At one level we feel we are so compassionate, at another we rejoice in violence. In the words of Robert Sapolsky, “We use shower heads to deliver poison gas, letters with anthrax, airplanes as weapons...We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication...we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on...When it's the right kind of violence, we love it...another complication...in addition to us being this miserably violent species, we're also this extraordinarily altruistic, compassionate one. So how do you make sense of the biology of our best behaviours, our worst ones and all of those ambiguously in between?”
Sapolsky says, “...every bit of behaviour has multiple levels of causality...an example: You have a gun. There's a crisis going on: rioting, violence, people running around. A stranger is running at you in an agitated state—you can't quite tell if the expression is frightened, threatening, angry—holding something that kind of looks like a handgun. You're not sure. The stranger comes running at you and you pull the trigger. And it turns out that thing in this person's hand was a cell phone...” What caused this behaviour?
Amygdala is central
“The amygdala is central to violence, central to fear and initiates pulling of a trigger. What was the level of activity in your amygdala one second before? Now, obviously, the sights, the sounds of the rioting, are pertinent. But in addition, you're more likely to mistake a cell phone for a handgun if that stranger was male, large and of a different race. Furthermore, if you're in pain, if you're hungry, if you're exhausted, your frontal cortex is not going to work as well, part of the brain whose job it is to get to the amygdala in time saying, ‘Are you really sure that's a gun there?’ Regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening. Elevated testosterone levels, elevated levels of stress hormones, and your amygdala is going to be more active and your frontal cortex will be more sluggish,” says Sapolsky.
He does not stop there. He says if your mother was stressed when you were still in your womb, if your ancestors belonged to a militant or passive tribe are all additional factors which could have influenced your response.
Then Sapolsky mentions some incidences where people underwent a change of heart. It is possible, he says and for that, “...everything in the brain changes, and out of this come extraordinary examples of human change...”. Sapolsky avers that here is the reason why we should study the biology of what can transform us from our worst to our best behaviours. Secondly, he says no action should be judged on the basis of the immediate cause, it could lie much deeper.
sudhamahi@gmail.com
Web link:
https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_
the_biology_of_our_best_and_worst
_selves#t-230264
