Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 4 MindBrained Bulletin Think Tank Conf Bias Apr 20 | Page 14

worst or best selves depending on a wide range of biological/cultural influences over
time. He warns us not to try to blame and hunt for a single part of the brain, or gene,
or hormone to explain it all, instead he proposes multiple levels of causality over
time.
Then he invites us to imagine we are in a rioting city where
everyone is going crazy! Suddenly there is someone running
towards us and apparently holding something that looks like a gun.
We also have a gun. The question he poses is, will you pull the
trigger. If one second before we were extremely frightened and our
amygdala (the fight or flight or freeze brain mechanism) is
aroused, then we probably will pull the trigger. We are more likely
to pull the trigger if it's a man, more so if he is of a different
ethnicity and big, and especially if we have been in pain, are sleep deprived, and are
hungry and our frontal cortex has turned off.
Then he pushes back further to hours and to days, the domain of hormones. If we
have developed high levels of testosterone we are more apt to see things as
dangerous. Pushing back to weeks and to months, we come tothe level of
neuroplasticity which regulates parts of our brain and how we might be less
adaptive if we have been overstressed.
Then he asks us to imagine being adolescents again, when our frontal cortex was
not fully formed and still battling with our amygdala for control. Then we go further
back to being infants and he notes that if we were not held enough, we may not have
attached with our parents much. And if while we were in the womb and our mother
was extremely stressed, then she probably passed those stress hormones on to us and
that the stress from our parents and ancestors may have changed our genes as well.
If we go back centuries even, and we belonged to a nomad culture, who believed in
honor killing, we may have been influenced by that as well. Thus, the multiple
layers of causality may push us to pull the trigger.
Sapolsky then tells us 5 fascinating stories that allow
Sapolsky then tells
us to see that we can change from our worst biologies
us 5 fascinating
to our best. 1) The Swedes several hundred years ago
were the rampaging Vikings, tearing Europe apart.
stories
However, they have had no wars for 200 years and
instead their “warriors” take naked snow baths together and saunas.
2) John Newton is famous for writing the wonderful hymn “Amazing Grace” but as a
young man was the captain of a slave ship and made himself rich by doing so. Then
for some reason he led the British to abolish slavery and became a priest.
3) During the Christmas truce of WW1, the Germans and the French and English had
been fighting over “no man’s land” and they agreed to stop fighting for 5 days to
allow soldiers to retrieve the dead in the trenches between them. They ended up