Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 4 MindBrained Bulletin Think Tank Conf Bias Apr 20 | Page 15

helping each other carry their dead, digging graves in the frozen ground, and then
they even exchanged addresses to meet after the war and played soccer together.
They only went back to killing each other later because their officers told them that
they had to or they would be killed.
4) WWII was started in the Pacific with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. 50
years later, Zenji Abe, who was one of the pilots in the original attack, went to Pearl
Harbor to greet some of the survivors. He hugged them and asked forgiveness.
5) Finally, during the Vietnam War there was the My Lai Massacre in which
hundreds of innocent villagers were being killed by the American army for no reason.
Thompson, a helicopter pilot, landed and saw what was happening and got back into
his helicopter and landed it between some innocent villagers and the soldiers and
trained his guns on the soldiers and said if you do not stop, I will open fire on you.
They stopped.
All of these five stories are about people who changed over time, and it can happen in
only seconds. Sapolsky says that we could end with the cliché: “If we do not study
history, it is bound to repeat.” However, he preferred to end with a different way by
looking at these stories and our biologies: “Individuals no more exceptional than the
rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans” (2017b, p.
674). We must study them in order to be able to repeat these wonderful moments of
amazing grace.
References
Sapolsky, R. (2017a). The biology of humans at our best and worst. TED Talk. April
15:51minutes