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June 12, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2720 The Bomb in the Brain: Brain Development and Violence with Stefan Molyneux

Stefan Molyneux, philosopher and host of Freedomain Radio talks about the wide ranging effects of Domestic Violence especially as it relates to brain development in childhood. The Toronto DV 2014 Symposium was organized and hosted by Attila Vinczer.

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	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	I normally do pyrotechnics and cartwheels and confetti cannons for my speeches, but this is going to be a sort of data transfer.
	This is going to be like a matrix plugin of what I call the bomb in the brain, which is the effects of child abuse on domestic violence.
	I think, to me, domestic violence is one of those words that artificially separates the violence that we see all around us in the world from the violence that has its origins in the family home.
	Really, all violence, I would argue, is domestic violence because you cannot become an adult with the capacity to inflict violence on people unless you have first experienced violence I think that domestic violence is all violence,
	and if you want to solve the cycle of violence and you wish, as all good people do, to have a civilized and peaceful world, you must first focus on the origins of violence, the origins of war, the origins of abuse, and human predation, which occurs in the womb, it occurs in infancy, it occurs in toddlerhood, and the bitter fruit is found in adulthood.
	When the spurned and hurt child is big enough to take vengeance on a world that either hurt him, ignored him, or supported and enabled his abuser.
	So we're going to go fairly rapidly.
	I have about an hour, and I'd like to leave a little bit of time for questions.
	So I'll go at nine times speed, but I think you can slow down the recording later if you like.
	So I think every generation gets these...
	Scare stories in childhood.
	For me, when I was a kid, and you can let me know what it was for you.
	For me, when I was a kid, razor blades in Halloween candy.
	Did you...
	Is that still...
	There's younger people here.
	Did that still occur for you guys?
	Fabrication.
	Yeah.
	Well, mostly.
	I mean, it was very, very rare.
	Ailar and apples.
	Do you remember that?
	They're supposed to be some poisoning apples.
	Does anyone else have anything as scare stories as kids?
	I'm sorry?
	I'm sorry.
	Well, the Tylenol thing was fairly real.
	I mean, but for kids that they talk about, this is really scary.
	Stranger abduction, again, it's real, but of course, most violence occurs within the home.
	But there's lots of things that people hear about or talk about.
	Remember the panic about swine flu?
	There was massive concerns about BPA in baby bottles, lead in children's toys.
	And these are all real issues, but very small relative to...
	There is an amazingly and terrifyingly prevalent problem in society that has lifelong effects on health, and the data is still coming out about this.
	It can contribute to a 48% greater chance of contracting cancer It has an average effect on the human lifespan of reducing it by 20 years, and it triggers massive increases in drug addiction promiscuity, STDs, alcoholism, criminality, suicidality, depression, etc.
	And it is in general, though the data is discussed in professional journals, as yet misunderstood or not understood or not visible at all to the general population in society.
	It is a terrible omission within the culture that we do not talk about something which produces such horrendous negative effects, both to individuals and to society as a whole.
	So, there is a study that is ongoing, and I had the head of the study on my show.
	17,000 Kaiser Permanente Patients or holders of insurance policies were studied over many years.
	And these are middle class people, generally pretty affluent.
	They don't even represent where significant portions of the victims of child abuse end up, which is in the lower stratus of society or the invisible black and gray market stratus of society.
	And the head of the study, Dr.
	Vincent Felitti, developed something called the ACEs, Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.
	And he tried to figure out why some people got so sick, why some people died so early, why some people were so prone to addictions.
	And it has profound negative, child abuse has profound negative effects on adult health and well-being decades later.
	Here's an example of a three-year-old child.
	On the left, we have a child who is developed in a relatively healthy environment, and on the right, we have a child who has been abused.
	As you can see, the brain mass is significantly different.
	I would argue that we actually develop almost as different species When we go through child abuse, almost as different species.
	We like to think of sort of one common humanity, and certainly that is the goal, I think, of all people.
	But certain people who are exposed to, they have a genetic predisposition to and are exposed to significant violence or the effects of violence within the womb.
	I mean, when the mother is stressed, the fetus is bathed in cortisol and other hormones and...
	Pathogens which harm the development of the brain.
	Capacity for empathy is diminished and so on.
	We'll get on to that.
	So I would argue that the child on the right is going to grow up to be most likely some form of either self-destructive or other destructive human being.
	Either a predator of the self or a predator of others.
	And it's this, I think, that we really have to focus on to build a better and more peaceful world.
	So adverse childhood experiences, I guess the first question is how prevalent are they?
	Adverse childhood experiences, I won't go through the whole list, but it's all the way from divorce to being physically or verbally or sexually abused.
	It is having a family member addiction in family members, incarceration within family members and so on.
	Things like neglect or being put in daycare at a very early age, which children or infants put in daycare for more than 20 hours a week experience the same symptoms as children completely abandoned by their mothers and fathers.
	So it doesn't even count that.
	It doesn't count neglect so much, but it counts pretty egregious abuse.
	And as you can see, so, you know, I guess up to 40%, 30-40% of people have zero abuse.
	Good, but as you can see, the prevalence goes down.
	And the real tragedy is the greater than four, which is when things go bad in a family, they tend to go really bad.
	I mean, it tends to be a real domino effect.
	Alcoholism leads to job instability, leads to financial insecurity, leads to moving around a lot, leads to a lack of continuity.
	I mean, it just goes on and on.
	So this is the prevalence that has been found so far.
	We'll do a little bit, I'm going to go through this stuff fairly fast, but to understand what happens in the brain, sorry if we can move to the next slide, to understand what happens in the brain is very important because it does develop in different ways.
	My sort of belief is that our brain from conception onwards is, in a sense, scanning for what kind of environment it's going to have to survive in.
	Now, if there's peace and calm and not yelling and the mother is well-fed and relaxed and so on, I think the developing brain assumes that negotiation and peace and trade and all that kind of good stuff is going to be How you flourish.
	It's going to be a peaceful and trade-based society.
	That's how you flourish.
	And therefore, hair trigger tempers, violence, and so on is not going to be the way that you're going to flourish.
	If, on the other hand, the mother is subjected to shortages of food, if the mother is subjected to massive amounts of stress, if there's loud noises, bangs, and yells, I believe that the brain then develops...
	To anticipate a time of scarce resources and massive social conflict, in which case peaceful handshakes and cooperation are going to get you plowed under the general tidal wave of sociopaths in charge.
	So it is my belief that the brain is scanning from conception onwards, what do I need to survive?
	We adapt, we evolve from the womb onwards to what social cues are coming in, even before we're born from the mother's stress system and so on.
	And this shows up quite a lot here.
	So just very quickly, I'm sure you know some of this stuff.
	So the amygdala is memory, emotional reactions, and controls the fight or flight.
	Some people call it the lizard brain, although I find that lizards are pretty peaceful for the most part.
	Hippocampus, long-term memory and spatial navigation.
	Corpus callosum, communication between the two hemispheres.
	And there are one of the significant brain differences between boys and girls is in that area.
	The prefrontal cortex, this is what we would call the ego.
	It's really the top rational part of us that allows us to intercept the impulses.
	From the amygdala.
	And you really statistically only have about a half a second to intercept an impulse from the amygdala to yell or to hit.
	And it is this part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that delays gratification, that interferes with that lizard brain that says, no more cheesecake for you, or whatever it is.
	This is a very important part.
	When that gets damaged, our capacity to have a civilized society goes down with it.
	All right, so with regards to the biology...
	Oh, sorry.
	Yeah, let's move on.
	That was a little animation.
	So the biology of violence is important.
	So after the past few decades, and this is relatively new information, the psychology and neurobiology of violence is very important to understand.
	And the consensus appears to be, and this can always change, but I think the consensus is really beginning to be, that during the first four years of the life, 90% of a child's brain develops through the experiences of We're
	good to go.
	So when we look at a violent human being, the general cop-out in society is, well, you know, like George Thurgood says, born to be bad.
	You know, just born with a bad gene, born with the warrior gene, born a mean guy.
	And then the parents generally portray themselves as victims of some evil spawn Damien-style child, which I would challenge with a fair amount of science.
	Over a hundred careful studies have shown that violence results from insecure attachments and so on.
	So, the emotional...
	The content, the emotional triggers within the brain are created in the first few years of life.
	And I'm happy to share this.
	I know some people taking notes.
	I'm happy to share this presentation with anyone who wants it.
	Insecure bond between the infant and the mother.
	An insecure bond, I think, trains the brain to recognize that there are going to be a shortage of resource and negotiations are win-lose.
	The essence of violence is that the negotiations are always win-lose.
	The essence of free trade is Ideally, is that it's win-win, right?
	Like if I have a dollar and you have a pen and we trade, I would obviously rather have my dollar and the pen.
	But if I trade voluntarily, I clearly want the pen more than my dollar and you clearly want the dollar more than my pen.
	So that's win-win.
	But violence is always win-lose.
	Somebody wins and somebody loses.
	So if you bring win-win to a win-lose environment, you lose.
	If you bring win-lose to a win-win environment, you lose.
	Which is why the brain is always trying to figure out, are we in a win-lose or a win-win environment?
	That's what I need to develop my emotionality in accordance with what is going to be optimal for my survival strategy in the environment that I'm born into.
	So it's mainly the right hemispheres of both the mother and the infant that regulates early emotional states and copes with stress.
	I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for five and a half years now, and babies get a little stressed.
	They're very selfish, very self-absorbed, never asked me what I feel like, never asked me if I feel like getting up in the middle of the night, and are always discontented that my boobs only come with floss and not milk.
	They're just terrible that way.
	But to learn, learning how to self-regulate emotions, the children, the babies, their emotions erupt, which is natural because they need to get attention and resources.
	And then you soothe them and you teach them, model how to soothe them down from their emotional escalations.
	30% of children have been found through research that if they have a problem, they actually prefer not to go to their parents.
	Because if they go to their parents, the problem will get worse.
	And so this is when you then teach children that they alone have to deal with their problems, and that if you go to your parents, it makes things worse.
	That creates a very difficult, self-regulatory, self-soothing environment for children to grow up in.
	So as you may have known, Ceaușescu in Romania had these orphanages where...
	Children were fed, they had medical attention and so on, but they were put in cribs and basically were not touched much at all.
	And a lot of them just died.
	Just died.
	Yes, if you give them all their nutritional and health requirements but do not touch them, the baby will die.
	Which is an amazing thing that we actually feed on contact.
	Our brain feeds on intimacy, on connection, on eye contact, on caresses, on touch.
	That is what we live on and for.
	Now, a lot of these Romanian orphanage children were adopted by French people because, you know, the horrors of all of this came out after the fall of Ceaușescu.
	And the French couples had an unbelievably difficult time of it.
	This appeared to be irreversible damage in the development of the child.
	It's the sort of analogy that I use is, if your sort of genetics say you should be six feet tall, but you get insufficient nutrition, and you only end up five feet tall, it doesn't matter how much food you get as an adult.
	That is the way you have become.
	There is neuroplasticity, so there is some potential within the brain to heal early damage.
	But as Gabor Maté has pointed out, he's a Vancouver physician who works with drug addicts, the part of your brain that would want to heal is the first part of your brain to go.
	And so you don't actually have the capacity for many people to heal this early damage.
	Eye contact is a sign of connection between healthy people.
	But eye contact with a human predator is considered a sign of aggression, right?
	So if the baby has eye contact with the mother, I think they're growing up in the win-win environment.
	But if the mother is either not present or not giving eye contact, that's because eye contact is considered to be a threat in a win-lose, in a violent-based society.
	Does that make any sense?
	Makes a lot of sense, but it's very, very interesting because think of all those young mothers out there in the world who are nursing and may not be aware of the importance of that eye to eye contact.
	No, I think eye contact is essential for building that sense of empathy as well.
	I mean, it's very hard to read people without their eyes, which is why, you know, you get in the South stopped by some cop with those mirrored sunglasses on, they might as well be a cyborg, because you can't read them through their eyes.
	So, I mean, you've probably heard of these studies, if you separate rhesus monkeys from their mother's gaze, and even if you give them, like, simulated monkey moms...
	Great name for a band.
	Anyway, if you give them all of that stuff, and you give them all, so they get the fur, they get it, but it's not eye contact.
	They still grow up aggressive and antisocial, which is important.
	And they just come up and attack, because then it'll win and lose.
	Insecurely attached children display nine times as much aggression as their securely attached peers.
	That is staggering.
	Staggering.
	900% more.
	Isn't it amazing that eye contact can end war?
	When you think about that at a very deep level, just how easy it is.
	We have lots of people who will chain themselves to tanks and lots of people who go and protest and so on.
	But I would argue that the end of criminality, the end of abuse, has a lot to do with eye contact and everything that that entails.
	So as we mentioned, the baby's brain is tuned by the caregiver's brain to produce the correct neurotransmitters and hormones.
	We're a whole mess of opiates and neurotransmitters and dopamines and all of that kind of stuff.
	So learning how to self-soothe, which is how you don't escalate into violence, is often trained by the mother.
	Now, again, I'm aware that there are paternal caregivers here, but for the sake of...
	So depressed or angry mothers regularly produce insecurely attached...
	Infants who grew up to be violent adults.
	These studies, they're called the Ainsworth studies.
	They run into the hundreds.
	It is about as established as it can be in the social sciences.
	Now, if violence produces these problems, let's ask ourselves, what is the prevalence of abuse?
	The ACEs do not include spanking.
	Spanking is still legal in Canada.
	From the age of 2 to 12, you can strike a child except in the face.
	UK childhood sexual assaults, two-thirds of girls and one-third of boys have been used sexually as children.
	Now that is a win-lose situation, as you can imagine.
	Physical abuse is astounding.
	And I've triple-checked these figures because they're just jaw-dropping.
	Two-thirds of British mothers said they routinely hit their infants in their first year of life.
	Two-thirds.
	Routinely.
	Routinely.
	97% they hit their children at least once a week.
	Most a good deal more often using straps, belts, canes, and sticks on the boys.
	Boys are hit much more often than girls.
	Which is one of the reasons why we need conferences like this.
	442 boys studied in 72.
	One out of every three boys with a particular gene maltreated during childhood almost certain to exhibit antisocial criminal behaviors in adults.
	This is not determinism.
	There are some people who smoke, like George Burns smoked his whole life and lived to be over 100.
	So the carcinogens of the cigarette smoke or the cigar smoke just didn't happen to hit his genes that way.
	But you don't know ahead of time what's going to happen, what is going to happen.
	And so you don't know if you have a kid with one of these genes or not or whether it's some other combination.
	So this is one of these don't smoke, don't hit kind of situations.
	You know, society talks a lot about how children are the future, children are everything.
	There's nothing I wouldn't do for my kids, but there's really not a lot of positive feelings that people have about children.
	Study of 900 American mothers, they enjoyed socializing, praying, eating, exercising, watching TV and cooking more than taking care of my children.
	Now, if you've seen a lot of Americans, they don't appear to like exercising at all.
	And the fact that they like their children even less is not good.
	Eighty percent of mothers experience mild baby blues for months after birth, postpartum depression for up to several years, and puerperal psychosis.
	Obviously the latter is much more rare.
	So my particular belief is if you combine it with the information in the previous slide, I believe in deep body and brain memories that are in the hippocampus.
	And if these mothers were hit as infants and then they have a baby, I think that it awakens very primal memories in them that they may not even be conscious of.
	And I think that contributes to this.
	And Landers asked, if you had to do it over again, would you have children?
	Out of 10,000 responses, 70% were a resounding no.
	To unwish the lives of your offspring is pretty chilling.
	And if that's how they felt years later when their children were grown up, imagine how they felt when the children were babies and much more needy.
	So we're going to go very quickly through abuse and cortisol as some of the medical grounds or basis for this.
	It's a hormone that helps the body prepare to cope with stress through its effects on metabolism and the immune system.
	So cortisol is designed for you get away from the lion Or you don't.
	Right?
	So the lion roars and jumps at you and it spikes like crazy and then it's supposed to go down.
	Cortisol is the sprinting mechanism.
	You cannot sprint through a marathon and life is a marathon.
	This is why people wear themselves out with stress.
	We have a life now with constant stressors that keeps a lot of people's cortisol levels elevated, which is a carcinogenic risk.
	So when you are a baby or a toddler subjected to abuse, then your cortisol levels are significantly higher, which has long-term negative health effects.
	Many infants and children who have been maltreated have abnormal secretions of cortisol.
	So they're basically in a permanent fight-or-flight situation or response.
	Now, when you are in a permanent fight-or-flight situation or response, it's my belief that you seek external stressors because you just get addicted to it and it's just what you need to live.
	And you're so used to managing it.
	And Aaron, of course, this is the book to some degree that you wrote in the 70s, which is that people then seek to recreate that situation because that's kind of what their bodies are attuned for.
	I'll race through this pretty quick because I do want to get to some of the good news.
	So the fight-or-flight mechanisms of babies who are insecurely attached are more active.
	They're larger, hyperdeveloped.
	When you're in fight-or-flight mode, your actual seed of reasoning, your neofrontal cortex, I would say the highest human part of us, shuts down.
	You don't ponder the existence of life when a lion is chasing you.
	You want to continue the existence of life, but you're not pondering it very much.
	When you're in the don't-die scenario, you're not coming up with a lot of creative and fertile ideas.
	They have found that when they electrically stimulate the amygdala, people have a sense of being reprimanded by authority.
	I don't know whether that's divine or schoolmaster or what, but they do have a sense of being bad in the eyes of authority, which I assume would be a parental echo.
	And when children experience maternal abandonment fears and maternal abuse, they release this cortisol shutdown, as I mentioned, in the prefrontal cortex.
	It makes their amygdala hyperactive, according to one researcher, indelibly imprinting and burning in the memory of the threatening mother in their amygdala.
	Amygdalan module.
	So the brain scans reveal an enduring pattern, according to a researcher, associated with destructive defensive rage is imprinted into an immature, inefficient orbitofrontal or cortical system during relational trauma in early childhood.
	This is changing the brain.
	This is changing the brain.
	Our environment has as much to do with our brain as our eating has to do with our bodies.
	And the right amygdala, which is really the fountain of the phytoflat, is larger and more excitable in psychotics, depressives, those with anxiety disorders, and murderers.
	And it is fed and created through abuse.
	So, sorry to skip some of this, but I would like to talk just a little bit about the mirror neurons, which are fairly new in the science.
	I actually, I cut my tongue the other day when I was eating.
	And I was like, oh, you know, it bled a little bit.
	And my daughter was sitting across from me and she looked at me and she said, oh, dad, I felt that in my own tongue.
	I'm like, yes, mirror neurons successfully implanted.
	She can now be cruel to no one.
	Yay!
	But these mirror neurons are very important.
	And if there were a wider dispersion of mirror neurons, then all of the ugly hit-in-the-groin home video shows would stop.
	Right?
	Because when you see a guy get hit in the groin, if you have mirror neurons, you pay good money to not see that because you kind of feel it, right?
	But a lot of people will laugh at it.
	Or if you see, you know, those shows where they wake some peacefully sleeking guy up with an air horn.
	I mean, I'm just...
	That really annoys me.
	I think that's incredibly cruel.
	But, of course, a lot of people find it funny for tragic reasons.
	So these mirror neurons, when you examine...
	When the neuropsychiatrist examined the abused and neglected kids...
	They can actually see the damage done that really affect their need for violence later on.
	This guy, Bruce Perry, has published a huge number of studies, abnormal brain development following neglected blues in little children, significantly smaller brains, decreased activity in the interception of violent impulses or strong impulses.
	And the violent impulses, I don't just mean for violence, sexual impulsivity.
	Extreme risk-taking behavior, storm chasing.
	I mean, who does that?
	Another guy just died recently who was a storm chaser.
	Anyway, so it can be impulsivity around other things, taking dares to do silly things and so on.
	You sit there and you think about it, if you do, and you don't do it.
	But if you have that impulse with that lowered capacity to intercept your impulses, then you're much more likely to do things without really thinking about the consequences.
	Hippocampal damage.
	A lot of people call into my show with life difficulties and I say, well, how was your childhood?
	And they're like, I don't remember.
	I don't remember.
	Now, one theory is that it's repressed, which is one of these, like most Freudian theories, you can't disprove it.
	There's no null hypothesis.
	If it's there, it's proven.
	If it's the opposite that it's there, it's a reaction formation.
	If...
	If it's not a reaction formation, then it's repressed.
	But there does seem to be good evidence that when you experience a lot of trauma as a child, you actually don't recall.
	Your capacity to remember and your capacity to retain memories is significantly damaged.
	And I think that empathy has a lot to do with memory.
	If we remember what it's like to be hurt, then we can't really hurt others.
	If we have no memory of being hurt, then everything is kind of like for the first time.
	I remember when my daughter fell for the first time, she was so surprised.
	It hurts.
	And if you don't have the memory, I think it's easier to hurt others.
	So we move on.
	We're going to do a little bit on the prefrontal cortex.
	Then we're going to skip to some of the health effects of this stuff.
	This is normally sort of a two-hour thing, but it'll be a little faster.
	So this is the seed of the moral decision.
	We want to find the moral muscle in the brain and strengthen it.
	I think this is the most fundamental task of moralists.
	It's not just Socratic argument.
	It's biological engineering to strengthen our capacity for moral decision-making, for the deferral of gratification, for the development of mirror neurons.
	And to some degree, we cannot work with bad clay as social shapers.
	You know, we have to work on the next generation.
	There's some things we can do, and I'll talk about the effects that exercise and psychotherapy has in helping with these issues.
	But we have to go with what is.
	And a lot of people are very physically damaged in the brain as a result of trauma.
	And we can't fix them.
	At least, I don't think there's any way to fix them easily.
	But we can certainly attempt to help the next generation.
	And I've also, on my website at freedommanradio.com, I'm reading an audiobook by Lloyd DeMoss, who's the editor of the Psychohistory Journal, called The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which is, again, quite fascinating, although some of the grimmest reading this side of Stephen King's Bad Nightmares.
	So...
	I used to read it very quickly.
	Child abuse frequently produces frontal lobe damage that contributes to violent tendencies.
	And when you do things that strengthen impulses and lower the suppression of impulses, you end up with a very chaotic and aggressive society.
	Violence and crime, the links are more and more clear.
	And to be clear, almost everyone who's a criminal was abused as a child, but not everyone who was abused as a child becomes a criminal.
	And that's, of course, very important to remember.
	Dissociated mind states, dissociation is when you have no contact with your own emotional state, and it is a prerequisite for cruelty.
	Because if you do not have contact with your own emotional state, you cannot empathize with others.
	So going into a disassociative state or dissociative state is a prerequisite for committing violence against others.
	And interviews with criminals and so on basically say the knife went in.
	They never have personal agency.
	It's not like I stabbed the guy.
	It's like this happened.
	And I was merely reacting in self-defense when, of course, it might have been just a glance, that eye contact that provokes aggression.
	So we want to have personal agency and self-empathy is, I think, the only way to ensure a reduction of violence.
	A researcher says people with childhood histories of trauma, abuse, and neglect make up almost the entire criminal justice population in the U.S. Robert Firestone, a prison psychiatrist, reports all his suicidal patients hear parental voices telling them they should kill themselves.
	And James Gilligan, another prison psychiatrist, says, As children, these men were shot, axed, scolded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps.
	Some people think armed robbers commit their crimes in order to get money, but when you sit down and talk with people who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at somebody.
	When you are raised in a win-lose paradigm, a gun means you win.
	And that is what you've been programmed for.
	You're tired of losing, and by God, you're going to win this time.
	Let's just touch very briefly on boys and girls, and then we'll move to the effects.
	Now, the only big difference that affects later violence is that Boys have a smaller corpus callosum part of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres.
	Boys who are abused have a 25% reduction in sections of the corpus callosum.
	Girls did not, even if they suffered from abuse.
	One of the things I think that's very powerful and important in the men's rights movement is to overthrow the myth of the invulnerable boy.
	Boys are incredibly fragile.
	They have incredible potential, as do girls, but they are very fragile, and we prey upon them, in general, outside of sexual abuse the most, in terms of physical abuse and emotional abuse.
	But boys are very fragile, and a society that thinks otherwise is only setting itself up, I think, for further cycles of violence.
	Boys grew up with less attachment strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at their boys less.
	It's that eye contact.
	Because both parents hit their boys two or three times as much as they do their girls, because boys are as much higher risk than girls for serious violence against them.
	And boys, of course, are continually told to suck it up, man up, be a man, don't feel, and so on.
	There's an American television or radio host named Glenn Beck We're good to go.
	Abuse and neglect produce equally damaging results in the brains of both boys and girls, but girls tend to respond more with dissociative internalizing symptoms, withdrawal, depression, helplessness, dependence, while boys tend to act out in fight-or-flight ways.
	So, very briefly, we're going to do...
	They have poorly integrated cerebral hemispheres.
	You need both sides of the brain to self-regulate, to manage your own emotions, to have the common sense to count to ten when you're upset, to not punch people, to not throw drinks, to not drive too fast, to not drink and drive, to not eat too much, all the things that lead people into trouble.
	This poor integration of these hemispheres and the underdevelopment of the orbital frontal cortex, the seat of reason and restraint, is the basis for difficulty regulating emotion.
	Lack of cause and effect thinking.
	If I do this, like I've never understood people who do stuff and then they're like, oh, now I'm going to jail for 10 years.
	It's just a complete inability to project yourself forward in time to empathize with your future self.
	Right?
	Again, I would say it all comes down to a lack of empathy.
	Inability to accurately recognize emotions in others.
	A casual glance can be perceived as a significant threat.
	And an inability to articulate emotions within a child, which leads to frustration, and there are some people who argue, which I think is not a bad argument, that all violence is the result of tension, all violence is the result of frustration.
	And if you cannot articulate your own emotions and get your needs met, then it becomes win-lose.
	An incoherent sense of self, an autobiographical history.
	In my conversations with people who've had a history with violence, and I've had quite a lot of them over the years, they have...
	A very chaotic personal history.
	And their own descriptions of themselves are like random people writing an autobiography who have no sense of the previous or the next paragraphs.
	And they also have verbal cues which actually inflame their anger.
	I did a show recently which goes into great depth into Elliot Rodger, the California shooter, recently.
	And he continually uses the same language to inflame himself.
	It's completely unjust.
	It's completely unfair.
	I'm the perfect gentleman.
	Why don't these women want me?
	And you can see him continually building this edifice of imminent aggression through language.
	And there's no bouncing off empiricism.
	It's all just self-created, self-constructed.
	I know it's a very fast and intelligent crowd, so I'm sure you got all that.
	Alright.
	I also wanted to mention as well, we obviously want people to be more intelligent and Spanking, which I do consider child abuse.
	I really could care less what the law says.
	Slavery was legal at 1.2, didn't make it any more moral.
	And it has been shown to shave four plus IQ points off children.
	That probably has to do with the continual activation of the amygdala and the resulting shutdown of the neofrontal cortex, which is where IQ primarily sits.
	And also, every time you hit a child, you are not negotiating with the child.
	You are not teaching that child how to negotiate for win-win.
	You are imposing a win-lose paradigm on the child, which is going to reduce empathy and provoke aggression.
	And it doesn't work.
	A study a guy just had on my show did a study where, within 10 minutes of being spanked, children were back to doing whatever it was beforehand.
	And also that the mothers initiated spanking within 30 seconds of the conflict beginning.
	Which means there's no possible time to negotiate in any way, shape, or form.
	And there was massive under-reporting.
	Parents said, oh, I only spank about 18 times a year.
	It turns out that they actually spanked, the mother spanked 18 times a week.
	A week.
	900 plus times a year.
	Being hit by someone five times your size, 900 times a year?
	Anybody who thinks that does not have an effect on violence in the world is fooling themselves.
	It provokes antisocial behaviors, oppositional defiance disorder, and when children cannot connect and cannot relate, then they tend to want to dominate or be dominated by, and this is where you get the foundation of gangs and pecking orders and so on.
	Something very interesting as well.
	There's a lot of interesting research.
	I'm sorry for the person who's doing that.
	If we can go on to spanking impunitive political beliefs.
	I'll just read this quote.
	It's very interesting.
	So people found that, particularly for males who've never had any psychotherapy, which I think is very, very important, so males who have not gone through therapy, who have reported high levels of childhood punishment, were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies.
	I.e.
	support of the death penalty and opposition to abortion, support for the use of military force.
	Isn't this one of the left-right differentials?
	And I think that's very interesting.
	I think that if you're punished by an authority figure as a child, and if you've not gone through therapy to deal with the pain of that, you tend to evangelize or put on a pedestal your abuser.
	And then when you're thinking of the government, the government will then take the place of the parental alter ego, and you're in support of more punitive punishments.
	Because if you justify punishment against yourself, you create punishment as value, and therefore when the government is putting forward punitive policies, I think you're likely to be more...
	I think you went too far...
	Okay, so this Kaiser Permanente study, how am I doing for time, by the way?
	Completely lost track, 2.05?
	Okay.
	And listen, if you have questions, I'm certainly happy to hear.
	So, even after accounting for age, race, sex, childhood stressors, adult health behaviors, and adult household income, individuals who had been physically abused as children were 47% more likely to develop cancer than individuals who had not been abused.
	Okay.
	Have you ever heard that before?
	I know those who are in the know, but whenever there's a slight cancer risk increase, what do you see splashed all over the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, the news, the media, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, cancer risk, blah, blah, blah.
	But this one, which is one of the greatest cancer risks in the species, is not discussed.
	Which is...
	A continuation of the abuse because you're not informing the children of cancer risks that they are subject to.
	So they can alter their behavior to lower that risk.
	Emotional abuse seems to have longer and deeper-term psychological effects than physical abuse, because physical abuse is recognized as wrong within the society, for the most part, and also is hidden, and also is experienced by the child as a significant negative.
	Emotional maltreatment is harder to pin down, is harder to get outraged about, and emotional neglect is even tougher, too, because it's in absence.
	Rather than a presence of something.
	So I think it gets tougher and tougher to define.
	Well, we know in general that children prefer abuse to neglect because it's parental attention.
	Which is why children act out and get punished when they know they're going to get punished rather than laying low.
	And they would rather have negative attention than no attention.
	Which so children experience, because you can survive a parent who hates you.
	You cannot survive a parent who doesn't care at all about you because they will just wander off.
	So if you at least become something necessary for the parent's sadism, then the parent will feed you.
	And this is a dark way of putting it, but if you become something that the parent needs whatever ugly, however ugly and dark that purpose, then you can survive because you will get the food and attention, but...
	To look at government as an amoral resource-maximizing institution, which is not the only way, but it's one way to look at it.
	They spend several hundred million dollars in daycare, which gets more women into the workforce, and they get several hundred billion dollars in taxes.
	It's a very good investment for them in terms of money.
	The ethics of it are another issue, which, of course, we're hoping to raise.
	I worked in a daycare for several years when I was younger, and no matter what your best intentions, there were two of us with 35 children ages 5 to 10.
	You simply cannot give one-on-one attention.
	And for babies, it's impossible.
	I mean, you've got to change them.
	You simply can't play with them.
	And it is, I think, a desperate wrong that is going to have negative effects for many generations.
	All right.
	If we can move on.
	Sorry, was there anyone else?
	I want to simply pause for questions.
	So you said that you don't agree with the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in the spanking case.
	Spanking is assault.
	I mean, why we have lower standards for children who are the most vulnerable in society is incomprehensible to me, and it's only because so many people have spanked that they can't look at it objectively.
	That's all.
	A 200-pound man beating a 100-pound woman is absolutely immoral on every level and a horror in society.
	But the woman is generally there by choice.
	We don't have arranged marriages that often in Canada.
	And she has the legal right to leave at any time.
	She has adult independence.
	She can earn her own money.
	There are shelters.
	She can go her own way at any time.
	Children do not have those rights.
	They do not have that independence.
	And therefore, to commit aggression against a child is infinitely worse than committing aggression against a woman.
	What happens politically as a result of that is not that consequential to me because it can't be controlled anyway.
	But we do need to at least have that basic moral distinction that children are not there by choice and cannot leave and have no independence.
	And therefore, we should have the highest standards of care and behavior with them.
	Do the studies make any correlation between contact sports, children participating in contact sports, and becoming criminal?
	I don't think so.
	And I'm not an expert on that area.
	But what I have read is that sports, in particular team sports, tend to ameliorate some of the effects of child abuse.
	Because team sports is win-win within the team.
	It's win-lose with the other team.
	But particularly for women, it gets them into looking at their bodies not in a sexual way, but in a healthy, exercise-y kind of way.
	And I think that's to the best.
	It's a big legal challenge, of course, because if you throw an abusive husband in jail, the wife can survive.
	But what do you do with the kids of abusive parents, right?
	I mean, it is a very challenging...
	We can talk afterwards, maybe.
	Let me just sort of finish up the last little bit here.
	Then we can go afterwards.
	Okay, so child abuse and depression.
	Children physically abused have a 59% increased risk of lifetime.
	Depression, a major depressive disorder, that's the MDD. Multiple types of abuse are 75% more.
	Childhood abuse and obesity is very, very important.
	And actually, I just read this morning that divorce is also causal, correlated, still being worked out, divorce and abuse.
	Child abuse and illicit drug use.
	You want to fight the war on drugs intelligently and effectively.
	Educate parents on peaceful parenting.
	That is how you can deal with it.
	Galbra Marseille said that there was not one heroin addict that he ever treated, a female heroin addict who was not sexually abused as a child.
	It is a form of self-medication.
	I just spoke about this a month or two ago at Upper Canada College.
	So if you look at this, it's dose-dependent, right?
	This is the real understanding.
	If we can go to the next one, drugs and ACEs.
	So this is prevalence, percentage of people who've injected drugs relative to ACE score.
	Tell me that's not a pretty clear cause.
	Alcoholism.
	Initiating alcohol abuse by age 14, two to threefold by individual ACEs.
	ACEs also accounted for 20 to 70% increased likelihood of alcohol use initiated during mid-adolescence.
	Child abuse and suicide.
	Compared to persons with no ACEs, prevalence of attempted suicide 1.1%, the adjusted odds ratio of even attempting suicide among persons to 7 or more was 31.1%.
	It makes life unbearable to go through this kind of childhood.
	Here we go.
	Next slide.
	ACEs versus percent lifetime history of attempted suicide.
	I'll just let the numbers speak for themselves.
	You couldn't get mathematically a more horrifying distribution.
	So, which still, because the graphs I think are the most important, let's go to ACEs and smoking, which is a slide or two down.
	Please.
	ACEs and smoking also is the same.
	Smoking supplies the neurochemicals that a happy childhood supplies, right?
	So most of us start at a happiness level of 100.
	If we take a drug, it goes to 110, 120, then goes back down to 100.
	People who've had significant adverse childhood experiences start with a happiness level of 20.
	And they take a drug, say like cocaine, which takes them to a happiness level of 100, which they didn't even know was possible.
	And then it takes them down to 15.
	So all most drug users are trying to do is become normally humanly happy.
	What you and I would consider a normal state of contentment.
	They're drugging themselves in the same way that somebody with chronic pain takes painkillers.
	The war on drugs is the war on violent parenting.
	ACEs and smoking.
	And...
	The last slide I just wanted to leave you with.
	I focus a lot on parenting in my show.
	I mean, as a philosopher, I'm dedicated to what's called the non-aggression principle, which is the non-initiation of force against others.
	And people say, well, why are you focusing so much on parents?
	Well, like the guy who says, why do you rob banks?
	That's where the money is.
	Why do you focus on parents?
	If we can go on to child abuse and neglect by relationship to victim.
	Well, because it's parents.
	If we go back one.
	It's parents who do it for the most part.
	Or it's people that parents put in charge of their children.
	If it's babysitters, the parents choose the babysitter.
	If it's a priest, the parents are going to that church.
	So we really, to end the cycle of violence, we need to focus on parenting.
	We need to remind parents how important it is to negotiate with children.
	I have never raised my voice at my daughter.
	I have never hit her.
	She experiences no punishment whatsoever and she is an incredible delight to be around.
	She's easy-going.
	She's social.
	She's done a show with me a couple of times.
	She is curious.
	She's always asking me about my shows and all of that.
	She went through the grade one curriculum in six weeks.
	If you deal reasonably with children, the world can be a paradise which we almost cannot imagine.
	We cannot imagine it as yet.
	But the simple act of applying rational ethics to parenting is the single greatest revolution that humanity and the future is capable of.
	And I think if we continue to focus on that and encourage and remind people that we build the Cathedral of Peace in the future brick by brick on every peaceful interaction and positive interaction and intervening interaction that we have with children, There really is no limit to what we can achieve as a species and we've barely begun to even taste the sweet nectar of the gods we can get from the future through consistent and peaceful parenting.

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