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Effects of stress on memory
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He may be one of the great behavioral scientists, but Robert Sapolsky, 66, does not believe there is any merit to that. He doesn’t say it out of modesty, but out of conviction. This prolific author believes that free will is an illusion, that our conscious decisions are really the consequence of unconscious processes in the brain. Sapolsky spent three decades studying baboons in the wild in Kenya, but has since gone on to write world-renowned books on his deterministic theory of human behavior. In his new book, Determined, he develops this idea further by drawing on neurology, philosophy and sociology. It’s not you, it’s not me, it’s determinism. The phrase, in addition to being the best of excuses, raises moral doubts about the concepts of guilt, punishment, merit and effort. We asked him about them in a video call conversation.
Question. You maintain that free will does not exist. How then is a concrete action formed, a decision over which we believe we have control?
Answer. A behavior is the end product of what happened in your brain a second ago, of environmental stimuli, which condition those neurons in your brain to do what they did a second ago. And the hormones you had in your bloodstream this morning. And what happened to you in the last few months. Your brain may have changed its structure during your adolescence, childhood, or fetal life. Either because of your genes or because of the culture in which you have grown up. It is biology, over which we have no control, interacting with the environment, over which we have no control. And when you look at all of these influences, you realize that neurobiology influences your decisions, as does genetics, geochronology and social psychology. It is not that all these disciplines are different, but that they become one discipline.
Q. So, the fact that you have written a book, the fact that you are giving an interview right now about this book… Hasn’t it depended on your effort and will?
A. If you think that there is no free will, it makes no sense to blame people for their mistakes or congratulate them for their achievements. But it’s incredibly difficult to think like that. Writing this book was a lot of work, but I managed to do it and there is an ‘I’ in this whole process that somehow did it. But if I really stop and analyze it, I understand that I finished the book because of the type of person I am. And that is due to many events that are beyond my control. I have to stop and review all the events, over which I had no control, that made me the type of person I am right now. It takes a lot of work to do it, and to not fall into the belief that you earned what you are and other people didn’t earn it.
Q. So much so that almost no one does it. Why is the concept of meritocracy so fashionable?
A. The people who have the most power are the ones who have the most reason to like meritocracies and keep them in place. It’s system justification. We may think that meritocracy makes no sense. But on the other hand, if you have a brain tumor, you’ll want to make sure you’re operated on by a great doctor, not some random person off the street. You need to make sure that competent people are doing the difficult jobs, without telling them that they’re better humans as a result of that, and without having them think that in any way they earned that. The problem with this idea is that it can kill motivation.
Q. And that can generate frustration. Not everyone can be a great doctor.
A. I think the United States is a particularly strong example of that. Because we have this incredibly strong cultural mythology in the United States, that anybody, if they work hard, can succeed. Anybody can become rich, if they’re motivated enough, any child can grow up to be president. And, you know, in the United States, if you’re born in poverty, there’s about 90% chance that you will still be in poverty as an adult. And every step of the way will explain why that is so. Your neighborhood, your education… However, we have a country where the entire mythology is built on the idea that it is in your power to solve any problem, it only depends on you. Because, look, here’s one person in a million who did it. And we’re going to make it sound like everybody can be there. So at least in the United States, where we have this really poisonous version of meritocracy, it causes an enormous amount of pain.
Q. If free will does not exist, what happens to concepts like guilt and punishment?
A. If a person is dangerous, but it is not their fault, we have to protect people from them, but doing the absolute minimum. More than a prison, they should be put in a kind of quarantine. If someone is violent, you have to stop them from doing harm, but that doesn’t mean it’s their fault.
Q. You give as an example the cases of police officers shooting Black suspects in the United States. Situations in which social racism has more weight than concepts such as guilt or will. It is an uncomfortable reflection…
A. Yes, because it is much easier to look at someone who doesn’t have much education and who hasn’t had much success in life and empathize and say that circumstances made them who they are. But if you have to look at a police officer who just shot an unarmed man simply because of the color of his skin; because in half a second he thought that that person who was holding a phone was pointing a gun at him… It’s a lot harder to sit and look at them and say, they’re just the end product of how they turned out that way.
Q. How does determinism affect love? Maybe saying “I do” at a wedding is not as accurate as saying, “Yes, as fate would have it”?
A. This is another field where determinism poses a huge challenge. If you are lucky enough to have fallen in love and been reciprocated, this idea has the potential to turn a very nice thing into something depressing. What if my marriage had happened only because of the levels of oxytocin we had in our brains? What if this love story comes down to a question of pheromones? What if we are together only because we were raised in similar cultural contexts? It’s totally depressing. But you have to accept that there is a structure beneath the surface. There is an underlying mechanistic biology in something as lyrical as love. And well, if you think about it it shouldn’t be depressing, because that means you’ve had the luxury of experiencing it.
Q. You spent decades working with baboons. How did you end up devoting yourself to refuting free will in humans?
A. The baboon work I did for many years in East Africa ended up being a small piece of this whole story. We studied the neurobiology of stress, what stress does to the brain. The fieldwork attempted to relate the baboons’ social rank to who handles stress well and who had poor blood pressure. I spent 30 years thinking about nothing more than that. And in the years since, I started to look outward and say, “Well, this is just one of the many little slivers. When you put them all together you can see the complexity of the biological machines that we are. And you conclude that no, there is no free will.
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·March 19, 2024
Summary: A new study highlights the importance of middle age in understanding and predicting future cognitive health. Researchers emphasize that this period, traditionally between 40 and 65 years, is pivotal for identifying risk factors for dementia and represents a crucial phase for interventions.
Key findings include significant brain changes during middle age, such as structural shifts and altered gene expression, which are linked to cognitive decline. This research underscores the need for more studies on middle age to develop early screening methods and identify new therapy targets, potentially offering insights into preventing cognitive deterioration.
Key Facts:
Source: Cell Press
The middle-aged brain could provide a window into future cognitive health, researchers write in a review publishing March 19 in the journal Trends in Neurosciences.
The team reviewed evidence from human and animal studies suggesting that middle age—commonly considered as the period between 40 and 60 or 65 years of age—marks a shift in brain aging. They argue that more research should be dedicated to middle age, a period of life that is historically understudied.
“Middle age is associated with specific and modifiable risk factors for future dementia risk,” write the authors, who include neuroscientist Yvonne Nolan of APC Microbiome Ireland at University College Cork.
“We encourage giving this previously understudied period of life renewed consideration.”
Most studies of brain health and cognitive decline focus on older age groups, but by this time, interventions may have limited efficacy. Screening for risk of future cognitive decline could help by allowing treatment to begin earlier when it might be more effective. A better understanding of brain shifts during middle age might also help identify novel targets for therapy, the researchers say.
During middle age, the brain undergoes significant molecular, cellular, and structural changes, and many of these changes have been linked to cognitive decline, which has also been shown to accelerate during middle age.
“There is good evidence to suggest that the human brain undergoes non-linear structural and functional changes during middle age that have implications for cognitive functioning, and variation in these processes could account for individual trajectories in cognitive aging,” the authors write.
Structurally, middle age is associated with changes in the volume of several brain structures, shrinking of the hippocampus (a brain structure involved in memory and learning), and decreased connectivity between different parts of the brain.
“The fourth and fifth decades of life may be a turning point in the organization of brain networks, characterized by optimal efficiency, system segregation, and modularity, followed by accelerated decay of these properties,” the authors write.
Middle age is also associated with changes in gene expression, both within the brain and in other parts of the body. In the human brain, studies show increased expression of immune-related genes and decreased expression of synaptic genes. The authors also point to evidence suggesting that changes in other parts of the body may predict brain health and function.
“Factors in systemic circulation—mainly proteins secreted by various organs—are understood to mediate brain aging in terms of cognition, plasticity, adult neurogenesis, and neuroinflammation,” the authors write.
“Some of the largest peaks of change across the entire adult lifespan occur during middle age, as measured in plasma, peripheral blood monocytes, and muscle.”
There is some evidence that exercise might aid healthy cognitive aging, but more research is needed.
“Studying the intersection of aging- and exercise-related molecular processes could unveil new therapeutic targets,” the authors write.
Further research is also needed to investigate observed sex differences in brain aging, as evident in the higher rate of dementia in women, the researchers say. They also note that it will be important for future studies to differentiate processes that cause declining brain health from biomarkers that reflect compensatory mechanisms.
“Ultimately, scientists will want to find novel therapeutic targets to mitigate unhealthy cognitive aging,” the authors write.
“We argue that applying recent trends in aging research to this period of life could reveal novel biomarkers and possible interventions to combat cognitive decline in an increasingly older global population.”
Funding: This research was supported by the Science Foundation Ireland, the Irish Health Research Board, and Alzheimer Nederland.
Author: Kristopher Benke
Source: Cell Press
Contact: Kristopher Benke – Cell Press
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“The ‘middle-aging’ brain” by Yvonne Nolan et al. Trends in Neuroscience
Abstract
The ‘middle-aging’ brain
Middle age has historically been an understudied period of life compared to older age, when cognitive and brain health decline are most pronounced, but the scope for intervention may be limited. However, recent research suggests that middle age could mark a shift in brain aging.
We review emerging evidence on multiple levels of analysis indicating that midlife is a period defined by unique central and peripheral processes that shape future cognitive trajectories and brain health.
Informed by recent developments in aging research and lifespan studies in humans and animal models, we highlight the utility of modeling non-linear changes in study samples with wide subject age ranges to distinguish life stage-specific processes from those acting linearly throughout the lifespan.
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Neuroscience News posts science research news from labs, universities, hospitals and news departments around the world. Science articles cover neuroscience, psychology, AI, robotics, neurology, brain cancer, mental health, machine learning, autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, brain research, depression and other sciences.
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March 20, 2024
In a GZERO Global Stage discussion from the sidelines of the United Nation’s 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the pervasive issue of online abuse and harassment faced by young women was in the spotlight.
Michelle Milford Morse, the UN Foundation’s Vice President for Girls and Women Strategy points out that “more than half of young women are experiencing some form of abuse and harassment online, sometimes as young as eight,” underscoring the urgent need for collective efforts to combat online abuse and create safer digital spaces for everyone, but especially women. Milford Morse points out the importance that we all work towards a future where everyone can thrive free from fear and harassment in both physical and digital environments.
The Opus Dei diaries https://www.ft.com/content/53bbc8a8-1c5b-4c6e-8d50-8b7c00ffa5f8 via @ft
