The Forum with Robert Sapolsky, October 7th, 2018

good morning so good to see all of you welcome to the forum on the nicest day of the year in San Francisco you could tell the topic is great because it's we're all glad to be here my name is Malcolm young I'm the Dean of Grace Cathedral and we're celebrating st. Francis day today st. Francis is the patron of animals so we have a dog here and we have a cat over there we have a few other human animals who are here today it's a perfect day to celebrate the close relationships that we have with animals and to think a little bit about the uniqueness of ourselves as animals also our guest today is dr. Robert Sapolsky he's the John a and Cynthia Frey gun professor of biology neurology and neurosurgery at Stanford he is a research associate at the Institute for primate research at the National Museum of Kenya and he has spent decades in the field studying the behavior of baboons the focus of his career has been to understand human behavior in the context of biology and his latest book is the fascinating behave the biology of humans at our best and worst so please join me in welcoming Robert Sapolsky I I liked all these all three of these I so it was a primates memoir and why zebras get the ulcer and on don't get ulcers was the other one that I read the most and thought the most about and one of my favorite things in this we have a school here and I was talking to the boys and it was the story when you were a boy yourself and he would go to the dioramas in New York City in the in the Natural History Museum especially the gorilla diorama and imagine yourself in that scene and I talked about that with the boys and and I remember feeling that way about the dioramas I think they did too so when you first you and you write in your book that you're disappointed that you didn't get to go to the gorillas you got the baboons instead but but you probably learned to love the baboons even more [Laughter] some of them right exactly I guess it just depends on the individual yes definitely personalities there what was it like when you first got there and and maybe you can talk about a particular individual that you remember maybe maybe one that you learned something from yeah well when I first got there I could not have been more clueless I was about 8 when I decided I wanted to be a primatologist and what I have noticed is of people who do fieldwork about 2/3 of them grew up in the business in some way their parents were field researchers or missionaries or AI dee' people or who knows what and then the other third were my category which was growing up in some god-awful urban neighborhood and at some point you stumbled into the Natural History Museum and that was it gimme a DES there and that diorama that's where I want to live and in my case it happened to be the the gorillas the mountain gorillas and you know I you were just telling me your your son has taken Swahili I I was teaching myself Swahili in high school I was writing fan mail or primatologists than stuff because I was totally set so you know I went and studied everything possible on the subject and studied with one of the kings of baboon ology in college and was finally going out in the field and the only problem was that I had never been south of Philadelphia north of Boston or west of like somewhere in Jersey um so like I knew nothing about anything and was just sort of dumped out there turned out I had been taught the wrong kind of Swahili so nobody could understand anything I was saying I was taught Tanzanian Swahili which is like the King's English it's like learning King James yeah and whereas in Kenya everybody Swahili is like your fourth language so everybody is just barely getting by and I I could not have been less prepared for what I was doing there so I sort of got dumped out there when I was 20 after college and spent a year and a half setting up my field site and then managed to go back there every summer for 33 years in terms of the baboons definitely is you said I loved mountain gorillas in the big abstract state baboons Savannah baboons you have much more mixed feelings about because they're basically they're foul animals animals they're terrible to each other they have the highest rates of violence of any non-human primate the leading cause of death of my male baboons over the years were male baboons like they're they're a good model for lots of aspects of human social stress they turned out to be perfect in that regard because if you're a baboon like this was in the Serengeti ecosystem which is like the greatest place on earth if you're a baboon you only have to work about three hours a day for your calories you you live in these big troops of the Lions don't mess with you much your kids have a better infant survival rate than the neighbouring Masai people do so with this critical implication if you only have to work three hours a day for your calories you've got nine hours of free time every single day to do vote to being rotten to some other but all they do is generate social stress for each other like they don't get ulcers because some like the Predators chases they get ulcers because some other Babu be planned it so they're incredible models for human psychosocial stress so in that regard they're not nice animals but they're certainly interesting and that's they you know you you develop affections for some of them there was this one sub adult male a guy named Benjamin ok disclaimer I gave all of my baboons Old Testament names and which I'm grateful for because it's so much easier to follow yeah and and then and then there was some you know they're they're not random names there's like a reason you say ah now I know why this is Benjamin but then there's the day where Nebuchadnezzar is often the bushes with Ruthie and wondering how that happened right so that's certainly a problem but this one guy I got very attached to the two of us got lost together once and sir if I'm the one who figured out where the troop was and he sort of like imprinted on me at the time he was like he had just he was adolescent you just transferred him to the troop he had no idea what he was doing um so he's sort of glommed on to me and we this was my favorite baboon um our son is named Benjamin our daughter Rachel was named for her favorite female so they this will come back to haunt us it's so yeah but amid that they were different what you loved about Benjamin was you know he had a different he had a different strategy for relating with other baboons um he was incredibly socially incompetent he spent most of his day stumbling into thorn bushes or sitting on like poisonous ants or things like that he was you know it was very he had crazy hair all over the place it was very hard not to identify with him feeling very much I mean I sort of was in a sub adult male stage at that point so it was very easy to sort of do a lot of identifying with him what have you learned in just your life in the troop I mean just about things like parenting or you know just about stress how do you get along with other people even just about just like marriage I mean it it was your marriage affected by all this time the truth for better or worse I asked my wife my wife who wound up doing eight seasons out there as well doing her oh yeah her doctorate on the baboons as well and female baboons so fortunately we shared the same taste for Old Testament names I would say the biggest thing I learned was something I had absolutely not a chance of figuring out until I was about 40 or so and it wasted 20 seasons with the baboons what what I went out there initially to do Western humans we don't die of collar anymore we dive stress-related diseases we dive diseases of lifestyle we live well enough and long enough that we have bodies that slowly fall apart over time we get diseases of cardiovascular and cerebral we get diseases of chronic stress and we're completely unique in that regard and the baboons turned out to be a perfect parallel to that because again they were not getting stress-related diseases from lions they were getting it from psychosocial stress they're perfect models for westernized stress-related disease so I went out there and the plan was to study which baboons were more or less vulnerable to stress-related disease I was able to dart these guys and Nesta ties them and watch their blood pressure was their cholesterol levels has this guy's immune system working do work ups on them out there and then let him go and I went out there is a 20 year old thinking that what this was all going to be about is if you have a choice in the matter you want to be a high-ranking baboon social dominance social it's going to be socially dominant males who are healthiest you've got the lowest blood pressure you've got the lowest stress hormone levels and I spent like the next 20 years trying to show exactly how that worked and what took me about 20 years to figure out and probably required me to be a middle-aged guy instead of a 20 year old which is figuring out that if you have a choice in the matter do you want to be a high ranking male baboon or do you want to be a male baboon with a lot of grooming partners the latter that one is so much better of a predictor social affiliation social outlets relationships and as a 20 year old husky for social dominance and hierarchy and you leave more copies of your genes and that turned out to have so little to do with what those guys were about so yeah and everything we know about sort of psychosocial stress in humans if you've got a choice between decreasing the stress in your life by getting more of a sense of control or more of a sense of outlets or more of a sense of predictability or more social support social support is the way to do it every single time in terms of health that's so interesting I mean I think I mean when you're talking especially in behaved I mean I think of there's so much that we just didn't know so recently I mean and your career spanned a time of just extraordinary breakthroughs in terms of how we understand what human beings are and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about you know just what we've learned like what did we not know about our bodies and ourselves you know in 1971 you know versus now and you know what would it look like almost everything yeah it's in sort of a theme in this book behave which I just spent the last five years sitting at home writing the glandular parts I mean just like that the neurochemical parts of the number well one of the things I sort of do at the end just reviewing the biology of what makes us wrong to each other and wonderful to each other and sort of the song and dance and there is you got to incorporate what's going on in your brain one second before behavior but also what stimuli a minute before triggered that brain and what hormone levels that morning made your brain more or less sensitive to those stimuli and what neural plasticity has gone on in your brain in previous months and back to your Adal since in childhood and your feet'll life and the genes that were turned on and off for your lifetime due to fetal environment your genes the culture your ancestors came up with evolution all of that and when you put all those pieces together like the main punch line is we're biological organisms there's nothing we do that's outside of the context of our biology but the point there is it's mostly really subtle biology and it's mostly influences on our behavior that we haven't a clue have any relevance whatsoever what happened to you when you were a third trimester fetus whether your ancestors were pastoralists or hunter-gatherers are going to have influenced the way your mother sang to you when you were a kid what you had for breakfast what you smelled 30 seconds ago so this constant theme with there's all these subterranean biological influences our behavior and the vast majority of them we knew nothing about 20 years ago 50 years ago when you like Google in like Google Scholar a search term for anything that's relevant to this testosterone and aggression and you look at the papers that come out all the scientific papers and you look at them by year and in the 1940s there were this many papers and the 1960s there were this many and by the 80s this room and 90% of the literature is 10 years old and that's the case in all of these domains the rate at which we are over and over being forced to say oh I had no idea biology had something to do with that is like exponentially increasing priming like when did priming when to become aware of priming as an issue so you know so if you you give people a maybe you can give a better example of priming but if you give somebody two people a different kind of quiz and you mentioned old age terms in one of the quizzes it takes them more time to walk down the hallway than the perfume a sensory environment like that absolutely the the definitive study in like every textbook there is Oh - - cliches out there one is on the average males are better at math and females the other is on the average Asian populations do better at math tests than non Asian populations both of which are highly questionable nonetheless our sort of standard folk wisdom and this classic study you have a bunch of Asian American high school girls and beforehand if you taking a math test and beforehand if you mention offhandedly oh isn't it interesting that on the average males are better at math and females afterward math scores go down if beforehand you say oh isn't it interesting that on the average Asian Americans do better at math and non Asian Americans math scores go up simply prompting which group you identify with at that point influencing like how you remember your algebra equations or this is like one of my favorite examples out there wonderful study from a group at Yale sit somebody down and have them fill out a questionnaire about their political views social issues economic geopolitical all of that and if you put somebody in a room with bad smelling garbage you become more socially conservative you are more likely to disapprove of gay marriage if you are heterosexual you are more likely to dis doesn't do anything to your economic views anything to your geopolitical ones part of how we decide whether when they are doing something that's different whether that's so different that it's disgusting and it's wrong wrong wrong is we're getting sensory information bad smells make us more conservative have somebody drink something bad tasting cod liver oil and five minutes afterward they advocate stronger punishment for norm violations because he got a bad taste in your mouth one classic study um this was looking at more than 5,000 court decisions of parole boards happened to be in Israel the judges there every single parole board case over the course of a country over the course of the year looking at who got sent back to jail who got paroled the single best predictor of what a judge was going to decide was how many hours it had been since the judge had had a meal see a judge right after lunch 60% parole rate by three four hours later down to zero percent judge has a snack and back up again and the remarkable thing about that is you sit one of those judges down and you say they couldn't think that I'm an affair I each case is different I would wish for worse they're gonna quote Rawls or Nietzsche well theory of justice yes and blood sugar levels have something to do with how well your brain does the harder thing when that's the right thing to do as opposed to saying and lock them away send him back again like so priming all this subterranean stuff going on there's that quote of the subterranean because that was one direct quote that you couldn't help but you meant using them in the books but that's just that world of Dreams imagination I mean it seems like it's such an important part of the religious life is just you know these intuitions that we have that were not even unconscious of and you know but I was thinking a lot of it you know just this last week with Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the confirmation yesterday and I kept thinking just you know just from your perspective as a neuroscientist talking about how memory works I mean like what counselor advice would you give people in terms of understanding you know events that happened a long time ago or just you know what was your whole take on that thing um I actually had a piece last Friday in CNN the op-ed thing honing in on something that a lot of Republicans seemingly honed in on when she was asked to describe what had occurred to her Ford and had spectacular searing amount of details about the event in the bedroom amid not being able to say whose house and when exactly it was and what you did afterward and a lot of folks saying well isn't that strange that's a rather selective memory that seems rather and Sienna asked me to do a piece on how the files away memories during trauma and it turns out what she was describing is exactly what the brain does you remember this part and the rest of it is utterly irrelevant you remember this part you're like dying day and the rest of it and there's like this wonderful classic study that showed this take people one group of volunteers you told them a 12 sentence story totally boring boy and his mother walked through town they walked past the drugstore they won they cross the street they go to the hospital where the boy's father works and they go to visit him and he shows them the x-ray room in the surgery room and then they go back home afterward the other group story 12 sentences long boy and his mother go walking through town they passed the drugstore they cross the street where the boy is hit by a truck and terribly injured and they rushed him to the hospital and take him to the x-ray room and operating all of that so they tell people these two different versions one or the other and then a week later people had to recall the story and what you see is people who got the terrifying horrific story remembered it better than the people who got the boring one they only remembered the sentence five onward from when the boy was hit the memory for the rest of it was if anything worse than an other folks and what you see there is you remember the part that matters the rest of it's irrelevant she also those of you who sort of listened to sort of her testimony she's a clinical psychologist she is a PhD she was explaining this part of the brain to hippocampus which is like my favorite part of the brain so I was like thrilled when that occurred and at her saying it's got it's got something to do with epinephrine and norepinephrine epinephrine also known as adrenaline and norepinephrine a closer related version which is the neuro chemicals that tell your hippocampus remember this part forever forever that part who cares about in this particular study what they then showed was if you blocked epinephrine and norepinephrine you didn't have the enhanced memory for the scary part of this so yeah that's exactly how the brain works so I hope that sort of doing that in CNN would like change one a if somebody's vote there I thought about that a lot too I mean it's just when you're talking about the scientific research so how do you find that balance I mean we're so grateful that you took the time to write these books because I I want to know what we're learning in these fields but it must be hard to decide like how do you decide how much you spend on your original research versus you know kind of sharing with CNN and in writing books like these well I actually made the decision five years ago that I closed my lab and stopped my research my Kenyan work had fallen apart a few years before for political reasons so I decided it was time to shift gears and produce that awful 800-page thing I'm glad you appendixes the pens were so helpful because I needed that basic biology lesson well too as it turned out so yeah that was a shift I you know do you if you live in a lab I had like 25 people in my lab at the time and you realize your entire sense of like self-worth and like trust in the universe is dependent on like if somebody figured out why the tissue cultures are contaminated this week or if somebody statistical test came up with a sufficient like p-value to be able to publish in like okay like it's just my new shove lab science and like 35 years of it it was kind of time to shift here so spending four years sitting at home and the hates sort of obsessing over this stuff and so definitely a shifting of gears so I'm spending most of my time now working on actually death penalty cases involving people with brain damage and trying to teach juries about the brain so it's it's been a big shift yeah that is those parts about criminal justice ISM were very comparable to me yeah you know not too many juries as it's turning out but see bad I found them very compelling I mean could you talk a little bit about just you know what how we should restructure the criminal justice system just given what we are starting to know about how the brain and how the whole body functions they basically I think every single aspect of the criminal justice system is sheer raving medieval gibberish which often is viewed as kind of off-putting when I first kind of voiced this to say a bunch of lawyers shirred judges or such am I actually taught a class last week at the the law school for the first weeks that's great well you're all in the wrong profession and if I do my job right you should quit law school by the end of today so that let me go over any well evil punishment retributive justice makes no sense whatsoever when you spend enough time studying about the brain currently the American criminal justice system recognizes one component of neurobiology and it's something called the Macan Dalton rule which is if you are so thought disordered that you can't tell the difference between right and wrong a jury can find you organically impaired insane sufficiently so that you're sent to a psychiatric hospital instead of a prison this was invoked for example when John Hinckley tried to kill Reagan Hinckley paranoid schizophrenic classic sort of test case for McNaughton difference between right and wrong McNaughton was a guy in England in 1840 who by everything we can tell sort of paleo forensics was paranoid schizophrenic was hearing voices tormenting him telling him to try to kill the Prime Minister and he went up killing the person standing next to him whatever and this was the first time a jury said this guy is so thought disordered that he can't tell the difference between right and wrong lock him up and a hospital for the rest of his life where he obliged everyone by being dead from TB within a year or two but that was midnight that's it 1840 1814 neuroscience that's the criminal justice systems incorporation of neurobiology and most states in this country after Hinckley got away with trying to kill Reagan most states in this country predominantly in the more conservative and don't even allow a McNaughton defense and then you got another thing that creeps in which is a part of the brain called the frontal cortex it's the most interesting part of the brain I often decide I waste a decade studying the stupid hippocampus instead of studying the frontal cortex what does the frontal cortex do that makes you do the right thing when that's the harder thing to do impulse control long-term planning gratification postponement emotional regulation it's the last part of the brain that evolved in us we've got more of it than any other species it isn't fully online in us until we're 25 years old it's the last part of the brain to fully develop and what's the frontal cortex do the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing 25% Thanks 25 domina 25% of the men on death row in this country have a history of concussive head trauma to the frontal cortex and when you have a damaged frontal cortex you have someone who knows the difference between right and wrong they can give you wonderfully prudent advice as to the emotionally regulated things you should do in your life they can sit there put in a testing situation and say exactly why this is the thing the choice to make even though that's kind of tempting and which is why they're exactly good and then every time they go for the wrong one this is a world of people who know the difference between right and wrong and they have in volitional organic impairment nonetheless they can't regulate their behavior so you look at something dramatic like somebody's frontal cortex was blown out on a car accident when they were eight and this is a pretty dramatic example but then you ask in a much more subtle realm so what are some of the other things that influence how well your frontal cortex is working how much stress hormones you were exposed to when you were a fetus whether your mother was stressed like crazy her stress hormones get past the placenta into your circulation and the most sensitive part of the brain to them is the frontal cortex what socioeconomic status you were raised in in your first five years of life this was work pi night pioneered here by Tom Boyce at UCSF Berkeley first showing by age five if you were stupid enough to have picked the wrong family to have been born into by age five your socioeconomic status is a predictor of your stress hormone levels and the lower your SES the higher the stress hormone levels and the less developed your frontal cortexes the thinner it is the lower its metabolic rate I bet if any of you were at any point in erotic parents you know about the marshmallow test and how long five-year-olds can hold out for N or ready at age five your SES and your stress hormone levels and your frontal cortical thickness are predictors of how well you do on the marshmallow test which you are ready now as a predictor of 50 years later how likely you are to be overweight how likely you are to have diabetes how likely your lifelong earning things of that so by age five your socio-economic set but also how much sleep you got last night how many hours it's been since you've eaten a meal how high your testosterone levels are if you're male what do you know testosterone turns out to do stupid things to your frontal cortex and your judgment goes out the window where you are in your ovulatory cycle what everything in between and this entire world of at those critical moments do you do the right thing even though it's the harder thing to do is a purely biological phenomenon and then we invent words like evil and punishment and retribution and it's you you don't like you have a car whose brakes are broken you obviously don't let it out on the street being driven it's dangerous it can and you fix it if you can and if you can't fix it you lock it up in the garage for the rest of time but you don't sit there and say that car deserves not to be able to take a ride in the park on a Sunday afternoon when it's beautiful out it's brakes are broken and we're biological machines and this is a shift that is beyond certainly the American criminal justice system by centuries worth of insight and what I mean one of the things that you write about a few times it's just inequality I mean just like how destructive and damaging inequality is I mean it's it's a it's a major public health crisis for us it's like I guess you don't quite see it in that way but certainly is it's a massive one when you look at okay another bandwagon Scientific American has an issue coming out next issue is on inequality the United States and I have an article and they're on the the health effects of it when you look at the upper ten percentile of income in this country in the bottom 10 percent off in percentile life expectancy difference is more than twenty years this is the scale of difference between like Bethesda Maryland and Angola when you look at these issues they're just it's an enormous enormous difference virtually every disease out there from cardiovascular to psychiatric to gastrointestinal to inflammatory etc show a socio-economic gradient the further you are down the SES ladder the worse your health the more prevalence of disease the worse the impact it has and what's been one of the most striking things like incredibly smart people have been studying this for 50 years why you see an SES gradient in every westernized country that's been examined so obvious answer poor people have less access to health care that doesn't explain it in the slightest because you see the gradients and countries with socialized medicine universal health care and you see the gradients for diseases where it doesn't matter how many doctors checkups you get it doesn't affect the incidence of juvenile diabetes and still you get the gradient ah okay it's because poor people have higher rates of smoking higher rates of drinking to excess higher rates of imprudently living next to toxic waste dumps things that you control for those that explains only about a third of the variability ah poor people can't afford to have the protective factors you don't get the vacations you don't get the health clubs you'd okay that explains a tiny percentage of the variability what it's about is the psychological stress of being poor and the best evidence for that is it's not so much being poor it's feeling poor right this was work pioneered by Nancy Adler here at UCSF looking at people's objective socioeconomic status versus subjective how do you feel you're doing compared to other people and it turns out your subjective SES is a better predictor of your health and your objective it's not being poor it's feeling poor and what is it that is the surest way to make the poor feel poor rubbing their noses in it work by a guy named Richard Wilkinson and the UK showing income inequality independent of absolute levels of income is the thing that drives the socio-economic gradient it's not being poor it's being poor surrounded by the haves and being reminded of it over and over so the final piece of that is work done by a guy at Harvard Public Health named de Chirico Watchi who has shown sort of what happens when you have high degrees of income and equality in a community social capital goes down right hasn't asked you about that people stop trusting each other people stop having a sense of efficacy social capitalist is termed the sociologist Robert Putnam came up with with this sort of famous book of his encompassing this notion of Bowling Alone the number of people in the United States who Bowl has been climbing for years the number of people who were in bowling leagues has been plummeting social connectiveness that is the metaphor for it and you want to study vast amounts about social capital you asked to two questions of people in a community on the average can you trust people or not and how many organizations do you belong to and it turns out when the income inequality goes way up what happens is people stop trusting each other Trust is built around symmetrical reciprocating relationships and by definition what a steep hierarchy does is make it impossible to have easy symmetrical relationships because there's less symmetry the second question you ask people is how many organizations you belong to because when inequality becomes rampant unions don't work very well people don't bother joining unions of any sort people don't join Oregon because you have no sense of collective efficacy those are the media so it's not so much being poor it's feeling poor which consists of being reminded of it by inequality because you then wind up in communities that are less healthy less safe less kind less generous and that winds up being the mediator for that and that one's like a catastrophe yeah and it's the story of you know why churches look the way they look why the Elks Club looks the way that it looks now why you know every since kind of even just political and you know how people participate in politics is is much more atomized and social and in the past and this you know it's it's easy to get on a bandwagon about this and in terms of degree of social inequality the United States is the poster child for it and all it's been doing is getting worse since the 80s since Reagan a steep increase since then it bottomed out in the 60s has been rising since and then bid a big inflection curve around then in terms of average social capital the US has less of it than any other European Western culture out there oh my god were such a mess it has I mean 1971 when they didn't know that that the parts of the brain were secreting hormones in 1971 you know that yet there was a 90% tax bracket I mean you could pay ninety percent taxes and ninety one and something happened to that picture of what society is like so it's amid that you know it's easy to get on sort of rant about that but that's kind of what makes this country what it is for better or worse I mean on a certain level like our our god-given rights as Americans are to be mobile to be anonymous to be like go move away from where you grew up go change your name get rid of your accent once you go to college you're regional embarrassing accent go to what go reinvent yourself you and invent Silicon Valley among hunter-gatherers this has to be the world's mecca for misanthropes who have very little need for social connectiveness and social community and this is the world where like you go when I when I've finished grad school in New York City I went and did a two-year postdoc in San Diego at the Salk Institute and you go when you do a postdoc you were there for only one reason which is to get three reasons you're there to get a lot of publications to learn a whole bunch of techniques in the lab that does different stuff in the lab you did your PhD and and then go get a job somewhere and you're there for two years and you were there to work like a maniac and like I lived somewhere and in my two years living there I never exchanged a word with my neighbors and among like my friends in Kenya like that is a psychiatric symptom if you like don't speak to your neighbors that is like and what this here is like buffing up your resume so you can get it I'm here for two years I'm not here to make friends I'm here to work 80 hour weeks in a lab and like hoorays somebody gave me a job afterward like this is this is part of the political structure that's on some kind of equality and we on a certain level of signed up for this in amid it being very easy to bellyache about our breakdown of communities and all like I would not want to still be like living next door to my parents house and pairing caring for the grandchildren cows of their cows and marrying someone who like learned how to pluck chickens and are a little shtetl or whatever like yeah there's advantages to this and then along comes something like 9/11 and we discover we don't know the names of our neighbors and like had ago when like so double-edged swords any questions of things that I read about in here but there's been something I've been just dying to ask you from the moment I started reading these things you know the like that Ray Kurzweil and those artificial intelligence people who are our neighbors to the south of us what are your thoughts about that whole those kinds of discussions you know like the singularity and to 1:32 the machine's gonna be smarter than the humans I mean it from a humanities perspective we were realizing more that we're not just abstract consciousness we are embodied humans our bodies are much more important and I wonder for you who studies you know those dominance displays and in primate behavior and brain function I mean how that that artificial intelligence conversation what does it sound like to you mostly terrifying I hope terrifying just because I'm utterly ignorant our son Benjamin is a is a CS person that Stanford doing artificial intelligence this this was his oedipal revenge on me his his being being able to be contemptuous of neurons and how computationally primitive they are so depending on his mood which I suspect has a lot to do with sort of social emotional priming issues having nothing to do with computer science depending on his mood either like we're all gonna be uploaded onto chips and the first immortal people are already alive and like that sort of thing or if he's in a bad mood we're about 20 years away from being harvested for our carbon emissions [Music] so collectively I'm not sure how terrified to be but it does sound fairly scary yeah you on the most fundamental level it's scary when I'm separative like obvious stuff like not only will most like working-class jobs be made obsolete by machines but doctors are gonna be put out of business soon by machines a eyes are better at spotting melanomas than human dermatologists are by now radiology reading for tumors things of that sort you know on the objective level like that but the fact that we're gonna get to a point where we really can't tell the difference between whether we are talking to a person or a machine let alone which one we prefer this is kind of scary yeah yeah I mean for me it's just there can't be an alternate humanity that just that didn't evolve but was just invented by us do you mean so I do I I do wonder about that part like about dreams and desires and I mean just all those irrational parts the subterranean parts that you were talking about that we're more aware of even than our machines gonna have dreams are they gonna have to have dreams and right for us - yeah but anyway I'm glad you you you it's like dinner table conversation for you guys well it usually ends in like a combination of complete technological confusion on the part of my wife and I on and thinly veiled contempt for our son but it's it's pretty interesting up until then so one of our traditions at the Forum is we I'm taking we take questions I'm so Rebecca Nestle is gathering the questions so please just go ahead and let us know what questions you have um in one of my favorite parts of behaved was the section on us versus them I just thought that was just so helpful for you know just putting it context and all those tensions and distrusts and stereotypes and prejudices I mean it's just so much of our newspapers are about that experience of us versus them and you talked a little bit about Jonathan hates work on on values and you know the kind of the differences and you mentioned it earlier about the smells and the conservative parts is there anything about biology that you that you've been paying attention to especially just as is that is the Trump administration kind of you know their work begins to take hold and I mean it like when people when you see those rallies on television you know as a primatologist as a neuroscientist what are you thinking is going on for those people and and and what is it well I was so hoping you were Takei is the Trump administration unravels but I was now - I'm on does decades of social progress it's a little bit of a yes because there's so many people quitting and so many you know and yet somebody yeah you know the you know I'm human my frontal cortex is of only limited power I'm perfectly capable of wallowing in a tremendous vituperative anger and all of that it takes a lot of work - remember what makes people who they are and people don't become who they are and that worst guises and the most damaging ones outside of the context of invariably a lot of pain a lot of fear and a lot of deprivation a lot of adversity and all of that and if you can sort of find a way to like figure out that it's very meaningful that 90% of people who were murderers in this country have a whole conglomeration of what are termed adverse childhood experiences that set you up for a brain that has a whole lot of trouble with empathy and impulse control and long term planning and things of that sort if like it's capable of using biology to reason through a point of deciding they are as troubled with machines as I am a lucky machine to do the same thing for like Brett Kavanaugh or like anybody else in that category you know something that comes out of Jonathan Heights work he's a social psychologist at NY used and wonderful work addressing this whole issue of moral decisions that we make how much do we think our way to a moral decision versus how much do we feel our way and it's obvious that Western philosophy has spent hundreds of years saying hey this is thinking and thank God we're such cognitively gifted and all we have to do is understand moral developmental stages and children and theory of mine and all of that and give ethics classes and ethics classes and what hate has been sort of the most visible a sort of discoverer of is the extent of which we feel our way to our moral decisions and our cognitions then race to play catch up afterward to make it sense make sense of when we say I can't put my finger on it but when they do that it is so so I just figured out why it is they are so so wrong it is post hoc rationalization rather than rationalizing rather than rational thought something that comes out of his worry rationalize our emotional experience exactly and neurobiologically the best way of showing that is you give somebody you know a bunch of moral scenarios is this right wrong whatever and you stick them in a brain scanner and the emotional parts of your brain activate before your frontal cortex does and what your emotional parts do which parts do what are a better predictor of the decision you make than what your cortex does what comes out of that is this incredibly important dictum which is you can't reason somebody out of a stance they weren't reasoned into in the first place if you can't address the emotional pains and the emotional tumult and the emotionality that brought people to where they are and some of our worst ugliest moments rationality isn't going to get somebody into a different spot than that and I think you know America somewhere around November 4th 2016 discovered oh the disenfranchised angry pointless lower working-class uneducated white American male and the revenge that he just had in the polling booth yesterday kind of thing yeah you can't reason somebody out of something they weren't reasoned into most of where our stances are coming from is from emotions there's a lot of subterranean emotional pain that brings people to where they are yeah yeah I mean again that that's a huge massive change in inequality is is and it's something that we've just never experienced before and and we're starting to see the effects of that in all sorts of different ways um here's that my 28 years so I've got a bunch of one son we're gonna have to start picking up this you don't have to but I mean my 28 year old daughter is a child therapist which of your books which you suggest she read robably why zebras don't get ulcers which is about stress stress-related disease and what it's mostly about is so joël psychosocial factors in health I really like primates merit to think I mean what is the role of stress in your own life oh that's like why else would somebody spend 40 years working 80-hour weeks studying a subject if they weren't inherently really bad at handling it I mean I'm at some point I'm gonna just keel over dead from a heart attack and that's gonna ruin all the book sales credibility it's gonna go down the tubes you know I'm from that tribe of very driven very motivated very long-term planning sort of folks that are way familiar in our part of the country and in academia so it's not something I deal with very well soccer is good keep playing soccer well that that unfortunately I figured he couldn't because he is eventually can't do that well lumbar discs not be quite what you would want them what do you know about the biology of quote unquote awkwardness well awkwardness I think that's a constellation of a bunch of things when you look at the genetics of behavior and I can like pontificate haha for hours and hours about how little genes actually do have to do with human behavior one of the realms where there is a stronger genetic component which is not to say it's the majority of what goes on but a stronger one is introversion extroversion that one seems to have relatively large genetic load it's got much more to do with a hormonal exposure back when you were a fetus but genes have something introversion extroversion that's got something to do with social awkwardness turns out probably the most prevalent psychiatric disorder in the world right now is anxiety anxiety disorders and one of its major subtypes is social anxiety it's an enormous ly difficult skill to learn social intelligence it's got much to do with the fact that our cortex again isn't there until about 25 years because you don't just learn rules of social behavior you gotta learn all the rules of acceptable hypocrisy and rationalization and why you're an exception to what is otherwise a very very sensible rule but here's why my particular circumstances making an exception to and that's hard thirds of everyday interactions are gossip yes I mean that's part of awkwardness too maybe you just don't want to deal with that or you're not very good at it where you're at not the person they want to gossip with and they want to gossip about instead and this is based on like anthropologist go and sit around the campfire with Inuits or with Sami and northern Finland or hodza in Tanzania and you keep track of what people are talking about and an enormous percentage of what humans have talked about since we invented language was who's doing what with who who they're not supposed to be and who's I cannot get in power they oh and that's as it's been said revenge is gossip is the revenge of the weak in a society so here's a question I'm a new parent and I've heard of that quote/unquote parrot mind opposed to the square mind is there evidence for this how do I access the parent mind in an optimal way I've never heard of this I wish I had known about 15 20 years ago and let's see just falling back on biology there is as everyone who has ever done so will attest to there's something vaguely resembling biologically a mommy brain which is to say that at the time if you are lactating if you were nursing regularly that sort of thing various hormones related to that blunt some aspects of memory what do you know you're not quite as good at doing math or remembering long lists of words you are much better at keeping track of social relations there's a shift in cognition due to the hormones related to being post partition a lactation mails testosterone levels go down after they become father's and the more they go down that's a predictor of the more involved of a father they're going to be and this turns out to be found in every pair bonding species on earth there's a whole biology of the shifts then it's a time where your biology screams about being really really really concerned about haces versus them but it's a time where the brain is extremely malleable as to who counts isn't us because after all your universe just completely transformed over having at the center of it someone you didn't know back before you went into labor you were very malleable at that point as to who counts as a very fundamental us here's another question trauma seems to be deeply ingrained in the human brain can you speak to this and how it relates to neuroplasticity do you find the same stickiness and other primates yep you know if there's a an epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder now with people coming back from where various foreign ventures and Afghanistan etc much of it having to do with the fact that we're keeping people alive now from battlefield injuries that we used to not be able to so they come back physically and or psychiatrically crippled we're learning tons about PTSD and what the traumatized brain does and one of the things that shows is sort of a double-edged quality to one of the irresistible trendy things in neuroscience these days which is neural plasticity the brain changes in response to experience spend become a musician a serious musician and you expand the amount of your auditory cortex that's devoted to detecting the sound of your musical instrument Oh your brain changes in all sorts of ways and this could be totally amazing you come back traumatized beyond what ever and one piece of neuroplasticity is a part of the brain called the amygdala which does fear and anxiety and aggression you have PTSD and your amygdala neuro plastically and gets bigger than normal and it has trouble shutting off and thus you never ever feel safe so this business of neuroplasticity is very exciting but a brain can suddenly work a whole lot better better at being afraid better and more efficiently ethnically cleansing villages better at keeping track of where the VINs are hiding it's it's a double-edged sword that was great that's exactly what you did it's it in the book - I'm in popular vernacular what lifehacks are most helpful in support of healthy frontal cortex functioning Oh God never thought of that that's a good one well this shows how out of it I am I am unfamiliar with what a life hack is but let me just perhaps generalize it into what could make for a stronger frontal cortex and maybe in the realms of rather than a better frontal cortex at holding on and so you could take your company public maybe a better frontal cortex when it comes to doing the harder thing when it comes to being like decent to people or not what the studies show are foreseer brain to take somebody else's perspective I'm not asking you to agree with them but if they had to say why they are so upset about what's been done to them and their people what would they say force your brain to individuate other people yes they are part of this category what do you what do you suppose do you suppose they've like broccoli or do they like cauliflower what do you suppose was their favorite birthday party they ever had what an individual perspective taking things of that sort focusing on the fact that other people are malleable as well induces malleability of our own views and these are not just sort of knee-jerk this is like research that's been done take Israelis and Palestinians and force them to do perspective-taking and then afterwards see if you have a change in their viewpoints things of that those are exercises that make your frontal cortex stronger and the most important sound like speeding a novel has that effect I never thought about you know what why that's such a and it takes so much work I mean the energy that the brain consumes it takes a lot of work and then wonderful study with that published in Nature a few years ago from the New School for Social Research not a hotbed for publishing and sort of serials and what they looked at were the effects of reading popular fiction versus reading literature literature may be best defined as fuchs books you were forced to read rather than you would want to read books where characters motivations are ambiguous where resolutions are not all that resolved or a plot lines and you spend a bunch of time being forced to read literature versus popular fiction and you get better at theory of mind with literature you get better at perspective taking because you're spending more time dealing with the fact that other people think and feel different things than you do right exactly could you talk about education is now how we edge is how we educate children at odds with fire biology oh god don't start me on that we can't yeah yeah yes maybe probably in the most fundamental way is one that like is like oh yeah good luck with that one what should be clear is I don't have a whole lot of belief in free will and I spent an awful lot of time thinking about what the world is supposed to look like if people actually started accepting how much we are purely biological machines and how the answer should not be we all just get to run amuck at that point but the whole realm like if you're any like decent parent like obsessed crazily over your child having an internal locus of control and good self-esteem and all of that and what we have to like teach our kids much more of is predominantly the kids of people in an audience like this I would guess is how much they are just nothing other than the outcome of just sheer utter biological luck of picking the right room picking the right family picking the right neighborhood picking the right history of vaccinations or clean border or distance from neighbouring warlords and things of that sort and like that's the biological thing I think that needs to be hammered into our kids because the sort of kids I think we tend to produce our ones who are much too readily instead tempted towards a sense of I have something to do with the Magnificent person that I am now that's what you say over and over again it's just the the hyerin's socioeconomic status the more likely you are to tribute your success to your own you know quality of system justification systems education I'm here where I am for a good reason yeah exactly because nobody else could be the Supreme Court justice but me so this is the last question we have you have emphasized the effect of stress in your work what is its effect on society as a whole particularly regarding massive changes such as social and environmental degradation to the point of societal collapse oh that this is another one of those where if you had asked me thirty years ago when I was obsessing over stress biology I would have had a completely different emphasis than now I had a guy who sort of became kind of a mentor father figure to me a guy named Meyer Friedman who older San Francisco residents here might remember the Meyer Friedman Institute on Scott Street Meyer Friedman was the cardiologist at UCSF in the 1950s who discovered type-a personality and spent a whole career doing that and he became sort of a father figure to me and mentor and my career he died aged 92 he saw his last patient a week before he died he was still seeing patients at UCSF Medical Center he used to say I'm still type-a but how much hype a tortoise now how much he had slowed down as a 90 year old he was still furious when his groups papers were rejected because some idiot reviewer didn't understand the statistics and what he would do I'd he had his Meyer Friedman Institute and he would get all these 40 year-old CEOs who would just had their first heart attacks and I had come in to join his six-month program to completely change their stress lifestyle and I would sit in on some of these and he would always give the first lecture and then he would turn it over to his team and his first lecture was about how he used to be so type-a he had his first heart attack when he was 50 and made some massive changes in his life and 92 years old and all of that and he would give this talk about how type-a he used to be and he wouldn't talk about his first heart attack he would talk about what a son of a he was back when and how awful he was to this nurse and to this secretary and all of that and at his funeral I talked to his like 60 year old kids who confirmed that's exactly that was not a rhetorical device he had he really was awful until he and at one point I sort of looking at this asked him one day so okay are you in this business to make people have healthier hearts or a you with this business to make people nicer to each other and he said absolutely the latter if I have to terrify people through their heart problems and to being sort of nicer people to each other when you look at what chronic stress does it does bad stuff to your bladder and your spleen in your gonads in your heart and your all of this it does bad stuff to remember E and your self-control and your impulses and your long-term planning it does bad things to your vulnerability to depression into anxiety what I now realize after decades of this is one of the most interesting important things that stress does is it decreases our capacity for empathy and we even know exactly what part of the brain that involves and which stress hormones do it some of the last research I did in my lab was on stuff with that and that's probably it's not only that stress makes us unhealthy and forgetful and maybe even demented and dead earlier stress makes us tunnel visioned in terms of who counts us and us and whose pains you can feel and that's the most important manifestation I think there's so much more to say and I'm so grateful for you for being here I wanted to ask more questions about religion there are a few people who also wanted to do that but and there's so much more to about what you were just saying that that the way that empathy that we that we can just literally not feel the pain of people who we regard as others but I do recommend of the books to read and and I look forward to our next conversation because I like I said I have so many more things in there not just the artificial intelligence I'm glad that you had been talking to your son about that um being lectured to I think is more accurate but he's he's very gentle that's good that's so if you're interested in hearing more from Robert Sapolsky he is going to be our preacher at the service upstairs so it means that when he's done he may sign a few like four books but not too many cuz you got to give him a little bit of space between this and the next thing but the service will be upstairs well there'll be lots of dogs and pets and cats and everything so it may be a little dark barking I just do it just that keep going through it you know hey I teach students investments for students with their computers have watch her barking barking so please join me for next week our guest will be Jeff Chang Jeff Chang um is race forwards vice president of narrative arts and cultures it's gonna be a conversation about race culture and resegregate he's a person who's rotten written know the history of hip-hop lots of things like that he's gonna be great and if you can please make a donation there's a little box there for the donations we appreciate any gift that you can make and please join with me in thanking Robert [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Grace Cathedral San Francisco

Views: 141,750

Rating: 4.8997383 out of 5

Keywords: Grace Cathedral, The Forum, The Forum at Grace Cathedral, Robert Sapolsky, The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm C. Young, Science, neurology, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Id: 61tChpN3lhY

Length: 64min 36sec (3876 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/jasammajakovski]

God I love this man

[u/moshe4sale]

Does anybody have a social/economic/political structure shaped by (or inline with) the teachings of Robert Sapolsky?