Robert Sapolsky: The biology of our best and worst selves
Robert Sapolsky is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, studying stress in primates (including humans). Full bio
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spent the last few years
of our language trying to explain it is.
explain some of the thinking behind it
something like this.
against humanity."
version of the fantasy ends
once I allow myself.
or move or see or hear, just to feel,
with something cancerous
is screaming in agony,
feels like an eternity in hell.
wicked soul in history.
in souls or evil,
I would like to see killed,
I was at a laser tag place,
hiding in a corner shooting at people.
confused human when it comes to violence.
have problems with violence.
airplanes as weapons,
our champions of it.
being this miserably violent species,
altruistic, compassionate one.
of the biology of our best behaviors,
ambiguously in between?
the motoric aspects of the behavior.
tells your muscles
the meaning of the behavior,
pulling a trigger is an appalling act;
self-sacrificial.
one someone else's
of our behaviors,
is you're not going to get anywhere
the brain region or the hormone
that explains everything.
has multiple levels of causality.
in an agitated state --
is frightened, threatening, angry --
that kind of looks like a handgun.
that thing in this person's hand
that caused this behavior?
one second before you pulled that trigger?
of a brain region called the amygdala.
central to violence, central to fear,
in your amygdala one second before?
we have to step back a little bit.
seconds to minutes before
the sounds of the rioting,
a cell phone for a handgun
is not going to work as well,
to get to the amygdala in time
that's a gun there?"
at hours to days before,
the realm of hormones.
testosterone levels in your blood,
a face with a neutral expression
elevated levels of stress hormones,
is going to be more active
will be more sluggish.
weeks to months before,
can change in response to experience,
have been filled with stress and trauma,
more excitable,
in that one second.
of the adolescent brain
until you're around 25.
and experience sculpt your frontal cortex
as an adult in that critical moment.
to childhood and fetal life
that that could come in.
that your brain is being constructed,
experience during those times
epigenetic changes,
certain genes, turning off others.
of stress hormones through your mother,
your amygdala in adulthood
elevated stress hormone levels.
was a collection of genes.
important to all of this,
determine anything,
in different environments.
to commit antisocial violence
you were abused as a child.
before you pull that trigger
of those gene-environment interactions.
we've got to push even further back now,
they were nomadic pastoralists,
what's called a culture of honor
the values with which you were raised.
about the evolution of genes.
for extremely low levels of aggression,
in the opposite direction,
by every measure are humans,
barely defined species
to go one way or the other.
a wondrous one,
what happened a second before
real careful, real cautious
you know what causes a behavior,
you're judging harshly.
point about all of this
can change in different circumstances.
the Sahara was a lush grassland.
people in Europe were the Swedes,
military does now.
examples of human change.
of slavery from the British Empire
spent decades as a younger man
in the thing that he's most famous for,
on the morning of December 6, 1941,
bombers to attack Pearl Harbor.
50 years later to the day
the attack on the ground.
of Pearl Harbor survivors
for what he had done as a young man.
could happen in just hours.
Christmas truce of 1914.
had negotiated a brief truce
in between the trench lines.
dig graves in the frozen ground,
and exchanging gifts,
they were playing soccer together
so they could meet after the war.
until the officers had to arrive
to trying to kill each other."
a completely new category of "us,"
those faceless powers behind the lines
change can occur in seconds.
in the Vietnam War
village full of civilians
because the government denied it,
did nothing more than a slap on the wrist,
was not a singular event.
who stopped the My Lai Massacre.
his lifetime of conditioning
and American soldiers
on his fellow Americans,
I will mow you down."
are no more special than any of us.
is this inevitable cliche:
are destined to repeat it."
of extraordinary human change,
of what can transform us
are destined not to be able
magnificent moments.
a new mental model about something,
Good luck with the book.
to come here in person one year.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Robert Sapolsky - Neuroscientist, primatologist, writerRobert Sapolsky is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, studying stress in primates (including humans).
Why you should listen
We all have some measure of stress, and Robert Sapolsky explores its causes as well as its effects on our bodies (his lab was among the first to document the damage that stress can do to our hippocampus). In his research, he follows a population of wild baboons in Kenya, who experience stress very similarly to the way humans do. By measuring hormone levels and stress-related diseases in each primate, he determines their relative stress, looking for patterns in personality and social behavior that might contribute. These exercises have given Sapolsky amazing insight into all primate social behavior, including our own.
He has been called "one of the best scientist-writers of our time" by Oliver Sacks. Sapolsky has produced, in addition to numerous scientific papers, books for broader audiences, including A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: Stress Disease and Coping, and The Trouble with Testosterone.
His latest book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, examines human behavior in search of an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do?
Robert Sapolsky | Speaker | TED.com