Joe Rogan Experience #965 — Robert Sapolsky Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. Yeah. Perhaps not. So it's this protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, and it's got one of these weird parasitic lifestyles. and then put Toxo in a rat and it loses that aversion. And in fact, in a subset of rats, So Toxo has just figured out the most brilliant way of doing it. It makes cat pee smell You get rabies, Dopamine is this neurotransmitter.

5:20 other things that can kill them yep yeah wow and at one point my lab was full of like Bobcat pee and wolf pee and there's actually like a company you could buy urine from. bit disinhibited behaviorally so just in general they're out more and more exploratory more likely to get eaten but there's a higher rate with schizophrenia of individuals who have antibodies against toxo

8:07 reckless speeding. If you're toxo-infected and clinically depressed for the same severity of In the speech that I saw you give, infectious disease doctor who I don't know why, but there's a high rate of that like okay this is a parasite that's very selectively developed this life cycle between bacteria and God knows what else out there that manipulate host behavior in ways we just

10:58 but it seems to have some similar effects but not as extreme. rancid and infectious and rodent equivalents of STDs. So, normally sick animals, parasite-infected animals and such So you're a male rat infected with toxo. It's crazy. Other than, again, pure anecdotalism, that one elderly doc somewhere back when saying, watch it when you're getting organs from like people killed motorcycle accidents

14:12 inflammation outside in the body there for them chronic toxin infection is not something you parasites that do bizarre manipulative things to their hosts. Most of it's not in the realm of I mean, It's remarkable um you know just to flip to the the and infants connect to each other emotionally um when you and your beloved dog sit there and stare into

17:40 us wildly into like getting them like good, like dessert treat bones and stuff like that and they And there's a literature by now looking at oxytocin has its effects by binding to an oxytocin receptor. I just wonder if that mix applies to platonic friendships, like male bonding and stuff. Yeah. it right now you know you want it and the frontal cortex is critical at that juncture as to whether

21:01 if that person is holding a cell phone or a handgun will atrophy the frontal cortex. By age five, for example, a kid's socioeconomic status is already a predictor of how much frontal development there is in this part of the brain. just some key parts of the brain that are absolutely essential to its behavioral effect Now, the frontal cortex is not fully online until you're, what, 25?

24:23 And not just for, like, explaining why your freshman roommate was the way he was. the testosterone impedes it and then there's something else as well sure does not help but driving force around the Supreme Court some years ago and there's the frontal cortex taking another like 20 years to get there so you say so is the frontal cortex just a it's the part of the brain that's most sculpted by experience and environment

28:13 circumstances of protection or so on and every culture does this differently every culture has monogamy and build our theologies around that, yet at the same time have incredibly high rates rules as to when it's okay to lie and in fact this sort of thing that we view is heroic but with the frontal cortex, it's happening in a rodent. Like rodents could learn to master,

31:13 We do delayed gratification that takes 60 years. The rule of what counts as the right thing and what counts as the harder thing is very, very culture-specific. seeing the first hints of frontal cortex so you know recently evolved the last 50 to 100 million Baboon troop that was next to the place that was dumping human waste or human garbage. years ago but it had been essentially 33 straight summers wow of like you go back

34:29 And in addition, I would dart anesthetize the baboons using a blowgun system, which was totally fun to do. their health, their diseases, their stress physiology related to aspects of behavior. do you sit and groom with somebody else how often you're sitting in contact how often you're playing to basically just living in the trees above the dump, Yeah, exactly. they got tooth decay they got different like parasites in their stomachs so they're they're just fine living off of the

37:58 No one from my troop would like dream of going near the garbage unless he's a big aggressive guy. all sorts of horrifying things. And, you know, a human gets tuberculosis and they can sit around are the nice guys. They're socially affiliated. They're the least aggressive. What's baboon So in and of itself itself that's totally fascinating. So okay, you get rid of 50%

40:56 and transferred as adolescents into this troop and somehow or other learned, even though they displacement aggression females who are getting dumped on less by males and thus are much more non-genetic transmission of a style of behavior from one generation to the next. baboons are as high rates of aggression as women are treated the way we they cohabitate with each other the way uh you know just whatever uh

44:14 what the biggest take-home message of that is exactly what you just honed in on oh these guys used to it but to see it in in another kind of primate and to see that circumstances can Game Park Rangers had to kill about half of them. The 17th century, like the most terrifying people in Europe, were the Swedes. Change can occur very who they are, and then them interacting with all these other people who share variables and have

48:51 yeah uh sam harris broke my brain talking about free will once where i really believed it was Display a pair of eyes on a computer screen that something that's different is different and wrong. People don't become more conservative about Wow. four hours and it's more likely that your frontal cortex in effect is going memory doesn't work that well then people learned we're more likely to be anxious and learn to be

52:52 doesn't work as well when stress hormone levels are elevated. of his head and took his frontal cortex with it landing of their heads. Wow. And that's a world of like volitional control is not that volitional. Well, is what they were originally called, got the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for this wonderful technique. lobotomy on like one person every umpteen minutes and just like go through an entire hospital's

56:45 My God, the damage they could have done then. Do you think it would be antidepressants? junctures. And they used words like justice back then. Wow, I can't believe the stuff they did. I mean, literally most people. demonically possessed. He's got something screwy with his potassium channels in his brain. And disorder. So it's only taken us about 500 years ago, if an epileptic during a seizure with their limbs flailing struck someone,

1:01:38 It's his disease. but so you see you seem optimistic then well optimistic in 500 year time spans when you think learned all of it in the last 50 years, in the last 20 years, in the last 5 years. sentencing of women who committed violent crimes around the time of their period. aggression in humans, if and only if the human was abused during childhood. In other words,

1:05:14 No Lie MRI is the name of the company in the United States Or should not, I should say. where just sentencing was decreased Yeah, I think... hey, this is not how it works, you assholes. wow it'd be great if people learn more about science way more than a sign like All right, everybody.