Unstressable with Robert Sapolsky - Revealing Humanity's Inner Workings

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back, everyone. My guest today is one of those that I call a sensei in my heart, even though I have never met them in person. Dr. Robert Sapolsky is definitely one of my big teachers. Robert is a neuroscientist. He's a primatologist with countless numbers of books. I actually don't even know if I read all of them, but I can always tell you that the ones I read, I absolutely loved. Of course, Behave, Determined, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, fabulous piece of work. A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone. I loved that idea. So many of them. Truly, truly enlightening. Robert, at the bottom of my heart, is the person that basically tells us how biology makes you the human that you are.

1:29So that link between biology and our behavior, I don't think has ever been summarized as well as it has been by my guest today, Dr. Robert Sapolsky. This is part of our mini series on stress in preparation for Unstressable to be released in the U.S. 30th of April and international English in the U.K. on the 9th of May. Unstressable is a big effort on my side to take a million people out of stress every year as part of the One Billion Happy Mission. So please do give it a chance. Go do your pre-orders if you want. If you do pre-order, keep your pre-order receipt. Go to unstressable.com and come to our opening seminar on 28th of April.

2:12With no further ado, I have been looking for this forever, Robert. as I told you before we started, the best thing about having a podcast is those moments where you meet your heroes. So thank you for being here. Well, thank you for having me on. This is a very nice way to start off the morning. So much appreciated. It is definitely a very good way for me to start next week. So that's how important this is for me. So Robert, I'd like to start with what I was wishing to include you in this series was to start with the biology of stress and how stress actually works within humans from a biological point of view.

2:53Stress seems to be this very understood thing for people who are feeling stressed. It seems so unpredictable, but if we truly understand the biology, it's a lot more predictable than we think it is. So maybe start us there and then we flow to the more interesting sides of it. Well, I guess for me, the most critical thing in terms of making sense of humans and stress and stress-related disease is, of course, just how bizarre of a species we are evolutionarily. revolutionarily. Something I'm always struck by is, you know, you go back a hundred million years and there was some sunny afternoon somewhere where some tiny dinosaur was being chased by a predatory one and the little one was running for its life and the big one was running for its meal and, you know, highly stressed moment.

3:47And what astonishes me is the certainty with which we know that both of those dinosaurs were secreting the exact same stress hormone that we're still doing these days or something very close structurally to it, something like cortisol or hydrocortisone. The fact that the stress response is this ancient piece of wiring in us, it's like the basic building blocks the same in us, vertebrates, mammals, reptiles, fish, amphibians, birds, so on. Everybody out there has roughly the same one and has been around forever. And it's always solving the same problem, which is some emergency where you are running for your life and everything comes down to what happens in the next two minutes.

4:38And what did we evolve? We evolved the capacity as smart primates to secrete it in response to psychological stress and chronic psychological stress and thinking about some horror going on on the other side of the planet and we're using it in a way it didn't evolve for and that's where we get into trouble. And we call that smart. I mean it's quite interesting when you really think about it because every other species on this planet would normally stress as an escape mechanism, a survival mechanism, right, to a clear and present danger. We tend to create threats that are not even sensed by the amygdala, if I understand that correctly.

5:23They're really generated in the prefrontal cortex and then affecting our stress response, which is not smart at all when you really think about it. no and would make no sense at all to some other species i mean if you sit down a hippo and try to describe your fears about the planet warming or whatever and that's causing you to secrete this particular stress hormone it would make no sense at all or the fact that you're doing it when you're stuck in traffic or when you're thinking about mortality or when you're any such psychologically it is just unprecedented in the history of like animals running around on this planet to be smart enough to be able to make yourself sick just by thinking or feeling or remembering.

6:13So I quoted you in the book, actually my co-author Alice quoted you in the book from Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and the idea that animals will just suspend the stress response as soon as the threat is gone, right they'll shake their bodies and they're done right we keep it going we even increase it a little we add a bit of drama and a bit of you know our previous trauma and as you beautifully stated in so much of your work we may even go back genetically to things that happened tens of thousands of years ago and include that in our genetic makeup and and basically just create a massive problem out of nothing that exists in the current moment at all yeah exactly in a way that is just bizarre and unprecedented again my book i wrote about stress and why zebras don't get ulcers metaphor but zebras is just your prototypical beast running around in the grasslands and such and it's sitting there eating grass minding its own business a lion suddenly leaps out the zebra runs for its life like crazy, has a mass, massive stress response and good luck for the zebra, escapes and the lion gives up and disappears.

7:32And you go look at the zebra two minutes later. And clearly the only thing in its brain at that point is what to make of this blade of grass versus that blade of grass. It's gone. It's gone. The capacity for just anticipatory stress and especially stress, anticipatory stress responses for things that never really happen. That's where our problems come from. I mean, it seems simple. Like when you think about it logically, yeah, if it hasn't happened, I don't need to stress about it yet, but we're so bad at that. So teach us, how do we change this? Well, we're very, very smart. And showing where we could get into trouble is our smartness is not just purely cognitive, it has big emotional contents to it.

8:28And we're the only species out there that could read a book. And when the protagonist dies at the end, you're devastated. You're emotionally overwrought. You could sit there and you could watch a frightening movie and you could have a massive stress response despite the fact that you're sitting there. And wait, those really are not, they don't exist. Those are fictional characters. Those are actors playing them. They're computer generated images. You're getting upset about pixels. It's wild that we're capable of doing that. and it's wild that we can thus have a stress response as abstract as reading about something that's happening to refugees on the other side of the planet and it's wild that as a species we can be smart enough that we send a drone off and we kill somebody whose face we have never seen We have this capacity to abstract our emotions over space and time like nothing else out there for better or worse.

9:41How do we stop that? Well, some of the time, I think, and again, you know, we're just another primate in some ways. We've got the same blueprint going on in our heads for how we feel empathy. but if you're a baboon out in the savannah in East Africa, the empathy you feel is maybe for a member of your group who's having a hard day. It depends on who they are and whether you're friends with them and what's in it for you and that sort of thing. And it's a very good thing that we instead can feel empathy for somebody on the other side of the planet or somebody whose life experiences are completely different from her and we're able to see the commonality and we're able to walk a mile in their shoes and that some of the time that enormous capacity to feel somebody else's pain thank god we're smart enough as a species to do that that could be a very good thing when it's something we have no control over when it's something that's purely in our heads when it's something that's driven by emotional needs on our part that are purely selfish or heartless or some such thing, you know, then you're having emotional responses that are nothing but humans at their worst.

11:01What can we do, you know, in terms of stress management, tell the difference between what you can control and what you can't. Tell the difference between information about the world around you that is actually useful rather than merely stress-inducing. Tell the difference between real sources of social support and people who turn out to be just acquaintances or worse than that, you know, and recognize that all of those are difficult, slow processes to get good at. Some people will say, but it's what makes us human to, a lot of people will say, how can I be calm when there is so much injustice in the world, when there is a child that fell in a well all the way in Morocco, but it's still a child anyway, right?

11:57I need to be informed of that stuff, Mo. I need to be aware of it. I need to find my humanity and my heart in relating to it. Well, it's wonderful if that's the only way you could do that. It's counterproductive if it leaves you in an ulcerated mess of anxiety, depression, things of that sort, because those tend to be disorders of incapacitation. It's not productive if the empathy you feel for somebody else is so painful that all you can think about is how to reduce your own pain in that circumstance, which empathy is not a virtue in and of itself. Empathy is a wonderful thing only insofar as it moves you to act compassionately.

12:47And if instead it causes you to flee, this is not a very good thing. I love these studies that have shown the following. Okay, so you're looking at somebody in trouble, somebody in pain, somebody whatever, and you were feeling empathy for them. And the question becomes, is this a predictor of you're going to actually be able to reach out and help them? Or is it going to become too painful for you and you have to pretend it's somebody else's job and oh, I couldn't make a difference anyway. And there's two ways of predicting it on two very different levels of getting at how our brains work that ultimately wind to being the exact same thing.

13:29On the psychological level, do you sit there and say, oh my God, what if that were happening to me? That would be so awful. That's a predictor that's going to get so painful for you that you're going to decide I need to look away. On the other hand, if you're sitting there saying, oh my God, imagine how painful it is for that person experiencing it. That's a predictor of having enough detachment that you could actually act compassionately. Another way of looking. Yes. And then physiologically, it's the exact same thing. You sit there and you look at this other person in pain. And if you have a massive increase in your heart rate and your blood pressure, that's a predictor that it's all going to be much too much and you've got too much of a stress response and the pain you need to deal with at that point is the pain you were feeling.

14:24If you could sit there and physiologically be a little bit detached, that's the predictor that you're going to be able to work on their pain rather than your own. This ability to get a little bit of distance. It's, you know, every time you have a pediatrician that could give a child a vaccine and the child is screaming in pain over it and all of that, and the pediatrician nonetheless has developed the skills of detachment to know I'm actually saving this child's life by doing this, you're seeing that principle in action. This is so eye-opening to be honest, because in In the last few, the last many months, actually, probably over two years now, because of the nature of my work all over the world, you know, you see that the current events in the world are leading to massive, massive engagements on social media and anger and comments and, you know, people believing that if you're not commenting on one side, then you're on the other side and so on and so forth.

15:29which interestingly, I tended to always tell people that, which I think aligns with your first comment, that a comment is only valuable if it makes a difference and accordingly, empathy should lead you to engage in ways that make a difference. But when you're saying it now, I've actually noticed that a lot of the shouting is not about the victims. A lot of the shouting is about the screamer. Exactly. So it's basically, I am angry that this is happening in the world. It is an issue for me. It's not that I have an empathy for the victim. I'm directing my anger at the world because it serves me to vent that anger, right?

16:11What you're saying is the predictor is I am actively engaged to alleviate the suffering of the victim. That's the kind of empathy that we're looking for. Yeah. And what that often requires is for us to do something that's very difficult in terms of feeling empathy. What are the easiest circumstances for somebody to feel empathy and act compassionately? if it's for somebody who is nearby, psychologically or literally, somebody who seems like a me, seems like an us, somebody who you can identify with, and somebody whose troubles is something you could imagine, something that is comprehensible to you.

16:58And thus, we face our toughest challenges, which is to feel empathy for somebody who is very distant in some form or other psychologically and way different than us and people who count as someone like me and who has a problem that is way different from anything you've ever had to deal with. And what we have here is a prescription for why it is so much easier to feel the pains of in-group members for people who count as an us rather than a them. And that's where the biggest challenge is because the world is full of people where we have to work very hard to try to imagine the world from their perspective.

17:42I've waited to meet you for a long time. So let me tell you why I find your work so intriguing. Because I often respond the first time I hear some of your extreme comments with a no in my mind. I go like, no, no, that doesn't make sense. like I don't like this, right? Or I don't want to align with this. And then you listen to it again. And then you go like, but there is so much almost brutal truth in it. You know, it's like, I feel that in your work, you're like, I don't care how it's gonna make you feel. It's just what the science says really, right? And so, you know, you might as well take it from me, get angry if you want, but it is what it is, right?

18:22And remember your TED Talks around five, six years ago? The first one, it was so intriguing. I don't recall it exactly now because it was a long time ago, but it was, I think it was watched 20 million times or so. And you start to address violence and the idea that somehow for some of us, some violence is good and some violence is horrible. Okay. And it's the same person. And it's almost like what you see in the movies When the bad guy is killed, you're happy. When the good guy is killed, you're upset, right? Or, you know, you sort of almost at the end of the movie, you want the bad guy to suffer before he dies, right?

19:05And that's so inhuman in an interesting way, but it speaks to the tricks that our biology play on us. Would you care to mention that a little bit? Well, it's part of our enormous, vast complexity in that humans, there's this paradoxical thing about us. Without question, we're the most miserably violent species on this planet. And it's horrifying. And without question, we are the most compassionate, empathic, cooperative, altruistic species on this planet. And often, it's the same person who's capable of those extremes. Often, it's the same behavior at the same time, and it's in the eye of the beholder, we have this enormous human capacity to do good in some settings and bad in others.

19:58And what is challenging for me is the similarities underneath when we're looking at us at our best and at our worst. We have moments where we can act with strong emotions to stop someone from doing what they're doing. And in one setting, That's an absolutely appalling act. And in another setting, it's a greatly humanitarian one. And what that tells us is, for example, we don't hate violence. We hate the wrong kind of violence. When it's the right kind, we love it. We leap up. We're excited. We pay money to see it in a movie. We give out medals for the person who has done it and saved innocent people or whatever.

20:44And in the same way, we approve of love. We don't do it in all cases because when it's the wrong kind, we are appalled. When it is someone who loves the wrong person, who brings them tremendous pain, when it is someone who loves inflicting pain, we don't uniformly hate hatred and we don't uniformly love love because they're context dependent. Damn, we've got complicated brains going on. And you go that layer deeper and suddenly all of the romantics realize that it's not one size fits all. And all of the, you know, of the violent ones realize it's not the one size fits all. But I have to say the first time I heard you say this, it really took me a very long time because I hate violence a lot more than I like it.

21:35I mean, when you're speaking now, you always hit that thing that I cannot disagree with, right? So, you know, if someone saves an innocent life by using violence, well, I'm going to have to approve of that, actually celebrate that, right? But I tend to say, if we ever revert to violence, it has to be the very, very lost resource, right? However, having said that, I think the reality of the matter is that the species in general, I think since the gladiator years has been quite celebratory of violence in so many ways, which again gets me back to the biology, right? Like why are we like that? Why do humans approve of what empathetically they wouldn't want for themselves?

22:26Because our capacity for empathy comes with fine print, comes with conditions as to who we could feel it for. Here's another study that I love showing just how terrible things can be with us as a species. You take somebody, there's a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, and it's got a lot to do with empathy. It's the part of the brain, you put somebody in a brain scanner and you poke their finger with a pin and a whole bunch of areas and your brain activate. and one area is saying that's my finger, that's not my toe, and another area is saying that's a sharp pain, that's not an abrasive pain.

23:09An area like the anterior cingulate is saying, oh, what does that pain mean to me? What's the interpretation I'm giving to it? And if it's a very aversive interpretation, it will activate. It's, I don't like this, I am made to feel stressed, unhappy, unsafe, whatever. Okay. So now you put somebody at a brain scanner and you don't poke their finger with a pin, make them watch their loved one have their finger poked with a pin. And the part of the brain that says, Ooh, that's your finger, not your toe. It doesn't activate because it's not your finger and it's not your toe. And it doesn't say it's not a sharp pain.

23:48It's not telling you anything like that, but the anterior cingulate activates because it's the part of the brain where you're also feeling somebody else's pain. Wow. That's amazing. There's neurons there that could not tell the difference between your pain and somebody else's. But now you look at a study where you put somebody in a brain scanner and they're looking at a little film clip and they see somebody's hand and they're seeing a needle poked into the hand. And as the needle goes in, you just squinted. You just exactly went, oh my God, I can't even look at that. And all of that and then you look at the experiment and if the hand has a skin color that is not your own on the average the anterior cingulate doesn't activate as much in your average test subject you don't feel their pain as much she's you make the skin color purple and it has no effect because you're saying oh for some reason yeah they're messing around with like the computer graphics or something here, but oh my God, that would hurt so much.

24:56No, make it realistic. And it depends on whose pain, whose face, whose skin, whose circumstance. And that's the thing with us. On a certain neurobiological level, it's the most straightforward thing in the world. Ooh, tell me what the brain is doing when you pull the trigger. And I can tell you the exact neurobiology of the command going to these muscles, causing it to, what, contrast rather than extend or whatever, and it's always the same. But if you're pulling that trigger, doing something appalling, or if you're pulling that trigger, doing something suicidally brave to draw fire on yourself to save a bunch of others, it's the exact same, you know, mammalian act.

25:48It's the same and it's such different if you move your hand to put it on top of somebody else's that could be a moment of great empathy and compassion that could be a moment of enormous betrayal of a loved one and it's all context wow it's not the it's not the action it's the meaning of the action or is that complicated when it comes to us us humans at the end of the day though it's that anterior, what was it called? Anterior? Anterior cingulate. Cingulate, yeah. Anterior cingulate. That is basically telling me I can relate to another human. And that also could be, which I don't remember which book you mentioned that in, can be altered with stress.

26:35So if two minutes before I was feeling stressed because I was in the traffic jam, I would actually have less empathy to another human's pain because of my stress. Exactly. Which is thoroughly discouraging and totally familiar. The world is horribly stressful. Your sort of landscape, your horizon as to who counts as someone whose pain you feel becomes very local and very narrow and very parochial and very built around people who look like me or pray like me or love like me or eat foods like me. or any such thing like that, it becomes very, very local. And what research has shown, sort of my lab about a decade ago, we did a collaboration showing with this, that part of what goes on during stress when you feel less of a capacity for empathy is this class of stress hormones, cortisol, glucocorticoids, are working in the brain.

27:41And part of it involves the anterior your cingulate and makes it more selfish and more focused on its own needs and, you know, translating out into neurobiology. It makes neurons, they're less responsive to stimuli to somebody else's pain. It makes the threshold much, much higher. Stress does that. Stress makes some people at their best. And I think what we've seen, you know, flagrantly since the start of the pandemic is it brings out the worst in an awful lot of people and fear does that and anxiety and pain and insecurity and uncertainty and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness it brings out the best in some of us but it does awful things to an awful lot of people and that's the neurobiology about why a brain that is very very stressed is a brain that has a whole lot of trouble feeling the pain of somebody who counts as a them rather than as an us.

28:44Do you think this is from an evolutionary biology point of view, like sort of, we survived because of our tribal come together somehow? So I need to be closer, I need to care more about those who are like me, and I need to protect them more and so on. But those who are further away, they could be the enemy or at least not related to my survival. Yes, but in such an interesting way when it gets to us. Okay, this is like the most depressing literature out there. Take volunteers, you put them in a brain scanner. Once again, it always seems like these depressing stories, the first sentence is always, you put somebody in a brain scanner.

29:24So you got somebody in there and you're flashing up pictures of faces and you flash up the face of somebody of a different race and in about 75 percent of people there's activation of the amygdala the amygdala part of the brain having to do with fear and anxiety and aggression okay that's awful what's even more awful is the amygdala activates in under one hundredth of a second in a fraction of a second thought even begins before you even consciously know what you were looking at your visual processing system has a shortcut that sends information to the amygdala the amygdala knows what you were looking at if it's an emotionally arousing thing it knows it before you were even consciously aware of it by about a half second or so Oh my God, that's the most depressing thing on earth because it activates in response to the face of somebody who's a them.

30:28Oh my, are we innately wired for racism, for example? And the answer to that is that's the craziest thing on earth because you take a non-human primate and you show them a picture of the face of a them, somebody from an outgrouper, and their amygdala activates. You show this has been around for millions and millions of years and races insofar as that's even like a scientifically valid concept. Races are only about 30 ,000, 40 ,000 years old or so. Like nobody ever used to encounter somebody who looked very different from them. We're hardwired to divide the world between us and them. But it's really, really easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an us and who counts as a them.

31:19And this is shown in the follow-up studies. Now you take somebody, you put them in a brain scanner, and you get somebody who is a sports fanatic. They're a soccer fan, and they have their home team, their soccer team, that they would kill for and they would die for. And they're a fan of that team and all of that. And there's the soccer team that's the hated enemy and the rival and all of that. And now you're flashing up faces once again for this person in the brain scanner. And each one of these faces is wearing a cap, either with the logo of your home team or the logo of the hated enemy team.

32:00And now your amygdala is responding to the hat they're wearing. The amygdala doesn't care about skin color. Who is an us and who is a them? It has changed in a fraction of a second. We're constantly changing our categories with that. so it is very very innate in us i think exactly as you say along the lines of millions of years ago as to divide the world into us into them and to not like the thems but who counts as a them we could change in a second's notice with symbolic stuff with things like that oh my god i mean what i would do to shadow you for a day what what how do you come up with those experiments Well, no, I did not do those experiments.

32:51I mostly have just done things to rats and monkeys, and I have not done a whole lot to actual humans. But no, this is reading astonishingly good work by lots and lots of colleagues out there. but they're amazing ones because they show but then to look at like the world around us somebody calls you up on the phone and says hi i'm on the other side of the world and a kid has just fallen in a river and i'm thinking about jumping in to save them but if i do that like i've got my airplane ticket back home this is like ancient times where like it was actual piece of paper. I've got my airplane. If I jump in the river, it's going to disintegrate and it's going to be ruined.

33:41And I'm going to need money to buy a new plane ticket. Will you give me the money for that? And you'll say, oh, you know, that's kind of, you know, I would love to, but here's the reason why. Yet, if you were standing there in that same moment on the edge of that river and you saw this kid whose face you have never seen before, and they've fallen in there and everyone's saying, oh my God. And there's a decent chance that you would be the person who jumps into the river to save the child. Wait a second. You were unwilling to like pay for a plane ticket on the other side of the planet to in effect save this child's life.