The Forum with Robert Sapolsky, October 7th, 2018 

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

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

"Behave" by Dr. Sapolsky is easily one of the most amazing books I've read recently.

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

Dr Sapolsky is an absolute genius. He also has the rare gift of inserting clever observations -- -that seem at the time unrelated - at the right junction. It becomes immediately obvious that he is not only a remarkable scientist, but a humanist, a noble person and completely diverse from the average american. People like him make the U.S. a respectable country.

Sapolsky is an atheist. This interaction is incredible. Well done Robert.

Sapolsky is brilliant and funny. What a privilege to watch his lectures for free. RU-vid owes me a degree.

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!"

This is the first time I see Robert Sapolsky sitting down! Great talk.🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂

I am so happy I get to watch this man speak live. Thank you life for giving us, Dr. Sapolsky!!

Robert salposky is the man..he is an agnostic and he handles the talk so good and he isn't trolling..he is such a nice human being..he respects religion too..he is brilliant to say the least

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.

Paused the video, ordered the book, hit play again.

Big props to a church having Sapolsky speak about his work. A few hundred years ago he would have been burned at the stake. It gives me hope for the future.

I didn't realize that Dr Salposky plays soccer. I now think he's even cooler than before!

I have read 2 books by dr. Sapolsky. Even if he is an atheist, he does appreciate how the positive value of religiosity and spirituality could be beneficial for people. He just does not believe what religion is telling people about the nature of reality and the world.

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

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!

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

I have always been fascinated by his intelligence and humility...

Anyone else notice that, in the beginning, when Robert moved his chair, Malcolm moved his, then right after that when Robert crossed his legs Malcolm did as well. I can't help but to think that Robert would be the best person in the world to explain why that happened. I love hearing everything this man lectures on.

I will have to buy his books, his Stanford lecturers are amazing. Brave new world

My brain expanded. Thank you for this!

So I've battled with PTSD, anxiety and depression and when I really truly thought of the brain as a muscle and started to train what I wanted to be stronger and really stop using what I wanted to grow weaker I could with (lots of) time get past it quite drastically. My neuro pathways for memory and imagination was strong so I trained up the strength to let go of thoughts I didn't want, think the thoughts I did want, and focus strongly on the current now and what is actually within my current control and limit my life experiences to the close borders of now. I saw the memories as a photo album, that just because I remember it clearly when I look at it doesn't mean it's happening now and really identify when I was actually safe despite feeling unsafe. Took several years of mental strengthening and discipline and patience but as I got out of the PTSD and anxiety and could focus on the current now and what was in my control I started to feel more confident in my capabilities (since my mind wasn't stuck on imagining all worst case scenarios that never happened in that moment) which in turn helped me be able to be in public places again. I get nervous but not anxious so I still have a few more years of practice but it is very possible to train yourself past that recorded moment of trauma (granted, I know head trauma makes things a bigger challenge but giving up before starting wins you nothing. You can't know until you really test what your brain can still do and how it can invent new pathways for you). New memories to cling on to is important also and using the senses to do so was also helpful... like touching the texture of flowers or having incense to pick a mood that is connected to that scent etc. I'm 11 years into my practice towards getting my life back but 13 years of suffering instead of forever sure was worth the hard work and lots of that time was spent trying to figure out how to get progress to improve. The brain is amazing and you have the capability to choose what thoughts to think, you just need to get stronger at it. Like that headvoice that tells you that you are worthless, ugly and you suck? I evicted it. It doesn't live rent free in my mind anymore. If the words are considering bullying if you say it to someone else you don't deserve it either so don't treat yourself worse than you would treat a friend or stranger. By the way this training proved helpful in grief too. The obsessive replay of memories and the guilt that comes with grief became much easier to take less personally and just see it as my brain processing and just passively let the brain do its thing to heal without me interfering through latching on to the memories that play in my mind while processing. This talk was very interesting but since PTSD was mentioned I felt like sharing this. I haven't had flashbacks or nightmares in like 7 months now so I definitely think this is something worth fighting for.

Picking this guy's brain is a privilege

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

I would be so grateful to have dinner conversations with Sapolsky considering his immense knowledge base to draw from.

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

I've been following Dr. Sopolsky for a while now . Me... graduate work in Health Sciences (Virginia Tech/Johns Hopkins).... under-grad in Global Cultural Geography. He is so insightful. If you have not seen his student class lectures at Stanford re: Human Biological Behavior, check them out. Anyway, long story short... "Sopolsky for President". Ha... but serious.

I've only very recently come across Dr. Sopolsky's work and wow, what a fascinating and brilliant guy. I find it a little sad, and a reflection on the shallowness of our society, that this video has only 70,000 views on RU-vid, and a boy having his finger bitten by a baby has approaching half a billion views. Sopolsky's studies offer amazing insight into the human condition.

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 🧬🧠🧠🥇👋👋🌎🌌

Thanks Prof for putting into words a feeling I had about the Brexit debate that I had lacked the skills to clearly express: you can't reason someone out of a stance that they never adopted through reason.

Sapolsky forever!❤

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"

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

wow! I just loved this conversation, could have listened on and on. I am following Dr. Sapolsky's course on "Behavioural Biology" on youtube (Stanford Univ. channel), which is fascinating! I am going to read all his books. Malcolm Young was great here too. I am so grateful to be able to listen to this, thank you!

Awesome stuff. Thank you.

Holy crap i LOVED THIS

Robert Sapolsky and Jordan Peterson should have a talk. Only good things could come from it. Similar to the conversation between Peterson and Iain McGilchrist which was one of the best things I've seen, both experts, I anticipate that Dr. Sapolsky can parallel that. These are the top minds of behaviorism and we all benefit from observing their exchange of knowledge.

Thanks!

Great interview! Fascinating incites.

Good for you! I am repeat #III. Ill get there eventually. He is great to listen to. I wish they still let high school teachers lecture. I miss that aspect of the classroom.

Thank you for the lecture Sir. God bless you 🙏

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

Excellent talk!

He is an exceptional man, really interesting convo

Information is intressing

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.

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

showing an accurate and deep understanding; great perceptive. 💡 Muito obrigado for all the insightful information. 🤝

תמיד מעניין לשמוע את דבריו. מדברת באומץ וכנות מדעית.

Please lecture more 🙏

He is so natural. So brilliant so necessary

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.

I love Grace Cathedral! Physiology, the base that unites us all as human beings, no matter what our culture. -wendy PS Malcolm, I found it incredibly difficult to find The Forum online. Could we have a dedicated webpage at Grace Cathedral for advertising and a dedicated RU-vid channel for viewing? -wendy

Danke

This clip is the one hour version of Schopenhauer's phrase "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills". The full version is called "life".

Understanding free will

He's a great educator for folks who don't have a degree in the field. More complex ideas than a PBS special but doesn't load you down with the PhD jargon. Kids named after his favorite baboons. :) I had my daughter going for about 3 moths (when she was 16) telling her she was born with a tail... she's used to my sense of humor.

Awesome beard ++

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

in regards to the comparison of Robert Sapolsky and Jordan Peterson. I have listened to several lectures from both and find it hard to define either of them by a single idea that is part of their vast knowledge. I tend to look for connecting factors, things that people have in common, and I find that both of them are fundamentally saying we should see each other and ourselves as individuals within a group - that I like to call the human family - in hopes to get along better and create a more harmonious life that serves the common good. Each does that in their own way and they have both very valuable insights that help in this regard. Both of these gentlemen are very well versed and have spend decades on studies in their fields and beyond. I don't want to make the mistake of creating an alienating environment by placing one over the other. We don't need to accept every idea that a person presents but I don't think it is wise to dismiss someone just because there is one idea that I might not find appealing. Maybe I just misunderstood. That's an option I always consider. At the core we all aim for 'a feeling of good' about our selves and our place in the human family. As Robert Spolansky mentions in this video, positive encouragement can make a huge difference. I never heard either of them say that the individual is more important than the group or vice versa; both are an integral part and need to be considered equally. Not one over the other. Both Robert Sapolsky and Jordan Peterson are very intelligent men and both deserve a high level of respect for their contributions in understanding the mechanisms of humanity (ourselves as individuals within the human family)

So guys i'm asking a question to all you americans. After you heard what SApolsky said about inequalities... How can you still support your extreme economic model?

hm... it's possible to strengthen your Frontal Cortex with individuation exercises? Cool.

Very much agree that we humans need to humble ourselves and realize that most of what success we have is based off of luck/coincidence.

I burnt saint francis bible from 1643, but i hope to take the rest of my palimpsests to stanford to study them

indeed!

Overlaps with the work of Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

Why dodnt they give the man a bit of water?Why isn't there a drink ?

How does caffeine intake affect anxiety?

i've thought this too about poverty, hormones, and etc... although no one paid attention. go figure. florida u s a

I am still trying to guess if there was one leading theme driving this whole conversation. The title of the conference gives no clue. It's more like a rambling promenade touching on many points in BEHAVE with some strong allusions to ZEBRAS and stress. I don't recall if he ever mentioned glucocorticoids once. But the insula and even the anterior cingulate cortex did make an appearance. But not the lateral geniculate. The frontal cortex got the most space, as it should. This is the first time I heard our good Prof. Sapolsky mention that he had studied the wrong kind of Swahili. As usual, we keep admiring the impeccable sentence and phrase production and choice of words.

It was just starting to get juicy when it ended

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I would like to see Robert clarify what he means when he says humans don't have free will. At first glance that sounds like apathy. Is he saying that we as a collective do not have the ability to coordinate substantial redirects in our economic and cultural policies.......or that I cannot arbitrarily decide to wear the blue shirt today or quit my job and start a new life as an entrepreneur ? Of course....we can and DO often make informed decisions....even if we are not fully informed......but we are also aware of our own ignorance and decide anyway.

On the one hand I' m fascinated by all the things Robert Sapolsky found out and/or taught about, but on the other hand I think there is individual/collective free will and moral judgement and we're not only executors of our pre/postnatal heritage. And you might find some kind of proof in the fact that people who were raised in the same family with the same background made very different life choices. With Sapolsky's point of view we should judge nobody for his/her deeds because they could not act otherwise: would he believe this to be true about Hitler, Stalin etc.?

Anybody made that Malcolm Young/AC-DC joke yet?

Jose Luis Rangel

5:06 I would like to hypothesize that humanity talks about the "absurd" so often- to reinforce a shared reality and increase the likelihood of cooperation due to shared perception

Why are people comparing the doctor with Peterson, oh I forgot that is part of the many stories our brain likes to run with. We(our consciousness) are a passenger we are not driving the bus

"will machines have dreams?" - yes; in fact, they already do: dreams are what tickles consciousness (even though asleep) during mental 'housekeeping' which is what sleep is all about as memories of the events of the day are integrated into long-term rentention structures (achieved by revisiting events and reinforcing those that cohere with what's already in the brain). machines do a lot of housekeeping when they boot down, admittedly not as much as brains, but still some, as for example when RAM memories are transferred to disk.

How do I meet this man?

Sapolsky in a church, lol. I'd have sat near the door and listened for the beams creaking.

Is it true that some ideas are so topical yet dangerous that they ought not be shared openly? I'm a liberal, but I have learned there must be limits.

🦋

Robert Sapolsy every time making us have a deeper understanding of ourselves, humans. I hope he lives much longer and keeps divulging his work

Since Peterson has been brought up here a number of times, Here's my take on it...To start, Peterson doesn't deny biological influences at all, nor does Sapolsky deny that personal choices can be made, I don't think he's diametrically opposed to Sapolsky AT ALL. I think they're quite complementary to understanding social phenomena on a deeper level. Biology is great for understanding how some individuals may be wired for fight over flight, it is good for understanding the mechanics of depression and anxiety, and you can use all that to estimate how certain percentages of people will react to a given stimuli. Biology falls short in many ways though, and that's where Peterson's lectures complement it... Peterson looks at historical fiction and nonfiction writing and looks at moral and psychological lessons to be learned from them. Skip to 1:30 here and you'll see what I mean ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RppW9xwyqJs.html

Sapolsky is the smartest person to ever enter a church.

Jesus of Atheism........

Hi sir

I feel the part about Sapolsky's son and the AI stuff XD

I work with people with immense brain damage, and it's difficult because everyone else is operating in a different paradigm. I am no expert but I have a vague understanding of the bizarre possibilities which ensue from brain trauma, though my co-workers likely have no clue

His description of the testimony against Kavanaugh proves nothing except that Ford had a better background than most to produce lies based on strange ambiguities and her claims of recall after 30 years. I would like to compare her experiences to that of others with similar circumstances which she claims happened to her. I suspect her claims would be difficult to match. And what about Kavanaugh's memory and the memories of those who Ford claims were there, and none of them support her claims, nor did she tell anyone until 30 years later. I think Sapolsky is an extraordinary intellect, but his is being driving by an ideological bias to reach some unfair and unsupported conclusions, and he is just the right person to investigate this flaw in his ability to be fair and just.

What a pity, to waste an interview with one of the greatest minds in the country! Father, you have neither a gift for listening nor speaking.

Amygdala volume increases to _reduce_ PTSD. Higher volume before trauma is associated with resilience. The amygdala maps negative events, so if course it's going to be more active after trauma. But exposure therapy works for a reason.

Thought sapolsky disappeared good to see something again

Karl Popper would have a field day with his studies.

You can google it.....He has also previously argued that many forms of religiosity can be indistinguishable from mental illness, but they are, paradoxically, highly adaptive in a chaotic, world we know very little about

In other words, those who are victimized want harsher punishment for offenders. Of course!!

I almost got hit by a car because of the cough