May 25, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:07:33
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I I had heard something about toxoplasmosis. | ||
| Am I saying it right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I've had cats my whole life, and I even had feral cats. | ||
| And I've always wondered, like, I should probably get tested, and I'm worried about the result. | ||
| Perhaps not. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Okay, totally bizarre. | ||
| So it's this protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, and it's got one of these weird parasitic lifestyles. | ||
| The only place on earth where it could reproduce sexually is in the gut of a cat. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just hardwired, instinctual aversion to cat pheromones and then put toxin in a rat and it loses that aversion. | ||
| And in fact, in a subset of rats, they like the smell. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yes, that's actually work that we did in my lab, that it... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And in male rats, when they smell cat pheromones, they increase testosterone production. | ||
| So TOXO has just figured out the most brilliant way of doing it. | ||
| It makes cat pee smell sexy. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Like, how does that work? | ||
| Well, that's something my lab spent a bunch of years on, trying to figure out... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| 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, which it now passes on to the next individual. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And toxo knows, quotation marks, something about fear and aversion and the neurobiology of attraction. | ||
| 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. | ||
| In mammals. | ||
| Dopamine is this neurotransmitter. | ||
| It's about pleasure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then, a couple years ago, there's a paper showing that in chimpanzees, toxo makes you less afraid of the smell of leopards. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So specifically cats, do the chimpanzees still have aversions to snakes and other things that can kill them? | ||
| Yep. | ||
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Wow! | |
| And at one point my lab was full of bobcat pee and wolf pee. | ||
| There's actually a company you could buy urine from. | ||
| I don't know why anyone would want it except for us, but they sell urine. | ||
| Actually, what they use it for is you can go spritz it around your garden to scare the deer away. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| I don't know where they get the urine from, but it's certified and all of that. | ||
| And yeah, it's remarkably specific. | ||
| So, have they ever done tests like wolf urine or anything like that around chimps? | ||
| Do they have any aversion to that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| The rodents lose a little bit of their general skittishness. | ||
| They get a little bit disinhibited behaviorally. | ||
| So just in general, they're out more and more exploratory, more likely to get eaten. | ||
| But the most selective lasering effect is they're not scared anymore of cat pheromones. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, that one's new to me, but that sounds like exactly the sort of epidemiological studies that are popping up about humans. | ||
| Okay, so what about humans? | ||
| There's two branches of interesting stuff with Toxo in humans. | ||
| One is a literature that's been around for quite some time showing that Toxo seems to increase the risk of schizophrenia. | ||
| There's a higher rate of schizophrenia of individuals who have antibodies against Toxo. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The other realm is toxo-infected humans get subtle changes in personality, neuropsychological profiles. | ||
| They get a little bit disinhibited. | ||
| If you're toxo-infected, you're more likely to die in a car accident involving reckless speeding. | ||
| If you're toxinfected and clinically depressed for the same severity of depression, you're more likely to impulsively kill yourself. | ||
| In other words, toxo is doing something kind of similar. | ||
| If you're a rat, one of the hardest wired scary things in the universe out there is the smell of a cat. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This was actually something I heard from a clinician. | ||
| 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, | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And weird, when it gets into humans, it has some behavioral effects also. | ||
| That's just kind of evolutionary spillover. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or we just haven't discovered the particular... | ||
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What does it do to women? | |
| Does it have a similar effect? | ||
| It seems to have less severe effects on neuropsychological profiles of women. | ||
| Again, the literature on this is pretty scanty in humans, but it seems to have some similar effects but not as extreme. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, so normally, one of the things animals have evolved to be really good at is picking up signals that somebody else is unhealthy. | ||
| Like a potential mate is unhealthy. | ||
| There's sickness behavior. | ||
| There's very olfactory cues. | ||
| If you're a rodent, it makes perfect sense. | ||
| The last thing you want to do is to be mating with somebody who's like rancid and infectious and rodent equivalents of STDs. | ||
| So normally, sick animals, parasite-infected animals and such are detected by other rodents and avoided. | ||
| Toxin does something different. | ||
| you get a toxo-infected male, and now he smells more attractive to female rodents. | ||
| And when mating, toxo gets into the sperm and can be transmitted to the female. | ||
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Whoa. | |
| So suddenly we've got a different story here. | ||
| We start off with a parasite story where toxo is just ruthlessly exploiting the poor rodents for its own reproductive benefit and its own evolutionary selfish gene well-being. | ||
| But now instead, it's got elements of, instead of parasitism, symbiosis. | ||
| So, you're a male rat infected with toxo. | ||
| Downside, you're more likely to get eaten by a cat. | ||
| Upside, you're more likely to pass on copies of your genes by increased sexual selection. | ||
| So, it might be, in fact, more of a balanced symbiotic relationship between male rats and toxo. | ||
| You know, more research is needed, blah, blah. | ||
| It's just, like, cool sort of biology out there. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And is it transferred sexually with men and women, too, as well as with rats? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think it's been looked at. | ||
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Oh, wow. | |
| That seems like something I would want to look at right away. | ||
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Yes. | |
| What about organ donors? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Beyond that, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, people are looking at it, I'm sure. | ||
| But do they even test? | ||
| Like, say, if you've got a liver... | ||
| I suspect they do, and sort of in the clinical world of people who worry about toxo, toxo, pregnancy, scary, alarms going off. | ||
| Toxo, anything else, after an acute period of infection... | ||
| You have a latent toxoplasma infection. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For them, chronic toxinfection is not something you worry about a whole lot. | ||
| But if it's having behavioral effects up there in the nervous system, maybe it is something to worry about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's most remarkable is it turns out this is like a whole world of parasites that do bizarre manipulative things to their hosts. | ||
| Most of it's not in the realm of mammals. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's, you know... | ||
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The aquatic worm that infects the grasshopper and makes it commit suicide? | |
| Exactly. | ||
| That one's bizarre. | ||
| That one's bizarre. | ||
| There's this wasp that gets into cockroaches and takes over his nervous system. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This current state, but how something evolves to be so effective. | ||
| It's so confusing. | ||
| It's remarkable. | ||
| Just to flip to the other end of the spectrum in terms of what co-evolution between two different species could be like. | ||
| Over the last 20,000 years, look at what we've done. | ||
| We've taken wolves and we've turned them into these creatures we put Halloween costumes on. | ||
| And a finding a couple of years ago, which floored me, is hormone oxytocin, which is totally trendy. | ||
| Oxytocin is completely cool. | ||
| Mother-infant bonding is mediated by oxytocin. | ||
| Pair bonding in monogamous species. | ||
| Oxytocin makes you more trusting and expressive and generous and... | ||
| And economic games and oxytocin has all these pro-social effects within a species. | ||
| 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, you both secrete oxytocin. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they, in turn, do all sorts of wondrous stuff for our self-esteem because they, like, lick us unconditionally. | ||
| Where'd that come from? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We and wolves worked out somewhere back when. | ||
| Does it have any effect on friendship? | ||
| Like human beings staring at each other? | ||
| Has anybody ever tested that? | ||
| I would assume people have looked at that... | ||
| For example, it strengthens monogamous bonds. | ||
| And there's a literature by now looking at oxytocin has its effects by binding to an oxytocin receptor. | ||
| There's a gene for the oxytocin receptor. | ||
| It comes in a number of variants. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Ah. | ||
| So, you know, none of this stuff is deterministic. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was just wondering if that mix applies to, like, platonic friendships, like male bonding and stuff. | ||
| I wonder if there's... | ||
| When guys are out having a good time, if they're also getting a good juice of oxytocin. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it only makes sense. | ||
| I mean, how many of these different factors are there in manipulating human behavior? | ||
| I mean, this is essentially your specialty, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so switching over to this part of the brain, the frontal cortex, which is just the coolest part of the brain. | ||
| It's the most recently evolved. | ||
| We've got more of it, or it's more complicated in us than any other species. | ||
| What does the frontal cortex do? | ||
| It makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. | ||
| self-control, long-term planning, gratification, postponement, emotional regulation, all this sort of stuff. | ||
| And frontal cortex, its function is totally amazing how it does this. | ||
| 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 like do the inane and 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. | ||
| What your frontal cortex does at critical junctures is one of the most consequential pieces in neurobiology we've got. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Or in that one second where you decide do you take this thing and run or does temptation get resisted? | ||
| So what sort of biological things affect what your frontal cortex is doing? | ||
| How hungry you are. | ||
| If you're hypoglycemic. | ||
| How tired you are. | ||
| If you're in pain. | ||
| All of those make the frontal cortex work not as well. | ||
| If you're male, what your testosterone levels are at the time. | ||
| No surprise, testosterone makes your frontal cortex all sluggish and stupid. | ||
| What your stress hormone levels were. | ||
| If you've been traumatized over the previous five months because sustained stress will atrophy the frontal cortex. | ||
| But wait! | ||
| What versions of the number of genes you've got? | ||
| How much stress hormones you were exposed to from your mother when you were a fetus? | ||
| How much lead there was in the water when you were a kid? | ||
| If your ancestors were nomadic pastoralists and developed a culture of honor? | ||
| What your nutritional status was when you were a kid? | ||
| Everything in between. | ||
| All of this coming down to Whoa! | ||
| There's just biological forces shaping what we're doing to an incredible extent. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And as a result of that, on the average, your frontal cortex is thinner and not developing as fast. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, does toxo have an effect on the frontal cortex? | ||
| Almost certainly, that's a hot area of research. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, or a weaker biology of, hold on a second, are you sure this is such a great idea? | ||
| The hold on a second, is this such a great idea is the realm of the frontal cortex. | ||
| So that could very readily be half of the equation right there. | ||
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Wow. | |
| No, the frontal cortex is not fully online until you're 25. It's a boggling thing. | ||
| So you just live your life like an ape. | ||
| You're deep into your adulthood. | ||
| You're responsible for yourself for over seven years. | ||
| Which has some stupefying implications, and not just for explaining why your freshman roommate was the way he was. | ||
| Is it uniform with men and women? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Female development, maturation of the frontal cortex configures faster in females than in males, of course. | ||
| But nonetheless, it's this very delayed maturation. | ||
| That has to do with what you're talking about with testosterone impeding it? | ||
| It seems to be a different mechanism there, but just in general, the social brain compounds it. | ||
| So the testosterone impedes it, and then there's something else as well. | ||
| Sure, it does not help. | ||
| But it's this completely, well, it's basically the explanation for why adolescents are adolescent. | ||
| They have a brain that's going full blast, especially the dopamine system with reward and sensation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's why adolescents are the way they are. | ||
| So, two sort of really interesting implications with that. | ||
| First one is sort of in the kind of big picture legal implications realm. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It has to be judged differently. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And there's the frontal cortex taking another like 20 years to get there. | ||
| So you say, so... | ||
| Is the frontal cortex just a tougher construction project than the rest of the brain? | ||
| Does it have fancy type neurons you don't see elsewhere that take amazing wiring or unique neurotransmitters? | ||
| Is it just a tougher construction project? | ||
| Is that why you get the delay? | ||
| And you look closely and, no, it's not implicitly a tougher project. | ||
| You don't get delayed frontal maturation because it's so hard to wire up. | ||
| You get the delay because we've been selected to have the delay. | ||
| You want a frontal cortex that spends a long, long time learning. | ||
| Okay, how come? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And this is the part of the brain that does social appropriate context learning. | ||
| And that's incredibly tough stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Some get medals, some get damnation, some get like simply that one. | ||
| Every culture has some sort of strictures against lying, yet in some circumstances expect you to have socially appropriate lying. | ||
| In certain circumstances of protection or so on. | ||
| And every culture does this differently. | ||
| Every culture has culture-specific mores and situational ethics and things like that. | ||
| And that's like fancy, complicated stuff that takes a long time to learn. | ||
| That's what you're doing as an adolescent, as a young adult. | ||
| You're learning all the subtleties of appropriate behavior. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And all the things that make us human above all the other primates. | ||
| Above all others. | ||
| 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, | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, no, of course not. | ||
| Situational ethics like that, it takes a very Strong frontal cortex to keep you from lying in certain tempting circumstances. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is like complicated neurobiology. | ||
| It can't just come with a genetic program that wires it up. | ||
| It's got to be totally sculpted by learning all those subtleties. | ||
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Wow. | |
| And is there another animal other than humans that does delay reward? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the dopamine system, the reward system, the interactions with the frontal cortex, it's happening in a rodent. | ||
| Like, rodents could learn to master, okay, if I press this lever once, I get one reward. | ||
| But if I do two levers, It's hard. | ||
| I get three rewards. | ||
| Whoa, that's the way to go. | ||
| It could master that. | ||
| Monkeys can master that. | ||
| But it's just implicitly a different thing. | ||
| Like a monkey could do a delayed gratification task where it's got to wait a couple of minutes for the reward. | ||
| And it's the exact same neurobiology as us doing delayed gratification. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We do delayed gratification that takes 60 years. | ||
| Depending on your theology, we do delayed gratification where the reward's not going to come, supposedly, until the afterlife. | ||
| So, like, yeah, a monkey can have its frontal cortex do delayed gratification for it. | ||
| Wow, on the scale of minutes! | ||
| And we go and we, like... | ||
| Do it for 70 years. | ||
| We're just in a different league in that regard. | ||
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Wow. | |
| So, essentially, maybe even some religious rules or some ethical guidelines that we follow could almost be like a scaffolding for the frontal cortex. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The rule of what counts as the right thing and what counts as the harder thing is very, very culture-specific. | ||
| That's a tough neurobiological job to master. | ||
| Do we have any idea when this was due? | ||
| You said this is the most recent thing developed in humans, or the most recent we understand? | ||
| Well, it's the most recently evolved part of the brain, which is to say, like, lizards have a cortex. | ||
| I mean, it's not much to write home about, but they've got, like, primitive cortex. | ||
| It's not until you get to mammals. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, you know, recently evolved, the last 50 to 100 million years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Baboon troop that was next to the place that was dumping human weight or human garbage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Yep. | ||
| Okay, so, as you said, I've been studying baboons. | ||
| How do you study them, by the way? | ||
| Like, how does that work? | ||
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What do you do? | |
| Oh, it's been 33 summers I spent out there going back to essentially... | ||
| You go every year? | ||
| It ended about eight years ago, but it had been essentially 33 straight summers. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, which baboons have the high blood pressure, who's healthy, who's not? | ||
| So these are animals where you'd go do your basic Jane Goodall scene of just like watching them endlessly and knowing all about their personal lives. | ||
| And in addition, I would dart, anesthetize the baboons using a blowgun system, which was totally fun to do. | ||
| But anesthetize them and when they're down, do basically the same clinical workups you would do on a human. | ||
| Sort of, okay, how's this guy's immune system working this year? | ||
| How's this guy's immune system working this year? | ||
| The last time I was out, I had a portable electric cardiogram machine for looking at cardiovascular, cardiac function in these guys. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's even more protective. | ||
| How often do you sit and groom with somebody else? | ||
| How often you're sitting in contact? | ||
| How often are you playing with infants? | ||
| Turns out that's much more of a buffer for good health than simply what your dominance rank is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They knew when the food was coming, so they just wandered down to this dump. | ||
| And then they would basically essentially fight over dominance of the dump. | ||
| And a few strong, powerful males had control over that until they got sick. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So this was the troop next door to mine that had this tourist lodge in their territory and thus had a garbage dump. | ||
| National parks everywhere have this issue of having a controlled wild animal's access. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I did a few studies on this troop. | ||
| They got high cholesterol levels. | ||
| They got borderline diabetes. | ||
| They put on subcutaneous fat. | ||
| They're eating us. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They got tooth decay, they got different parasites in their stomachs. | ||
| So they're just fine living off of the good life there of throwing out desserts from this tourist lodge. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If they smelled it, I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The key thing was that it wasn't random which of my baboons would go over there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No one from my troop would like dream of going near the garbage unless he's a big aggressive guy. | ||
| The other thing is, morning is when baboons do most of their socializing stuff. | ||
| They sit around and they groom and they gossip before they go out and they do the day's foraging. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, in other words, the males from my troop who were going to eat the garbage were the most aggressively socially affiliated guys. | ||
| 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. | ||
| A meat inspector who's being bribed and all sorts of horrifying things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| TB kills other primates, like, over the course of weeks. | ||
| It's like wildfire in non-human primates. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So now what you have is half the number of males as usual. | ||
| So you got a two to one female to male ratio, which is pretty atypical for a baboon troop. | ||
| And the key thing is the baboons who are left are the nice guys. | ||
| They're socially affiliated. | ||
| They're the least aggressive. | ||
| What's baboon aggression about? | ||
| You're having a bad day. | ||
| You find somebody smaller and weaker to take it out on. | ||
| They weren't dumping on weaker animals. | ||
| They weren't having displaced aggression. | ||
| And it turned into, just to be technical here, like a much nicer troop. | ||
| They had much higher rates of grooming, less aggression, more sitting in contact. | ||
| Male baboons would groom each other, which you don't see male baboons grooming each other in this troop. | ||
| So, in and of itself, that's totally fascinating. | ||
| So, okay, you get rid of 50% of the males who are the jerks, and you have a commune there going on. | ||
| What was most interesting, the thing that just flattened me, was 10 years later, the troop is still like that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So who are the new males? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| Cut it out. | ||
| And I did a ton of work sort of seeing what that was about. | ||
| And it takes about six months. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Females who are getting dumped on less by males and thus are much more relaxed. | ||
| Lower stress hormone levels are more willing to be affiliated with them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| In this troop, it was like three days. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because everybody's much more relaxed because no one's being miserable to each other. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This was culture being transmitted, a culture of high affiliation and less aggression. | ||
| And these baboons are essentially living a natural life. | ||
| They're not getting food from people. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| They're just living the... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Out in the Serengeti in East Africa and just going about normal baboon life. | ||
| For me, what was most striking about this is baboons are as high rates of aggression as you find in any non-human primate. | ||
| Male dominance, highly hierarchical structured societies since the early sixties. | ||
| 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, | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's differences in the way we behave. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is this the only time you've ever seen a complete variation of the standard behavior of a primate? | ||
| As far as I know, this is the only example of something like this that's been seen. | ||
| Other ecological extremes, and you get some radical shifts. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And for me, what the biggest take-home message of that is, exactly what you just honed in on. | ||
| Ooh, these guys are textbook examples of the inevitability of stratification and aggression and all that. | ||
| And no, it turns out it's not inevitable. | ||
| It can suddenly flip with some unique circumstances and be transmitted multigenerationally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| 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, it's like 20 years later, they're still the same, right? | ||
| Is that the case? | ||
| The culture there went for about 20 years. | ||
| And does it dissolve now? | ||
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Did it evolve back to normal baboon behavior? | |
| 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. | ||
| A lot of them got habituated enough to the humans there to represent the danger. | ||
| Game Park Rangers had to kill about half of them. | ||
| So the troupe basically does not exist anymore, but it went for about 20 years. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Well, does that give you hope when it comes to human beings? | ||
| Because it seems to me like it's such a radical shift of the behavior of a primate without a language. | ||
| To see that that's possible, that just a shift of circumstance can change the entire behavior pattern of this troupe. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I guess that's not the sort of most obvious take-home message. | ||
| But, I mean, you look at... | ||
| Humans change. | ||
| Human cultures change. | ||
| The 17th century, like the most terrifying people in Europe, were the Swedes. | ||
| They spent the whole century rampaging through Europe, and they've now gone more than 200 years since they've had a war. | ||
| World War I Christmas Truce. | ||
| 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, | ||
| 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. | ||
| Change can occur very dramatically. | ||
| 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, help build schools, all of that. | ||
| What if that could have been conceived of in like 1970? | ||
| Yeah, humans have an astonishing capacity to change. | ||
| 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, a city, a country? | ||
| It's pretty mind-boggling when you consider all the variables. | ||
| 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, there's this thing we call free will. | ||
| And all free will is, is the biology we haven't discovered yet. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There is a little bit of something that we have where you're talking about the frontal cortex that allows you to resist things. | ||
| But why is yours the way it is is the big question, right? | ||
| Yeah, and if some of it had to do with how stressed your mother was when you were a fetus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, how... | ||
| 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, and people litter less. | ||
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Whoa. | |
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| People don't become more conservative about economic issues or geopolitical stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
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Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| And when you're hungry, you feel less sympathy. | ||
| You feel less empathy. | ||
| People become less generous in economic games and how much would you contribute to this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
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Wow. | |
| So, like, maybe one of the best ways we can enhance society is keep people well-fed and lower stress. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Um... | ||
| If nothing else, like what people have known for decades when we're stressed, our learning and memory doesn't work that well. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then we learned we're more likely to have horrible judgment and have our frontal cortex not work very well. | ||
| And the newest realm of that is when you're stressed, you're less empathic. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, what about the frontal cortex and actual damage? | ||
| Like damage from car accidents or head trauma? | ||
| One incredibly interesting contentious area. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
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Wow! | |
| And that's a world of, like, volitional control is not that volitional. | ||
| Well, that seems to go contrary to the idea of a lobotomy, then. | ||
| Okay, a lobotomy was just, that's great, that lobotomy was just, like, savaging about the front third of the brain. | ||
| It was getting the frontal, but it was also getting limbic. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, and go in there and just scoop around, and there you go. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They were scrambling. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So frontal damage instead is a much more selective issue. | ||
| Do you shudder when you think about the fact that that was just not even a hundred years ago? | ||
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| And, like, yeah, you shudder. | ||
| My God! | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What do you think would be the big one? | ||
| Do you think it would be antidepressants? | ||
| Do you think it would be painkillers that they're handing out? | ||
| What do you think would be the big one that people would be freaking out about today? | ||
| I think about what we think about in the future. | ||
| Yeah, about what we're doing now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| They punished people. | ||
| Who had brains that couldn't regulate their own behavior. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they used words like justice back then. | ||
| Wow, I can't believe the stuff they did. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's so few people that share this idea that you're having. | ||
| Obviously, your sense of it is so much more educated than the average person. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But most people are not aware of this. | ||
| I mean, literally most people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like 500 years ago, if you had an epileptic seizure, the smartest, most reflective, most compassionate, like... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And now instead we're, I don't know, a century or two into having a mindset where instead we make a biological statement. | ||
| Oh, it's not him, it's his disease. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And we even recognize constraints with it. | ||
| If somebody has uncontrolled epilepsy that's treatment resistant, they may not be able to get a driver's license. | ||
| But you don't sit there and say, yeah, let's have a burning of the driver's licenses and the epileptics. | ||
| It's about damn time they got what they were... | ||
| No, it's a realm where words like evil or soul or punishment or justice is totally irrelevant. | ||
| Oh, it's a neurological disorder. | ||
| So it's only taken us about 500 years to get to that point. | ||
| So maybe, you know, we've done that cognitive leap at least once. | ||
| But there's no victims there though. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 500 years ago, if an epileptic during a seizure with their limbs flailing struck someone, that would have been assault and battery. | ||
| Who told them to go, like, sleep with Satan? | ||
| That's their own damn fault. | ||
| And it's like, it's a ridiculous mindset now. | ||
| 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. | ||
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No, no, that was not, they didn't choose to do that. | |
| That was something screwy with their biology. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Maybe half the juries in this country are capable of doing the same thing of saying, it's not him, it's his disease. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They have this thing called dyslexia, meaning there's abnormalities, macromalities in their cortex and the part having to do with it. | ||
| So, you know, we're making a little bit of progress, but... | ||
| So you seem optimistic, then? | ||
| Well, optimistic in 500-year time spans. | ||
| I mean, you think it's kind of playing out in the right direction, just very slowly. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's incredibly frustrating. | ||
| They will look back at us and say, my God! | ||
| 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, and we've learned all of it in the last 50 years, in the last 20 years, in the last five years. | ||
| 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, | ||
| 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. | ||
| Has anyone ever used Toxo for an excuse or for a defense, for a crime? | ||
| There was that Twinkie case. | ||
| Remember the Twinkie case? | ||
| Twinkie murder case? | ||
| Dan White, blood sugar levels. | ||
| That's been used. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How have they used that? | ||
| What is the warrior gene? | ||
| It's a gene called MAO alpha, monoamine oxidase alpha. | ||
| It's got something to do with neurochemistry and something to do with the neurochemistry of aggression. | ||
| The gene comes in a couple of different versions, and one particular variant is associated with high rates of antisocial aggression in humans. | ||
| If, and only if, the human was abused during childhood. | ||
| In other words, the gene is determining absolutely zero, you're getting a gene-environment interaction. | ||
| The absence of an abusive childhood, having this gene variant, has zero impact on this behavior. | ||
| 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, 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? | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
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Yep. | |
| Basically, there's no science for that. | ||
| The science is not there yet. | ||
| So it would never work in America, that case. | ||
| Or should not, I should say. | ||
| Should not, and should not work in India. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a case where the science is... | ||
| So what have they done with this warrior gene? | ||
| How has someone been exonerated? | ||
| Oh, where was it? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, like, that's like... | ||
| Isn't Italy the place where they charged scientists with not being able to register when an earthquake was coming? | ||
| Protected an earthquake, yes, by assuring the public there wasn't an earthquake. | ||
| Yeah, they literally tried them for this. | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| I think the dust is still settling from that one. | ||
| I think most of those convictions have been overturned. | ||
| But terrifying that those people had to go to court. | ||
| Imagine if you're a seismologist and you have to go, hey, this is not how it works, you assholes. | ||
| Jesus Christ, I can't tell you when it's coming. | ||
| You don't think I would be out of the country? | ||
| What the fuck is wrong with you? | ||
| Oh no, my son the scientist is like being convicted of murder. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it's dangerous, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean you see... | ||
| Like, be careful what you wish for in terms of, wow, it'd be great if people learned more about science. | ||
| Way more. | ||
| Way, way more. | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| Yes, a little bit of it is mighty scary. | ||
| Let's see, I'm just knowing I need to... | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's 6.15. | ||
| Should we wrap it up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Really, really appreciate it. | ||
| It was a pleasure. | ||
| I've been a fan of yours for years, so this is a real treat for me. | ||
| I was really looking forward to it. | ||
| All right, everybody. | ||
| This was a short one, but an awesome one. |
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