Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D: Humans are Unique Among Living Creatures

okay we are all here presumably because we are deeply interested in what makes us human what's unique about us what surprisingly is not unique about us I study brain cells and primates for a living so I come at this from a certain perspective which is you could learn a lot by studying animals by studying their nervous systems their hormones their behaviors in order to get insight into us now if you want to understand humans though from the perspective of we're just another animal we're just another primate it comes with some challenges and some of the time the challenge is recognizing we're just like every other animal out there some of the time it's seeing that we're just like every other animal and the basic wiring but we do out early unique things with it and some of the time we do things that simply do not have precedent okay let me give you an example of each first one cases where we are just like every other animal and where that's often the hard thing to accept okay you are a hamster you're a female hamster and what you normally do is about every four days or so you ovulate except if the scientists take another female hamster and put her in the cage with you in which case both of you were going to lengthen your cycles and eventually synchronize so that you're both ovulating the same afternoon so that's what you're doing now until they take a male hamster and put them into the middle of your cage and then the two females completely Sun scramble their cycles and desynchronize and it works this way it's done with pheromones it's done with olfactory cues people have shown how elegant this it could be now instead of taking the male hamster and put him in the cage with the two females pump the air from his cage into theirs and they will D synchronize their cycles it's all olfactory most amazing is it's not random which female synchronizes the other more tends to be the socially dominant one now this is completely understood it's shown in dogs and cats and pigs and I'm told you can go to like a 7-eleven in Iowa and buy a can of Pig ovulation synchronising spray if you want I I'm growing up in New York we never synchronized there are pigs ovulating so I don't know why they do that in Iowa but you this is sufficiently well understood that these are like commercial products and what's most amazing about it is it works exactly the same in US where it's known as the Wellesley effect first described 1970 women during freshman year Wellesley College tending to synchronize their cycles over the years except for women who had close intimate relations with men who desynchronized most interesting of all suggestions it's not random who synchronizes who the more socially extroverted dominant women do more this is so well understood that like when I was in college people would sit around the doorman and say you know when we roomed together the summer I had her synchronized by August 1st you know that's what you get the biologists so some of the time what's hard to accept is we're just like every other some of the time what's challenging is the novel use we use for the plain old memory and why right let me give you an example here you've got two humans they're engaged in a ritual they're not making eye contact they're not speaking they're not moving much all they're doing is every now and then one of them does nothing more metabolically taxing than move a small piece of wood on a table and if these are two chess grandmasters in the middle of a tournament they are maintaining the blood pressure of triathletes for hours on end simply with thought and that's a whole other domain we take the basic mammalian wiring for arousal for various emotions and we turn it on in the most abstracted States possible now finally a challenge is under some circumstances where there's simply no precedent out there in the animal world and let me give you sort of a shocking example of this okay you have a couple they come home from work at the end of the day they talk they dinner they talk they go to bed they have sex they talk some more they go to sleep the next day they do the same exact thing they come home they talk they eat they talk they go to bed they have sex they talk they fed they do the same thing every day for 30 days hippos would be repulsed by this because hardly any other she says non-reproductive sex like this and nobody talks about it afterward and in that regard we simply have no precedent out there so as we begin to look at where humans fit in the spectrum that is often going to be a challenge my current one is finding the next button okay so what I will look at here briefly setting us up for the coming session is looking at some of these domains that used to be uniquely human which no longer are but still where we do them in some very unique ways aggression every time life special used to tell us at the end we're the only species that kills that's what we're not the only species that kills this is something that's now observed in a number of other species chimps will make weapons they will have organized violence premeditated violence and so far as planning goes into it we are not the only species this was a baboon of mine a male who had just joined one of my troops and the only way to describe this guy is he had horrible political skills he spent two weeks hassling guys he should not have gone near and one morning coalition of six of them formed and this is what was left in the morning and my thirty years of studying baboons the leading cause of death of male baboons are male baboons these are chimps these are the male's of a small group and they are about to start what have we now called a border patrol they will go to the edge of their territory and if they encounter another chimp a male from the next Valley over they won't kill him they will kill him and it's documented now by Goodall and a number of other researchers this will take in to the point where the male's of one group will systematically eradicate all the male's of another this is genocide this is killing someone not for who they are but because of what group they belong to we are most certainly not the only species that does this but what remains human humanely unique about our violence is yes we are perfectly capable of culling somebody to death with a club but we can pull a trigger we can drop a bomb from 30 we can operate a drone from the the other side of the planet we can look the other way we could dam with faint praise we could be passively aggressive in those realms we are without precedent remarkable story and VS Naipaul x' book travels through islam he was describing something that happened in Indonesia in the 1960s there were some attempted coup in the aftermath there was complete meltdown of society there every bit of revenge and ethnic strife was played out a couple of million people were killed people would go to the village over and Hammer people into their huts and burn down the villages and Naipaul had heard a rumour about this which was sometimes when the people from one village would come to the next to kill everyone they would bring a gamelan orchestra along with them and he found someone who had been a veteran of one of these massacres and said I heard is this true and they said young we used to bring a gap said why would you do this and the answer was to make it more beautiful we are unprecedented in some of the ways that we damage each other and the psychological baggage we bring with it ok next domain theory of mind very trendy in psychology when do kids when they're growing up first grasp that other individuals have different thoughts than they do precursor for different emotions empathy all of that kids get it somewhere between ages 3 to 5 my kids got it on the morning of their 3rd birthdays and this is a uniquely human thing except it is now clear that other species have the rudiments of it leaving over chimps for example will do theory of mind if you were a low-ranking chimp and some interesting food has been put out there and a high-ranking chimp sees it you don't bother trying to get it but if the high-ranking guy hasn't seen it you do you know what information he has were not the only species that can do theory of mind well we appear to be the only ones who can do is secondary theory of mine to understand what that individual knows about that individuals knowledge and that is very ornate and very human and for that reason we're the only species you could possibly sit through a performance of the midsummer nights dream and keep track of who knows who's doing what to who their again completely unique next domain the Golden Rule tit for tat do unto others a massive amount of work in behavioral economics neuro economics done understanding the evolution of patterns of cooperation and classic work showing that in these sort of proto games prisoner dilemma games tit-for-tat strategies are most optimal I'll cooperate until you stab me in the back and I'll stab you back reciprocating that's time around and these are optimized and the second these studies were done in the 70s all the zoologist said aha let's go look at our species do they do reciprocity with these optimized game strategies and it turns out that's absolutely the case and what you see for example is in a case of that in vampire bats ooh horrifying vampire bats these are mommy bats taking blood from cows keeping them in their throat sacs and discouraging them to feed their cute babies and what you see with vampire bats is the females do communal feeding they have a communal nest and they discourage blood and feed each other's kids now make the bats believe one of the females is cheating on their reciprocal social contract their net the bat as she comes out of the nest grab her and pump up her throat sac with air and clear back in the nest and everybody sitting there saying oh my god look at all the throat sac blood she has and she's not feeding my kids and the next time around none of the females feed her kids we're not the only species that works at rules for reciprocity of do unto others what were the only species is that one that can deal with the fact that others have different desires than you do we don't all want to be done unto others as they would no other species can look at this and possibly make sense of what's going on here yet we have different motivations different I are these different values and what we are unique at is finding a common currency for this next domain empathy the thing that defines us it is so we are no longer the only species we've at least the rudiments of empathy wonderful work by franz Duval and others showing for example you have a low-ranking chimp sitting there minding his own business who was spontaneously attacked by a high-ranking guy in a bad mood alternative low-ranking chimps a fight with a high-ranking guy and is pummeled afterward this guy was an innocent bystander this guy was asking for it and what he is shown is in the aftermath the other members of the group are far more likely to groom the guy who was the innocent bystander than the one who provoked it they understand intention they understand and they are capable of expressing more pro-sociality for victims than for perpetrators this is not unique to humans what is unique though is the sheer level of abstraction that we bring to our empathy let me give you an example of this ok so look closely at this picture this dog whose paw was caught in some sort of trap and necrotic the pawl comes and we are recoiling looking at this think about what you are doing right now you are feeling the pain of a member of another species that is unheard of for the most part we feel the pain for a character and a novel we feel the pain for the people killed in the eruption of Pompeii thousands of years ago we could look at this and we say oh no the poor Navi home tree is falling over an avatar these are pixels these aren't really real creatures their computer jet and we feel terrible for them we could take empathy in realms of abstraction like no other species out there what else used to be about us uniquely so gratification postponement that sort of thing working hard to delay reinforcement and we all know that you work hard in high school to get into a good college to get in a good grass table to get a good job to getting a good nurse home and we all work on this thing which delayed the pathways of reinforcement but it turns out the neurobiology of it is very similar in other species much of it has to do with this neurotransmitter dopamine dopamine cocaine works on dopamine systems it's about reward that's what people used to think take for example a monkey and give him an unexpected reward and these pathways of dopamine activate aa dopamine is about reward it's much more interesting than that now instead train the monkey that when a signal comes on a little light comes on and what happens then is if the monkey presses a lever a bunch of times it then gets a reward it's learned vez so now when this is occurring when does the dopamine rise when the monkey gets the reward know when the signal comes on this is the monkey sitting there saying I know how this works I got this down cold ok it's one of those press the levers I'm all on top of this dopamine is not about reward dopamine is about the anticipation of reward remarkably interesting subtle study done by Wolfram Schultz and colleagues in this scenario the monkey presses the lever and it gets reward a hundred percent of the time now instead it gets the reward unpredictably an average of only 50% of the time what happens then to dopamine when the signal comes on it goes through the roof what have you just added into the equation the word maybe and nothing drives us to do stuff to work in a goal-directed way but it may be thrown in there and it's that cusp that fulcrum that gets generating the psychologists who run Las Vegas have understood this forever and what we see here is the exact same principle in the neuro chemistry of another species so what's unique about us in that regard just the incredible extent with which we are willing to delay the lag time between the signal and the lever pressing and when the comes and we have entire ideologies and theologies built around the reward will come in the afterlife the reward will come unto the generations after you this is unique next domain culture yes culture defining feature of humans and in more recent years that has become a common term in primatology it used to be if you talked about culture with your primates you immediately were denied tenure now instead what's clear is there are all forms of culture probably the best study first seen by Jane Goodall tule construction and used by chimps by now 29 different types of tool use has been observed in different chimp populations across Africa where the same tools are used in different ways in different places different tools have evolved to solve the same job and it's passed on to the next generation one interesting finding with this was the observation here we have a young chimp watching her mother with a termite stick learning how to the daughters learn much better than the sons do because the sons are off screwing around playing the whole time the daughters are actually watching mom so what is different in terms of human culture just the sheer Byzantine complexity and splendor of what we can do no other species can do this brine shrimp would be green with envy at the cultural complexity in rituals we can invent we are unprecedented in that regard okay nonetheless there are all sorts of domains where what we do is completely unique the things we do with language with symbols with metaphor the abstractions that we will come up with the social constructs one very very important one initially looks just like over every other species out there as soon as you see baboons fighting with each other based on kinship lines as soon as you see male chimps killing the male systematically in another population you see we are not the only species that divides the world into us and then but what we do with it are some very unique things we're the only species that is willing to divide our Oh season to them and them based on ideology based on the idea of whether workers should own their factories or not based on ideas of whether you speak the same language whether you wear different clothes what your God's name is how many of them they are if you smell different and eat funny food and wear strange clothing what we do with us is and them's presents one of the most central challenges to our future as humans and what you'll hear about in the next two talks are two extraordinary leaders in the field of thinking about this issue of how we deal with them do we think of all them as the same do we denigrate them all in the same ways absolutely Naz you will hear from Susan Fiske with tremendous insight as to the malleability with which we humans can rapidly turn us as and thems into the other category and what you'll hear from Josh green is this issue of how is it that we and our brains go about making moral decisions when dealing with an us versus dealing with them and seeing these are completely different ways that we approach these issues and currently these being huge challenges for our happy survival as a species so with that let us transition to the next talks starting with Susan Fiske you

Channel: FORA.tv

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Keywords: data, being human, technology, future, human, 2013, fora.tv, tv, fora, fora tv, conference, better humans, humanity, perception, consciousness, science, Robert Sapolsky

Id: zhoXXpRhpgI

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2013