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Podcast 17 Jun 2020
https://youtu.be/S5g_LAoUYZQ

3:38

grew up in Brooklyn, going to Natural History Museum, looking at Africa diaramas, wishing he could be in there

humans, baboons

What are unique traits of humans? vs on a continuum with other animals.

Not unique to humans

• kill
• apes commit murder
• form border controls
• chimps have committed genocide

5:55

On a continuum with apes

• empathy
• justice
• theory of mind

6:27

One way we are unique: the capacity to think symbolically. To speak in metaphors. And to understand when someone else is doing it.

we are a symbollic species

cave paintings

our brains are not very good at it

insula: a small region of the cerebral cortex (located deep in the lateral sulcus, which is a large fissure that separates the frontal and parietal lobes from the temporal lobe)

a rat bites into rotten food, insula cortex fires, rat spits out the food

test with a EEG on a human, same response but the human also responds the same way to a picture of something disgusting

gustatory disgust imagining gustatory disgust moral disgust: show them pictures of a swastika or KKK costume

a single neuron in the insula, fires for both moral disgust and gustatory disgust

when confronted with moral disgust, we feel sick to our stomach, we want to puke, we are left with a bad taste in the mouth

primitiveness of the human brain

moral disgust is 20,000 years old, maybe 40,000 years old
insula cortex is 70 million years old

brain cannot tell the difference between the gustatory disgust and the metaphor

12:28

another example

anterior cingulate: tells you about pain, interpretive perceptual data about pain, poke finger with pin, is it serious? what is the context?

same activation when you watch a loved one be poked with a pin, where you feel someone else's pain

the anterior cingulate cannot tell the difference between your pain and someone else's

(note: if the person's skin color is different from your own, the cingulate will not fire as much)

again, an older part of the brain is borrowed and assigned a new purpose

14:07

have persons fill out a questionnaire
fill the room with a disgusting odor
answers become more socially conservative

have persons describe the personality of someone they met in an elevator
holding a hot or cold cup of coffee
subject will describe the personality as warm or cold depending on the temperature of the coffee the person is using a brain part dedicated to thermal regulation, adapting it to the new purpose of assessing a personality, and can't tell the difference

17:21

read a passage about pathogenic invasion
become more hostile to immigration, legal or illegal
brain applies the idea from pathogens to humans

the brain is improvising when thinking symbollically

18:52

demogague, dictators know intuitively:
to get people on your side, find a “them” to take it out on
make your followers disgusted by them
implicitly, subconsciously, subliminally associate the “them” with something disgusting

use imagery to compare the target group to something disgusting,

• Nazis referred to jews as rats
• In America, Muslims are referred to as invasion
• In Rawanda, the Hutu referred to Tsutis as cockroaches
• American right-wing, “if it's brown, flush it down”, associating Latino with shit

if you want to pull off a genocide
take advantage of the limitations of our brains
build up disgust of “thems”
activate the insula cortex with gustatory disgust activate the reptilian hypothalmic brain, viewing them as cold and clammish

viscera

22:08

Susan Fiske at Princeton: different kinds of “thems”, how we react

• pity
• disgust, insula cortex
• scary, amygdala
• envy - desire to be them, to have their resources, first step is to degrade them

kin selection, cooperation among kin, “I'll lay down my life for two brothers or 8 cousins”

most animal species do this instictively
humans do not, humans have to think about it
this allows us to be manipulated

• pseudo kinship: make army recruits feel they are a “band of brothers”
• pseudo speciation: make the “thems” so degraded they seem to be a lesser species

26:20

questions

How to use this knowledge to promote peace?

“you can't reason someone out of a stance they weren't reasoned into in the first place”

Primates have a sense of justice, what do you mean by that?

Franz Duval: Two monkeys, both learn a skill, press a lever to get food Introduce socio-economic inequality give one monkey a cucumber, the other a raisin (much better) both will refuse to press the lever, the food, throw it back at the researchers

Are thoughts and feelings the same thing?

Descarte dichotomized the two. Cognition, emotion.

Antonio Damasio: “Descartes's Error”. Cortex and limbic system, so many projections back and forth, one cannot function without the other. Inseparable.

You've proved the inseparability of thought and emotion:

• Every time you think of something that happened in your past, and your heart starts to beat faster
• Every time you make a god awful decision because your limbic system is overwhelming your cortex

When either part of the brain is damaged, decision-making dysfunction is catastrophic.

Brain damage that prevents limbic emotional data from getting to the cortex make horrifying decisions.

The decision to risk your life running into a burning building is not rational, it is emotional.

35:42

Can education overcome negative consequences of the limitations of metaphorical thinking? How can we teach positive emotional response?

contact theory, have classroom be diverse, where the differences become the norm

brain imaging, showing photos of other persons, persons of another race fire the amygdala

• this happens less in persons raised in mixed neighborhoods

deliberately craete mixed classrooms

• sometimes works, but only within narrow parameters.

39:00

Michael Bang Peterson, correlation between high disgust sensitivity and right-wing authoritarianism

also, right wing authoritarianism is linked to conspiracism

Why?

We make moral decisions via the wisdom of repugnance.

• the viscera of physical gustatory disgust
• “If it makes you puke, you must rebuke”
• If what they do is different from what you do, and you decide it is disgusting, that is a recipe for intolerance.
• compare conservatives to progressives, the former have more cleaning products in the home
• after reading something morally disgusting, conservatives are more likely to wash their hands afterward

Hatred comes from fear, and memory of suffering, from visceral emotional responses which occur hundreds of milliseconds before the cortex begins to figure it out

vermin, rodents, malignancies, feces

42:00

What about lessons of robbers cave experiment?

conflict theory - Muzafer Sherif. intergroup conflict occurs when two groups are in competition for limited resources.

Robbers Cave Experiment - Muzafer Sherif. 22 white 11-year-old boys divided into two teams at a summer camp in Oklahoma. Within one week they began to demonstrate verbal and physical prejudice. (confirming Sherif's conflict theory)

contact theory - suggests that prejudice and conflict between groups can be reduced if members of the groups interact with each other.

summer camps bringing northern Irish catholics and protestant teenagers together

summer camps bringing palestinians and israelis together to achieve goals together

premise

• spend time together
• with a common goal, like, clear a soccer field

can create kinship

if you don't do it right, it makes it worse

• use a neutral space
• use equal sized groups
• no flags, decals, etc., sacred values

even if you do it right, the effects are not long-lasting

• most often, a subject will particularize this sense of kinship, only to one person. It does not generalize to the group or to other groups, “those people”.

45:18

How are people taught to like symbols like swastika, and how does it happen in the brain?

10,000 year old situations using a 100 million year old brain to tap into fear, disgust, hatred, pride, sadness

47:13

how do morality and identity… ?

we are primates

we are parochial

our biases are formed early

example, a derivative of Robbers Cave, minimal paradigm approach, take a group of people, flip a coin to divide into two groups. by the end of the day, participants are showing a preference for their in-group

• more cooperation
• more generosity

we are terrified of mortality. there is comfort in a sense of belonging to a group, a sense a group identity

50:10

How can we use moral disgust to engage anti-racism and anti-authoritarianism?

the good side, the down side

how do we do the hard thing, sacrifice, to right a wrong, that is only a cognitive abstraction for us?

get enough viscera to mobilize us to do the harder things

not disgust at them and how they pray and love and whatever

disgust at them and how they damage, hate, scapegoat, bully

the much easier thing is to look the other way, decide it's too big, leave it for someone else

51:55

Are there examples in other species of neurological bases for very different social behavior?

there are cultures that view polygamy as moral, and those that view monogamy as moral

voles

• prairie voles, Nebraska, monogamous, mate for life
• mountain voles, Colorado, polygamous

males release vasopresin when mating (both voles and humans)

vasopresin gets into the brain and binds with vasopresin receptors

prairie voles have vasopresin receptors on their reward pathway neurons

in a landmark experiment, the segment of DNA was snipped from a prairie vole and inserted into a mountain vole and turned him from polygamous to monogamous

we, like the voles, are nothing more or less than our biology

54:56

monogamous monkeys have the prairie vole version

polygamous monkeys, South American like marmosets, have the mountain vole version

humans have a version that is halfway in-between with a lot of individual differences

persons with the more polygamous version of that stretch of DNA have shorter, less stable marriages and more risky sexual behavior

56:00

How can I respond to a friend who makes a racist statement about people of my race, knowing how the brain works?

speaking to the viscera. can't reason out of what was not reasoned into in the first place.

“That hurts. Even though you don't mean it, all sorts of people out there would like to see me suffer. That hurts. I thought you were better than that.”

57:38

59:00

Susan Fiske, on gender bias

usually the groups you are biased against are the groups you don't want to be near

in chauvinism, sexual violence

the group you hate are a group you do want to be with, on your terms, on your prejudicial, exploitative terms

arousal comes into play and that increases the screweyness of the situation

it's a different category

racism is only a few thousand, maybe 10,000 years old

sexism is one of the deepest us-them dicotomies we have

you can undo racial automatic categorization easily in all sorts of ways

gender categorizations are the ones that are toughest to change