The Joe Rogan Experience - May 25, 2017


Joe Rogan Experience #965 - Robert Sapolsky

Topics
Toxo and behavioral effects toxo and its effects frontal cortex maturation and impulsivity situational ethics baboon culture shift
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Robert Sapolsky
Mentioned
Toxo Twinkie Walter Freeman Jane Goodall Jesus Christ Sam Harris Agas Moniz Dana White Serengeti Radiolab Sort
Joe Rogan Experience #964 - Everlast Joe Rogan Experience #966 - Tom Papa

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 7 minutes

Words per minute

155.03

Word count

10,475

Sentence count

645

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

32

sentences flagged

Hate speech

20

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic infection found in the feces of cats and other animals, and it s been around for a really long time. It s found a way to get into the brains of animals and humans, and in doing so, it s changed the way we think about fear and attraction. In this episode, we talk to neuroscientist and animal behaviorist Dr. Robert Krieger about the cat parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, and how it got into our bodies and brains. And how it s changing our perception of the world and the things we can do to make us more attractive to other animals and things we don t want to be attracted to them. Plus, we learn about how a parasite can rewire an animal s brain to reprogram its neural wiring to make them less afraid of predators. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Music by Ian Dorsch and Mark Phillips. Additional music by Zapsplat and Matthew Boll. Art: Mackenzie Moore. Music: Hayden Coplen. Editor: Steven Kanter. Editor: Patrick Muldowney. Cover art by Ian McKirdy. The theme song is by Ian Somerhalder. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music was written and produced by Matthew Boll, and additional selections were produced by Robert Kucharski. Additional music was done by Mark Hollands and Mark Boll, with additional engineering by Matthew McElveen. and John Rocha. Thank you, and the rest is by Mark McElroy for the music used in this episode was written, edited by John Chamberlain, and edited, and provided by Ian Meegan, and Matthew Korte, and his band is . and the music was produced and produced for this episode is by Bobby Lord, and is by Jeff Perla. , and the production was edited by Jeff Graham. for use in the music is , and is a postcode is by in this eponymous author, and by , with permission by . Thank you is a copyright of , edited by ? by Brian Stellare, on this episode and , in association with permission by Rachel Ward, by David Schwartze .

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:12.000 I found out about you several years back.
00:00:15.000 I had heard something about toxoplasmosis.
00:00:19.000 Am I saying it right?
00:00:20.000 Yeah.
00:00:20.000 And I had seen a speech that you had given on it where you were talking about How many people have been infected by this cat parasite?
00:00:29.000 I've had cats my whole life, and I even had feral cats.
00:00:33.000 And I've always wondered, like, I should probably get tested, and I'm worried about the result.
00:00:37.000 Perhaps not.
00:00:39.000 Well, it was just fascinating to me that, literally, I mean, what is the number that you estimate in Americans alone that might have been infected?
00:00:48.000 I think it's on the order of, I'm not sure with Americans, but worldwide, it's something like 50% of humans is the best guess.
00:00:59.000 For people who've never heard of this, would you mind explaining what this parasite is and how it affects rats and then cats and then people?
00:01:06.000 Okay, totally bizarre.
00:01:07.000 So it's this protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, and it's got one of these weird parasitic lifestyles.
00:01:15.000 The only place on earth where it could reproduce sexually is in the gut of a cat.
00:01:21.000 I don't know why there are people who know this, but so it reproduces there, comes out in the cat feces, feces are eaten by rodents, and now Toxo's evolutionary challenge is to get that rodent into a cat's stomach.
00:01:35.000 So what Toxo has evolved is this ability, it slowly migrates to the brain of rodents and basically wipes out the innate fear that rodents have of cat smells.
00:01:49.000 Like, you take a lab rat who's been like the descendant of lab rats for like a thousand years and they've never seen a cat and put like a little puddle of cat pee in its cage and the rat's going to go on the other side of the cage.
00:02:01.000 Just hardwired, instinctual aversion to cat pheromones and then put toxin in a rat and it loses that aversion.
00:02:10.000 And in fact, in a subset of rats, they like the smell.
00:02:13.000 So, out in the natural setting, you now go and approach a cat, and soon the rodents inside the cat's stomach, and Toxo is completed its life cycle.
00:02:24.000 Well, I'd heard that it was a subset of rats that actually are gravitated towards it, because I'd heard it actually rewires them sexually, right?
00:02:32.000 Yes, that's actually work that we did in my lab, that it...
00:02:37.000 Basically crosses some of the circuitry in the brain and the hypothalamus so that cat pheromones that used to be activating every alarm circuit in your limbic system and these rodents now instead sort of taps into sexual arousal pathways.
00:02:54.000 And in male rats, when they smell cat pheromones, they increase testosterone production.
00:03:01.000 So TOXO has just figured out the most brilliant way of doing it.
00:03:05.000 It makes cat pee smell sexy.
00:03:08.000 Is there any understanding at all of the mechanism of how a parasite can figure out how to rewire an animal's sexual reward system, the fear of predators?
00:03:20.000 Like, how does that work?
00:03:22.000 Well, that's something my lab spent a bunch of years on, trying to figure out...
00:03:28.000 I mean, you look at some of these parasites, this taps into this whole world of behavioral manipulation of hosts by parasites, and it turns out They've evolved unbelievably brilliant mechanisms for manipulating hosts for their own benefit.
00:03:43.000 Think about it.
00:03:44.000 You get rabies, you get a rabid dog, and what that's about is a virus that has affected the nervous system of that dog so that it's now rabid and more likely to bite somebody with viral Particles in its saliva,
00:04:00.000 which it now passes on to the next individual.
00:04:03.000 Like, you take 10,000 neuroscientists and stick them in a convention on the neurobiology of aggression, and rabies knows more about the neural wiring of aggression than we do.
00:04:15.000 And toxo knows, quotation marks, something about fear and aversion and the neurobiology of attraction.
00:04:24.000 Part of what it seems to involve is toxo, somewhere along the way, has picked up a gene that is pertinent to the dopamine system.
00:04:35.000 In mammals.
00:04:36.000 Dopamine is this neurotransmitter.
00:04:38.000 It's about pleasure.
00:04:39.000 There's no protozoan parasite for buoy mirrors that's had any use for this stuff, except it's part of how toxo seems to be manipulating the reward system in rodents.
00:04:51.000 And then, a couple years ago, there's a paper showing that in chimpanzees, toxo makes you less afraid of the smell of leopards.
00:05:01.000 So, this appears to be a parasite that just has evolved like this spectacular insight into fear circuitry and attraction circuitry, and it's all for its own benefit to wind up in a cat's gut.
00:05:15.000 So specifically cats, do the chimpanzees still have aversions to snakes and other things that can kill them?
00:05:21.000 Yep.
00:05:22.000 Wow!
00:05:22.000 And at one point my lab was full of bobcat pee and wolf pee.
00:05:28.000 There's actually a company you could buy urine from.
00:05:33.000 I don't know why anyone would want it except for us, but they sell urine.
00:05:38.000 Actually, what they use it for is you can go spritz it around your garden to scare the deer away.
00:05:43.000 Oh, that makes sense.
00:05:45.000 I don't know where they get the urine from, but it's certified and all of that.
00:05:53.000 And yeah, it's remarkably specific.
00:05:56.000 So, have they ever done tests like wolf urine or anything like that around chimps?
00:06:02.000 Do they have any aversion to that?
00:06:04.000 As far as I know, the chimp study has only been with big cat urine, but the rodent studies, exactly that, showing it's a fair specificity.
00:06:12.000 The rodents lose a little bit of their general skittishness.
00:06:18.000 They get a little bit disinhibited behaviorally.
00:06:20.000 So just in general, they're out more and more exploratory, more likely to get eaten.
00:06:25.000 But the most selective lasering effect is they're not scared anymore of cat pheromones.
00:06:31.000 Now, what's fascinating to me is that I've also read that there was a disproportionate amount of successful soccer teams that are in countries with high rates of infestation of toxoplasma.
00:06:45.000 Okay, that one's new to me, but that sounds like exactly the sort of epidemiological studies that are popping up about humans.
00:06:53.000 Okay, so what about humans?
00:06:58.000 There's two branches of interesting stuff with Toxo in humans.
00:07:02.000 One is a literature that's been around for quite some time showing that Toxo seems to increase the risk of schizophrenia.
00:07:11.000 There's a higher rate of schizophrenia of individuals who have antibodies against Toxo.
00:07:18.000 In other words, sometime in the past, their body was Dealing with it, who had cats growing up, whose mother had cats during pregnancy, and like anybody who gets pregnant knows you immediately get all anxious about cat litter boxes because of the possibility of toxoplasmosis.
00:07:37.000 It can attack the fetal nervous system, do all sorts of damage, and a subtle version of it seems to be a sleeper effect of increasing the risk of schizophrenia.
00:07:48.000 The other realm is toxo-infected humans get subtle changes in personality, neuropsychological profiles.
00:07:59.000 They get a little bit disinhibited.
00:08:01.000 If you're toxo-infected, you're more likely to die in a car accident involving reckless speeding.
00:08:09.000 If you're toxinfected and clinically depressed for the same severity of depression, you're more likely to impulsively kill yourself.
00:08:18.000 In other words, toxo is doing something kind of similar. 0.78
00:08:21.000 If you're a rat, one of the hardest wired scary things in the universe out there is the smell of a cat.
00:08:27.000 If you're a human, it's hurtling through space really fast, jumping out of windows and Toxo seems to blunt a lot of those effects there.
00:08:39.000 In the speech that I saw you give, you were talking about your time working in a hospital and that there was a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims.
00:08:49.000 This was actually something I heard from a clinician.
00:08:54.000 An old sort of parasitology, infectious disease doctor, who sort of, when I was first telling him about this sort of emerging toxin story, he had like one of these bolts of memory saying, my God, I remember back when I was a resident,
00:09:10.000 there was this old doctor saying, you know, if you're ever harvesting organs from an accident victim, I don't know why, I don't know why, but if it's from somebody who was in a motorcycle accident, make sure you check to see if they have toxoplasmosis.
00:09:25.000 I don't know why, but there's a high rate of that that you find in organs from people who were killed driving motorcycles recklessly.
00:09:35.000 Totally anecdotal, n equals 1 kind of thing, but nonetheless, this was a guy who studies infectious disease and toxoplasmosis and had not heard about sort of the behavioral findings before and that out of the recesses of his memory.
00:09:51.000 So what initially seemed like, okay, this is a parasite that's very selectively developed this life cycle between cat stomachs and rodent brains and completing its life cycle.
00:10:03.000 And weird, when it gets into humans, it has some behavioral effects also.
00:10:07.000 That's just kind of evolutionary spillover.
00:10:10.000 But then you see if it's doing something similar between chimps and leopards, Suggesting that that life cycle manipulation has been selected for in primates as well.
00:10:22.000 Very strange.
00:10:24.000 It's very strange.
00:10:25.000 And for me the strangest thing is the certainty with which there's a gazillion viruses and bacteria and god knows what else out there that manipulate host behavior in ways we just haven't figured out yet.
00:10:39.000 Or we just haven't discovered the particular...
00:10:42.000 What does it do to women? 1.00
00:10:45.000 Does it have a similar effect?
00:10:47.000 It seems to have less severe effects on neuropsychological profiles of women.
00:10:53.000 Again, the literature on this is pretty scanty in humans, but it seems to have some similar effects but not as extreme.
00:11:01.000 However, the story now gets a little bit more complicated, and this is actually this fabulous scientist, Ajay Vyas, who's my postdoc, who's now a professor in Singapore, who's continued to study this.
00:11:14.000 Okay, so normally, one of the things animals have evolved to be really good at is picking up signals that somebody else is unhealthy.
00:11:24.000 Like a potential mate is unhealthy.
00:11:28.000 There's sickness behavior.
00:11:30.000 There's very olfactory cues.
00:11:32.000 If you're a rodent, it makes perfect sense.
00:11:34.000 The last thing you want to do is to be mating with somebody who's like rancid and infectious and rodent equivalents of STDs. 0.74
00:11:43.000 So normally, sick animals, parasite-infected animals and such are detected by other rodents and avoided.
00:11:52.000 Toxin does something different.
00:11:54.000 You get a toxin infected male and now Whoa!
00:12:08.000 Whoa! 0.98
00:12:29.000 So, you're a male rat infected with toxo. 0.99
00:12:34.000 Downside, you're more likely to get eaten by a cat. 0.98
00:12:36.000 Upside, you're more likely to pass on copies of your genes by increased sexual selection.
00:12:42.000 So, it might be, in fact, more of a balanced symbiotic relationship between male rats and toxo.
00:12:51.000 You know, more research is needed, blah, blah.
00:12:54.000 It's just, like, cool sort of biology out there.
00:12:58.000 It's crazy.
00:12:59.000 And is it transferred sexually with men and women, too, as well as with rats?
00:13:03.000 I don't know.
00:13:04.000 I don't think it's been looked at.
00:13:06.000 Oh, wow.
00:13:07.000 That seems like something I would want to look at right away.
00:13:09.000 Yes.
00:13:10.000 What about organ donors?
00:13:14.000 Other than, again, pure anecdotalism, that one elderly doc somewhere back when saying, watch it when you're getting organs from, like, people killed in motorcycle accidents.
00:13:25.000 Beyond that, I don't know.
00:13:27.000 I mean, people are looking at it, I'm sure.
00:13:29.000 But do they even test?
00:13:30.000 Like, say, if you've got a liver...
00:13:34.000 I suspect they do, and sort of in the clinical world of people who worry about toxo, toxo, pregnancy, scary, alarms going off.
00:13:45.000 Toxo, anything else, after an acute period of infection...
00:13:48.000 You have a latent toxoplasma infection.
00:13:52.000 In other words, the agreed-upon sort of notion there is, toxo has gone latent, it's formed sort of these cysts that are inert, and you've got nothing to worry about then.
00:14:04.000 But the whole notion that meanwhile, up in the nervous system, there's effects happening there, you know, infectious disease people are thinking about Inflammation outside in the body there.
00:14:15.000 For them, chronic toxinfection is not something you worry about a whole lot.
00:14:20.000 But if it's having behavioral effects up there in the nervous system, maybe it is something to worry about.
00:14:27.000 Well, to me, it's unfathomable how this little thing figures out how to hijack a whole body, a whole biological system, and work it to its own It's very hard for me to grasp.
00:14:45.000 Well, if you think of it in terms of, oh, I don't know, Toxo has had, like, 100,000 more generations to evolve its ways of exploiting mammals, and mammals have had ways of fighting it off.
00:15:02.000 What's most remarkable is it turns out this is like a whole world of parasites that do bizarre manipulative things to their hosts.
00:15:09.000 Most of it's not in the realm of mammals.
00:15:12.000 Instead, There's like some parasitic something or other that gets into barnacles and takes over their reproductive system so that the barnacle digs a hole for them, not the barnacle, but the parasite to lay eggs into.
00:15:29.000 There's, you know...
00:15:31.000 The aquatic worm that infects the grasshopper and makes it commit suicide?
00:15:34.000 Exactly.
00:15:35.000 That one's bizarre.
00:15:36.000 That one's bizarre.
00:15:37.000 There's this wasp that gets into cockroaches and takes over his nervous system.
00:15:44.000 I'm fascinated by parasites, beyond, but it's so confusing to me how something, I mean obviously you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of generations for it to get to this point.
00:15:55.000 This current state, but how something evolves to be so effective.
00:16:00.000 It's so confusing.
00:16:03.000 It's remarkable.
00:16:06.000 Just to flip to the other end of the spectrum in terms of what co-evolution between two different species could be like.
00:16:17.000 Over the last 20,000 years, look at what we've done.
00:16:20.000 We've taken wolves and we've turned them into these creatures we put Halloween costumes on.
00:16:24.000 And a finding a couple of years ago, which floored me, is hormone oxytocin, which is totally trendy.
00:16:33.000 Oxytocin is completely cool.
00:16:35.000 Mother-infant bonding is mediated by oxytocin.
00:16:39.000 Pair bonding in monogamous species.
00:16:41.000 Oxytocin makes you more trusting and expressive and generous and...
00:16:46.000 And economic games and oxytocin has all these pro-social effects within a species.
00:16:52.000 But then it turns out that this hormone that has spent the last, I don't know, 100 million years having mothers and infants connect to each other emotionally, when you and your beloved dog sit there and stare into each other's eyes,
00:17:08.000 you both secrete oxytocin.
00:17:10.000 And if you pump up oxytocin levels in your dog, it will stare at you longer, and you will stare longer back and secrete more oxytocin.
00:17:19.000 This is like an ancient, ancient hormone having to do with mother-infant bonding, and in 20,000 years, which is like a blink of an eye evolutionarily, suddenly we're doing this weird oxytocin-tango thing with another species.
00:17:34.000 Another species who we feed and take care of and they, like, manipulate us wildly into, like, getting them, like, good dessert treat bones and stuff like that. 0.98
00:17:46.000 And they, in turn, do all sorts of wondrous stuff for our self-esteem because they, like, lick us unconditionally.
00:17:54.000 Where'd that come from?
00:17:56.000 Just 20,000 years, and you've hijacked this ancient neuroendocrinology about parental behavior, and now it's got to do with this weird symbiotic thing.
00:18:08.000 We and wolves worked out somewhere back when.
00:18:10.000 Does it have any effect on friendship?
00:18:14.000 Like human beings staring at each other?
00:18:16.000 Has anybody ever tested that?
00:18:18.000 I would assume people have looked at that...
00:18:22.000 For example, it strengthens monogamous bonds.
00:18:27.000 And there's a literature by now looking at oxytocin has its effects by binding to an oxytocin receptor.
00:18:34.000 There's a gene for the oxytocin receptor.
00:18:36.000 It comes in a number of variants.
00:18:37.000 And if you have one particular variant that's associated with oxytocin having less effective of an oomph in your nervous system, that's associated with less stable relationships.
00:18:50.000 Ah.
00:18:51.000 So, you know, none of this stuff is deterministic.
00:18:54.000 Your sex life and your romantic life is not being determined by this one gene, like nothing remotely resembling that, but that's just part of the mix in there.
00:19:04.000 I was just wondering if that mix applies to, like, platonic friendships, like male bonding and stuff.
00:19:09.000 I wonder if there's...
00:19:10.000 When guys are out having a good time, if they're also getting a good juice of oxytocin.
00:19:15.000 My guess is when you have your basic pathetic male sociality, which is like you talk about sports for five minutes with some guy and as a result you're willing to give up your life for him because this is male, male body, I bet that's got something to do with oxytocin.
00:19:32.000 Yeah, I mean, it only makes sense. 0.73
00:19:34.000 I mean, how many of these different factors are there in manipulating human behavior?
00:19:39.000 I mean, this is essentially your specialty, right?
00:19:41.000 Yeah.
00:19:42.000 Okay, so switching over to this part of the brain, the frontal cortex, which is just the coolest part of the brain.
00:19:50.000 It's the most recently evolved.
00:19:52.000 We've got more of it, or it's more complicated in us than any other species.
00:19:57.000 What does the frontal cortex do?
00:19:59.000 It makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.
00:20:03.000 Self-control, long-term planning, gratification postponement.
00:20:13.000 Okay, so another way of stating that is over and over in life we come to splits in the road where we've got temptations and we've got impulses and we've got yeah go for it right now you know you want it and The frontal cortex is critical at that juncture as to whether we do the inane,
00:20:35.000 impulsive, self-indulgent thing that we may perhaps regret for the rest of our lives, or if you tough it out and do the right thing.
00:20:43.000 What your frontal cortex does at critical junctures is one of the most consequential pieces in neurobiology we've got.
00:20:51.000 So you ask what kind of things affect how well your frontal cortex is working in that one second where you have to decide if that person is holding a cell phone or a handgun and do you pull a trigger?
00:21:05.000 Or in that one second where you decide do you take this thing and run or does temptation get resisted?
00:21:13.000 So what sort of biological things affect what your frontal cortex is doing?
00:21:18.000 How hungry you are.
00:21:20.000 If you're hypoglycemic.
00:21:22.000 How tired you are.
00:21:23.000 If you're in pain.
00:21:25.000 All of those make the frontal cortex work not as well.
00:21:28.000 If you're male, what your testosterone levels are at the time. 1.00
00:21:31.000 No surprise, testosterone makes your frontal cortex all sluggish and stupid. 0.99
00:21:36.000 What your stress hormone levels were. 0.99
00:21:38.000 If you've been traumatized over the previous five months because sustained stress will atrophy the frontal cortex.
00:21:45.000 But wait!
00:21:46.000 What versions of the number of genes you've got?
00:21:48.000 How much stress hormones you were exposed to from your mother when you were a fetus?
00:21:53.000 How much lead there was in the water when you were a kid?
00:21:56.000 If your ancestors were nomadic pastoralists and developed a culture of honor?
00:22:01.000 What your nutritional status was when you were a kid?
00:22:04.000 Everything in between.
00:22:05.000 All of this coming down to Whoa!
00:22:09.000 There's just biological forces shaping what we're doing to an incredible extent.
00:22:14.000 And it's the exact same story about any other part of the brain, but this is just like one of the most Of agency and free will and volition, whether or not I'm going to resist this temptation or not, by age five, for example, a kid's socioeconomic status is already a predictor of how much frontal development there is in this part of the brain.
00:22:37.000 Because if you've been foolish enough in this country to choose the wrong parents to get born into there, and you're being raised in poverty, on the average, your stress hormone levels are higher.
00:22:48.000 And as a result of that, on the average, your frontal cortex is thinner and not developing as fast. 0.96
00:22:54.000 And on the average, already at age five, you're not as good as on average at the hold out, relieve me, you're going to be glad you held out for this long-term reward thing.
00:23:05.000 Wow.
00:23:06.000 Now, does toxo have an effect on the frontal cortex?
00:23:10.000 Almost certainly, that's a hot area of research.
00:23:15.000 We were originally hoping to see that, oh, toxo was just going to laser in on just some key parts of the brain that are absolutely essential to its behavioral effects.
00:23:26.000 It seems to wind up more widespread, so that sort of makes it a tougher story, but in some ways, Sort of impulsive behavior is either due to a stronger biology of impulsiveness, which has much to do with the limbic system,
00:23:44.000 or a weaker biology of, hold on a second, are you sure this is such a great idea?
00:23:50.000 The hold on a second, is this such a great idea is the realm of the frontal cortex.
00:23:55.000 So that could very readily be half of the equation right there.
00:23:59.000 Wow.
00:24:00.000 No, the frontal cortex is not fully online until you're 25. It's a boggling thing.
00:24:09.000 So you just live your life like an ape.
00:24:13.000 You're deep into your adulthood.
00:24:15.000 You're responsible for yourself for over seven years.
00:24:19.000 Which has some stupefying implications, and not just for explaining why your freshman roommate was the way he was.
00:24:27.000 Is it uniform with men and women?
00:24:29.000 Yeah.
00:24:31.000 Female development, maturation of the frontal cortex configures faster in females than in males, of course. 0.98
00:24:37.000 But nonetheless, it's this very delayed maturation.
00:24:40.000 That has to do with what you're talking about with testosterone impeding it?
00:24:44.000 It seems to be a different mechanism there, but just in general, the social brain compounds it.
00:24:51.000 So the testosterone impedes it, and then there's something else as well.
00:24:55.000 Sure, it does not help.
00:24:56.000 But it's this completely, well, it's basically the explanation for why adolescents are adolescent.
00:25:03.000 They have a brain that's going full blast, especially the dopamine system with reward and sensation.
00:25:11.000 Seeking a novelty, seeking anticipation, and a frontal cortex that's like half-baked at that point and is not very good at controlling impulses.
00:25:21.000 That's why adolescents are the way they are.
00:25:25.000 So, two sort of really interesting implications with that.
00:25:29.000 First one is sort of in the kind of big picture legal implications realm.
00:25:36.000 This fact that the frontal cortex is not fully developed until you're in your mid-20s was implicitly the main driving force around the Supreme Court some years ago saying you can't execute somebody for a crime they did before age 18. And you can't put him behind bars for the rest of life without a chance of parole because their frontal cortex isn't quite there yet.
00:26:00.000 Of course, the flaw with that thinking is the presumption that magically on the very morning of your 18th birthday, you suddenly have a spanking new frontal cortex that has memorized all those Sunday morning sermons and can get you to do the right thing.
00:26:13.000 But at least the courts have implicitly recognized that brain maturation Parentheses, frontal cortex is such that adolescent impulse control is not what you see in adults.
00:26:26.000 It has to be judged differently.
00:26:28.000 The other issue that sort of fascinates me on a neurobiological level, you know, most of your cortex is doing just fine by the time you're three, four, five years old.
00:26:39.000 And there's the frontal cortex taking another like 20 years to get there.
00:26:43.000 So you say, so...
00:26:45.000 Is the frontal cortex just a tougher construction project than the rest of the brain?
00:26:50.000 Does it have fancy type neurons you don't see elsewhere that take amazing wiring or unique neurotransmitters?
00:27:00.000 Is it just a tougher construction project?
00:27:03.000 Is that why you get the delay?
00:27:05.000 And you look closely and, no, it's not implicitly a tougher project.
00:27:10.000 You don't get delayed frontal maturation because it's so hard to wire up.
00:27:15.000 You get the delay because we've been selected to have the delay.
00:27:19.000 You want a frontal cortex that spends a long, long time learning.
00:27:24.000 Okay, how come?
00:27:26.000 Because by definition, if this is the last part of the brain to wire up, it's the part of the brain that's most sculpted by experience and environment and least constrained by genes.
00:27:38.000 And this is the part of the brain that does social appropriate context learning.
00:27:44.000 And that's incredibly tough stuff.
00:27:47.000 Like every society, every culture on earth, you think about it, every culture on earth celebrates some types of murder and is horrified and punishes other types.
00:27:58.000 Some get medals, some get damnation, some get like simply that one.
00:28:04.000 Every culture has some sort of strictures against lying, yet in some circumstances expect you to have socially appropriate lying.
00:28:12.000 In certain circumstances of protection or so on.
00:28:17.000 And every culture does this differently.
00:28:19.000 Every culture has culture-specific mores and situational ethics and things like that.
00:28:24.000 And that's like fancy, complicated stuff that takes a long time to learn.
00:28:29.000 That's what you're doing as an adolescent, as a young adult.
00:28:32.000 You're learning all the subtleties of appropriate behavior.
00:28:35.000 That's your frontal cortex, learning not just how to get you to do the right thing when it's a harder thing to do, but all those complexities of what actually counts as the right thing.
00:28:46.000 And all the things that make us human above all the other primates.
00:28:50.000 Above all others.
00:28:51.000 Because we're the species that in some cultures can say we strongly believe in monogamy and build our theologies around that, yet at the same time have incredibly high rates of people failing to remain monogamous,
00:29:07.000 yet condemn that we have cultures where you're not supposed to lie, yet at some point you have to learn Okay, it's okay to lie in a circumstance of, so tell us, are you harboring those refugees in your attic? 0.96
00:29:23.000 No, no, of course not.
00:29:26.000 Situational ethics like that, it takes a very Strong frontal cortex to keep you from lying in certain tempting circumstances.
00:29:35.000 But once you decide you're going to lie, it takes a strong frontal cortex to do it right, to do it effectively, because you've got to regulate your voice and your facial expressions and where your eyes are looking.
00:29:48.000 Whoa, so this is a part of the brain that's got to incorporate your society's rules as to when it's okay to lie, and in fact this sort of thing that we view as heroic, but when it's not okay to lie, but once you decide you're going to lie, how to do it effectively.
00:30:04.000 This is like complicated neurobiology.
00:30:08.000 It can't just come with a genetic program that wires it up.
00:30:11.000 It's got to be totally sculpted by learning all those subtleties.
00:30:16.000 Wow.
00:30:17.000 And is there another animal other than humans that does delay reward?
00:30:23.000 Yeah.
00:30:24.000 I mean, the dopamine system, the reward system, the interactions with the frontal cortex, it's happening in a rodent.
00:30:31.000 Like, rodents could learn to master, okay, if I press this lever once, I get one reward.
00:30:36.000 But if I do two levers, It's hard.
00:30:40.000 I get three rewards.
00:30:41.000 Whoa, that's the way to go.
00:30:43.000 It could master that.
00:30:44.000 Monkeys can master that.
00:30:46.000 But it's just implicitly a different thing.
00:30:48.000 Like a monkey could do a delayed gratification task where it's got to wait a couple of minutes for the reward.
00:30:57.000 And it's the exact same neurobiology as us doing delayed gratification.
00:31:02.000 Except we do delayed gratification like you study hard to get a good SAT score, to get into a good college, to get into a good grad school, to get a good job, to get into the nursing home of your choice.
00:31:13.000 We do delayed gratification that takes 60 years.
00:31:16.000 Depending on your theology, we do delayed gratification where the reward's not going to come, supposedly, until the afterlife.
00:31:24.000 So, like, yeah, a monkey can have its frontal cortex do delayed gratification for it.
00:31:29.000 Wow, on the scale of minutes!
00:31:31.000 And we go and we, like...
00:31:33.000 Do it for 70 years.
00:31:35.000 We're just in a different league in that regard.
00:31:39.000 Wow.
00:31:39.000 So, essentially, maybe even some religious rules or some ethical guidelines that we follow could almost be like a scaffolding for the frontal cortex.
00:31:50.000 Absolutely.
00:31:51.000 The rule of what counts as the right thing and what counts as the harder thing is very, very culture-specific.
00:32:01.000 That's a tough neurobiological job to master.
00:32:04.000 Do we have any idea when this was due?
00:32:06.000 You said this is the most recent thing developed in humans, or the most recent we understand?
00:32:10.000 Well, it's the most recently evolved part of the brain, which is to say, like, lizards have a cortex.
00:32:18.000 I mean, it's not much to write home about, but they've got, like, primitive cortex.
00:32:22.000 It's not until you get to mammals.
00:32:24.000 That you start getting fancier, cortex that does more abstract stuff, and it's not till you get to mammals that you start seeing the first hints of frontal cortex.
00:32:34.000 So, you know, recently evolved, the last 50 to 100 million years.
00:32:39.000 So, in other words, the frontal cortex is like spanking new, and it's not till you get to primates that you get a big frontal cortex, and it's particularly large in apes, and then proportionally it's particularly large or complexly wired in us.
00:32:54.000 Now, I know you spend a lot of time studying baboons, and I listened to that Radiolab podcast that you did where this baboon, do you call it a troop?
00:33:02.000 Yeah.
00:33:02.000 Baboon troop that was next to the place that was dumping human weight or human garbage.
00:33:09.000 Yeah. 0.72
00:33:09.000 And that these baboons became accustomed to eating this human garbage and the unprecedented change in their behavior when the males, the dominant males, got sick from tuberculosis. 0.72
00:33:22.000 Yeah. 0.97
00:33:22.000 Yep. 0.97
00:33:23.000 Okay, so, as you said, I've been studying baboons. 1.00
00:33:28.000 How do you study them, by the way?
00:33:30.000 Like, how does that work?
00:33:30.000 What do you do?
00:33:31.000 Oh, it's been 33 summers I spent out there going back to essentially...
00:33:36.000 You go every year?
00:33:38.000 It ended about eight years ago, but it had been essentially 33 straight summers.
00:33:43.000 Wow.
00:33:44.000 Of, like, you go back to the same animals and you camp under the same tree, and this is in a national park in East Africa.
00:33:51.000 And you go back to the same animals and sort of the particular area I've focused my work on over the years is stress and health and what stress does to the brain and with the baboons it was trying to make sense of What does your social rank and your personality and your patterns of social affiliation have to do with which baboons have the rotten cholesterol levels,
00:34:16.000 which baboons have the high blood pressure, who's healthy, who's not? 0.96
00:34:19.000 So these are animals where you'd go do your basic Jane Goodall scene of just like...
00:34:25.000 We're good to go.
00:34:48.000 Just working that the last time I was out, I had a portable electric cardiogram machine for looking at cardiovascular, cardiac function in these guys.
00:34:56.000 So you keep them there for a day, you do various tests, and then you let them go back to their buddies, and then you have a sense of How is their bodily function, their health, their diseases, their stress physiology related to aspects of behavior?
00:35:13.000 For the first 10 years out there, I thought what I had learned was if you want to be a healthy baboon with a minimal number of stress-related diseases and you get a choice in the matter, you want to be high-ranking. 0.71
00:35:26.000 It took me about 25 years, and almost certainly that had to do with my having to grow up a little bit on my own, to realize that there's much more interesting stuff going on.
00:35:36.000 If you've got a choice between being a high-ranking baboon or a baboon with a lot of stable affiliative relationships, translated into English, friends, friends are going to be even better for your health. 0.95
00:35:49.000 That's even more protective.
00:35:51.000 How often do you sit and groom with somebody else?
00:35:54.000 How often you're sitting in contact?
00:35:56.000 How often are you playing with infants?
00:35:58.000 Turns out that's much more of a buffer for good health than simply what your dominance rank is.
00:36:05.000 So these baboons, they started eating food from a resort, and it changed their behavior to the point where they were no longer getting up very early and foraging. 0.74
00:36:15.000 They knew when the food was coming, so they just wandered down to this dump.
00:36:19.000 And then they would basically essentially fight over dominance of the dump.
00:36:22.000 And a few strong, powerful males had control over that until they got sick.
00:36:27.000 Great.
00:36:27.000 Yep.
00:36:27.000 So this was the troop next door to mine that had this tourist lodge in their territory and thus had a garbage dump.
00:36:35.000 National parks everywhere have this issue of having a controlled wild animal's access.
00:36:39.000 So this garbage dump troop, as you said, had taken to basically just living in the trees above the dump, waddled down each morning just in time for the food junk leftovers from the lodge to be dumped there.
00:36:52.000 And I did a few studies on this troop.
00:36:55.000 They got high cholesterol levels.
00:36:57.000 They got borderline diabetes.
00:36:58.000 They put on subcutaneous fat.
00:37:03.000 They're eating us.
00:37:04.000 Exactly.
00:37:06.000 They got tooth decay, they got different parasites in their stomachs.
00:37:10.000 So they're just fine living off of the good life there of throwing out desserts from this tourist lodge.
00:37:17.000 And in my troupe, a couple of kilometers away, I don't know how this works, but in some baboon way, some of my males got word Of this feasting going on up there. 1.00
00:37:30.000 If they smelled it, I don't know.
00:37:32.000 But it evolved that in the mornings, about half the males from my troop would pick up and run those couple of kilometers to go punch it out with the guys there to get access to some of this garbage.
00:37:44.000 The key thing was that it wasn't random which of my baboons would go over there.
00:37:49.000 So you're a guy from like an outside troop and you show up at this garbage dump and there's 80 baboons like feasting there and you're an outsider. 1.00
00:37:58.000 No one from my troop would like dream of going near the garbage unless he's a big aggressive guy.
00:38:05.000 The other thing is, morning is when baboons do most of their socializing stuff. 1.00
00:38:09.000 They sit around and they groom and they gossip before they go out and they do the day's foraging.
00:38:14.000 So, if you're willing to pick up and instead spend each morning fighting with strangers over garbage, that means you're not very socially affiliated.
00:38:23.000 So, in other words, the males from my troop who were going to eat the garbage were the most aggressively socially affiliated guys.
00:38:31.000 So this is going on for a couple of years, and then there turns out to be a tuberculosis outbreak among the baboons over there because there was tubercular meat in the lodge.
00:38:43.000 A meat inspector who's being bribed and all sorts of horrifying things.
00:38:49.000 And, you know, a human gets tuberculosis and they can sit around and write thousand-page novels about it for the next ten years while they slowly waste away.
00:38:58.000 TB kills other primates, like, over the course of weeks.
00:39:01.000 It's like wildfire in non-human primates.
00:39:04.000 So there's an outbreak of TB from the infected meat in this lodge dump, and it basically kills all the baboons in that troop, and it kills all of my baboons who had been going over there every morning for food.
00:39:18.000 So now what you have is half the number of males as usual.
00:39:22.000 So you got a two to one female to male ratio, which is pretty atypical for a baboon troop.
00:39:27.000 And the key thing is the baboons who are left are the nice guys. 1.00
00:39:31.000 They're socially affiliated.
00:39:33.000 They're the least aggressive.
00:39:35.000 What's baboon aggression about?
00:39:37.000 You're having a bad day.
00:39:38.000 You find somebody smaller and weaker to take it out on.
00:39:41.000 They weren't dumping on weaker animals.
00:39:44.000 They weren't having displaced aggression.
00:39:45.000 And it turned into, just to be technical here, like a much nicer troop.
00:39:52.000 They had much higher rates of grooming, less aggression, more sitting in contact.
00:39:58.000 Male baboons would groom each other, which you don't see male baboons grooming each other in this troop.
00:40:03.000 So, in and of itself, that's totally fascinating. 1.00
00:40:05.000 So, okay, you get rid of 50% of the males who are the jerks, and you have a commune there going on. 0.99
00:40:12.000 What was most interesting, the thing that just flattened me, was 10 years later, the troop is still like that. 0.97
00:40:21.000 Ten years later, all the males who were there during the TB outbreak, who survived it and ushered in sort of the commune, they're long gone.
00:40:31.000 So who are the new males?
00:40:33.000 Male baboons pick up at puberty, they leave their home troop, and they go wandering and join some adult troop somewhere else and spend the rest of their life there hanging up the hierarchy. 1.00
00:40:44.000 In other words, By ten years later, all the males in this troop, who were still being less aggressive and more socially affiliative, they had all grown up someplace else in some other troop and transferred as adolescents into this troop and somehow or other learned, 0.96
00:41:01.000 even though they grew up in the normal big bad baboon world out there, somehow they learned, we don't do crap like that here. 0.90
00:41:09.000 Cut it out.
00:41:11.000 And I did a ton of work sort of seeing what that was about.
00:41:15.000 And it takes about six months.
00:41:18.000 Once these new males show up, for them, they're less subject to resident males dumping on them because there's less of this displacement aggression.
00:41:28.000 Females who are getting dumped on less by males and thus are much more relaxed.
00:41:32.000 Lower stress hormone levels are more willing to be affiliated with them.
00:41:37.000 You're some new adolescent male, and you show up in your typical baboon troop, and it's like 80 days on the average before some female grooms you. 0.97
00:41:45.000 In this troop, it was like three days.
00:41:48.000 Wow.
00:41:49.000 Because everybody's much more relaxed because no one's being miserable to each other.
00:41:53.000 And it turns out you take a jerky adolescent male, because these guys were just as jerky as any transfer males were to any of the neighboring troops, and you treat them nicer and they kind of calm down over the next six months.
00:42:08.000 Literally, what you had, what social anthropologists would be forced to define as cultural transmission, non-genetic transmission of a style of behavior from one generation to the next.
00:42:22.000 This was culture being transmitted, a culture of high affiliation and less aggression.
00:42:28.000 And these baboons are essentially living a natural life. 1.00
00:42:30.000 They're not getting food from people.
00:42:32.000 Yep.
00:42:32.000 They're just living the...
00:42:33.000 Wow.
00:42:33.000 Out in the Serengeti in East Africa and just going about normal baboon life.
00:42:39.000 For me, what was most striking about this is baboons are as high rates of aggression as you find in any non-human primate.
00:42:49.000 Male dominance, highly hierarchical structured societies since the early sixties.
00:42:56.000 They've not just metaphorically, but they've literally been the textbook example of primates evolved for aggression and male dominance and hierarchy and stratification and all it took was one generation of a radically So,
00:43:18.000 in a sense, what we see in human beings, we see big differences in cultures, in the way people are treated, the way women are treated, the way they cohabitate with each other, whatever community they live in.
00:43:33.000 There's differences in the way we behave.
00:43:35.000 But with most primates, would you essentially say, Most chimpanzees or most bonobos that you can kind of uniformly say, bonobos behave this way, chimpanzees behave this way.
00:43:45.000 Is this the only time you've ever seen a complete variation of the standard behavior of a primate?
00:43:52.000 As far as I know, this is the only example of something like this that's been seen.
00:43:59.000 Other ecological extremes, and you get some radical shifts.
00:44:03.000 But in lots of ways, this is the biggest cultural shift that anyone has seen in sort of the social milieu of a baboon troop. 1.00
00:44:13.000 And for me, what the biggest take-home message of that is, exactly what you just honed in on.
00:44:18.000 Ooh, these guys are textbook examples of the inevitability of stratification and aggression and all that.
00:44:24.000 And no, it turns out it's not inevitable.
00:44:26.000 It can suddenly flip with some unique circumstances and be transmitted multigenerationally.
00:44:33.000 Anyone who could look at humans and say that there's certain inevitabilities to some of the most unpalatable things we do, they don't have a leg to stand on.
00:44:42.000 If baboons have the behavioral sort of flexibility, plasticity, built into them just lurking for a unique situation like this, And suddenly, six months of a different cultural style, and you adopt it and pass it on, 0.95
00:44:59.000 again, you don't have a leg to stand on to say that certain of the worst things about human culture and behavior is inevitable.
00:45:05.000 We vary so wildly from continent to continent that we've kind of gotten used to it, but to see it in In another kind of primate and to see that circumstances can change the way they behave and literally change their entire community to the point where decades later,
00:45:23.000 it's like 20 years later, they're still the same, right?
00:45:26.000 Is that the case?
00:45:27.000 The culture there went for about 20 years.
00:45:31.000 And does it dissolve now?
00:45:33.000 Did it evolve back to normal baboon behavior?
00:45:37.000 It basically ended when the troops sort of moved into the vacuum created by the TB outbreak and the neighboring troop moved into the lodge area and they kind of disintegrated as a troop.
00:45:49.000 A lot of them got habituated enough to the humans there to represent the danger.
00:45:53.000 Game Park Rangers had to kill about half of them.
00:45:56.000 So the troupe basically does not exist anymore, but it went for about 20 years.
00:46:02.000 That's crazy.
00:46:03.000 Well, does that give you hope when it comes to human beings?
00:46:05.000 Because it seems to me like it's such a radical shift of the behavior of a primate without a language.
00:46:12.000 To see that that's possible, that just a shift of circumstance can change the entire behavior pattern of this troupe.
00:46:20.000 Yep.
00:46:21.000 I mean, sort of the easy take-home message is to usher in world peace with humans, just like go give TB to all the aggressive males.
00:46:30.000 But I guess that's not the sort of most obvious take-home message.
00:46:33.000 But, I mean, you look at...
00:46:36.000 Humans change.
00:46:37.000 Human cultures change. 0.89
00:46:39.000 The 17th century, like the most terrifying people in Europe, were the Swedes. 1.00
00:46:43.000 They spent the whole century rampaging through Europe, and they've now gone more than 200 years since they've had a war.
00:46:49.000 World War I Christmas Truce.
00:46:52.000 In 1914, all it took was about four hours of British and German troops fraternizing from across the lines while they were supposedly doing nothing more than Retrieving dead bodies from no man's land between the trenches and before it was over with,
00:47:07.000 they were praying together and having Christmas dinner together and playing soccer together and exchanging addresses to meet after the war and where they held out for days at some of those points until officers had to show up and threaten to shoot these guys unless they went back to trying to kill each other.
00:47:24.000 Change can occur very dramatically.
00:47:26.000 These days, there's entire travel agencies that are devoted to Vietnam veterans going to Vietnam, going back for reconciliation ceremonies, or going back to foundations that literally build bridges across rivers,
00:47:48.000 help build schools, all of that.
00:47:51.000 What if that could have been conceived of in like 1970?
00:47:55.000 Yeah, humans have an astonishing capacity to change.
00:47:58.000 It's so fascinating when you consider all of the variables that cause a person to be who they are, to behave who they are, and then them interacting with all these other people who share variables and have unique variables and that there's so many different factors What makes a community,
00:48:18.000 a city, a country?
00:48:19.000 It's pretty mind-boggling when you consider all the variables.
00:48:24.000 It's utterly mind-boggling, and just to really get sort of provocative at this point, what one does with all that complexity And with all the biology we haven't discovered yet, and all those gaping sort of holes of explanations to where that behavior comes from,
00:48:43.000 there's this thing we call free will.
00:48:47.000 And all free will is, is the biology we haven't discovered yet.
00:48:52.000 Yeah, Sam Harris broke my brain talking about free will once where I really believed it was real until he started explaining to me determinism and all the different variables.
00:49:02.000 There is a little bit of something that we have where you're talking about the frontal cortex that allows you to resist things.
00:49:08.000 But why is yours the way it is is the big question, right?
00:49:11.000 Yeah, and if some of it had to do with how stressed your mother was when you were a fetus.
00:49:19.000 Yeah.
00:49:19.000 Like, how...
00:49:22.000 Okay, just on the level of sensory stuff going on, just the sensory cues we're getting in the world and how that's influencing our behavior, put up a pair of eyes, a poster with just showing a pair of eyes on a bus stop,
00:49:40.000 and people litter less.
00:49:42.000 Whoa.
00:49:43.000 Display a pair of eyes on a computer screen and people become more generous in online economic games because it's tapping into being watched.
00:49:53.000 Stick somebody in a room with smelly garbage and they become more socially conservative on questionnaires they're filling out because something just feels viscerally disgusting and that biases us towards deciding that something that's different is different and wrong.
00:50:10.000 People don't become more conservative about economic issues or geopolitical stuff. 0.96
00:50:15.000 They're just more likely to decide that thems who do something different from you, it's not just different, it's wrong because something just feels kind of disgusting because there's smelly garbage in the room.
00:50:28.000 One very influential study looking at 5,000 judicial decisions over the course of a year in a parole board system, and the single biggest predictor of what decision a judge was going to make if they gave somebody parole or sent them back to the slammer was how many hours it had been since the judge had eaten a meal.
00:50:47.000 Wow.
00:50:48.000 Because when you get higher glucose levels in your bloodstream, your frontal cortex works better because it's a real expensive part of the brain.
00:50:56.000 And when you're hungry, you feel less sympathy.
00:50:59.000 You feel less empathy.
00:51:00.000 People become less generous in economic games and how much would you contribute to this?
00:51:05.000 And what sort of a judge has to do there in a situation, anytime we judge, is do this difficult frontal task of trying to view the world from somebody else's perspective.
00:51:18.000 They're hypoglycemic, you haven't eaten in four hours, and it's more likely that your frontal cortex, in effect, is going to say, screw that, that's too hard, the guy's rotten, send him back to jail.
00:51:27.000 And what's most amazing is, if you had gotten one of those judges two seconds after they made that decision, that could most be predicted by the effects of glucose on brain metabolism, and asked them, so, why do you make that decision?
00:51:40.000 And they're going to, like, be quoting, like, Enlightenment-age philosophers or something, And that's just like rationalization, running to catch up with the biology that's just rumbling underneath the surface there and influencing our behaviors.
00:51:56.000 Wow.
00:51:57.000 So, like, maybe one of the best ways we can enhance society is keep people well-fed and lower stress.
00:52:05.000 Yeah.
00:52:06.000 Um...
00:52:07.000 If nothing else, like what people have known for decades when we're stressed, our learning and memory doesn't work that well.
00:52:15.000 Then people learned we're more likely to be anxious and learn to be afraid of things we don't need to be afraid of.
00:52:21.000 And then we learned we're more likely to have horrible judgment and have our frontal cortex not work very well.
00:52:27.000 And the newest realm of that is when you're stressed, you're less empathic.
00:52:33.000 Because it takes a lot of work to try to view the world from somebody else's perspective and worry about their worries instead of your own problems.
00:52:42.000 And if you're in a defensive or worried position, you're most likely to lash out, you're most likely to protect yourself quickly.
00:52:49.000 Yep, and quite literally a part of the brain that's involved in empathy doesn't work as well when stress hormone levels are elevated.
00:52:56.000 Now, what about the frontal cortex and actual damage?
00:53:01.000 Like damage from car accidents or head trauma?
00:53:06.000 One incredibly interesting contentious area.
00:53:10.000 You massively damage somebody's frontal cortex and They will know the difference between right and wrong, yet they still cannot regulate their behavior on the most fundamental level.
00:53:24.000 Famous neurological patient in the 1840s, Phineas Gage, he had part of his frontal cortex destroyed, and he was a foreman of a railroad construction line, had a problem with some dynamite, somebody did something wrong, had a 13-foot metal rod,
00:53:40.000 Shot up one of his eyes and out the top of his head and took his frontal cortex with it, landing about 50 feet away.
00:53:46.000 And Gage, who was the sobrietest, devout, reliable, he was the foreman there, turns into this disinhibited, crass, sexually abusive bully afterward who never was able to hold a job again for years afterward because you had taken out his frontal cortex.
00:54:04.000 And you damage the frontal cortex, and you get dysregulation of volitional behavior, which is once again a way of saying people know what their optimal behavior is, the difference between right and wrong, and yet they can't regulate their behavior.
00:54:21.000 Something like, depending on which study you look at, something like 25 to 50% of the men on death row in this country have a history of concussive head trauma to the front of their heads.
00:54:33.000 Wow!
00:54:35.000 And that's a world of, like, volitional control is not that volitional.
00:54:43.000 Well, that seems to go contrary to the idea of a lobotomy, then.
00:54:46.000 Okay, a lobotomy was just, that's great, that lobotomy was just, like, savaging about the front third of the brain.
00:54:54.000 It was getting the frontal, but it was also getting limbic.
00:54:59.000 Well, by the time it really got developed, the guy, like one of science's amazing ironies, the guy, a Portuguese neurologist named Agas Moniz, who developed leucotomies, is what they were originally called, got the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for this wonderful technique.
00:55:16.000 And then when it hit America as a sort of psychiatric intervention, good American know-how and Can-do spirit decided to get a sort of assembly line approach to it.
00:55:27.000 A guy named Walter Freeman pioneered sort of rapid, like, wham-bam frontal lobotomies where you would insert an eye pick An ice pick, rather, behind somebody's eyeball, go up through the optic cavity there,
00:55:43.000 and go in there and just scoop around, and there you go.
00:55:47.000 He had instructional films in the 50s for how you could do a frontal lobotomy on one person every umpteen minutes and just go through an entire hospital's worth of psychiatric patients in one devoted afternoon of Calvinist ethics.
00:56:05.000 They were scrambling.
00:56:06.000 So the neurobiology of what you were disconnecting there was virtually random other than you were just making a mess of the front part of the brain.
00:56:16.000 So frontal damage instead is a much more selective issue.
00:56:20.000 Do you shudder when you think about the fact that that was just not even a hundred years ago?
00:56:24.000 Yeah.
00:56:27.000 You know, go to a medical school library and go eight floors down to the sub-sub basement and, like, go read some of these journals from, like, 19-aught, whatever.
00:56:39.000 And, like, yeah, you shudder.
00:56:42.000 My God!
00:56:43.000 The things they didn't know then, my God, the damage they could have done then, the damage as to the causes of disease, the causes of psychiatric disorders, my God, some of the things they were doing then.
00:56:57.000 And if you've got a shred of capacity for self-reflection, you then have to sit there and say, well, a hundred years from now, they're going to be looking at our level of knowledge and they'll be saying the same exact thing.
00:57:10.000 What do you think would be the big one?
00:57:12.000 Do you think it would be antidepressants?
00:57:14.000 Do you think it would be painkillers that they're handing out?
00:57:16.000 What do you think would be the big one that people would be freaking out about today?
00:57:19.000 I think about what we think about in the future.
00:57:21.000 Yeah, about what we're doing now.
00:57:23.000 I think it's overwhelmingly going to be, my God, that quaint, medieval, destructive belief they held onto then about human agency and free will.
00:57:36.000 Whoa! 0.71
00:57:37.000 They punished people. 0.88
00:57:39.000 Who had brains that couldn't regulate their own behavior.
00:57:43.000 They punished people who, because of toxin exposure or stress during adolescence, wound up with brains that couldn't control this or that at particular junctures.
00:57:52.000 And they used words like justice back then.
00:57:55.000 Wow, I can't believe the stuff they did.
00:57:58.000 It was practically like gangs of, like, gorgeous peasants getting burning torches and going and burning down to whatever's around the medieval castle, in terms of senses of the word justice applying to what biology has to do with behavior.
00:58:14.000 There's so few people that share this idea that you're having.
00:58:18.000 Obviously, your sense of it is so much more educated than the average person.
00:58:22.000 And you understand all the mechanisms behind all these particular behavioral problems that people have, and all these different things can affect the way human beings operate.
00:58:31.000 But most people are not aware of this.
00:58:34.000 I mean, literally most people.
00:58:36.000 If you had a guess, it might be that 90% of people haven't really considered all the factors that lead to someone having a brain that would put them in these impulsive, terrible decision-making situations.
00:58:50.000 Well, what gives me a little bit of sort of optimism is most people, though, at least in the West, have done that in a couple of realms.
00:59:00.000 Like 500 years ago, if you had an epileptic seizure, the smartest, most reflective, most compassionate, like...
00:59:10.000 Middle Ages bleeding heart liberals even would have had an explanation for what caused an epileptic seizure, which is you were demonically possessed and the therapeutic intervention was to burn you at the stake. 0.76
00:59:21.000 And now instead we're, I don't know, a century or two into having a mindset where instead we make a biological statement.
00:59:30.000 Oh, it's not him, it's his disease.
00:59:33.000 Oh, he's not demonically possessed, he's got something screwy with his potassium channels in his brain, and once he gets synchronized outbursts every now and then, he has a seizure disorder.
00:59:42.000 Like, it's taken us about 500 years to do that one, to go from, this is a blasphemous behavior where we know the intervention, which is to burn somebody at the stake, to saying, oh, it's a biological problem.
00:59:56.000 And we even recognize constraints with it.
00:59:59.000 If somebody has uncontrolled epilepsy that's treatment resistant, they may not be able to get a driver's license.
01:00:06.000 But you don't sit there and say, yeah, let's have a burning of the driver's licenses and the epileptics. 0.97
01:00:12.000 It's about damn time they got what they were... 0.97
01:00:14.000 No, it's a realm where words like evil or soul or punishment or justice is totally irrelevant. 0.99
01:00:21.000 Oh, it's a neurological disorder.
01:00:23.000 So it's only taken us about 500 years to get to that point.
01:00:27.000 So maybe, you know, we've done that cognitive leap at least once.
01:00:33.000 But there's no victims there though.
01:00:37.000 Most of the time, obviously if someone's behind the wheel and they have a seizure and someone dies, but we don't think of it as someone doing something.
01:00:44.000 We think of it as they lost control of their body, like literally, and they're piloting a car, unfortunately, and that's what happens, versus someone committing a crime.
01:00:53.000 500 years ago, if an epileptic during a seizure with their limbs flailing struck someone, that would have been assault and battery.
01:01:02.000 Who told them to go, like, sleep with Satan? 1.00
01:01:05.000 That's their own damn fault. 1.00
01:01:07.000 And it's like, it's a ridiculous mindset now. 0.99
01:01:10.000 There's large parts of the developing world that still has exactly that view of epilepsy, but at least in the West, like, that's an unrecognizably different mindset.
01:01:19.000 No, no, that was not, they didn't choose to do that.
01:01:22.000 That was something screwy with their biology.
01:01:25.000 Like, we've gotten to that, so, I don't know, maybe another 500 years and we're going to be able to do that with...
01:01:32.000 Maybe half the juries in this country are capable of doing the same thing of saying, it's not him, it's his disease.
01:01:39.000 When you have somebody with paranoid schizophrenia who in a delusional state does something violent, maybe, I don't know, half of teachers in the country are able to incorporate, no, this kid isn't lazy, that's not why they're not learning to read.
01:01:53.000 They have this thing called dyslexia, meaning there's abnormalities, macromalities in their cortex and the part having to do with it.
01:02:02.000 So, you know, we're making a little bit of progress, but...
01:02:06.000 So you seem optimistic, then?
01:02:08.000 Well, optimistic in 500-year time spans.
01:02:12.000 I mean, you think it's kind of playing out in the right direction, just very slowly.
01:02:16.000 Like, when you see these, like, political debates and people on television talking about crime and punishment and none of these factors being discussed, is it incredibly frustrating?
01:02:26.000 It's incredibly frustrating.
01:02:31.000 They will look back at us and say, my God!
01:02:35.000 The things they thought then, the damage they did then, and all we can do at this point, given that we don't know a whole lot of the biology, and look at most of this stuff that we've learned about the frontal cortex or oxytocin or genes,
01:02:51.000 and we've learned all of it in the last 50 years, in the last 20 years, in the last five years.
01:02:57.000 If you look at the distribution of when these papers were published, All we could do in the meantime is simply have a hell of a lot of humility before we think we understand what the cause is of the behavior, especially a behavior that we judge harshly,
01:03:15.000 because the odds are we haven't a clue what the actual biology is of what's going on there, and we fill in those attributional yawning vacuums This invention that we call volition and free will.
01:03:29.000 Has anyone ever used Toxo for an excuse or for a defense, for a crime?
01:03:37.000 There was that Twinkie case.
01:03:39.000 Remember the Twinkie case?
01:03:40.000 Twinkie murder case?
01:03:41.000 Dan White, blood sugar levels.
01:03:43.000 That's been used.
01:03:45.000 Severe perimenstrual syndrome has been used successfully in courts of law to mitigate sentencing of women who committed violent crimes around the time of their period.
01:03:56.000 Having certain variants on genes, this one gene, which unfortunately this variant has gotten the horrible term, the warrior gene, has been used successfully in a couple of courts of law to mitigate sentencing.
01:04:08.000 How have they used that?
01:04:09.000 What is the warrior gene?
01:04:11.000 It's a gene called MAO alpha, monoamine oxidase alpha.
01:04:17.000 It's got something to do with neurochemistry and something to do with the neurochemistry of aggression.
01:04:23.000 The gene comes in a couple of different versions, and one particular variant is associated with high rates of antisocial aggression in humans.
01:04:33.000 If, and only if, the human was abused during childhood.
01:04:38.000 In other words, the gene is determining absolutely zero, you're getting a gene-environment interaction.
01:04:45.000 The absence of an abusive childhood, having this gene variant, has zero impact on this behavior.
01:04:50.000 So, like, ridiculously simplified pseudo-scientific interpretations, findings like these, have sort of led even to courts of law saying, oh, well, has that genetic variant, that's inevitably So is this similar in a way to,
01:05:05.000 I believe it was India, they used fMRI to determine someone's knowledge of a murder and they convicted the woman and made her guilty of it?
01:05:13.000 Yep, yep.
01:05:14.000 No Lie MRI is the name of the company in the United States that purports to have the technology well enough that they can tell if you're lying or not.
01:05:22.000 But from what I understand, it was just functional knowledge of the crime, which could have been imparted In defending, or trying to put together a defense, because you obviously have a lot invested in this crime, because you might go to jail for the rest of your life for it.
01:05:37.000 Yep.
01:05:37.000 Basically, there's no science for that.
01:05:41.000 The science is not there yet.
01:05:42.000 So it would never work in America, that case.
01:05:45.000 Or should not, I should say.
01:05:47.000 Should not, and should not work in India. 0.99
01:05:50.000 Yeah.
01:05:51.000 That's a case where the science is...
01:05:52.000 So what have they done with this warrior gene?
01:05:54.000 How has someone been exonerated?
01:05:55.000 Oh, where was it?
01:05:57.000 I think it was in a court in Italy, where just sentencing was decreased because the defense made an argument afterwards saying, well, genetically predisposed.
01:06:08.000 So, like, that's like...
01:06:10.000 Isn't Italy the place where they charged scientists with not being able to register when an earthquake was coming?
01:06:19.000 Protected an earthquake, yes, by assuring the public there wasn't an earthquake.
01:06:22.000 Yeah, they literally tried them for this.
01:06:23.000 Yeah, I think...
01:06:30.000 I think the dust is still settling from that one.
01:06:33.000 I think most of those convictions have been overturned.
01:06:36.000 But terrifying that those people had to go to court. 1.00
01:06:38.000 Imagine if you're a seismologist and you have to go, hey, this is not how it works, you assholes. 0.99
01:06:43.000 Jesus Christ, I can't tell you when it's coming. 1.00
01:06:45.000 You don't think I would be out of the country? 0.99
01:06:48.000 What the fuck is wrong with you? 1.00
01:06:49.000 Oh no, my son the scientist is like being convicted of murder. 1.00
01:06:54.000 So it's essentially in these less informed areas where these things have passed, like the fMRI thing in India and this in Italy, the warrior gene thing.
01:07:03.000 But it's dangerous, right?
01:07:05.000 Yeah, I mean you see...
01:07:07.000 Like, be careful what you wish for in terms of, wow, it'd be great if people learned more about science.
01:07:13.000 Way more.
01:07:14.000 Way, way more.
01:07:15.000 That would be great.
01:07:16.000 Yes, a little bit of it is mighty scary.
01:07:19.000 Let's see, I'm just knowing I need to...
01:07:21.000 Yeah, I know.
01:07:21.000 It's 6.15.
01:07:23.000 Should we wrap it up?
01:07:24.000 Sure.
01:07:24.000 Thank you so much.
01:07:25.000 Really, really appreciate it.
01:07:26.000 It was a pleasure.
01:07:27.000 I've been a fan of yours for years, so this is a real treat for me.
01:07:29.000 I was really looking forward to it.
01:07:31.000 All right, everybody.
01:07:32.000 This was a short one, but an awesome one.
01:07:33.000 Thank you.