The Most Depressing Thing on Earth

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We have processes in our brain that work on time scales of, what should I say, seconds? Is it as short as milliseconds? How many, tens of milliseconds? Yeah, you look at, here's another set of those incredibly depressing studies. You stick somebody in a brain scanner and you're looking at the amygdala. Kind of the, like, villainous parts of the brain. It's about fear. It'sabout anxiety. It'sAbout aggression. That's interesting. You can't understand the neurobiology of injuring other people outside the context of being terrified out of your wits. But what you see is, you know, the amygdala is part of assessing is this a friendly

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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