5 TILF Robert Sapolsky

Harvard Gazette

From People I (mostly) admire podcast, Robert Sapolsky.

1. Object Permanence.  

You could see exactly what stage baboons were at and that they're pretty smart. But you cover something and it no longer exists. So they'd be all circling around the anesthetize guy. And I had to slither in and throw a burlap sack over him. And he's gone. He's gone. And I could pick him up. And if inadvertently, like one foot stuck out, everybody suddenly is crazed and snarling again in quick cover the foot and he's gone. He doesn't exist anymore.

2. Stress -- Chronic, Childhood

The punchline of the whole field of stress and disease is that we humans turn on the exact same stress response as those of lizard or a fish or a bird. This ancient ancient piece of wiring for like running away from the predator or running after a meal. And we turn it on for psychological reasons. And that's not what it evolved for. And if you do that because of chronic psychological stress, you're going to get sick. So the issue was to try to understand a non-human model for westernized psychosocial stress.

*The nuts and bolts of stress physiology like adrenaline has been around for 100 million years. And I don't know, it's been maybe 10 million years that primates have been smart enough to generate psychosocial stress for each other. It's been a lot less time since humans have been able to invent societal things that could stress the hell out of you like material goods and they're unequal division. So we're using this ancient piece of wiring for totally novel reasons, and that's exactly where we get into trouble.

*We could get better at dealing with stress and putting things in perspective and trying to figure out in a certain circumstance what parts of it can you control and which parts can't you do you actually have social support or are you mistaking drinking buddies or Friday night pickups with true social connectedness?

Overcoming adversity

*Amid that and amid the enormous variability as what counts as over the top, stressful for us. What's clear is you get to that stage as an adult, as a function of your genetics, as a function of how much of your mother's stress hormones you were marinating in when you were a fetus as a function of your parents socioeconomic status, when you were a kid, as a function of how much you learned efficacy in childhood, etc., that all of the biology and all of the environment and all of their interactions wind up explaining why at any given moment some of us are far better able to grow from adversity rather than collapsing from it.

Trauma in Young People

*(young person stress worse than post-war PTSD). Absolutely. And this is this whole world of trying to quantify just how awful somebody's childhood was, what sort of adversity they experienced. And it has been formalized now into what is an ACE score, and that's adverse childhood experiences. And this is the metric of were you witness to abuse, physical, psychological or sexual? Were you a victim of poverty? Did you witness violence? Was there a substance abuser in your home? Was there somebody incarcerated? Was your family unstable?

And essentially what you see there is for each additional point you get on your bad news, a score, there's an increase in your likelihood of various stress related diseases of having a history of antisocial violence if you were female, a likelihood of a teen pregnancy, a likelihood of substance abuse and dependency. And when you look at the kids who are coming in with ACE scores that are through the roof, PTSD is the most gentle way of describing the mess that they are.

And it's a mess of constructing a brain that has to conclude nothing is ever safe and nothing is ever reliable and don't plan for the future because getting through right now is going to be big enough of a challenge. Combat trauma is a way in which like 15, 20 percent of people come back with PTSD. I think the studies suggest that kids with high ace scores, they're coming in with much higher rates of PTSD.

What does the frontal cortex do? It makes you do the right thing when that's the harder thing to do. Gratification, postponement, long term planning, impulse control, emotional regulation, frontal cortex, absolutely critical to this. And when you've got a lousy frontal cortex at every juncture, you're going to make the wrong, impulsive decision. And what the studies show is approximately 25 percent of the men on death row in this country have a history of concussive head trauma to their frontal cortex..

3. Being positive makes you healthier

And it took me about 20 years to become clear in the fact that absolutely every time I go for friends rather than high dominance, rank it turn up the amount of time you spent socially grooming was far more predictive of the amount of time you spent successfully terrorizing somebody else. If you had an upbeat personality, if you saw the watering holes is half full instead of half empty, your physiology, independent of your rank was going to be so much healthier than someone who saw threat and provocation everywhere.

4. Amygdala/ Us v Them

Well, like most primates, we have a very strong tendency to divide the world into us and them. There's a neurobiology of it showing that a part of your brain called the amygdala, which is about fear and anxiety and aggression, your amygdala is doing us them distinctions and under a tenth of a second before you're even consciously aware of who you're looking at. So like every other social primate out there, we do ask them with a real propensity towards being a whole lot nicer to the US than them.

5. We have no free will

*We need a massive rethinking about both reward and punishment because none of us are anything more than our biological clock.

And if that sounds totally absurd and ridiculous, like how in hell you're supposed to think that way, what we need to do is reflect on 400 years ago, if you were the most thoughtful, reflective, educated, civic minded, bleeding heart liberal and you were asked to explain why every now and then somebody's eyes would roll up and they would suddenly shake and fall to the ground and spasm and have a seizure, you had a scientific explanation for it, which is the person had consorted with Satan and there was a medical intervention at the time, which is he burned at the stake.

And it would have been inconceivable at the time for somebody to accept that someday you would think completely differently about that. And it only took us about 300 years to do that with epilepsy, only took us about fifty years to figure out that lousy, heartless, cold mothers were not the cause of schizophrenia. And it only has taken us about 30, 40 years to figure out that laziness and lack of motivation is not the explanation for dyslexia. We've totally subtracted out the notion that Satan has anything to do with an epileptic seizure and society hasn't fallen apart.