly what you just honed in on who these guys are textbook examples of the inevitability of stratification and aggression and you know it turns out it's not inevitable it can suddenly flip with some like unique circumstances and be transmitted multi-generationally anyone who could look at humans and say that there's certain inevitabilities to some of the most unpalatable things we do then I would like to stand on yeah AB Boone's have the behavioural sort of flexibility plasticity built into them just lurking for a unique situation like this and suddenly six months of a different cultural style and you adopt it and pass it on again you don't have a leg to stand on to say that certain of the worst things about human culture and behavior is inevitable so we vary so wildly from continent to continent that we've kind of used to it but to see it in in another kind of primate and to see that circumstances can change the way they behave and literally change their entire community to the point where decades later it's like 20 years later they're still the same writers of the case they the culture there went for about 20 years and is it does it dissolve now the Dom off back to normal Babylon unfortunately it basically ended when the troops were moved into the vacuum created by the the KP outbreak Americans who moved into the lodge area and they disintegrate it's true a lot of them got obituaries enough to the humans there represent the danger game Park Rangers had to kill about half of them so the troop basically does not exist anymore but for about four years that's crazy well does that give you hope when it comes to human beings because it seems like it's such a radical shift of the behavior of a primate without a language yeah that to see that that's possible that just a shift the circumstance can change the entire behavior pattern of this troop yep I mean sort of the the easy take-home message is to usher in the world peace with humans just like go give TVs or like a dress but I guess that's not the sort of most obvious take-home message but I mean you look at humans change human cultures change with 17th century like the most terrifying people in Europe were the Swedes they spent the whole century rampaging through Europe and they've now gone more than two hundred years since they've had a war world war one Christmas trees in 1914 all it took was about four hours of British and German troops Fratton all fizzing from across the lines while they were supposedly doing and more than retrieving dead bodies from no-man's land between the trenches and before it was over with they were praying together and having Christmas dinner together and playing soccer together and exchanging addresses to meet after the war and where they held out for days at some of those points until officers had to show up and threatened to shoot these guys unless they went back to trying to kill each other change can occur very dramatically I mean these days there's entire travel agencies that devote that are devoted to Vietnam veterans going to Vietnam going back for reconciliation ceremonies are going back to you know foundations that literally build bridges across rivers help build schools all of what if that could have been conceived of like 1970 yeah Kings have an astonishing capacity for change it's just it's so fascinating when you consider all of the variables that cause a person to be who they are to behave with Iran and them interacting with all these other people who share variables and have unique variables and that there's so many different factors in what makes a community a city a country it's it's pretty mind-boggling when you consider all the variables it's utterly mind-boggling and just to really get sort of provocative or at this point what one does with all that complexity and with all the biology we haven't discovered yet and all those gaping sort of holes of explanation mr. where that behavior comes from this is thing we call freewill yeah all freewill is is the biology we haven't discovered yet yeah Sam Harris broke my brain talking about 30 will once where I really believed it was real until he started explaining to me determinism and all the different variables and yeah I mean you did there is a little bit of something that we have where you're talking about the phial cortex it allows you to resist things but like why is yours the way it is big question right yeah and if some of it had to do with how stressed your mother was when you were fetus yeah like how okay like here's just on the level of sort of sensory stuff going on just the sensory cues we're giving of the world and how that's influencing our behavior put up a pair of autism poster with just showing a pair of eyes on a bus stop and people Ritter less well display a pair of eyes on a computer screen and people become more generous and online economic games because it's tapping into um being watched stick somebody in a room with smelly garbage and they become more socially conservative on questionnaires they're filling out because something just feels this really disgusting and that biases us towards deciding that something that's different is different than wrong people don't become more conservative about economic issues er geopolitical stuff they're just more likely decide that them to do something different from you it's not just different it's wrong because something just feels kind of disgusting because they're smelly garbage in a room one very influential study looking at 5000 judicial decisions over the course of a year in a parole board system and the single biggest predictor of what decision a judge is going to make if they gave somebody perl or sent them back to the slammer was how many hours having been since the judge you've eaten a meal Wow because when you've got higher glucose levels in your bloodstream your frontal cortex works better because the real expensive part of the brain and when you're hungry you feel less sympathy you feel less empathy people become less generous and economic games and how much would you contribute to this and what sort of a judge has to do they're in a situation anytime we judge is do this difficult frontal task of trying to view the world from somebody else's perspective and they're hypoglycemic you have and even in four hours and it's more likely that your frontal like some effectives going to say slim bad that's too hard the guys robbing send it back to jail what's most amazing is if you had gotten one of those judges two seconds after they made that decision that could most be predicted by the effects of glucose on the brain metabolism intestine so why do you make that decision and they're going to like be quoting like Enlightenment Age philosophers or something and that's just like rationalization running to catch up with the biology that's just rumbling underneath the surface there and influencing our behaviors Wow so it like may be one of the best ways we can enhance society is keep people well fed and lower stress yeah if nothing else like what people have known for decades when we're stressed are like learning and memory doesn't work that well then people learned we're more likely to be anxious and learn to be afraid of things we don't need to be afraid of and then we learned we're more likely to have horrible judgment and have our frontal cortex not going to work very well and the nudist realm of that is and when you're stressed you're less empathic because it takes a lot of work to try to view the world from somebody else's perspective and worry about their worries instead of your own problems and if you're in a defensive or worried position that you're most likely to lash out you're most likely to protect yourself quickly yep and quite literally a part of a brain that's involved in empathy doesn't work as well when stress hormone levels are elevated now what about the frontal cortex and an actual damage like damage from car accidents or shirk head trauma um one incredibly interesting contentious area you massively damage somebody's frontal cortex and they will know the difference between right and wrong yet they still cannot regulate their behavior on the most fundamental level famous neurological patients in 1840s fitty Phineas Gage he had part of his frontal cortex destroyed in he was a foreman of a railroad construction line there probably was some dynamite somebody did something wrong a 13 foot metal rod shot up one of his ARS and at the top of his head into his frontal cortex with it landing about 50 feet away and gage who was the sobriety devout reliable he was the foreman there turns into this disinhibited crass sexually abusive bully afterward who never was able to hold a job again for years afterward because he would take an outage frontal cortex and you damage the frontal cortex and you get dysregulation of volitional behavior which is once again we have saying people know what the optimal behavior is the difference between right and wrong and yet they can't regulate their behavior something like depending on which study you look at something like 25 to 50 percent of the men on death row in this country how the history of concussive head trauma to the front of their heads Wow and that's a world of like volitional control is not that volitional well that seems to go contrary to the idea of a lobotomy then okay a lobotomy was just that's great that did lobotomy was just like savaging about the front third of the brain it was getting the front but it was also getting limbic emotional this is what did they did when they did refineries well by the time it really got developed a guy like one of science is amazing irony is the guy a Portuguese neurologist named take a sneeze who developed leucotomy is what they were originally called about the Nobel Prize in Physiology and medicine for this wonderful technique and then when it hit America as a sort of psychiatric intervention good American know-how and can-do spirit decided to get a sort of assembly line approach to it guy named Walter Freeman pioneered sort of Rapids like wham-bam frontal lobotomies where you would insert an eye pick through some an icepick or other behind somebody's eyeball go up through the optic cavity there and go in there and just scoop around oh and varying though he had like instructional films in the fifties for how you could do a frontal lobotomy I like one person every umpteen minutes and just like go through an entire hospitals worth of psychiatric patients and one like devoted afternoon of like Calvinist ethic hard work so they were just scrambling it they were scrambling so the neurobiology of like what you were disconnecting there's is like virtually random other than you were just making a mess of the front part of the brain so frontal damage instead is a much more selective issue do you shudder when you say well the factor that was just not even a hundred years ago yeah you know go to a medical school library and go eight floors down to the sub sub-basement and like go read some of these journals from like nineteen off whatever and like yeah you shudder my god the things they didn't know then my god the damage they could have done then it damages to the causes of disease the causes of psychiatric disorders my god some of the things they were doing that and if you've got a shred of capacity for self reflection you then have to sit there and say well hundred years from now they're going to be looking at our level of knowledge and they'll be saying the same exact thing what do you think would be the big one with youth it would be antidepressants you could be painkillers that their Holly how what do you think would be the big one to do be freaking out about today I think about what we think yeah but what we're doing out it's I think it's overwhelmingly good to be my god that that quaint need evil destructive belief they held on to them about human agency and freewill mmm whoa they punished people who had brains that couldn't regulate their own behavior they punished people who because of toxin exposure or stress during adolescence welled up with brains that couldn't control this without it junctures and they used words like justice back then Wow I can't believe the stuff they did it was practically like gangs of like Gordy resins getting burning torches and going and burning down to whatever it's around the castle in terms of senses of the word justice applying to what biology has to do with behavior there's so few people that share this idea that you're having your sense of it is so much more educated in the average person and you understand all the mechanisms behind all these particular behavioral problems that people have and all these different things can affect the way human beings operate but most people are not aware of this I mean literally most people I gives you out of gadgets may might be in a ninety percent of people haven't really considered all the factors that lead to someone having a brain that would put them in these impulsive decision terrible decision making situations well what's what gives me a little bit of sort of optimism is most people though at least in the West have done that in a couple of realms like five hundred years ago if you had an epileptic seizure the smartest most reflective most compassionate like Middle Ages bleeding heart liberals even would have had an explanation for what caused an epileptic seizure which is your demonically possessed and the therapeutic intervention was to burn you at the stake and now instead we're a century or two minting having a mindset where instead we make a biological statement oh it's not him it's his disease oh he's not demonically possessed he's got something screwy with his potassium channels in his brain and once he gets synchronized outburst of renal and has a seizure disorder like it's taken us about five hundred years to do that one to go from this is a blasphemous behavior where we know the intervention which is to burn somebody at the state the same oh it's a biological problem and we even recognize constraints with it if somebody has uncontrolled epilepsy that's treatment resist um they may not be able to get a driver's license but you don't sit there and say yeah let's have a erling of the drivers licenses in the epileptics it's about damn time they caught but they were no it's a realm where words like evil or soul or punishment or justice is totally irrelevant oh it's a neurological disorder so it's only taken us about five hundred years to get to that point so maybe you know we've done that cognitive leap at least once where we recognize there's no victims there though there's no yep well I don't know if something but most of the time obviously someone's behind the wheel may have a seizure and someone dies yeah but we don't think of it as someone doing something we think of it there's a lutely lost control of their body like literally and yet our piloting a car unfortunately and that's what happens hybrid versus someone committing a crime 500 years ago if an epileptic during a seizure where their limbs flailing struck someone that would have been assault and battery because who told them to go like sleep with Satan it's their own damned fault and it's like this is ridiculous mindset now this large parts of the developing world that still has exactly that view of epilepsy but at least in the West like that's an unrecognizable E different lines no no that was not they didn't used to do that that was something screwy with their biology like we've got you back so I don't know maybe another 500 years and we're going to be able to do that with maybe half the juries in this country are capable of doing the same thing of saying it's not him as his disease when you have somebody with paranoid schizophrenia who in a delusional state than something violent maybe I don't know half of teachers in the country are able to incorporate no this kid isn't lazy that's not why they're not learning to read they have this thing called dyslexia meaning there's abnormalities micro that formalities in their cortex on the part having to do it's not with them it's so yeah we're making a little bit of progress but see see easy mop domestic ven welcome to optimistic in five hundred year timespan when you think it's kind of playing it out in the right direction just very slowly but when you see these like political debates and people on television talking about crime and punishment and and none of these factors being discussed is it incredibly frustrating incredibly frustrating I mean they will look back at us and say my god the things they thought that the damage they did then and all we can do at this point given that we'll know a whole lot of the biology and look at most of this stuff that we've learned about the frontal cortex or oxytocin or a gene to be and we've learned all over the last 50 years in the last 20 years in the last five years like you look at the distribution when these papers were published all we could do in the meantime is simply have a hell of a lot of humility before we think we understand what the causes of the behavior especially a behavior that we charge harshly because the odds are we haven't a clue what the actual biology is of what's going on there and we fill in those attributional yelling vacuums this invention that we call volition and free will has anyone ever used toxo for an excuse or for defense for crime I don't do that twisting case remember Twinkie case 20 murder and white blood their levels that's been used severe carry menstrual syndrome has been used successfully in courts of law to mitigate sentencing the women who committed violent crimes around the time of their period having certain variants on genes this one gene which unfortunately this variant is got really horrible term the warrior gene has been used successfully in a couple of courts of law to mitigate sentencing but how they have to use that out of the wordage it's it's this giant it's a gene called Mao halfa monoamine oxidase an alpha it's got something to do with neuro chemistry and something to do with your chemistry of aggression the gene comes in a couple of different versions and one particular variant is associated with high rates of antisocial aggression in humans if and only if the human was abused during childhood in other words the gene is determining absolutely zero you're getting a gene environment interaction the absence of an abusive childhood having this chain variant as zero impact on this behavior so like ridiculously simplified pseudo scientific interpretations findings like these have sort of led you to courts of law saying oh well have such an etic variant that's in Negril yes so this is similar in a way to I believe it was India they used fMRI to determine someone's knowledge of a murder and they convicted the woman and made her guilty of it yep yep no lie MRI is the name of the company in the United States that purports to have the technology well enough that they can tell if you're lying or not but it's all to understand it was just functional knowledge of the crime yet which could have been imparted in defending or trying to put together this lab because you're obviously of a lot invested in this crime because you might go to jail for the rest of your life or you know basically there's no science for that the science is not there yet so it would never work in America at that down case or should not it should should not and should not work in India ending women yeah yeah that that's a case when so what if they'd done with this warrior gene how has someone been exonerated where was it I think it was in a court in Italy we're just sentencing was decreased because the defense made an argument afterwards well genetically predisposed so like that's slavery isn't Italy the place where they charged scientists with I'm not being able to register when an earthquake was Hammond earthquake yes by assuring the public there wasn't an earthquake that it literally tried them for this I think it's my people Rommels kids it I think the dust is still settling from that one job given most of those convictions have been overturned but with terrifying that those people had to go to court imagine Piedra seismologist and you have to go hey this is not how it works you are a little surprised Christ I can't tell you what it's coming you'll be I would eat to another country ball so the is wrong with you oh no my son the scientist is like being convicted of murder so it's essentially in these less informed areas where these things have passed like the fMRI in India and this in Italy the warrior gene thing well what but it's dangerous right yeah I mean you see like be careful what you wish for in terms of wow the creative people learn more about science yay more the sign a way more through the outer great there's a little bit of it might be scary let's see I'm just going on eat yeah I know it's 6:15 table to actually wrap it up surface thank you so much really really appreciate this pleasure I've been a fan of yours for years this is a real trust me I was really looking forward to it alright everybody this is a short one but an awesome one thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 1,569,678

Rating: 4.8944712 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, UFC, MMA, comedy, stand, up, Deathsquad, funny, Freak, Party, Joe Rogan, Robert Sapolsky, JRE #965, 965, comedian, jokes, human, behavior, neuro, toxoplasmosis

Id: obmt_PkIfBE

Length: 67min 46sec (4066 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/PrinceAbdie]

I mean it's also kind of ironic how they were all shitting on that trans athelete participating in sports with other biological women (idk is it cis or biological?) because of all the advantages she had pre-transition and they're not ok with there being a "meritocracy" there between her and the cis-women which is fair enough but later in the show Woody is arguing that we should have a "meritocracy" now after a certain class/race of people have already reaped the benefits of being born the right colour/to the right parents even though the people they're "running" against in this scenario would be the cis-women - a perfect hypocrisy that literally wrote itself. Also love how we're going to pretend AA means someone with a 3.0GPA is going to be accepted over someone with 4.0GPA. Not to mention his constant reference to himself as if he's the standard or we expect everyone to rise above their circumstance en masse; no where in history has this been obeserved nor expected so why now? - when we speak of social issues like this we're talking about the millions as such individual/anecdotal experiences are of little to no value; perhaps can even be more detrimental than having no anecdotal evidence.

I love Woody - his mail mondays were really good and had some well-thought out answers that undoubtedly helped a lot of people but he's plain wrong on this topic and most academics/social scientists would agree with this Stanford professor.

[u/xdisforfags]

where the FUCK is JAMIE???? i need that young cocksucker to get my nut

[u/[deleted]]

Maybe Taylor could get it through his thick skull

[u/vincethepince]

Favorite youtube comment of all time:

Zach Galifianakis knows a lot about cat piss