Robert Sapolsky is a renowned professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, who has dedicated over 30 years to studying chimpanzee behavior in Kenya and the effects of stress on human behavior. His course on Human Behavioral Biology, available on YouTube, is highly popular and informative. Sapolsky’s work includes numerous papers and his book “Behave.” Medspire has conducted an interview with him, which is presented below.
Medspire: What led you to specialize in the field of neurology?
Sapolsky: It seems so obvious — what could be more interesting, and what is more tragic than a neurological disease that destroys who a person is?
Medspire: In one of your lectures, you mentioned that if given the chance, you would have studied the frontal lobe instead of the amygdala. Could you please elaborate on this statement?
Sapolsky: True; I’ve spent most of my laboratory career on the hippocampus and amygdala. Memory (the hippocampus, to be simplistic), fear (amygdala) are obviously interesting. But then along comes the frontal cortex, which is amazing — its central role in self-control, emotional regulation, gratification postponement — it is so essential to who we are, and frontal cortexes that don’t work well are probably the cause of half the world’s problems, to get a bit reductive. The thing that most interests me about it is that it is the last part of the brain to fully mature — not until around age 25. The implications of that are what astound me — by definition, if the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to mature, it is the brain region whose growth is most sensitive to environment and experience, and least controlled by a hard-wired biological program. Stating it a different way, the frontal cortex is the part of the brain most sculpted by your luck — good or bad — in early life.
Medspire: In your expert opinion, what do you believe is the cutting-edge frontier in brain research for aspiring researchers to focus on?
Sapolsky: Understanding the bases of individual differences. The fact that, unless there is some serious neurodevelopmental disorder, we all have brains that are very similar but not identical.
Medspire: Could you share your philosophical perspective on the nature of the mind and the basis for your viewpoint (physicalism, idealism, dualism, or panpsychism)?
Sapolsky: I think I count as a “hard incompatibilist” — there is no possibility of reconciling our being biological organisms built on the physical rules of the universe with there being free will, a soul, a “Me” inside there which is somehow free of biology. You have to choose one or the other and, philosophically, I am completely in the direction of us being nothing more or less than our biology (and its interactions with environment).
Medspire: Do you think the concept of “the hard problem of consciousness” presents a real challenge, and why or why not?
Sapolsky: It sure presents a challenge for me. Consciousness is beyond me to understand — every few years I read a review from the people trying to understand it on a neurobiological level, and I cannot understand a word of what they are saying. For me, consciousness arises as a “complex emergent property” — which explains everything and nothing.
Medspire: How has your understanding of free will as an illusion impacted your outlook on life and personal attitude?
Sapolsky: I truly truly believe in the implications of there being no free will — that none of us has “earned” anything, “deserves” anything, that we are not entitled to have our needs count for more than those of any other person, and that hating anyone, I mean any human on Earth, for what they might have done is like hating a hurricane, or a virus, because they were not ultimately responsible for their actions. A world without entitlement or hatred as moral imperatives. That said, I can truly function that way for maybe three seconds at a time, every few months — this isn’t going to be easy. I am told that these overall conclusions are similar to the Buddhist concept of “unselfing” — which is all I can say as I’m totally ignorant about Buddhism..
Medspire: In light of your observation that “primates are highly intelligent and organized enough to spend their free time stressing each other out and compromising their health,” what steps do you believe society can take to minimize these chronic stressors?
Sapolsky: Well, once people have the basics — not only food, water, shelter, safety, and the assurance that this can be relied upon, is a given, I think the biggest source of societal stress is inequality. Across an array of countries, the more inequality in a society, the worse the health, the shorter the life expectancy, the more violence, the more bullying of children. Living in a highly unequal world destroys “social capital,” destroys the capacity for people to feel trust and efficacy with other people.
Medspire: Have there been any lasting biological effects on future generations as a result of catastrophic events such as the Anfal campaign and the Halabja massacre in Kurdistan?
Sapolsky: I think that is absolutely the case — the test example is that grand-children of people who survived the Nazi Holocaust have, on the average, biologically different stress responses, and in unhealthy directions. Multi-generational, non-genetic transmission of traits is a very real phenomenon (although sometimes exaggerated about its magnitude), and the multi-generational biological consequences are almost certainly there for the descendants of Kurdish people who survived these horrors, for descendants of the Armenian Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Rwandan Tutsi genocide… I would guess that these are most likely to be about metabolism and vulnerability to age-related cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and vulnerability to mood disorders — depression and anxiety.
Medspire: For someone who is passionate about the brain and wants to participate in related research in an underdeveloped country like Kurdistan, what advice would you give?
Sapolsky: On a structural level, developing countries have to do better at the really difficult job of avoiding a “brain drain,” the phenomenon where the best, most educated, try to get to the West and stay there. In the US, for example, in many poorer areas of the country, the majority of doctors are immigrants who “escaped” (in both a political and social sense) their home countries. Those home countries suffer tremendously for that. Kenya, a place I know well, has that problem. If you manage to get educated in the West, you try very hard to never go back (very similar to the economic pattern in the developing world of the rich getting their money outside their country, investing elsewhere, because of the greater stability). So countries like that need to be more successful at having their best and brightest not leave. But of course, that requires these countries to be far more privileged than they actually are, to be able to make someone who can now have an easy, wealthy life in a place like the US want to return home to help build the place.
On an individual level, I think what has worked best is for someone to get their training at a good place in the West, return home, but then retain their scientific connections with where they were trained. This requires the luck of being trained by a mentor who feels like they have a responsibility to this person they’ve trained, to have them be able to return home, build a scientific career there, and still benefit from the contact.
Medspire: Is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t covered in the previous questions?
Sapolsky: I think that covers everything. We have been heart-broken here from afar at the devastation of the earthquake. I hope you and your loved ones are well.
