We're Like Every Other Animal Out There

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The ability of human beings to conceptualize the future especially sort of counterfactual hypothetical future scenarios seems to be if not unique to humans at least much better developed in human beings than elsewhere. We have automatic implicit you know lightning fast classifications of people as to whether they are in us or them and we have automatic lightning fast conclusions that we like the us is a whole lot more than the them's but where are we different? And it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to which dichotomy seems most important to us at any given point.

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

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Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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