The Forum with Robert Sapolsky, October 7th, 2018

In conversation with Malcolm Young, Sapolsky answers the question: why we do the things we do…for good and for ill and builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace.

[donaldwhittaker]

His Stanford lectures are outstanding. I am on #19 Of 25. Really good stuff.

[efortune]

Notes
10:45 “Everything we know about psychosocial stress in humans, if you’ve got a choice about decreasing your stress in your life by getting more of a sense of control, or more of a sense of outlets, or more of a sense of predictability, or more social support, social support is the way to do it every single time in terms of health.”

11:45 biology of behavior, adolescence, culture, ancestors, what happened to you when you were a third trimester fetus, whether ancestors were pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, the way your mother sang to you when you were a kid, what you had for breakfast

14:00 Priming people, sensory environment. Males math, Asians better than nonasians experiments.

15:30 experiment, fill out form on social views, bad smelling garbage becomes more socially conservative, not economic or geopolitical

16:30 classic study, parole, judge’s last meal, subterranean biology

18:30 Brett Kavanaugh, trauma, wrote piece for CNN

23:20 “Basically I think every single aspect of the criminal justice system is sheer, raving, medieval jibberish.”

***26:00 frontal cortex, 25% imprisoned men

***30:00 Ineqaulity, Nancy Adler researcher, Richard Wilkinson, Ichiro Kuwachi
Malcolm Young: “One of the things you write about, a few times, inequality, just how destructive and damaging inequality is. It’s a major public health crisis for us.”

Robert Sapolsky: “It certainly is. It’s a massive one. Scientific American has an issue coming out, next issue on inequality in the United States and I have an article in there in the health effects of it. When you look at the upper 10 percentile of income in this country and the bottom 10 percentile, life expectancy difference is more than 20 years. This is the scale of difference between Bethesda, Maryland and Angola. When you look at these issues there it’s just an enormous, enormous difference. Virtually every disease out there from cardiovascular, to psychiatric, to gastrointestinal, to inflammatory etc. show a socioeconomic gradient.

The further you are down the SES (Socioeconomic Status) ladder, the worse your health. The more prevalence of disease, the worse the impact it has. And what’s been one of the most striking things, like incredibly smart people have been studying this for 50 years, why you see an SES gradient in every westernized country that’s been examined. So obvious answer poor people have less access to health care. That doesn’t explain it in the slightest because you see the gradient in countries with socialized medicine, universal health care, and you see the gradient for diseases where it doesn’t matter how many doctors checkups you get it doesn’t affect the incidence of juvenile diabetes and still you get the gradient.

Ah ok, it’s because poor people have higher rates of smoking, higher rates of drinking to excess, higher rates of imprudently living next to toxic waste dumps, you control for those, that explains only about a third of the variability.

Ah, poor people can’t afford to have the protective factors. You don’t get the vacations, you don’t get the health clubs, you don’t get, that explains a tiny percentage of the variability.

What’s it’s about is the psychological stress of being poor. And the best evidence for that is it’s not so much being poor, it’s feeling poor. This was work pioneered by Nancy Adler here at UCSF looking at people’s objective socioeconomic status vs subjective. How do you feel you’re doing compared to other people? And it turns out your subjective SES is a better predictor of your health than your objective. It’s not being poor, it’s feeling poor. And what is it that is the surest way of making the poor feel poor? Rubbing their noses in it.

Work by a guy named Richard Wilkinson in the UK showing income inequality, independent of absolute levels of income, is the thing that drives the socioeconomic gradient. It’s not being poor. It’s being poor surrounded by the haves and being reminded of it over and over.

So the final piece of that is work done by a guy at Harvard Public Health named Ichiro Kuwachi who’s shown what happens when you have high degrees of income inequality in a community, social capital goes down. People stop trusting each other. People stop having a sense of efficacy. ‘Social capital’, this is this term that sociologist Robert Putnam came up with, with this sort of famous book of his encompassing this notion of bowling alone. The number of people in the United States who bowl has been climbing for years. The number of people who are in bowling leagues has been plummeting, social connectedness, that is the metaphor for it. And you want to study vast amounts of social capital, you ask two questions of people in a community: ‘On the average can you trust people or not?’ And ‘How many organizations do you belong to?’ And it turns out when income inequality goes way up what happens is people stop trusting each other. Their trust is built around symmetrical reciprocating relationships, and by definition, what a steep hierarchy does is make it impossible to have easy symmetrical relationships because there’s less symmetry.

The second question you ask people ‘How many organizations do you belong to?’, because when inequality becomes rampant tenant unions unions don’t work very well. People don’t bother joining unions of any sort. People don’t join organizations because you have no sense of collective efficacy. Those are the mediators.

So it’s not so much being poor, it’s feeling poor. Which consists of being reminded of it by inequality because you then wind up in communities that are less healthy, less safe, less kind, less generous, and that winds up being the mediator for that. And that one’s a catastrophe.

38:45 Singularity, Ray Kurzweil

41:45 Q&A

42:30 Trump and his followers

***43:12 90% of murderers ACE
“It takes a lot of work to remember what makes people who they are. And people don’t become who they are, the worst guys and the most damaging ones outside of the context of invariably a lot of pain, a lot of fear, and a lot of deprivation, and a lot of adversity, and all of that and if you can sort of find a way to like figure out that it’s very meaningful that 90% of people who are murderers in this country have a whole conglomeration of what are termed adverse childhood experiences (ACE) that set you up for a brain that has a whole lot of trouble with empathy, and impulse control, and long term planning and things of that sort.”
~Robert Sapolsky

44:25 Jonathan Haidt research on moral decision making, making decision based on emotions than rationalizing our emotional experience after the fact.

Give people a bunch of moral scenarios, stick them in brain scanner
Emotional parts of brain activating before frontal cortex does.
You can’t reason a person out of a position they were reasoned into.


2016 voting emotional

48:45 biology of awkwardness, social anxiety

51:00 ish mommy daddy brain

53:00 neural plasticity of trauma

55:30 Life hacks, perspective taking of others, experiment on reading popular lit

57:15 education

[Onoma]

Somebody should do a " What's in your home library " show with academics like Robert. I'd be fascinated to see what he reads at home

[michaelreich]

This is just one of the best lectures I've listened to in such a long time. Not only did I get an insight (as I always do from Dr. Sapolsky) into how we can apply biological methods to *pressing* social issues, but seeing a religious man so interested and appreciative of his work, was a sort of "blessing!"

[mariainesgarcia]

Just beautiful- wish my priests had been as open as this guy. Sapolsky is my nes youtube obsession. This is the San Francisco I know and miss- this is the way the world heals.

[AlayaMoody]

Thank you for the lecture Sir. God bless you . Thank you for the lecture Sir. God bless you .

[billyranger]

Listening to this man. Takes hate away from me. Thank you

[jamesmurray]

Imo he is a great teacher. Great teachers, in my experience, are seemingly teaching by telling a story. These teachers, in my life, I didn't have to take notes or study for the exams. I got As on both. The way they frame it or make it seem as though the are telling a story just stuck in my memory. This man is a great teacher!

[betford]

I've watched a lot of his lectures. I love this man

[barryfield]

Thanks for this. My favourite part of the brain is the frontal cortex at 26:00. I found his Stanford teachings informative.

[inkoftheworld]

Thanks for posting this amazing talk! I'm so glad some hot button topics were addressed.

My favourite part was when he was talking about how people came to their ideas, and that emotion happened first then reason. It seems so obvious now that he's said it.
"You can't reason somebody out of a stance they weren't reasoned into in the first place. If you can't address the emotional pains and the emotional tumult and the emotionality that brought people to where they are and some of our ugliest moments, rationality isn't going to get them into a different spot than that"

[Aymiikeeganmelb]

I liked this video as soon as I seen Dr Robert Sapolsky was speaking ....

[mr.schwinn]

I love this guy he's the type of guy you could be waiting online for an hour and a half and you could write a book with him/keep you entertained or well informedwhile still on the waiting long line 🧬🧠🧠🥇👋👋🌎🌌

[teeIck]

showing an accurate and deep understanding; great perceptive. 💡

Muito obrigado for all the insightful information. 🤝

[nattyswede]

Love me some Sapolsky, man! This guy is so cool in his own way. What a mind!

[billyranger]

He is so natural. So brilliant so necessary

[JayBobJayBob]

At 4:40 I find it interesting that many people end up embodying that which they put their mind to a lot such as in his studies mentioned here. Or did he already embody that appearance and behavior and that is what attracted him to these studies? It was nice to hear him admit it at 7:55.

[jimhammond]

So what I'm hearing here, just further supports my theory: that: 'Perspective, is King'. The body follows what we believe. Our brain and our body responses to our beliefs.

[justing]

I am going to grow a beard like this guy. Maybe people will think that i am wise.

[christymomma]

Would love to hear Dr S opinion about the pandemic and stress