Behave

Most notes here from the [JCCSF] talk.

• A fantasy: breaks into Hitler’s bunker, wrestles him to the ground, captures him, and either brutalizes him, or else tells him that he’s being arrested and will be tried for war crimes.
  • “I’ve had this fantasy since I was a kid, I still have it now and then, and when I do my, heart beats faster, my breathing speeds up. All these plans for the most evil soul in history, the most deserving of punishment. I’ve got a problem with that, though, in that I don’t believe in souls, or evil, or punishment, and I believe the word wicked only belongs in a musical. But at the same time, there’s all sorts of people I’d like to see killed, but I’m against the death penalty very firmly. But there’s all sorts of violent, schlocky movies I like going to. But I’m for very strict gun control, except this one time at a kid’s birthday party we went to this laser quest place and I had soooo much fun, hiding in a corner shooting at people over and over. In other words, I’m your basic confused human when it comes to figuring out the place for aggression in our lives.”
  • “We don’t hate violence, because when it’s the right kind we love it.”
  • “We are the weirdest species on Earth when it comes to being violent. Okay, we could be like any other chimp out there, and like cudgel somebody over the head and be violent that way, but we can also do something no more physically taxing than pulling a trigger, or signing an order, or looking the other way, or damning with faint praise, or being passive-aggressive.”
  • Weird example of violence. In Indonesia in the 1960s there was a right wing coup that brought in a military dictatorship for the next 30 years. That brought a vendetta against leftists, atheists, communists, etc.. 500,000 were killed over the 6 months after this coup, entire villages wiped out by death squads.
  • Decades later, VS Naipaul was travelling through Indonesia and heard a rumor that when the death squads came, they’d bring a traditional gamelan orchestra. Ran into one of these death squad veterans, and interviewed him. The vet said they did that whenever it was possible, and when asked why, he said “to make it more beautiful, of course.”
• But we’re also unprecedented in altruism and compassion, and it’s getting moreso
• [6:30] How do we make sense of ourselves as a species
• The motoric issues are totally boring. The brain directs action. But context determines whether it’s a horrible act (pulling a trigger on an innocent child vs pulling a trigger to draw fire away from innocents)
• [8:00] “Why did that behavior occur?” asks a large hierarchy of questions
• [9:20] One second before: what happened in their brain?
  • For horrible behaviors, usually the amygdala is involved: if you stimulate the amygdala, you bring about unprovoked aggression. If you destroy it, the organism becomes incapable of aggression.
  • But aggression is only a byproduct of the amygdala’s function, which is mainly about fear.
  • “Okay so suppose you see something scary and your eyes detect it and what’s the obvious thing, the information goes into your brain and there’s this sensory waystation called the thalamus and it gets sent to your visual cortex. And then your visual cortex starts this science fair project. The first layer of neurons figures out what the dots are, and then the next layer turns them into lines, and then the next layer turns them into shapes and dimensionality and eventually four months layer you figure out, oh no, it’s a rattlesnake, perhaps we should let the amygdala know about this. You’re long dead under those circumstances. Turns out, at that waystation, that switchpoint, that thalamus, there’s a shortcut, and visual information also veers off and heads straight into the amygdala. In other words, your amygdala gets information about a rattlesnake while your visual cortex is still looking for the instruction manuals. In other words, your amygdala can decide it is seeing something scary before you’re even conscious of what it is.”
  • So the two provide an accuracy verus speed tradeoff. If you’re in an environment where speed matters, and this is very adaptive.
  • The Insular Cortex: In 100ms of eating rotten food, any mammal will activate reflux pathways (gagging, spitting, throwing up, nausea). It detects disgusting gustatory stimuli like poisons.
  • Except: in humans, the insula also mediates imaginary disgusting gustatory stimuli, and moral disgust.
  • This can be a good thing: it gives concrete motivation to act on moral disgust. Except, everyone has different standards for moral disgust.
  • “One person’s morally disgusting way of behaving is somebody else’s perfectly normal loving lifestyle. Moral disgust is a moving target.”
  • And when the insula activates, no surprise, it tells the amygdala.
  • The frontal cortex: the most recently evolved part of our brain, we’ve got more than any other species out there.
  • The frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do. Long-term planning, gratification postponement, impulse control, emotional regulation.
  • “Its job is to muffle the amygdala before it goes and does something stupid and disastrous.”
  • But it’s not one-way: the amygdala can also communicate to the frontal cortex
  • Once you’ve succumbed to temptation, the frontal cortex is active to ensure you do it well (whether that’s making sure you think empathically in order to tell a lie convincingly, or get organized to commit genocide effectively)
  • The mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine system: regions having to do with the neurotransmitter dopamine
  • Dopamine seems to be about pleasure (cocaine works because it works on dopamine pathways)
  • If a rat gets a reward out of nowhere, the system activates, dopamine neurons get excited.
  • Train the rat, if a light comes on and they press a lever ten times, they get a reward. Under those conditions, dopamine rises not when the reward is given out, but when the light comes on.
  • Dopamine is not about reward, it’s about the anticipation of reward.
  • If you block the rise of dopamine, they don’t put in the work. Dopamine creates the motivation for goal-oriented behavior.
  • If you give the reward 50% of the time, dopamine goes way higher (Fiorillo et al, 2003 Science)
  • “That uncertainty of ‘maybe’ pumps behavior out of us like nothing on Earth, and this is something that the neurobiologist who invented Las Vegas understood from day one. Intermittency is an enormous force in this system.”
  • And few things more reliably activate this dopamine system than getting to righteously punish somebody else.
  • The fusiform cortex: mainly seen in primates, does face recognition
  • The anterior cingulate: has to do with empathy and feeling the pain of others
  • The fusiform is less likely to recognize the presence of a face, or remember a face, of people of a different race, and that conditions the amount of empathy you feel
• [23:45] Seconds to minutes before: what environmental stimuli influenced their brain?
  • Put up a pair of eyes on a poster at a bus stop, and people litter less. If they flash up on a computer screen, people cheat less at online games (even if for less than 100ms, so fast that people can’t consciously process it)
  • Give somebody something like cod liver oil, something disgusting, and in the minutes afterward, they’re more condemning of a moral transgression, and they advocate a more severe punishment.
  • If a person sits in a hard wooden chair or a cushy sofa, and read job applications. The ones in the hard chair will more likely assess applicants as being a hard-ass.
  • Put somebody in a room filling out a questionnaire about social, political, economic views. If the room has smelly garbage in it, they become more socially conservative (but unchanged in terms of economics)
  • Over the course of the year, the 5000 parole decisions in Israel (whether to keep someone in jail or free them), and the single best predictor of whether a judge would grant parole or not was how many hour since the judge had eaten a meal (60% chance just after a meal, near 0% if it’s been a long time).
    • We understand the biology of this: blood-sugar have to do with how well your frontal cortex works. And your frontal cortex is needed to do the right thing and think about a person’s mitigating circumstances
  • If you flash pictures of faces super fast (100ms) to people getting brain scanned.
    • If you flash faces of other-race people, you see amygdala activation
    • This makes it seem like the brain is hard-wired to be racist
    • If someone’s a sports fan and you flash the face of someone, wearing a rival team’s hat, you also get amygdala activation (irrespective of race)
    • So, it’s not about racism, it’s about us versus them and tribalism
  • We are primed toward/away from some behaviors by sensory information that is entirely subliminal.
• [29:50] Hours to days before: what hormones sensitized them to those stimuli?
  • Testosterone
    • “Why is it that testosterone is at the centerpiece of the fact that in every culture on earth and in virtually every species out there, males are such a pain in the rear when it comes to violence. Testosterone causes aggression. Turns out, that’s not remotely what testosterone does.”
    • Take 5 male rhesus monkeys that form a dominance hierarchy. Take the middle member, shoot him up with a bunch of testosterone. Is he now going to be in more fights? Yes. But those fights are not uniformly distributed across the hierarchy, he just picks on his lesser monkeys way way more.
    • “Testosterone doesn’t invent new patterns of aggression, testosterone amplifies the pre-existing social learning you have about aggression. Testosterone lowers the threshold for external stimuli to trigger it.”
    • The Challenge Hypothesis by John Wingfield at UC Davis. What testosterone does is, whenever you’re being challenged, testosterone makes you do whatever behavior you need to do to hold on to your status.
    • In humans, the context can be adjusted so that you gain status by being generous, and so adding testosterone can boost altruism.
    • “In other words, if you took a thousand Buddhist monks and shot them up with testosterone, they would run amok doing random acts of kindness.”
  • Oxytocin
    • promotes mother/infant bonding; in monogamous species promotes the formation of pair-bonds; makes us more trusting; makes us more expressive
    • Study from the Netherlands, gave subjects the trolley problem (do you redirect a runaway trolley from a track of 5 people to a track of 1 person?). 3 different test conditions, where the 1 person has a name that is very Dutch, very German-sounding, or very Islamic-sounding. If you give someone oxytocin, they are much less likely to sacrifice a Dutch person, but much more likely to sacrifice a German or Muslim person.
    • Oxytocin makes us more pro-social to in-group, and makes us crappier and more pre-emptively xenophobic to out-group
• [36:20] Weeks to months before: how did experience reshape how their brain responded to those forces?
  • Neuroplasticity in action
    • the amygdala is enlarged by stress, PTSD
    • The hippocampus is enlarged by extensive spatial learning (in cab drivers)
    • The hippocampus is atrophied by stress, depression, and PTSD
    • Learning an instrument expands the percentage of auditory cortex responding to its sound
    • Rewiring occurs in American Sign Language signers from the eyes to the auditory cortex
    • Rewiring occurs in Braille readers from fingertips to the visual cortex
    • Juggling expands the size of the motor cortex coding for hands
  • Neuroplasticity has limits: no amount of practicing makes you recover from certain injuries, or become Yo-Yo Ma
  • “Neuroplasticity is a value-free concept, and sometimes your brain could be neurally plastic and as a result you get much better at being a saint, and some of the time you get much better at being an ethnic cleanser.”
• [38:00] Back to adolescence: how did that immature frontal cortex shape the adult they became?
  • By the time you’re about 12 years old your dopamine system is going full blast
  • Your frontal cortex doesn’t fully mature until you’re about 25 years old
  • The combination of these is that this is why teenagers are sensation-seekers and novelty-seeking and violent and join cults and and and.
  • “This is why teenagers are teenagers, because this dopamine system is a gyroscope without a frontal cortex putting its hand on now and then to keep things balanced.”
  • What that explains about adults is: your teenage experiences generate the frontal cortex you’ll have as an adult.
  • “If the frontal cortex is the last part of your brain to mature, by definition it’s the part of your brain least influenced by genes, and most shaped by environment and experience. And almost certainly, it had to evolve that way.”
  • “You put your visual cortex together in about 3 years, 25 years for your frontal cortex. Is it fancier neurons or is that a tougher construction project? No, it’s exactly the same. Why the 25 year delay? We’ve been selected for that, because that’s how our frontal cortex learns all the really subtle social rules. Don’t kill, but it’s good to kill them. You don’t lie, but here’s a circumstance where you lie. Hypocrisy, rationalization, why I’m an exception. Those don’t come by the time you’re 3 years old, that takes a quarter century to even begin to wire that up properly. That’s why frontal maturation is so delayed.”
• [40:35] Back to childhood and fetal life: how did early life experiences cause lifelong changes in brain function and gene expression?
  • Epigenetics: A wildly trendy new field about the way that experience causes some genes to activate or not
  • Shown in the early ’60s. If a rat had a highly-attentive mother (licking the pups, grooming them, pick them up and carry them around a lot), it had a lot less stress hormones in its bloodstream as an adult. And it was found that this was caused by differences in the brain. And such a rat is more likely to also be a highly-attentive mother.
  • This is now called a non-genetic, non-genomic transmission of traits
  • If a rat fetus is exposed to an excess of stress hormones, it will have a larger amygdala as an adult and be hyper-reactive to stress, which makes it more likely that its children end up in the same situation
  • Epigenetic changes in gene regulation can be life-long
  • Where epigenetics is most dynamic is in fetal life
• [44:00] Back to the fertilized egg: what genes coded for those hormones, neurotransmitters, etc.?
  • The “deterministic power of genes” is something that gets people very excited
  • “Your genes have no idea what they’re doing. Your genes no more decide what your cells, what your organs, what your body does. No more decides than the recipe on a cake box decides when you make the cake. It’s just the instructions. What actually is regulating genes: the environment. The environment is what determines when your genes are turned on and off.”
  • The environment can be boring, e.g. the cellular environment. Some cell is running low on energy, a gene is turned on, and your body makes more glucose transporters.
  • The environment can be the whole body: if you’re exposed to more testosterone, genes turn on in muscle cells to create protein scaffolding. That makes the cell grow bigger, and you now have more muscle mass.
  • The environment can be the world out there. If you have given birth and smell your child, your pituitary cell turns on genes to release more oxytocin.
  • [46:30] But the same genes function in different ways in different environments. And here’s a chart that shows some genes that are associated with some outcome, but only if some extra environmental condition is present
  • Don’t ask what a gene does, ask what it does in a particular environment. Which would be great, except humans life in a greater variety of environments than any other species.
• [48:25] Decades to millennia before: how did culture shape the social environment in which they live, and how did ecological factors shape their culture?
  • Certain types of cultures are correlated with certain ecosystems
    • Desert dwellers are more likely to: be monotheistic, believe in an afterlife, have top-down hierarchy, have class systems based on age or warrior status
    • Rainforest dwellers are more likely to: be polytheistic, not believe in afterlife, be egalitarian, without class systems
  • Different community sizes produce different religions
    • Hunter-gatherers have gods who are indifferent to human
    • When people live in higher density permanent settlements start interacting anonymously more often (interacting with strangers), then they start inventing moralizing gods. Gods that watch over people and judge their behavior and reward them.
  • Pastoralism and cultures of honor
    • There are traditionally 3 ways of making a living: hunter-gatherer; agriculturalist/horticulturalist; or pastoralist
    • Pastoralists have a vulnerability: people can show up and steal your cattle
    • By contrast, people who pick what’s there, or who cultivate large tracts of land, can’t really have it all taken away from them overnight or in an instant.
    • Every pastoralist culture on earth comes up with a culture of honor.
    • This involves being hospitable to strangers travelling through, severe retribution for norm violations, clan-based feuds and vendettas. There will be warrior classes and honor killings.
  • Within seconds of birth, culture shapes everything from what we view as the purpose of life, whether we are intrinsically beautiful or sinful, what happens after we die….to where our eyes track over the course of milliseconds
  • “For example, suppose one of the biggest distinctions out there, culturally, between what are called individualistic cultures–the US is the poster child of it–or collectivist cultures–typically East Asian–and what you see is, if you were born into one of those cultures, within a minute of life on the average, mothers in individualistic cultures are talking to their babies more loudly than those in collectivist cultures. They’re [individualist cultures] are holding them for less time. They’re [collectivist] waiting less time to pick up a baby when they’re crying. This [individualistic] baby will be sleeping alone on average earlier, and from the first minutes of your life, culture is leaving an imprint on who you are. And thus, what we see is, brains and genes and cultures co-evolve.”
• [52:30] Millions of years back: how did the behavior evolve?
  • Modern evolutionary biology has 3 building blocks:
    • Individual Selection
      • the selfish gene concept: animals behave in order to leave as many copies of their genes in the next generation as possible
      • “What we see here is a great example of this in humans: currently, 16 million people on this planet are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the most reproductively successful human on Earth.”
    • Kin Selection: Helping your relatives reproduce a lot
      • “Which winds up being a function of how related you are, producing this famous quip: I’d gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins”
      • Humans have developed material culture and inheritance, a totally nuts extension of kin selection
    • Reciprocal Altruism: cooperating with individuals, even if they aren’t related to you, as long as these are stable, symmetrical, reciprocal relationships
  • These seem useful, but there are still behaviors that are completely contrary to these evolutionary pressures:
    • religion-based abstinence is totally at odds with individual selection
    • our concept of who we’d help is based on notions of family (blended by marriage, adoption, etc) are informed by, but not solely based upon, genetic kinship
    • helpful behaviors and generosity continue even in cases where reciprocity is impossible (holding the door for someone at a highly anonymous setting like an airport)
• [56:20] So where are we now? It’s complicated.
• “Let’s try to make this a little more useful. It’s complicated, so be damn sure you understand how things really work before you decide that you do and go and judge somebody, especially if you’re judging them harshly.”
• “For me, the single most important thing about all of these biology factoids I just downloaded on you is every single one of them can change. Every single one of them can change over time, change with experience, and potentially, with enormous consequences.”
• Ecosystems change: here’s a rock carving of a hippo taken in the middle of the Sahara, where 2000 years ago it was lush grassland
• Cultures change: in the 18th century, the scariest people in all of Europe were the Swedes. They spend centuries rampaging through Europe. Now they haven’t had a war in more than a century.
• And people change:
  • John Newton, British theologian, who played a central role in the abolitionist movement in the early 1800s in his old age.
    • He spent his younger years working as captain of a slave ship, and in his middle years back on land he invested in the slave trade.
    • 34 years after he retired from investing in slavery, he wrote his first pamphlet against slavery.
    • Something changed in him, and that change he celebrated in the hymn he wrote that he is most famous for: Amazing Grace.
  • Zenji Abe, lead pilot on the bomber squadron that attacked Pearl Harbor
    • As an old man, in 1991, he came to a survivors' ceremony in Honolulu, came to elderly men who’d survived his attack and apologized.
  • World War I, the Christmas Truce of 1914
    • Various powers-that-be (including the pope) declared there’d be a 3 hour ceasefire on Christmas day afternoon so men could retrieve their dead from no-man’s land.
    • They did so, and after a while, started helping their opponent carry their dead, and help them dig holes, and prayed together at burial ceremonies.
    • Eventually opponents had Christmas dinner together, exchanged gifts, played soccer, exchanged addresses so they could visit after the war, and made agreements to shoot over one anothers' heads
    • It took the officers showing up and threatening the soldiers with bullets to get them to again start attacking the soldiers of the other side
  • The Me Lai Massacre
    • To Americans, one of the most traumatic events of the Vietnam War
    • In 1968, an American brigade went into a village and killed 350-500 civilians (mutilating bodies, gang-rapes before killing, killing the livestock, burning the fields)
    • The US government hid it for a year, before giving slaps on the wrist to those involved, leading Americans to realize this must have happened lots of times.
    • Man who stopped the Me Lai Massacre was a helicopter pilot, figured he’d see American troops defending villagers from the Viet Cong, and instead saw Americans conducting horrific acts.
    • Landed his helicopter between the last group of surviving villagers and the American troops, pointed the machine gun at the troops, and said he’d fire if they didn’t stop.
  • “What’s most remarkable about each one of these men, each one of these transformations is, they’ve got the same neurotransmitters we do, and the same sort of neural wiring, and the same endocrine glands, and the same gene regulation. There’s nothing different about them from us, they put their pants on one leg at a time.”
  • “What we’re left with here at the end is brining out that inevitable George Santayana cliche, those who don’t study history are destined to repeat it. What we have here is an inversion of this, those who don’t study the history of extraordinary human change, and don’t study the science of what makes those more likely to occur, are destined not to be able to repeat moments of incandescent change of that sort.”

Q&A

• [1:04:26] Question: When babies are born drug and alcohol exposed, what part of the brain is affected, and what can be done to overcome those effects
  • Every single part of the brain
  • Most affected:
    • the frontal cortex, where prenatal substance abuse exposure ends up with prematurely aged chromosomes, setting you up for this part to fail earlier in adulthood
    • the dopamine system: dopamine expression is downregulated, meaning for a fixed amount of dopamine release, you need more stimulus than the average person. this makes you more prone to substance abuse yourself
  • As with all of epigenetics, there are interventions, but the longer you wait the more effort it takes to overcome
• [1:06:30] Question: Given how much of culture correlates to economic type (hunter-gatherer, agriculturalist, pastoralist), what do we think are the behavioral correlates of current economic systems?
  • Not gonna answer that one, but instead give a sidenote
  • The American South was colonized predominantly by immigrants from former pastoralist economies, who brought with them a culture of honor
  • You see highest murder rates in the country in the South, not in the cities, not by non-whites, not about material gains–people taking affront at slights against their honor
  • We also see lower prosecution rates, lower conviction rates, and lighter sentences, for people suspected of or convicted of, crimes where they were retaliating for some violation of their honor
• [1:10:00] Question: Has your work made you more optimistic or pessimistic about humankind
  • “Well, the answer is yes.”
  • “Against my better nature, I’m forced to be optimistic.”
• [1:11:15] Question: How do you reconcile that sometimes the ability to change, though it exists, is not entirely under our control
  • This sounds like a question about the degree to which free will exists.
  • At the end of all this investigation, biology influences a lot more of decision-making, action, post-hoc rationalizations, and thought, than we ever considered before. And likely it explains even more
  • “If I’m being, you know, congenial, and a good house guest or whatever, I will say, if there’s some free will it’s in all sorts of really boring places and it’s getting cramped and tighter and tighter.”
  • “Personally I don’t think there’s a shred of free will out there. I think it is completey incompatible with modern science. To my mind, free will is what we call the biology that has not yet been discovered. Soooo…that’s cool, and that’s interesting, and so okay no free will and all of that. And at the same time that I am so comfortably assured that there’s no free will whatsoever, I haven’t the remotest idea how we’re all supposed to live in a world in which people didn’t think there was such a thing as free will.”
  • “So within this framework of not believing in free will, how does anything change? The fact that the knowledge, for example, that change can occur, leaves a biological trace in your brain.”
  • “Knowledge leaves a biological trace just as every other bit of experience does, and what the right type of knowledge does is bias us in directions of feeling a sense of efficacy, and actually trying to do something in circumstances where we would have thought it inconceivable otherwise.”
• [1:17:00] Question: I’m studying how stress impacts birth outcomes (both self-reported, and based on cortisol). Is there anything else I should look at?
  • Quick primer on stress, cortisol is one of the most central hormones to the stress response. If you can only measure one thing and you can’t take tons of measurements super fast, this is the one to take.
  • Epinephrine/adrenaline tell you what the last 2.5 seconds of stress have been like
  • Cortisol levels (at rest, during and after a stressor, and how long it takes to get back to baseline) are the best measures about your recent weeks and months
  • And cortisol can be measured via saliva (rather than blood or urine)