ROBERT SAPOLSKY EXPLAINS TIM AND I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s

My latest discovery is a doozy: Robert Sapolsky from Stanford, is an expert on neuroscience and primate behavior who hones in on stress. Put his name in at YouTube and you’ll find a whole cache of absorbing ideas. I knew about his best-selling book, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” but shrugged it off as a pop review of the obvious. NOT. And there are other books plus lots of material on the Internet. He’s sometimes called the male Jane Goodall because he’s spent a lot of time hunkered down with baboons in Africa.

This particular vid came to my attention through Patrick Burns, who writes “Terrierman,” one of the few -- oh, heck, the ONLY REALLY HELPFUL blog about dogs. He’s a man who is literally “down to earth,” since his constant occupation is chasing varmints down their holes and then digging them back out with the help of terriers. More interesting than the uninitiated might expect. His take on the vid above is that it’s the best vid you’ll see all year. I agree.

Sapolsky is extremely sophisticated but as hairy and humorous as any veteran of the Aquarian revolution. There are jeans under his blazer. This talk is about the relationship between humans and other animals in seven different domains or dimensions that we used to think distinguished humans from all the other mammals, esp. primates. We have a preoccupation with privileging ourselves, even on the species level. But, as on the individual level, we are not always entirely honest or informed.

Here’s the list:

1. Tool use
2. Aggression (potential genocide)
3. Theory of mind (understanding what others are thinking)
4. The golden rule (stated either positively or negatively)
5. Empathy (feeling what the observed animal is feeling)
6. Pleasure in anticipation and gratification postponement
7. Culture

Sapolsky addresses each domain on this list in three steps: first, the behavior; then how it shows up in animals, which turns out to be obvious once we look; and third, how humans extend that behavior into a virtual realm where no sub-human (sorry) can go. Here’s where Sapolsky is quite brilliant. He makes it easy to understand, humbles and amuses us a little, and then hints at the wonder of the human brain, with the goal of making us realize our enormous obligation to respond to these domains. We can’t really help it.

The one that knocked me out was number six and his explanation of a very simple little graph of what happens to the “addiction hormone” dopamine when an animal is given a task and achieves it. Surprisingly, this pleasure hormone does NOT go up after the task is successfully achieved, but BEFORE. It is the attempt that evokes the surge, the anticipation of achievement. (Artists know this.)

Even more incredibly, when the task is much harder and only achieved part of the time, the dopamine level goes MUCH higher!! Humans are even more susceptible to this than are animals. Sapolsky says we are so potentially extreme in our attempts to achieve something or believe that something is real -- in spite of all evidence to the contrary -- that it actually explains martyrdoms by torture because of refusal to give up a faith stance. So in the movie “Goya’s Ghosts,” one can explain Javier Bardem’s character's ability to resist torture and death in terms of his hormone response, even though he keeps a poker face all the way through previous ecstasies and knife-edge dangers. If he had been blood-tested for dopamine, his scores at the end would have been out the top.

This dopamine effect explains why writers like Tim and I simply cannot leave writing alone. It has little or nothing to do with people who “write a book” for praise and social standing. Tim and I simply have an addiction to dopamine, seeking the actual molecular experience of the attempt. Tim would say, “Oh, the RUSH !!” We can’t help it. A molecular dopamine blocker would make us stop. Discouragement, persuasion or displacement simply don’t address the core. By now we don’t even need paper -- we write in our heads.

I have resisted most other obvious addictions because I’m wary of how easily I can be hooked. Tim has not. But we come together in our shared “hookedness” on writing. It’s the ATTEMPT and not whether we get prizes or praise. (I haven’t run this past Tim but I feel sure this is right.) It was also what Bob Scriver and I shared, though his addiction was to sculpture. There are physiological, cellular, molecular consequences to constantly working away at goal-directed effort. When one stops, there is real physiological withdrawal. People who are not hooked like this will NOT understand. It is obsession with a maybe reward. Sapolsky speaks of the human “astonishing capacity to hold on.” (Tim’s stalkers are getting dopamine hits off attacking him. They’re dopamine vampires.)

Number seven on Sapolsky’s list is pretty great, too, and we understand the necessity of mastering culture in our personal knowledge and transmitted values from the human category of our choice. There’s considerable overlap with Tim here as well, but also some radical differences. I was a little too early for the Aquarian Revolution but arguably it diluted my ability to get into sync with Bob Scriver. Tim was a little late for the actual Revolution but was hit dead-center by the AIDS pandemic. He and I have intense individual relationships with communities unknown to each other, who are naturally opposed to each other. On the surface we seem headed in opposite directions, but also drawn to reconciliation between the conflicting stances towards evil and virtue.

Sapolsky suggests that the less it is possible that something can be, the more we insist that it CAN be. He goes to Kierkegaard, not as a Christian apologist but as a philosopher of the mutual category exclusions that obsess some humans. Sapolsky defines himself as an Atheist, knowing that this means more intense attention to Theos than any easy acceptance would. His example is Sister Prejean’s devotion to scum-of-the-earth killers on death row in Louisiana. She says she must because they are so undeserving. He calls us to a paradoxical moral imperative: forgiving and loving in the most impossible and culturally forbidden terms.

But this is a graduation speech and he does not neglect his obligation to the youngsters just ready to take on the world. He says, quietly, it is impossible to make the world better all by yourself. We must join together to make it happen. The effort can be as obsessive as writing, but you must start the attempts. Then you begin to get your dopamine hits.