119. ROBERT SAPOLSKY
In a Clear+Vivid podcast interview with neuroendocrinologist, professor, and author Robert Sapolsky, Alan Alda opened many interesting vistas. The interview covered a wide range of subject matter, from which I have selected passages that relate to the theme of these posts.
Robert: “But what we’re very good at, the way we figure out who counts as an ‘us’ and who counts as a ‘them’ is rather than relying on instinct, we’ve got to think about it. As soon as we have to think about it, we’re subject into being manipulated into feeling more connected to some individuals than we actually are genetically connected by culture, ideology, theology, all that sort of stuff, or feeling so unrelated to some other fellow humans that it hardly even counts as killing a human when we do that. The mere fact that we have to think our way through and we’re subject to symbolic manipulation as to who counts as an ‘us’ or a ‘them’, is where all the complexities come in.”
Robert: “You look at someone who’s just done something wonderful and altruistic, or brutal and savage, or ambiguously somewhere in between, and a classic human response we have is to in effect say, ‘Why did they do that just now?’ When you ask that, you’re asking something about what neurons in different parts of their brain did a fraction of a second ago. But you’re also asking about what environmental stimuli in the previous seconds to minutes triggered those neurons. You’re also asking what did hormone levels that morning have to do with making those neurons more or less sensitive to those triggers. Then you’re often running in neuroplasticity, how has experience changed those neurons in previous months. Then you’re back to adolescence and childhood and fetal life, which has a huge amount to do with the sort of brain you’re going to have as an adult, deciding whether or not you’re going to do that critically wonderful or critically horrible thing.”
Alan: “You said something once that struck me as something so important, I wrote it down immediately. You said, ‘You can’t reason with someone out of a position that they weren’t reasoned into in the first place.’ I suppose you mean if they have a feeling connection to their position, and it’s mainly the feeling that got them into that position, you’re not going to change them or affect them much with logic.”
Robert: “They have an opinion. You disagree with it deeply. They feel something about economics or social policy that’s totally in contrast to you, and how can they believe that. How can they think that? The key thing is to figure out what circumstances brought them to that point. Those circumstances have more to do with emotion than they do with cognition.”
Robert: “Again, we’ve got a part of the brain, a different part, called the anterior cingulate that activates if somebody is poking your finger with a pin. And it activates if you’re looking at the finger of a loved one being poked…. I think that’s one of the things that naturally emerges. If it doesn’t at all, you’re on the path to sociopathy. What you get is like typical landmarks when kids first get distressed at somebody else’s pain when for the first time you can show their heart rate increases, when they would first give up a cookie to somebody else to share with them because the other person unfairly doesn’t have one. When kids are beginning to get first egalitarian thinking, things of that sort.”
Robert: “Well, what you’ve got is, and on a certain level, all of adolescents could be explained by two neurobiological facts. The first one is that the emotional part of the brain chugging the limbic system parts of the brain having to do with aggression, with lust, with love, with all that stuff, regions like the amygdala, for example, the neurotransmitter dopamine, and another part that’s very implicated, you’re pretty much up-to-speed with your limbic system by the time you’re early adolescent. … The part of your brain that spends its time getting to the limbic system and saying, ‘I know this seems like a wonderful idea. Don’t do it. You’re going to regret it, believe me, believe me,’ is the frontal cortex. All of adolescence is explained by the fact that the emotional brain is going full speed there, and the frontal cortex in humans isn’t fully wired up until they’re about 25 years old.”
Robert: “You see, adolescents are weird. It’s the time in life you’re most likely to mug an old lady, rob a liquor store, join some nationalist, fascist, groupie… it’s the time in life where you’re most likely to devote yourself to the wellbeing of strangers on the other side of the planet, the time of life you’re most likely to like found a religion or a cult. It’s one of emotional extremes.”
Robert: “What you see is, in a sense, there’s two different types of empathy. One is the easy one. That’s just automatic, and it’s someone who looks like you, and it’s someone who’s pained in a way that you’ve experienced. It’s somebody local. All of that is just tapping into effortless sense of empathy…. But then the type of empathy where you’re trying to make sense of someone from extremely different culture whose practices and values are totally alien, or somebody whose pain happens to be something that you would enjoy doing. Those take work. It takes real cognitive work to take somebody else’s perspective and to say, ‘Wait a second. Stop before you judge. Their circumstances are different.
“What are their mitigating factors?’ That takes work. When we’re tired, when we’re hungry, when we’re stressed, when we’re distracted, it’s harder to do that. We become much more parochial and narrow in our empathy when we’re stressed. … In other words, part of our narrowing of empathy in scary circumstances, novel circumstances, all of that, as it turns out, this stress hormone works in the brain to narrow our focus as to whose pain matters, as to who counts as an us.”
Robert: “On a more cognitive behavioral level, if the main point of somebody else’s pain is, you sit there and say, ‘Oh my God. This must be so awful for them,’ that’s a predictor of a compassionate act. On the other hand, if you sit there and say, ‘Oh my God. It would be so awful if this were happening to me,’ that’s the predictor of the person who says, ‘This is just way too upsetting and I’m going to change the channel now.’”
Robert: “This is exactly where this notion of, you can’t reason somebody out of something they weren’t reasoned into in the first place, comes in. You don’t sit down and then tell somebody about all the shared values you have with this person who you would otherwise consider a ‘them’ in all the ways in which they actually have the same feelings. You show them a picture of the person, like giggling with their kid, or holding a puppy, or smiling because they’ve just tasted a piece of food that they love. That’s the visceral level. You discover that you and them loved the same game when you were little, that you both loved Twister, that you both did this.”
Alan: “Instead of pointing out intellectually what you share in common, you actually go through some kind of experience together, even in memory or in pictures, or actually sharing a meal together and loving the taste of it together. That can bring you together apparently, from what you say, better than an intellectual listing of the ways in which you’re similar.”
Robert: “The gut feeling is it’s this unexpected little bits and pieces of things. I mean, even on the level of living in San Francisco as I do, this city is flooded with homeless people, and homeless people who by now are often homeless working poor, and because of their costs of rent that have skyrocketed here, things of that sort. You go through an area that’s overrun with homeless people and, my God, what’s happening, in all the ways in which our visceral, bristly, porcupine quills of yeck, are being activated there.
“The knowledge that one of those people probably had a supporting lead in their high school play. Most of those people, at some point or other, had a group of people sing Happy Birthday to them. Most of those people opened up a Christmas present at some point where they were so excited that they could barely stand it, that they were eight years old before something went really wrong, or before all the bits of rotten luck they had caught up enough that this is where they are now. But just on that visceral level, my God, that person once was applauded in an auditorium for giving a good debate, whatever, before they got into drugs and wound up on the streets. Any of that, that… if one could see every homeless person who as a child got to blow out the candles on a cake and were so happy and felt so safe in the world that they couldn’t even believe it, if you could see that they went through that as well, that would be transformative.”
Q: What is your takeaway from what Robert Sapolsky has said here?
