Science and Society: Interview with Dr. Robert Sapolsky

and let me begin by thanking you professor Sapolsky for giving what was for me the single most brilliant talk I have heard on Stanford campus in the 15 years I've been here and the book you have written is a absolute masterpiece and although it's a book of science I think it's also a work of art in the sense that art they say the familiarizes reality makes us recognize the complexities of things we thought we understood and it makes simple the things we thought were complicated that's a great quote that's what you booked us and I want to begin by congratulating you and before accepting our invitation and for I wouldn't congrat thank my very dear friend for having such wonderful colleagues and friends I do thanks that was a fun evening yeah that was a wonderful experience for me as well I truly enjoyed it we are looking forward to learning even more from you in our sea view so thank you so shall we start yes I think if you don't mind me going first asking you Robert why do we have brains why do we have brains probably to more effectively strategize at how to cheat at social contracts I mean single single-cell bacteria do all sorts of unwatered of things and honest things and dishonest things when they can get away with it but they can't do it extremely well I suspect a nervous system not only makes you a whole lot more responsive to changes in environment but certainly makes for a lot more complexity in your social interactions so the brain is biologically and evolutionarily necessary in order to manage the life that is complicated or does it help create that complicated life yes and immediately self-reinforcing in terms of the by the time you get to the point of brains inventing things like culture then you've got brain culture coevolution in each affecting the other but it's certainly gives one a whole lot more flexibility in one's behavior then you find an brainless single-cell organisms so how do you compare the human brain with brains of primates non-human primates that you have studied what makes human brain so singular and stand out well at the end of the day it may not be so singular and may not stand out all that much when you look for actual regions or cell types in the brain that are unique to humans just not there there's fusiform face recognition area which was once thought to be only in humans it's another primates a bunch of other species there's these things called von Economo neurons which for a while appeared to be the only neuron type specific to human now it's an elephants and whales it's and other primates so the thing that makes the human brain the human brain sure is not that we've invented anything new I mean we use the exact same neurotransmitter biosynthetic pathways as a shrimp does or something the big difference is numbers it's just like our neurons do the exact same thing as a fruit floss and you put them under a microscope and they look the same and they smell the same and they taste the same or who knows what and the only difference is that we have a hundred million for every one that a fruit fly does and I think the thing that makes human brains what they are is just sheer number of component parts and emergent properties that come from that so can you expand on it why do we have enlarged brains compared to other animals well I mean one thing but that immediately gets into a which came first sort of thing is we're pretty pitiful compared to an awful lot of other species when it comes to surviving in terms of physical strength things of that sort so there was a lot of pressure on brains but what's clear when you look across all the primate species selection for brain expansion has not been because predators get smarter or prey get tougher to find or it's for social complexity remarkable finding a guy named Ian Nutt and Dunbar at Oxford as shown across about 150 primate species the single best predictor of the relative size of the cortex and of the frontal cortex is how big the average social group is and that species in other words our brains have evolved for gossip and backstabbing and hierarchy and keeping track of who's messing around with who and it's been enormous evolutionary pressure for just mastering social complexity this goes very much against the view that we are created in God's image oh yeah that one I would sign on to you fairly quickly you know I'm a biologist I'm a neurobiologist I can see how some folks have room for a deity in their picture of the world I happen not to it's inconceivable to me but that sure does run counter to that image as a entry point to this discussion I have as a monk biologist neuroscientist I read about something that it's claimed to be a god gene what about that perhaps we should just agree that go anywhere near that there's also been identified a warrior gene which sighting that somebody possessed that has now led to two her trials where sentences were decreased because there's no genes for there's no genes for any specific behavior let alone a gene for something is abstract in a belief in things that cannot be proven but there is a biology to why some people have a lower threshold than others for how much evidence they demand before believing in something how critical they are in their thinking how much random patterns are perceived by them as not being random and I think that's genetics of anxiety of cognitive flexibility things of that sort somewhere in there the difference between being capable of religious belief or not lurks somewhere in aspects of that but sure isn't a god gene but if it wanted the things you emphasize throughout the book is that there's a lot of ambiguity in the world that there is no very little certainty can the brain tolerate this ambiguity or is there a proclivity to try to create or cling on to these false certitudes which is the foundation for the totalitarian movements for ideologies for religions yeah we have a frantic need for attribution we have a frantic need to perceive agency where there isn't I mean beginning with like six month old kids you show them some scenario of a triangle moving on a screen and a circle on a square and they're interacting they bump into each other and one of them falls over them and the big one falls over when the little one hits that oh my god that makes no sense in terms of dominance interactions none of this gets kids attention at all until you draw a face on each one of those okay agency the triangle wants to do that the triangle you know we we personify processes we see intentionality where there isn't we have a whole lot of trouble accepting lack of explanation or statistical relationships between things the more stressed we are the more anxious we are the more pressured we are the more frightened we are the more we tend to go in those directions thus why some populations are more subject to sort of brainwashing than others are you saying that religion is like opium for the masses no I know about Marx there the trouble the trouble with religion it's very good for decreasing pain and anxiety isn't that good that's good but most of the time the pain and anxiety that is decreasing is pain and anxiety that it invented in the first place know about that that kind of gets you caught in a loop when you were talking about when he has about the singularity of the brain in your book you mentioned one place that we as primates aren't the only ones to choose leaders not just based on much is more yeah of ours but is that part of our singularity that we in other words democracies are invention but it's so new that we sometimes elect dumb Trump you know we're the only species that does something like have the concept of leadership like you look at a bunch of baboons and there's an alpha male and absolutely nothing that he does is ever motivated to help anybody else in there I mean what being an alpha male consists of is you get the best stuff and if there's scary lions around you get the safest spot in the tree to hide and everybody else has to deal with it the notion of leadership of somebody doing something for this crazy concept of common good that's absolutely a human invention so that's pretty rare um and obviously much rarer is the notion of getting to choose the person who supposedly is going to maximize the common good and even rarer than that is when one actually does get to do that and it works that way I happen to be very attuned to Kenya just as a country I've been working on and off 30 years or so and their most recent presidential election had a 98 percent yes rate so like some democracies work better than others but all of those are absolutely unique to humans can you compare or can you tell us some stories about your work in Kenya with pebbles I love this story of the born colony got cleaned up because of eating some bad food dealer dezerter that story about being all of a sudden the village of the boom you know became very humanistic yes it's certainly the most interesting thing that I saw on my thirty years hanging out with these guys um this was one of my troops this was my original troop that I started with when I was 20 years old a troop of baboons yes it's just it's just a clarify many about 50-60 and what I'm saying things like these guys yeah I'm referring to baboons rather than humans but then you kind of get it that way after a while my troop was just adjacent the adjacent troop the neighboring troop had a tourist Lodge within his territory yes and like lodges and a lot of national parks in the United States anywhere there's this perpetual problem of what to do with the food garbage and how to keep the wild animals out from getting to it and this place was doing a terrible job at it and so they had a garbage dump but pit they had dug and every morning at nine o'clock a tractor came out and dumped all the leftover desert from the tourists a night before and everything else leftover and this was seen a place where hyenas and vultures and works and baboons were hanging out to get this leftover food the troop that had this garbage dump within their territory quickly changed so that they were spending all of their time in this dump baboons walk about 15 kilometers a day foraging these guys slept in the tree above the dump and at like 859 they waddled down the tree in order to get their food and by like 9:15 everything was even when they went back to sleeping or something and I actually studied that troop they got elevated triglyceride levels they got borderline metabolic syndrome they got tooth decay they were eating a westernized diet and they were putting on tons of fat so yeah that was mighty familiar I have no idea how this works in baboons but somehow the guys and my troop heard about the garbage dump and it would turn out that every morning seven eight adult males would run a couple of kilometres over there to go try to get some of the garbage okay the key thing is it's not random who is doing this so you're one of seven or eight baboons from your troop and you're showing up to this garbage dump where there's 60 baboons there who are not from your troop and not pleased to have you there you're not going to get a scrap of food unless you're really aggressive so these were the aggressive males who were going over there the other thing is morning is when baboons do most of their socializing they sit in the room and they gossip and they sit or and if these guys instead wanted to spend that time fighting with strange baboons they were not very socially connected so these were about half the adults in the troop these were the most aggressive the least socially connected males in the troop about a year into this there was a tuberculosis outbreak and it was centered it was bovine tuberculosis cow meat the meat inspector at the lodge was being bribed to approve tubercular cows worst parts of the lungs were being cut out and tossed into the garbage dump and you know when humans tuberculosis takes two years to kill you or it could take two baboons died within a month non-human primates tuberculosis is like wildfire there's nothing scarier and a primate colony than a TB outbreak so before it was over basically most of the baboons and that troop were dead as were all the males from my troop who went there um so this was interesting so what was left there were half the number of males as usual um a baboon troop typically has a 1 to 1 female to male ratio suddenly I had a two to one ratio and it was not random which baboons were left there it was nice goddess they were socially affiliative they weren't aggressive if they were in a bad mood they didn't beat up on somebody else which is what your typical baboon does and what was most remarkable is this usher din and I use a word here and if you use this word in climatology thirty years ago they instantly fired you but it's a trendiest word right now this was a culture in this troop that was remarkably different from anything that's seen in a baboon troop before much lower levels of aggression I'm much more social affiliation animals sat in contact more they greet each other more males grew to each other like baboons flying would be less shocking than baboon male adults grooming each other and they did that it was true it's okay that was incredibly interesting what was most interesting though is male baboons at puberty pick up and they leave their home troop and they move to their adult troop at that point and it's this miserable long process it's like it's like freshman year at college nobody talks to you and you're isolated and it's like a miserable process and it takes you like a year to work your way socially into the new troop in other words every adult male and about troupe grew up someplace else mmm so you go away at that point and refuse to look at that troupe for 10 years which is what I did at this point because it was kind of upsetting losing my guys so I started with another troupe 40 miles away and wouldn't go anywhere near there for years and eventually when I went back they were still nice and they were still unaggressive and they were still sitting next to each other and they were still doing well but there were no males left from back when the tuberculosis outbreak occurred all the adult males in the troop now had transferred in in the years since then in other words all of these adult males grew up in the usual awful miserable dystopian baboon troops that you have showed up as adolescents and is true and somehow learned we don't do stuff like that they were transmitting this culture of less aggression and more affiliation and I spent the next 10 years trying to figure out how that was working in these goddess beautiful it was like you know it didn't quite make up for losing my god but it was astonishing seeing and it would take about six months for new males I mean immediately the question became okay maybe it was nice guys who were transferring into here somehow they were and you look at them and their first month in the troop they're just as aggressively jerks as adolescent male baboons were transferred and the other true it's not like you know they were pacifists and picking it took them about six months to take on this new cultural style so so what you're saying is that the aggressive males were killed by tuberculosis and then somehow filtered out aggression from this colony of and all of a sudden what was left was the non-aggressive males as well as the females and I think one of the keys was actually the female females and that was where I was actually going yeah so tell us a little bit more about the female and male and the gender role in primates and okay their hope for us our human society functionally made with them bringing in the garbage overhead well taking I think it depends on the species it depends on the troop but among baboons at least females inherit their ranks from their mother it's a hereditary system so if you are born to a high-ranking lineage you're two weeks old and adult females are already getting out of your way um it's it's extraordinary seeing this cultural training that goes on these animals and you spend your whole life in the same troop so you spend your whole life surrounded by your mother and your sisters and your nieces and so that you're a cohesive cooperative units of females function in terms of family units males they got no relatives there and they grew up 30 miles away 40 miles um so basically if you're a female baboon the biggest source of misery in your life as male baboons because about half of aggression and a baboon troop is a male isn't a bad mood and takes it out on a female so you see an adult male loses a fight and he'll bite a sub-adult who lunges at a female who slaps an infant and it just goes like that um which term displacement aggression and its enormous ly destructive over the years the only times I've seen females die violently was as a result of males biting them um where the male was just in a bad mood and she was getting on his nerves so it's it's the usual horrifying picture so now you suddenly have a troop where there's half the number of males there and they're actually nice guys and what you see is females were much more relaxed go figure their stress hormone levels lower I was able to show their blood pressure was lower and one of the things that they were able to do then is a new male shows up he's a transfer male he showed up yesterday you've never seen him before you have no idea who he is if he's a jerk or what he is and a normal normal babbling troop it would now be close to 80 days on average before this guy would first be groomed by a female in this troop for days the females were more relaxed they were more willing to take a chance to be pro-social to a new individual and what you welled up seeing was new adolescent males when they're actually being treated nicely become less aggressive just a default model where in the absence of big aggressive horrible males you get a cascade down and you get adolescent males learning within a few months six months or so that oh like I'm not going to be as aggressive here I'm gonna be more pro-social so do you think that cultures in the world where there is male chauvinism they are much closer to baboon societies and monkeys certainly I'm not quite advocating giving tuberculosis to the most aggressive males out there but somehow in the making not doing I'm a straddling but tell us about the gender roles now how do you see the human societies based on your knowledge of the human brain and human singularities if we can use that type of war to gain and other can be connected to a talk I heard you give are there differences in brain function between female and male if nothing else female brains are much more complicated because they have a rhythmic pattern for releasing hormones male brains just like drool out remember that of hormones of the usual rate that females have to generate cycles so that actually takes much more complex I'm acquiring the thing about sex differences in humans is we were very confused species and that way you take social animals and in a general way they fall into two categories one is what would be called a pair bonding species males and females mate they stay together that whole sort of thing the other is what's termed a tournament species polygamous polyandrous lots of mates one of the things you see is in pair bonding species you see more parental care coming from males males help take care of kids tournament species males do nothing at all pair bonding species among primates females give birth to twins all the time because there's two parents taking care of the kids if a female baboon has twins one of them is gonna starve to death because as a man so what you see is one of the biggest differences in pair-bonding species there's low levels of aggression among males because if the rule is hooray I'm the alpha male so now I can mate with forty seven females and they all have kids I'm gonna be doing parental care there's much more selectivity in mating amongst males and rather than mating being a function of male-male competition in the hierarchy mating is a function of female choice and thus males go through all sorts of rituals showing that they're capable of parental behavior most bird species for example or pair bonding and what two males do they go through courtship rituals where they come and they bring a worm to the female look I know how to get food I'll be capable of doing that okay so in pair bonding species not only are there low levels if a questions belong to the pair Marling's okay so not only are there low levels of aggression but males and females look very similar to each other because basically evolutionarily males have been selected to be sort of poor imitation to females when you look at ornament species males have been selected for fighting and muscle and bit canines and those of the species where males have crazy plumage like peacocks or various antlers and stuff where your advertising and in general males are about twice the size as females males live much shorter because they burn out from injuries in their metal box so there's classic tournament species chimps baboons all of those there's classic pair-bonding species Gibbons a bunch of South American monkeys so what about humans and you look at every possible measure like this term sexual dimorphism differences in body function based on sex and height weight lifespan pulmonary capacity prevalence of imprinted genetic diseases everything size of male testicles as a proportion of body weight by every measure you can get we're about halfway in between division we're not paired where this we're the most confused primate species there is out there because we're halfway in between by every measure you can come up with and that's why the majority of human cultures are polygamous but the majority of men and polygamous cultures are monogamous and in monogamous cultures an awful lot of the men who say they believe in monogamy are actually polygamous and that's like half of what poetry is about that we're halfway in between these two categories we're this incredibly confused species that's how we can occupy so many different ecosystems and different forms of cultures and economic and so you know that accounts for half of human misery and half of human fiction the fact that we're not in either category and any given individual one of us it's a little bit more this way or a little bit or that way vasopressin neuro chemistry shows individual differences look at the face of prescence system of rodents and you can tell this one's a pair of bonding species this one's a polygamous species by looking at receptor patterns humans halfway in between and if you're someone who's a little more in this direction on the average your relationships are less stable if they're more that we're like where we break all the rules so you can actually scan and decide whether this person has a tendency for a statistical tendency if you get a thousand test subjects and you need to get a doctoral thesis out of it you'd probably get it statistical significance one question that remains is really the legal system in human societies and how neuroscience can help us understand human nature and so on is neuroscience helping me long enough not enough but do you think neuroscience can help us create better societies absolutely in at least the American legal system and the American criminal justice system uses neuroscience that has not been updated since 1840 and which was based on a famous assassination case in England in the 1840s which provides the basic basic legal standard for deciding that somebody is so organically impaired they can't be held guilty for an act and this is it's called the McNaughton rule if you are so thought disordered that you can't tell the difference between right and wrong and that's basically a way of describing paranoid schizophrenics and McNaughton almost certainly that's what he was hearing voices killed a prime minister he tried to do that he killed his secretary instead whatever and this was the first jury that said this guy is simply too crazy put him in a hospital not in a jail it's not him it's his brain disease and that's it that's the McNaughton rule and that's not even in every state or every court in the United dates and what that doesn't touch on is the whole world of people who know the difference between right and wrong and nevertheless can't regulate their behavior can't regulate their behavior because they have massive damage to their frontal cortex or can't regulate their behavior because they're stressed or they grew up in poverty and their frontal cortex is thinner on the average or they have low blood sugar or they have any of these biological reasons why impulse control goes out the window I'm actually working on a murder trial right now where I'm actually actually testifying next week where this was a guy who had been attacked previously homeless guy and in a very similar circumstance a guy was hassling him and clearly he was in danger and he had a knife and he stabbed the guy 27 times and stabbed him to death and the court is basically saying well yep self-defense and he had a history of being attacked and actually he had been stabbed by somebody else in the streets two weeks before that so I could see stabbing him five or six times 10 or 11 ananova 27 that just seems too much weight you're supposed to be in a life-threatening circumstance and thinking about well is this one I should stop no we stop being rational this sort of beings at that point that makes no sense at all we have all sorts of circumstances where for biological reasons we are not behaving rationally and our impulse control goes out the window judges judges if they've gone three or four hours since eating a meal are much less likely to grant somebody parole because their frontal cortex doesn't have enough energy to think through the harder task of instead of saying that's just a rotten human saying wow they've actually gone through some extraordinary circumstances and let me tell you know whether you were a judge or a person with a knife defending yourself we are biological organisms and the criminal justice system has basically never heard of neuroscience so take it from biological system consisting of cells with molecules and in the human brain or transmitters and what I'm understanding from your book and from your lecture and what you are just saying is that this biological organism namely the brain is under the influence of so many factors factors that span from Millennials before so milliseconds before an action so where does freewill come in or is there freewill well for my money no such thing this simply isn't any room in there for freewill there's there's this very archaic need and this is going back to that emotional need for the agency and all of that yeah there's neurons there's neurotransmitters there's nerve pathways that but somewhere in there is a little creature at a control panel who yeah sort of knows what the neurons are saying but makes the ultimate decision like unless you were willing to throw out the laws of how we know the physical universe works it can't work that way as far as I'm concerned free will is what we call the biology that has not been discovered yet and that's really hard for people to deal with but people can deal with it five hundred years ago if you had epileptic seizures there was an explanation in Western European countries you and Satan were much too good of friends and time to burn you at the stake and somewhere along the way ah - no 150 years ago or so people learned oh it's not him it's a disease it's a brain disease and now we can even think in terms of no it's not that he sleeps with Satan he's got screwed up potassium channels in his hippocampus so I managed to do it in that realm in most places not other parts of Africa is and my Timon but at least in Western European countries we've subtracted free will out of the equation of so water epileptic seizures about so while that only took us 500 years to make that much progress so like maybe another 500 will make some more free will is simply the science we haven't discovered yet well how do you define responsibility then I mean responsible for our actions um we're not we're not and words like punishment and evil and soul and justice and retribution sin and sin and virtual virtue and morality and bravery and that side if it is well none of those are real terms that mean anything so this is a biologist talking now if somebody hears you don't you think they will be worried about the implications of this type of thinking that society can go to chaos oh I'm worried about the implications of this type of thinking and what's clear to me is intellectually it is absolutely clear to me that there's no room for free will at the same time I've absolutely no idea what the world is supposed to look like if people actually started believing that and it might be terrifying but again we managed to do it in some domains we don't burn epileptics at the stake we've learned to say there's no responsibility and you know we did that in the last 150 years we're about 50 years into saying Oh schizophrenia is not due to terrible mothering which is what every psychiatrist on earth taught every mother of a schizophrenic up until the mid 1950s it's a biochemical disorder and it's not the person's fault if they're not making any sense okay so we're 50 years into that we're you know we're making some progress in those areas but less people get very very uncomfortable at the notion of us as biological machines and if it's hard to do that when you're trying to make sense of that guy who's just murdered 20 people it's probably even harder to do and when somebody comes up to you and says wow you gave a good lecture it's the same biology so what so let me see if I understand I'm also a biologist and I totally resonate with what you're saying but I can also tweak your saying in this way and I want you to approve it or disapprove it what you're saying is that the human brain is under the influence of so many factors that go back in time milliseconds to seconds to minutes to years that on its own is basically you are you're advocating for education you're advocating for safe nurturing of our children and teaching them about good stuff because we know that there will be ramifications down the road so it all already puts responsibility on somebody's shoulder to be careful about the future ramification of the upbringing that I'm providing to my child now sure but school education by all is just to say that yeah that's good parenting good schooling there's all sound like good ideas god help us if we have to define what constitutes a good parent but that's a whole separate story but sort of your emphasis on all these influences in so many ways what the study of the biology of behavior has consisted of for a century is people saying wow I had no idea that that had something to do with how we behave hormones genes what happened when I was a fetus the fact that I'm a human and not ever an orangutan the fact that I grew up in this type of culture but not that time wow I had no idea that it wow I had no idea what I had for breakfast today has something to do with how readily I can somebody else's pain wow I had no idea that a bad smell in this room makes me less sympathetic to other people's problems so all we're doing is discovering more and more ways in which we say wow I had no idea that had something to do with why I do what I do Nietzsche was in this room you would be agreement with you it's beyond good and evil his famous book basically says you now have found sort of the neural scientific foundation for what something I suppose were saying at the Tarot section of this our social construct there are social constructs and we've made some progress in being able to be critical thinkers about it so in terms of let me ask one last question well you described in the book how the mapping of the brain and all of these imaging allows us to know what part of the brain is active when we make certain kinds of decisions is it in your view possible that in future for example capitalists or political parties knowing what part of the brain activates what kind of a behavior manipulate this from outside manipulate our brain to make certain decisions absolutely that's what's happening if you're in a crowd of 20,000 other people wearing brown shirts and saluting and shouting your brain becomes less critically thinking at that point and you go along with a demagogue absolutely how brainwashing works get somebody isolated from other stimuli and it's harder for them to sort of put things in context but putting a more technical way on it transcranial magnetic stimulation you could now take somebody and if you put a probe on the correct part of the brain near the frontal cortex you can change the moral decision someone will make about a runaway trolley problem is it okay to kill one person to save five you can switch somebody I mean it's an experiment two changes 15 seconds later but it's at that point you know a cliche is of course to talk about all the brave new world scary stuff facing us but absolutely I have that happiness thank you very much

Channel: Stanford Iranian Studies Program

Views: 16,839

Rating: 4.9269776 out of 5

Keywords: yt:cc=on, iran, iranian studies, stanford, biology, human behavior, society, science and society, robert sapolsky, behavioral science, human biology, behavior

Id: 68iNlWaAl4U

Length: 41min 47sec (2507 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020