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Dr. Paige Harden on Huberman Lab: Why puberty ages you

Faster puberty tracks faster biological aging via DNA methylation; polygenic overlap connects addiction, aggression, and impulse risk in the prenatal brain.

Dr. Kathryn Paige HardenguestAndrew Hubermanhost
Feb 9, 20262h 42mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 3:10

    Kathryn Paige Harden

    1. KH

      There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they see someone suffer, if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer.

    2. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    3. KH

      So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have anterior insula. It's like you're being shocked, too. Unless that person is first portrayed as violating some moral or social norm, in which case, dopamine, you get a reward out of seeing that person punished. I think that it is a lust, just as much as lust for substances or lust for sexual partners. It is a desire. People want to see people punished. [upbeat music]

    4. AH

      Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden. She is a psychologist and geneticist, and a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Harden is an expert in how our genes shape our life trajectory, especially how they interact with life events during our adolescence, and how they impact our long-term mental and physical health. Today, we discuss the interplay of nature and nurture in addiction, criminality, susceptibility to trauma, and the larger themes of sin, sociopathy, empathy, and forgiveness. As you'll soon see, Dr. Harden is unique in her ability to define how biology, psychology, and the sometimes randomness of life interact to drive people's choices. Today, we talk about known differences between males and females, the role of hormones and hormone-independent influences on male female differences, and how people assume different roles in life, depending on the power structures they find themselves in. I want to be very clear that this is not a tap dance around the big issues episode. Today, you are going to hear a very direct conversation about what the best science says about the role of genes and environment on human choice, and how the biology, meaning genes and everything downstream of them, neurotransmitters, hormones, et cetera, drive what choices are available to people and which ones they tend to make. I've long been a fan of Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden's work because I know of no one else researching these topics with the level of rigor that she is, and as you'll soon hear, she is an exceptional educator. She's clear, she's direct to the question, and her compassion and belief in people's ability to better themselves, no matter what their genes are, and to better the world, is woven into everything she says, and it's all backed by data. I should also mention that I learned during today's episode that Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden has a new book coming out soon. It is entitled Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problems with Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness, and you can find that anywhere books are sold. It's now available for pre-sale. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden.

  2. 3:10 – 6:44

    Adolescents, Genes & Life Trajectory; Adolescence Ages

    1. AH

      Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden, welcome.

    2. KH

      Hi, thank you for having me.

    3. AH

      Few things are as interesting to people as the relationship between genes and behavior, or what we call genotype and phenotype, the expression of all the stuff downstream of genes. And few things are as interesting as adolescence, and puberty, and the home we grew up in, and how our genes interact with our choices, et cetera. You work at the intersection of all of those, which is a very brave thing to do. Could you just frame for us why you selected to study the relationship between genes and outcomes using adolescence as, uh, the time point in which you jump off from those questions?

    4. KH

      Mm.

    5. AH

      Because I- it could have been, you know, from infancy or, uh, in, in old age. Why adolescence?

    6. KH

      Yeah. So I did my PhD at the University of Virginia, and I was trained as a clinical psychologist, and if you're looking at when does mental illness emerge, when does this risk for mental illness really start to increase? It's in adolescence. So most cases of substance use disorders or addiction begin in adolescence. That's when people's risk for depression goes up. If you're gonna have a first psychotic episode, that's gonna be in late adolescence, early adulthood. So from a clinical perspective, adolescence is really interesting, and then I'm also was trained as a lifespan developmental psychologist, so thinking about how does what's happening early in the life reverberate really through the rest of your lifespan? And if you think about when in life do individual differences between people emerge, canalize, get deeper, when are people's life trajectories really starting to be apparent? It's in adolescence. So I came into this field really interested in teenagers, late childhood and the teenage years, so thinking about puberty, sexual behavior, but then from there, what's happening in adolescence? It's also rule-breaking or aggression or, again, risk for alcohol and drug use. So my research program was really based on, okay, well, what's happening in this period of life where the genes we're born with and the family environments we were raised with, how do they combine to shape people's lives? By the time people finish their teenage years, they begin adulthood. They're beginning adulthood on such different life trajectories.

    7. AH

      What ages, uh, constitute, uh, adolescence?

    8. KH

      [laughing] I mean, that's changing, I think, right now.

    9. AH

      Okay.

    10. KH

      Um, we typically think of adolescence as beginning with the physical changes of puberty, right? Adolescence is this period of transition to reproductive and social maturity, so we're thinking of adolescence as beginning-

    11. AH

      Mm

    12. KH

      ... between 10 and 13, when people are going through puberty. I think more controversial is when does adolescence end?

    13. AH

      Mm.

    14. KH

      Because historically, we've defined that as you're an adult when you take on the social roles of adulthood, and that keeps being-... you know, for various reasons, economic, social reasons, pushed back later and later. So I've typically studied people between 10 and 25, so that kind of 15-year period. A 10-year-old is clearly a child. A 25-year-old is about to be kicked off their parents' insurance. They can finally rent a car. They can technically take on the social roles of adulthood, and that's a long period of time where a lot of things are happening in the body and the brain.

  3. 6:44 – 14:05

    Puberty, Aging & Differences; Epigenome; Cognition

    1. AH

      This may be outside the scope of, of what you work on, but I've always been struck by the fact that while kids, including myself, um, generally hit puberty somewhere, as you said, between 10 and 13 or maybe 14, some seem to go through puberty for a much longer period of time.

    2. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    3. AH

      And I think of puberty as perhaps one of the biggest developmental milestones because the brain changes, hormones change, of course, but perceptually, and how people perceive you changes completely. And the acquisition of w- what we know as secondary sex characteristics, um, seems to occur at such different rates. So I mean, I can be open about this. I, I know I hit puberty by... I know, at, [laughing] uh, at, uh, 14.

    4. KH

      Uh-huh.

    5. AH

      But then I didn't, you know, I didn't really shave until I was almost graduating college.

    6. KH

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      But I had grown, right? Whereas there were other kids that we went home for the summer-

    8. KH

      And they came back-

    9. AH

      ... and they came back, like, not a grown man, but looking like this guy is like-

    10. KH

      Looking like a grown man.

    11. AH

      Yeah!

    12. KH

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      And kicking our butts in soccer, and he's just, you know, just in terms of everything, right? But then, and I, [chuckles] I don't wanna out this person, but then when I look at us now, it seems that the people that went through puberty more quickly may have aged more quickly in general. Is there a, any notion of a clock, and the rate of that clock turning can be sort of visualized in puberty and predict longevity? Is there any relationship there?

    14. KH

      We are working on this right now. So we can think about individual differences in puberty in three ways. We can think about pubertal timing, so h- when does it start?

    15. AH

      Mm.

    16. KH

      Um, for girls, pubertal timing seems to be-- early pubertal timing seems to be the best predictor of risk for mental health problems, physical health problems, earlier menopause, shorter lifespan.

    17. AH

      Early onset of puberty.

    18. KH

      Early onset of puberty.

    19. AH

      So it's not looking at the sort of rate of-

    20. KH

      Rate

    21. AH

      ... characteristics?.

    22. KH

      Yeah. For boys, you-- it seems that the difference in pubertal pace or pubertal... Some people call it pubertal tempo, so not just how early does it start-

    23. AH

      Mm

    24. KH

      ... but how long does it take-

    25. AH

      Mm-hmm

    26. KH

      ... for all of those changes to unfold? Um, we did a study many years ago, where we found that boys were less affected by when it started, but more affected, at least for their emotional development, by how quickly it happened, with boys where they changed overnight, having the hardest time sort of assimilating all these changes that are happening. Because your cognition is not necessarily maturing as quickly as your height or your musculature or your hormones, and so, uh, it seemed that boys seem to be particularly sensitive to going through puberty very, very quickly. What we've been looking at recently is how the epigenome changes during this period of time. So the genome is your DNA. It's the DNA sequence in your cells, and that doesn't change with development. But the epigenome is everything on top of the genome that affects how DNA is used by the body, used by the cells. And there's one epigenetic mechanism known as DNA methylation, which is, you know, a methyl group is, is basically, like, this chemical tag, and it can get kind of tagged on to the genome. So there's great work in aging that shows that the epigenetic clock, measured by DNA methylation, starts ticking in infancy, and faster biological aging, as measured by the epigenome, predicts shorter lifespan-

    27. AH

      Yeah

    28. KH

      ... worse health, earlier mortality. What we looked at is, well, instead of training an, uh, an epigenetic clock on age, can we train it on pubertal development, so how physically mature you are? And what we found is you can. So there's these, these... The clock is ticking w- as you get older, but the clock is-- there's another clock that's also ticking as you become more physically mature, and those two things are correlated. So the epigenetic changes that we see as you go through puberty faster, um, do seem to be related to aging more rapidly, even in older life. So our reproductive development is, I think, very tied at a cellular, molecular level with our lifespan development, and we see this across species. If you genetically engineer mice to go through puberty earlier, they die earlier. So we have this trade-off between reproductive maturity and lifespan across species, within species, and I think now we're beginning to see that at the molecular level, too.

    29. AH

      Fascinating. Uh, I also like the way that answer lands 'cause I had a very protracted puberty.

    30. KH

      Yeah. [laughing]

  4. 14:05 – 16:45

    Sponsors: BetterHelp & Lingo

    1. AH

      I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing therapy for a very long time, and I can tell you that it's a lot like physical workouts. There are days when I want to do it, and there are days when I don't want to do it. But when I finish a therapy session, every single time, I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent. And typically, when I finish therapy, I come away with a valuable insight or new perspective on something I'm working through, whether that's with work, with relationships, in my personal life, or simply in my relationship with myself. There's just so much benefit that comes through effective therapy. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide the benefits that come from effective therapy. They have a short questionnaire to help you match to a therapist that's right for you, and while BetterHelp has an industry-leading match rate, if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. Also, because BetterHelp is done entirely online, it's extremely time-efficient. There's no driving to a therapist's office, looking for parking, et cetera. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get ten percent off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Lingo. Lingo helps you track your glucose to support better metabolic health, mental clarity, and sustained energy. Glucose directly impacts our brain function, mood, and energy levels, and it may even affect our levels of tenacity and willpower. This is why I use the continuous glucose monitor from Lingo. I absolutely love it, and I'm thrilled to have them as a sponsor of the podcast. Lingo helps me track my glucose in real time to see how the foods I eat and the actions I take impact my glucose. When glucose in your body spikes or crashes, your cognitive and physical performance do, too. In fact, large glucose peaks and valleys lead to brain fog, fatigue, irritability, and hunger. What you eat, of course, plays a major role in your glucose. Some foods cause sharp spikes and big crashes, and others do not. But not everyone is the same in terms of how they respond to particular foods. Seeing your glucose in real time helps you build eating and other habits that support metabolic health, mental clarity, and sustained energy. Lingo has helped me to better understand what foods to eat, when to eat, and how things like a brief walk after a meal can help keep my glucose stable and much more. If you'd like to try Lingo, Lingo is offering Huberman Podcast listeners in the US ten percent off a four-week Lingo plan. Terms and conditions apply. Visit hellolingo.com/huberman for more information. The Lingo glucose system is for users eighteen and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for the diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. Individual responses may vary.

  5. 16:45 – 22:26

    Puberty Onset & Family; Communication & Empathy

    1. AH

      I recall some mouse data showing that if you, um, expose young, uh, pre, uh, pubescent mice to older males, they enter puberty earlier. Does that exist in humans as well?

    2. KH

      So this is a controversial area of research. It is true that, um, girls, human girls who are raised with a non-biological father do, on average, tend to go through puberty earlier, and some have hypothesized that it's a similar sort of cue from the environment about the stability and availability of resources. If Dad is gone, maybe the provisioning of the environment is gonna be less stable. Maybe evolution would favor a reproductive strategy where you go through puberty earlier, rather than this continued... Y- you know, childhood is so costly, right? Like, a human childhood is long. It takes a lot. I have three kids. It takes a lot to feed them, to grow an adult. And so it might make sense to say, "Okay, well, if resources are gonna be scarce, or if resources are gonna be unpredictable, it might be better for me to have this strategy where I go through puberty earlier." What's difficult about that is that people don't end up in family structures at random, and moms who go through puberty are more likely to have sex at younger ages, more likely to end up in non-marital childbearing family structures, and are likely to have daughters who are being raised without a biological father. So is it the biological father absence that's causing the earlier puberty?

    3. AH

      Mm.

    4. KH

      Or is it that Mom has genes that predispose her towards early puberty? That changes her reproductive life-... and then she's more likely to be in this certain family structure and pass on those genes to her daughters. It seems to be a little bit of both-

    5. AH

      Mm-hmm

    6. KH

      ... which is kind of the standard answer to all of our questions about nature and nurture, that, um, ge- there's a very strong genetic effect on the timing of puberty for both boys and girls, but that also the environment is pushing it in different directions. And that's part of why we're seeing that the age of puberty keeps going down with every successive cohort. I mean, it's been falling for the last, basically, as long as we've been keeping data, people have been going through puberty earlier.

    7. AH

      I'm realizing that you have a very, very difficult job-

    8. KH

      [chuckles]

    9. AH

      ... because the languaging is so delicate.

    10. KH

      Yeah.

    11. AH

      So I'm just gonna jump on the bed of nails for you.

    12. KH

      Okay.

    13. AH

      I've also heard that if the biological father is present, it provides a, quote-unquote, "protective effect" against this on- earlier onset-

    14. KH

      Mm-hmm

    15. AH

      ... of puberty in the presence of the non-biological father. But just that language, protective effect-

    16. KH

      Yeah

    17. AH

      ... implies that a one-year shift or two-year shift earlier puberty is somehow bad. Like, immedi- I think the human brain just works this way, right?

    18. KH

      Yeah.

    19. AH

      For understandable reasons, like, "Oh, you know, these, these young girls that were supposed to go into puberty at 14, they're now going to puberty at, you know, 10, because the, the dad was absent." They, we- the human brain-

    20. KH

      They pathologize it.

    21. AH

      They pathologize it, and they write a script.

    22. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    23. AH

      And then it- as you point out, you know, there's things related to the, the situation as it relates to the, the mother and her choices-

    24. KH

      Mm-hmm

    25. AH

      ... and her genes, and it's a, it's a real barbed wire mess-

    26. KH

      Yeah, yeah

    27. AH

      ... for the typical person, um, to try and pull apart. You're pulling these things apart beautifully, but it's also, um, fodder for anyone that wants to drive a narrative. That's tough. How, how do you navigate that? Because I'm gonna ask you about adolescents-

    28. KH

      [laughing]

    29. AH

      ... and genes and, and, um, uh, sexual promiscuity, right? We're talking about s- today, we're gonna talk about sin.

    30. KH

      Yeah.

  6. 22:26 – 27:33

    7 Deadly Sins, Substance Use & Conduct Disorders, Genes

    1. AH

      have long thought that, um, the hypothalamus, right, these, these cl- the various clusters of neurons, uh-

    2. KH

      Yeah

    3. AH

      ... above the roof of our mouth, that drive hunger and sex behavior and thirst and aggression and, um, and a bunch of other interesting things, um, is sort of the seat of the seven deadly sins.

    4. KH

      [laughing]

    5. AH

      Um-

    6. KH

      I have heard you say this before.

    7. AH

      Yeah. Um, and of course, all those brain circuits, uh, and structures interact with other brain circuits-

    8. KH

      Yeah, yeah

    9. AH

      ... and structures. That's, uh, there's no one location in the brain, um, that governs, uh, a behavior entirely, with some rare exceptions. How do you think about the genetic programming of the hypothalamus in terms of people's proclivity for addiction, promiscuity, aggression-

    10. KH

      Mm-hmm

    11. AH

      ... being overly passive in a way that might harm them or other people as well?

    12. KH

      I don't really think that much about the hypothalamus, per se, actually, in relation to those behaviors. So just stepping back one step, when you, you made this reference to the seven deadly sins, right? So if I can, like, kind of remember all of them, there's wrath, there's envy, there's lust, there's greed, there's sloth, and what do the seven deadly sins have in common? How can we operationalize that more scientifically? You know, what those behaviors all have in common is, I mean, I mean, except envy for a second, is doing something that might be pleasurable in the short term, um, to the extent that there's negative consequences, negative consequences to yourself or negative consequences to other people. I think envy is interesting because you're seeing other people enjoying pleasures, and you're like, "I want that one," right? So it's kind of looking at other people-

    13. AH

      Yeah

    14. KH

      ... other people's pursuit of, of things.

    15. AH

      I think of envy as a severe opportunity cost because as long as you're envying some- what someone else has or is doing, then you're-

    16. KH

      Oh, that's interesting

    17. AH

      ... then you're missing all the stuff that's happening now that you could-... now build your life on.

    18. KH

      I think of envy as like a clue to what do you desire that you haven't admitted to yourself?

    19. AH

      Hmm.

    20. KH

      One question I ask graduate students when I'm recruiting them is, "Whose career do you want? Whose career do you envy?" Because that tells me more about where they really wanna go with their lives-

    21. AH

      Mm-hmm

    22. KH

      ... than, you know, their kind of prepared speech that they have for me.

    23. AH

      Great question.

    24. KH

      Yeah. You know, let's take wrath or let's take lust. You know, anger is an emotion that's useful. Sexual desire is an emotion that's useful. When do they become sins? They become sins in our minds when people are, are engaging that behavior, um, in situations where we think it's gonna be harmful, not just to themselves, but to other people. From a clinical psychology perspective, we would never say we're gonna study the seven deadly sins, but we do have, um, clinical language or diagnoses where the predominant symptoms that you see are people engaging in behaviors that are impulsive, that are, um, maybe immediately pleasurable, but in the long term, harmful to themselves or other people. So the obvious constellation of this is substance use disorders, right?

    25. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    26. KH

      So it's I'm, I'm ingesting a substance, it feels good, and I'm doing that at significant cost to myself and other people. We can also think about in childhood what would be called conduct disorder, which are people who are children who are engaging in wrath. They're engaging in aggression towards other people, that hurts other people, their parents, their teachers, their schools. The law is mad at them, and they're doing it anyways. So what we're interested in scientifically is, um, are there genes that affect the likelihood of developing these disorders? Yes. Um, are there genetic overlaps between these different things? So do the genes that, um... Are the genes that make it more likely for you to become addicted to substances also make you more likely to have many sexual partners, also make you more likely to engage in impulsive aggression? That also appears to be the question, yes. And then if we're looking at genes that have these associations, not just with substances or not just with sexual behavior or not just with aggression, but have cross-cutting effects on all of them, what are they? Like, what are those genes?

    27. AH

      Mm.

    28. KH

      Where are they- where are they active in the brain? When are they expressed in development? So that's work that, that our group has been doing for eight years now to try to discover what these genes... We have a good idea from twin and adoption studies that there are genetic influences on these things, and now we wanna figure out what are they and where are they active in the brain. And it turns out that it's not just hypothalamus. It's really broadly distributed, you know, throughout your brain.

    29. AH

      I'll update my- [chuckles]

    30. KH

      Yeah. [laughs]

  7. 27:33 – 33:05

    Family History; Genes & Brain Development

    1. AH

      There are genes that vary between individuals-

    2. KH

      Yes

    3. AH

      ... that predict addiction, predict impulsivity-

    4. KH

      Mm-hmm

    5. AH

      ... uh, and other things.

    6. KH

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      Um, you're exploring how the genes that predict addiction might predict impulsivity for other types of behaviors.

    8. KH

      Yes.

    9. AH

      I think I heard that the answer is yes.

    10. KH

      Yeah.

    11. AH

      Indeed, there's overlap.

    12. KH

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      So I'd be very curious to know what those genes encode for. Uh, what are the protein systems and-

    14. KH

      Yeah

    15. AH

      ... neural circuit systems, hormone systems downstream of those genes?

    16. KH

      Yeah. If we go back one step, just why did we think that there were gonna be genes that overlap between this? The biggest, um, set of results that supported this hypothesis were adoption and pedigree studies. So these big data registries, you get them in Sweden, you get them in the Scandinavian countries that keep track of every single one of their citizens. And what you see is that the seven deadly sins run in families. So if you have an adoptive parent who's addicted to alcohol, you are more likely to have many sexual partners, and you're also more likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorder or, um, be arrested for a violent crime, even if you were never raised by that parent. And it's not just substance use to substance use or violence to violence or impo- you know, risky sexual behavior to risky sexual behavior. It seems that having a family history of any of these things increases your likelihood of manifesting any one of them. So that's why we thought that there was this-

    17. AH

      Mm

    18. KH

      ... genetic commonality across them. Um, so what we found is that there's many, many, many genes that affect all of these behaviors. It's massively po- what we call polygenic, so it's not just one thing in one part of your genome. It's distributed throughout your genome. And that those genes are most expressed in neurodevelopment in utero, in second and third trimester. So if you, if you look at genes that are associated with all of these things, and you see, okay, when in the human lifespan are they most active? They're active during cortical development in the second and third trimester. So there's something very, like, early neurodevelopmental that's going on there, and it seems to be affecting the brain's balance of inhibition and excitation.

    19. AH

      Hmm.

    20. KH

      So as your brain is developing while you're in utero, the GABA system, which is inhibitory, and the glutamate system, which is excitatory, sort of being tuned, like, and the balance between those two things is, um, is being worked out. If children are born preterm, part of the reason that that affects their psychological development negatively is because it affects this balance between inhibition and excitation. So I think we're still very at the beginning of this, understanding the bioannotation of it, the biological mechanisms of it, um, but what it suggests to us is that-... you know, sometimes you hear, like, ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder. I think that substance use disorders are every bit as a neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD. I think conduct disorder, which is characterized by impulsive aggression, is every bit a neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD. 'Cause if you look at the genes that are causing them, they seem to be affecting this pattern of brain development s- very, very early-

    21. AH

      Mm

    22. KH

      - in life, and this balance between the brain's inhibition and excitation.

    23. AH

      Fascinating. I mean, I have to be careful not to go down this rabbit hole, but I started off as a developmental neurobiologist.

    24. KH

      Yeah, yeah.

    25. AH

      So, um, you know, fetal brain wiring is, uh-

    26. KH

      Yeah. Yeah, that's your, it's your whole-

    27. AH

      We've never really talked about it on this podcast, but it's- we've talked about the effect of, of, of fetal exposure to hormones-

    28. KH

      Yeah

    29. AH

      ... uh, in, in the brain, in particular, um, in terms of, uh, sexual differentiation. But yeah, there's a ton going on in there, [chuckles] um-

    30. KH

      Yeah, yeah

  8. 33:05 – 37:59

    Personality & Temperament, Motivation, Addiction; Trauma

    1. AH

      who wrote Dopamine Nation-

    2. KH

      Yeah

    3. AH

      ... she once said that, um, many addicts, behavioral addictions, uh, I guess they call them process addictions or chemical addictions, that they have this feeling that, u- unless they're experiencing something really intense-

    4. KH

      Mm

    5. AH

      ... like, life isn't really happening.

    6. KH

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      Like, they crave this intensity of experience.

    8. KH

      Yeah.

    9. AH

      They want peak experience-

    10. KH

      Yeah

    11. AH

      ... either to numb themselves, I mean, it could be a trough experience, i- in the case of sedatives. But, um, that stuck with me. Implied in that is that not everyone is seeking these, um, kind of extreme states. And so layered on what you just described in terms of excitation, inhibition, balance, I kind of wonder if, um, if people who struggle with addiction are, um, they're craving getting out of too much inhibition or too much excitation in th- but this is probably an overly simplistic-

    12. KH

      Yeah

    13. AH

      ... hypothesis.

    14. KH

      So just thinking about the, that sensation-seeking thing, that driving for intensity, usually when we, when we think of people who, um, are chronically engaging in some behavior, despite it having negative consequences for themselves and other people, so this could be drug use, this could be aggression, this could be risky sexual behavior, um, we can typically think of three dimensions of sort of personality and temperament, um, that are often at play, and one of them is this sensation-seeking drive for intensity. So I want it, I want it, and I want a lot of it, right? And then one is this disinhibition, um, failure of self-control. Um, I can't stop myself. And then another, which I think is less well-studied, is what people call antagonism or callousness, which is, um, "I know this has, uh, negative consequences for other people, but I don't really care. Like, that doesn't bother me." And I think what you see is that the, the combination of factors that goes into any one person's behavior can really vary. So for some people, it's like, "This feels great. This feels good. I want the high. I want it to be intense. I'm not disinhibited. I'm deliberately seeking out this behavior. You know, I plan the drugs that I'm gonna use for the club the whole week, and I plan my week afterwards." It's not, it's not disinhibited at all. It's very purposeful. And then there are people that are like, "I wasn't planning, but now I'm at the club, and someone offered this to me, and I can't stop myself." And then other people are like, "I'm not... I like it, okay? And I could stop myself, but these negative conse- the consequences that people keep harping on, you know, the fact that my partner doesn't like this or the police don't like this, like, oh, you know, I'm indifferent," right? And so, um, all of that to say, I think, I think we need to be aware of the complexity and the heterogeneity of, of different people's motivations when they're doing these behaviors.

    15. AH

      Yeah, and these days we hear a lot about, um, the role of trauma in addiction.

    16. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    17. AH

      I mean, I can't do a single post or podcast-

    18. KH

      Yeah

    19. AH

      ... about addiction and the biology and, um, and not hear, "Well, it's trauma-related." But of course, genes come from our parents. Uh, we'll talk about that-

    20. KH

      Yeah

    21. AH

      ... heritability. [chuckles] Um, and so generational trauma or ch- or just childhood trauma-

    22. KH

      Yeah

    23. AH

      ... doesn't even have to be transgenerational, it can get layered in there in a complicated way.

    24. KH

      Yes.

    25. AH

      And I'm not trying to say that trauma doesn't play a role. Clearly, it does. But-... it seems that genes could be primary, trauma in the parents, trauma in the children, traumatizing, you know, hurt people, hurt people, kind of, you know-

    26. KH

      Yeah

    27. AH

      ... it's the, the one cliché that seems to, you know, stand the test of time.

    28. KH

      Yeah. I think it's very hard to say that something is primary or secondary, because everything's interacting-

    29. AH

      Mm

    30. KH

      ... with everything else. One of the scientific challenges, and then also one of the very human tragedies that we often see, is that the parents who have genetic risks, who are passing those on to their kids, are also the caregivers for those kids. And so the kids who would most benefit from firm, warm, stable, nurturing parenting are also the least likely to get it, because the parents themselves are also dealing with their own stuff, and they're also leading their own complicated lives. And so it's a tapestry. Like, there's a warp and a weft to a piece of cloth. There's the threads that go this way and this way, and, um, I think that's how I think about the relationship between genes and trauma, early experience, is that really they both are woven together to build the brain, and the body, and the personality that then struggles with these behaviors later on in their life.

  9. 37:59 – 46:06

    Knowing Genetic Risk & Outcomes; Understanding Family History

    1. AH

      So if we were to have access to our genomes [sighs] heading into, uh, adolescence-

    2. KH

      Yeah

    3. AH

      ... or to our kids', uh, genomes, um, and we know based on your work and the work of others, presumably, that some of the genes that predispose to impulsive behavior, addictive behavior, promiscuity, et cetera, um, that would be useful information, I would think, right? Then one could think carefully about friend choices, situational choices, install buffers.

    4. KH

      Yeah. [laughs]

    5. AH

      You know, it sounds, it sounds so mechanical, but, you know, have people around who can help buffer against this- these-

    6. KH

      Mm

    7. AH

      ... genetic predispositions, which no doubt, as you just said, weave into, um, situational-

    8. KH

      Yeah

    9. AH

      ... predispositions. Why don't people want that information, or do they want that information? Because I remember in the '80s hearing, "Oh, you know, soon we're gonna have genomes," and-

    10. KH

      [laughs]

    11. AH

      ... "You can know if you're gonna get Huntington's."

    12. KH

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      This, you know, uh, very destructive, degenerative disorder, and, and then people said, "Well, I wouldn't want to know." I, I mean, I think many people would also want to know.

    14. KH

      Mm.

    15. AH

      And especially parents, i- you know, if they can just get past their guilt that it has something to do with them, I think they'd want to help their kids, uh, avoid these predispositions, given that most of what we're talking about are maladaptive predispositions.

    16. KH

      So this is a complicated and really rapidly growing area of research, which is, what happens if you return people's genetic information back to them? So if you have ever done 23andMe or some sort of direct-to-consumer genetics company, you might have gotten, like, "This is your genetic risk for Crohn's disease," or, "This is your genetic risk for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's." Um, and now there are more companies that are expanding into that genetic information around, um, many gene indices, we call them polygenic indices or polygenic scores, that are correlated with someone's risk for developing an alcohol use disorder, say. I think there's a couple things to keep in mind here. One is that the, our genetic information is rapidly improving. It's still not very good at the level of predicting an outcome for an individual. So, um, as an example, you can think cities that are at higher altitude tend to be colder. Like, that's a correlation, that's a correlation of around 0.4, 0.5. You can know that if you're trying to think about, "Okay, well, which cities are colder on average than others?" That's not gonna tell you, do you need to pack a sweater if you're going to Montreal next Tuesday, right? Like, that's a specific weather incident. Polygenic scores right now are like, I can tell you that, you know, on- in general, like, these people have a higher risk than these people, but they're not n- they're not a pregnancy test or even a Huntington's disease test. They're not prognosticators of, like, an individual person's-

    17. AH

      Mm

    18. KH

      ... risk for an alcohol use disorder. There's some uncertainty there. The other question is, what are the ethics of telling someone that they have a low genetic risk, especially if we're uncertain about that? Like, you've talked a lot about how, you know, no alcohol on average is better for you than some alcohol. We think about the risks of telling someone that they're genetically predisposed towards a negative life outcome, but there's also risks to telling someone that they're not genetically proposed, because is that going to... Are they gonna interpret that as license to drink more? "I don't need to worry about that. I need- I don't need to worry about my consumption, because this company told me that I'm at low risk." And then the other thing you're picking up on is that there are individual differences in desire for kind of deliberate ignorance. So there's a great study after the wall came down in Berlin, that was, um, conducted on whether or not people want to know the contents of their Stasi files, like, who was reporting on them. And some people were like, "Of course, I want to know. Of course, I want to know who was saying what about me." And other people were saying, "No, I don't. Deliberate ignorance. Ignorance is bliss. Deliberate ignorance is what I want."

    19. AH

      This is what other people were saying about them.

    20. KH

      Yes, yes.

    21. AH

      Don't read the comments.

    22. KH

      Yeah. [laughs] Deliberate ignorance. Don't read the comments is also a form of deliberate ignorance.

    23. AH

      [laughs] This is, like, an avid-

    24. KH

      Yeah

    25. AH

      ... uh, debate between podcasters.

    26. KH

      Yeah.

    27. AH

      You know, Rogan, Rogan is the Mr. Don't, Don't Read the Comments. Lex Fridman and I go back and forth on this, so-

    28. KH

      On, on guarding the comments.

    29. AH

      I mean, that, I mean, that, yeah, for-

    30. KH

      Yeah

  10. 46:06 – 46:57

    Sponsor: AG1

    1. AH

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  11. 46:57 – 52:12

    Genetic Information & Decision Making; Personal Identity & Uncovering Family

    1. AH

      I feel like the more information we have about our parents and their parents-

    2. KH

      Mm-hmm

    3. AH

      ... and their positive traits and their, let's just call them maladaptive, destructive traits to themselves or to others, the more informed our choices can be. But I do understand that it can start to set up some constraints in our mind of what we are capable of or not capable of.

    4. KH

      Yeah.

    5. AH

      But I also feel like, especially in the United States, there's this notion that we can become anything. It wasn't until I was in a relationship with somebody from southern Europe, that I realized that that notion, growing up with that-

    6. KH

      Yeah

    7. AH

      ... is kind of outrageous to some people in the world. [laughing]

    8. KH

      Yeah.

    9. AH

      'Cause in a lot of areas of the world, as you know, people get siloed really early on.

    10. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    11. AH

      Um, and they- not everyone grows up thinking they could be an amazing athlete if they chose that path.

    12. KH

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      They could be a billionaire if they chose that path, you know? They could- but in the United States, we love this notion of anyone can get to any position if they just work hard enough and believe in themselves-

    14. KH

      Yeah

    15. AH

      ... and align with the right people.

    16. KH

      So I think that you think of it probably as, you know, another source of data, and isn't more data better? Like, isn't... We, we improve our decision-making when we have more variables at hand? Um, that's a very scientific way to think about genetic information, whereas I think for many people in the broader public, there can be a temptation to see genes as a very special sort of information. There's a lo- genetic has, um, a myth around it, that maybe this is my data on my heart rate variability, doesn't have about it. I, I- often I think that people can fall into these really essentialist stories about genetics, that it's telling them something about their, like, their deepest or truest selves. Um, and that's when the delivery of genetic information, without correcting their perception of what genes are really telling us, can start to be dangerous.

    17. AH

      Yeah.

    18. KH

      I mean, I think about 23andMe, their tagline for many years was, "Welcome to you."... Spit in this tube, welcome to you, right? That we are going to give-- we are not just gonna give you another piece of information about yourself to add to all the things that you could be using. We are going to tell you who you really are, and, uh, it's when the genetic information lapses into these more essentialist stories that I think things get to be, in your words, a little bit thornier, a little bit riskier.

    19. AH

      I never did 23andMe, but, um, they were just right up the road, but somehow never did it. But I did hear that one of the surprising, uh, results of 23andMe, and companies like it, was that, um, a not insignificant number of, uh, people discovered they have-

    20. KH

      Yes

    21. AH

      ... relatives that they didn't know they had.

    22. KH

      Yes, or that their father isn't the father that they thought they had.

    23. AH

      Which is a pretty major psychological frame shift.

    24. KH

      Yeah.

    25. AH

      Yeah.

    26. KH

      I gave a talk at a college, a small college, um, and it was a writing class, and they had to write about a book, and they chose my book to write about, which is great. It's like, you know, freshmen, and they all have to actually write something, and they chose a book that was deliberately, you know, a little bit controversial to give them something to push off on. And I asked him, I said: "Why, how... You know, you're a writing professor. How did you find my book?" And he said, "Well, I did 23andMe, and I realized that my, the man who raised me is not my biological father. My parents didn't know this. It was our fertility doctor who was my biological father, and I have something like 26 half siblings-

    27. AH

      Oof

    28. KH

      ... 'cause this guy had been doing it in his practice for years. He's now, the doctor is now deceased," and I just was like, "That's so much more interesting than I'm gonna talk about, like, anything I'm gonna talk about with these freshmen," this story and that, um... And I think that speaks to he had a whole narrative about his life and his family, and then he got this piece of genetic information, and it blew that story out of the water because it f- there was something about the genetic lineage that is really important to our sense of, of who we are, and he really had to reconstruct, you know, his fam- his family story and his identity in the light of that information.

    29. AH

      That's so interesting because I've heard of people learning something unfortunate, bad, about their grandparent or parent that they weren't aware of, and then internalizing that somehow they are bad.

    30. KH

      Mm-hmm.

  12. 52:12 – 1:00:17

    Nature vs Nurture, Bad Genes?; Aggression, Childhood & Males

    1. KH

      So, uh, to go back to your earlier question about how do we talk about gen- genetics in relation to these phenotypes that are really part of our identities, another thing is that I don't think anyone's bad. I don't think anyone's all good either. I think that humans are complicated, and our behaviors are complicated, and none of us can be reduced to one thing we've done, or one gene we have, or one aspect of our phenotype. But that is a really common perception, that genetics is telling some... Uh, genetics is some, telling us something essential about ourselves, and that it might turn out that that essential thing is a bad thing.

    2. AH

      Mm.

    3. KH

      Um, I write in my new book about this letter that I got from, um, a man who is in prison. He's been in prison since he was 16 for a horrific crime that he committed. It's a, you know, a sexually violent crime, um, that he committed when he was 15 years old, so still in adolescence, still a growing brain, still not an adult. In Texas, you can be tried an adult as, as 15, and he's been in prison ever since then. And he read about my lab, my... You know, our behavior genetics lab at Texas, in an issue of Texas [chuckles] Monthly magazine, which I guess the prison subscribes to, and he wrote me a letter, and it showed up in my university mailbox, and it was him saying, "I've done this thing. Like, let me tell you about myself. I've been in prison my whole adult life, even before then. Um, what do you think makes a child go bad: nature or nurture?" And that question haunted me because I could give him a technical answer, which I could say, "It's we know that nature matters. We know that nurture matters. We know that all of our behaviors are influenced by both nature and nurture." Um, but I, I think when he's writing me, he's not just asking for a science lesson, right? He's someone who's done something horrible, and he's saying, "I feel like I'm inherently a horrible person, and that's might be because of my genetics and my gen- did my, did my genetics make me bad?" And I think that's a story about genetics which has no scientific basis, but really, um, pops up in a lot of places in our culture, and it makes it very difficult to talk about because y- you know, you're here saying, "These genetic variants are expressed at this point in prenatal development, and that increases your probability of these, having, having these behaviors." But if someone hears that as, "I could be born bad," or, "I could be born broken," that's absolutely not what we're saying, but that story about genetics is really, you know, woven through our culture.

    4. AH

      ... the bad seed.

    5. KH

      The bad seed, bad to the bone, natural born killer. We have s- I think the fact that we can come up with English idioms and phrases for this so easily tells us something about the way that we think about behavior, morality, the self, and biology.

    6. AH

      I have so many questions, but I think the first one I want to ask is a developmental one.

    7. KH

      Yeah.

    8. AH

      Um, I think most of us presumably carry this idea that it's during puberty and the activation of hormones, in particular testosterone-

    9. KH

      Mm-hmm

    10. AH

      ... that takes a sweet kid and makes them a bad kid. I think that's not true.

    11. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    12. AH

      I, I, I don't believe that's true, but are there examples of, um, in the literature of kids prior to puberty being destructive in, in a sociopathic way?

    13. KH

      Yes, and that's one of the biggest predictors of, um, what people have called a life course persistent pattern of antisocial offending, which is onset before the age of 10. Um, antisocial behavior that's not just destruction of property, but also aggression against other children. And when we're thinking about aggression, oftentimes we discriminate between aggression when provoked versus proactive-

    14. AH

      Mm

    15. KH

      ... kind of cold aggression. So the worst prognosis we would, we would anticipate would be a male child who begins to aggress against other children or against animals before the age of 10 and doesn't feel guilt or remorse around that. That has kind of this cold callousness about it. That's a poor prognosticator of having well-regulated behavior into adulthood. So of those kids who have conduct disorder be- before- especially before the age of 10 with these callous emotional features, we would expect that 50 to 70 per- 5% of them will have a substance use disorder in adulthood. Um, a non-trivial percentage will have, meet criteria for antisocial personality or another personality disorder in adulthood. Um, and so again, I think we're, we're looking at a subset of children where there's clearly a heavy genetic component, there's clearly a heavy nurture component. It's very neurodevelopmental in terms of its origins and early brain development, and currently, we have v- vanishingly few effective treatments. And again, I think that's because people have maybe implicitly or unconsciously interpreted the genetic research or the biological research as these kids were born bad, not these kids were born with a set of neurodevelopmental liabilities, and we really need to figure out how to help them.

    16. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    17. KH

      You know, what are the treatments we can offer them? And when people see something as a moral failing, they're less likely to see it as a biomedical problem that we can, you know, throw the weight of science behind.

    18. AH

      What percentage of these kids younger than 10 that show this antisocial behavior are male versus female?

    19. KH

      The sex ratio varies, but sometimes it's two to one, sometimes it's as high as four, four to one, so.

    20. AH

      Wow! It can't be explained by post-utero testosterone 'cause they haven't hit puberty yet.

    21. KH

      Yeah.

    22. AH

      So it either is an or- early organizing effect in utero, or there's something on the Y chromosome-

    23. KH

      Yeah

    24. AH

      ... that creates a susceptibility.

    25. KH

      And we really don't know. Actually, one of my former postdocs is working on this now, the analysis of the X chromosome, um, because most genetic studies just w- just focus on the autosome, so just focused on the, you know, the non-sex chromosomes. Um, the other thing is we also see this in animals, that male guinea pigs are much more vulnerable to the effects of preterm birth than female guinea pigs. Again, preterm birth disrupts that same kind of GABA to glutamate, excitatory inhibitory balance that, um, we're also seeing popping up in the genetic research. Also, I've just-- I've, I have have two... Three kids. I have two girls and one boy, and even with humans, the labor and delivery nurse will be like, "Okay, well, we gotta keep him in longer 'cause those early, early boys, they struggle." They know that the male fetus seems to be more vulnerable to these insults-

    26. AH

      Mm

    27. KH

      ... than the, than the female fetus.

    28. AH

      Are the guinea pigs sociopathic? [chuckles]

    29. KH

      [chuckles] Guinea pigs-

    30. AH

      Yeah.

  13. 1:00:17 – 1:10:31

    The Original Sin; Whitman Case & Brain Tumor; Genetic Predisposition

    1. AH

      but I was about to say, um, I know we're both, uh, dog lovers. Um, there's this saying, um, "There are no bad dogs, just bad owners."

    2. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    3. AH

      But we don't say that about humans. We don't say, "Oh, you know, there are no bad people. Everyone is a good person. They're just bad parents." At some point, usually 18, we say, "You're responsible for your actions, regardless of what happened to you, regardless of the genes you came into this world with." And things, uh, shift, where people understandably are responsible for their behavior in a different way. Sounds like in Texas, it can come in earlier-

    4. KH

      Yes

    5. AH

      ... depending on the crime.

    6. KH

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      But I assume all dogs are good dogs, that they're trustworthy, that they would never harm you or another dog, maybe an animal, 'cause I've, I've seen what happens when certain dogs get a hold of certain animals, but-... I don't think we make the same assumption about people.

    8. KH

      I don't think we do either. I, I titled my new book, Original Sin, to, to really spotlight this exact thing. Uh, you know, before I was a scientist, um, the first 20 years of my life, I was an evangelical Christian, so I was raised in a very, um, fundamentalist household, Southern, praise God, and pass the ammunition in lots of ways. And, um, and, and I- in my brand of Christianity that I was raised in, which was, um, Protestant, Reformed, Calvinist, I really was raised with this idea of original sin, which is that humans are born bad, that they're born depraved, that they're born broken. And I don't believe that's true, but that's the explicit teaching of some religious traditions, and that's a religious tradition that was really foundational to our culture and our institutions. So I don't think it's a coincidence that, um, w- we talk about how there's no bad dogs, but we assume people can be inherently bad, because I think many of us were taught that, you know, from a young age, that, that all of us or some of us, you know, if they're-- if you're thinking about Calvinist theology, of some people are the elect and some people are that, that some of us are inherently bad. Um, so you can be raised with a, a religious tradition that, that really is talking about inherent depravity, and then you have a scientific tradition that's studying, well, how does genes-- how do genes affect bad things that people do? And, and then we have debates about how science should be used, and that's where I think things get really thorny and really tricky, which is: How do we apply the science without lapsing into this really ancient way of thinking? Um, which is interpreting the science as proof that we're broken, that, s- that people are broken. At the same time, I mean, going back to this letter that I received, people do horrible shit. Like, people do horrible things to each other. And I think about that man who wrote me a letter, and I can say, I think he did a horrible thing, and I think he probably... Everything I know scientifically, I think he probably had horrible luck in terms of his parents, and his genes, and his birth experiences, and his childhood experiences. And so how do we put those together? What does it mean to hold someone responsible for how they behave? I do think that we're responsible for ourselves and responsible to each other, while also keeping in mind the fact that no one created themselves from scratch. By the t- by the time he was an adult, he was already in prison for the things that had happened to him while he was still technically a child. I wrote this book, my new book, because I was really attempting to, to wrestle through that question.

    9. AH

      I think I'm getting this, this story right. It's a true story, uh, that was, uh, told by our former director of neurosciences at Stanford, Bill Newsome, um, about the guy who went up in the tower at UT Austin-

    10. KH

      Yes. Uh-huh

    11. AH

      ... and shot a bunch of people-

    12. KH

      The tower shooter

    13. AH

      ... killed them. The tower shooter, I think he was eventually taken out by a security guard. The remarkable thing about the story is, at least the way I remember it, is that this guy knew something was wrong with him, thought that the site of the problem was in his brain, was asking people to look at his brain and help him. I think I'm getting this right.

    14. KH

      Yes.

    15. AH

      We'll double-check. Um, and then said, at the point where he realized he was gonna go through with this thing, with this act, that he wanted them to look at his brain, and it turned out he had a tumor in a, I think it was some temporal lobe region that-

    16. KH

      It was amygdala. It's amyg-

    17. AH

      It was, oh, it was, it was actually in the, in the amygdala. So you know the story clearly.

    18. KH

      Yeah, yeah.

    19. AH

      Uh, I- and it's where you work.

    20. KH

      Yes.

    21. AH

      Um, fortunately, occurred long before you worked. I mean, terrible that it happened at all, but in this age of school shooters and public massacres, right? People just, you know, going up into a Vegas hotel window and, you know, hosing people with bullets. Th- this case is a unique one because the guy knew there was something wrong with him, want- in some sense, wanted help, but you can s- kind of create this picture of, you know, um, angel-devil conversations in his head between neural circuitry that's saying, "Don't do this. Don't do this. Ask for help, and do this. Do this."

    22. KH

      Yeah.

    23. AH

      And, um, I mean, it's like the cartoon or movie with the angel and the devil-

    24. KH

      Yeah

    25. AH

      ... on the, on the shoulder or in each ear. What are we to make of that?

    26. KH

      Yeah. Gosh, the Whitman case is so- it's so interesting 'cause he did, um, say that he-- there was something wrong with him. He did ask for help. Um, when- after he died, the state of Texas ordered a autopsy, and, um, they found that they had this tumor, and the whole thing was basically labeled like, um, almost like a natural disaster had hur- had occurred.

    27. AH

      Mm.

    28. KH

      So the, the report talks about, like, the catastrophe or the, you know, the, this incident that happened. Um, so the, they ultimately, when, when trying to make sense of Whitman's shooting people from the tower, uh, at Texas, took what wh- some philosophers have called this objective view. So basically, like, he... They weren't viewing him as an agent who's choosing, who's doing something in the realm of good or bad, a moral failing. They were viewing him as kind of a machine that's gone haywire, right? He got a tumor in his amygdala, and he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't had this tumor.... how would they have made sense of his behavior if he hadn't asked for a brain autopsy, if they didn't know about this tumor? How many other people have something going on with them in a specific location that, um, if we knew about it, might help us understand how this behavior came across? I, uh, I write in my book this story of this Dutch family, where basically all the women in the family were functioning okay, but half the men in the family were-- one raped his sister, one stabbed his boss with a pitchfork, one, multiple- one committed arson, multiple of the men were in prison. And at some point, I guess one of the women was like: "Y'all, you have to figure out what's going on with the men in our family. Like, this is too much to be a coincidence." And what they found is that on the X chromosome, they had inherited a rare mutation in the MAOA gene. So MAOA is an enzyme that degrades monoamines, that, you know, regulate how your neurons are talking to one another. And women have two X chromosomes, so if they inherit a bad version, there's still the other version, whereas men only have one X, and so from their mom, they got a fifty/fifty shot. Am I gonna get the, the mutated version or the non-mutated version? I mean, I find this study fascinating on so many levels, right? That the single letter change in your DNA could have this massive effect on your behavior, but also that all of these men were in the criminal justice system and had not been obviously flagged as something organic or biological or mental illness going on with them. And later, they-- there was another group that, um, found this, this, you know, ostensibly rare mutation in several other impulsively aggressive boys that had been referred to their hospital. And they, they ended their scientific paper on what I find one of the most haunting notes in the scientific literature, which is: Is this actually rare, or is it that when we're faced with people doing horrible things, we never even stop to look for what might be causing it from a genetic or neurobiological, from organic way? Which I, I think that's a really, really chilling thought. Um, so, uh, how do we... You know, in the absence-- I think the question that you're asking is an important one, which is, in the absence of some smoking gun, you know, the mutated gene, the amygdalar tumor, how do we put together our knowledge as scientists, as people who read the science, that, yes, it's genes, yes, it's environment, yes, it goes into the behavior. And also, we're humans. We have this, m- this outrage and this, naturally, this blame towards people that harm each other. How do we, as humans, hold both of those truths at the same time? I think that's the real challenge.

    29. AH

      I

  14. 1:10:31 – 1:21:03

    Free Will; Genes & Moral Judgement; Skillful Care for Kids; Social Cooperation

    1. AH

      think once somebody is harmed, our empathy shifts to the victim-

    2. KH

      Yes. Mm-hmm

    3. AH

      ... or victims-

    4. KH

      Yes

    5. AH

      ... in a way that occludes our, maybe even at times, depending on how close we are to the victims or how much we identify with it, that occludes our, um, even care.

    6. KH

      Yes.

    7. AH

      That, like, like, okay, this guy-

    8. KH

      Our benevolent concern for them.

    9. AH

      This guy went up on this... I'm describing it historically. This guy went up on this tower, killed two people. The security guard eventually got him. But the, you know, the parent of that kid that was-

    10. KH

      Mm-hmm

    11. AH

      ... just walking to class or, you know, the young woman who was, you know, freshman year or whatever, you know-

    12. KH

      Yeah

    13. AH

      ... she's dead now.

    14. KH

      Yeah.

    15. AH

      She's gone.

    16. KH

      Yes.

    17. AH

      And so I think that in a, in a kinda healthy way, not kind of, in a healthy way, we just, we think, "The hell with that guy. One less-- Glad they killed him." People will say that, right? People will say that. And I'm, I'm not necessarily... Yeah, I guess in some sense, if I just stand back and my reflexive response is like, "This guy killed a lot of people." I understand he was driven to it. He was stricken with something, and I, the, the, um, but it's hard for me to get to, "Okay, well, there's a genetic thing that set him up from a, a glioma in the amygdala, of all places. Like, he, he- bad luck." But because we assume that people can intervene in their own behavior, this gets down to kind of free will-type-

    18. KH

      Yes

    19. AH

      ... stuff that-

    20. KH

      Yeah

    21. AH

      ... my colleague, Robert Sapolsky-

    22. KH

      Yeah

    23. AH

      ... you know, he'll argue t- till the end of time-

    24. KH

      That we don't have it

    25. AH

      ... that there's no free will-

    26. KH

      That's what we- [chuckles]

    27. AH

      ... which is a frustrating one for, for many of us, but, you know, he's a hell of a smart guy. You know, I think that the, the issue for many people is that genes are fairly far upstream from behavior.

    28. KH

      Yes.

    29. AH

      You know, if I said, "Okay, there was this guy down in, uh, you know, Los Angeles, and, you know, he, I don't know, he, he, he got rabies from a dog he was trying to save from the LA River, and then three days later-

    30. KH

      Yes

  15. 1:21:03 – 1:25:21

    Breaking the Cycle; Genetic Recombination & Differences; Identity

    1. AH

      I'm letting that sink in. Uh, everything you say, uh, resonates, and I therefore am updating my, uh, hypothesis. Um, uh, again, just a hypothesis that people have an inherent desire to stop the progression of the bad seed. I'm intentionally using this language-

    2. KH

      Yeah.

    3. AH

      ... like we wanna-

    4. KH

      Yeah.

    5. AH

      Like, if that person is-- Sure, stuff happened to them, but guess what? Stuff happened to them 'cause their parents were bad, and guess what? They're bad 'cause their parents were bad, and, like, those are-- they're a bad seed. At the extremes, of course. I'm just-

    6. KH

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      I also think, because based on your dog example of adopting puppies from, um, you know, fighting parents, uh, that in that example, there is this notion that with the appropriate amount of love and care, that we can rescue them, but also we can choose whether or not they have puppies.

    8. KH

      Yeah.

    9. AH

      So I do think that there is this idea that, like, if we see children in really horrible circumstances, that I think it's a very human, hardwired thing that we can rescue the lineage.

    10. KH

      Mm.

    11. AH

      Yeah, that we can rescue lineage. I mean, one thing that's always fascinated me and, and, um, encouraged me is I think, yes, there's lots of, uh, you know, transgenerational trauma, whether or not it's purely through genes or through experience is, is still debated, but probably both. Um, but that also, in a single generation, you know, the, the child of a-- of severe alcoholics who makes the choice not to drink or to quit drinking, to then pair with somebody who can have a healthy relationship to alcohol-

    12. KH

      They're cycle breakers.

    13. AH

      They, they're cycle breakers. So you can br-- I think we understand this without understanding genetics.

    14. KH

      Yeah.

    15. AH

      Like, we don't have to take a class and understand Mendelian genetics, you know, [chuckles] -

    16. KH

      Mm-hmm

    17. AH

      ... uh, to understand that in one generation, something can start or stop in a family line.

    18. KH

      Yeah. Yeah.

    19. AH

      And I think most people are wise to the idea that family lines no longer exist in small tribes. I mean, you see shows like Succession, right? Where it's over like, "Oh, let's talk about the propagation of, of sociopathic, uh, ish-

    20. KH

      [chuckles]

    21. AH

      ... narcissistic, uh, traits."

    22. KH

      They were not trying to be cycle breakers.

    23. AH

      No, they-

    24. KH

      Yeah

    25. AH

      ... they were trying to maintain the cycle that had fed them-

    26. KH

      Yes

    27. AH

      ... in their, in their, you know-

    28. KH

      Yeah

    29. AH

      ... niche.

    30. KH

      I mean, I think the other thing w- with regards to cycle breakers is also people, people tend to think of genetics in terms of how it makes you like your parents. You know, you got your genes from your parents. But the other thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is genes recombine, right? You are not just like your dad or like your mom. You are a random draw of all the potential draws that you could have gotten from their genotypes. And so even within a family with the same parents, you see tons of differences. I have three kids, and they are different personalities, definitely [chuckles] different risks for addiction and conduct disorder problems across the three of them. And so I think it's a mistake to think of lineage as genes being an unbroken lineage, because our genes are getting recombined in these novel ways with every generation.

  16. 1:25:21 – 1:27:01

    Sponsor: Our Place

    1. AH

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  17. 1:27:01 – 1:36:15

    Status, Dominance, Science; Positive Attributes of Negative Traits

    1. AH

      I like to believe that despite the fact that humans have a, you know, some selfish wiring, that we are all inherently good, can be drawn toward goodness, can, um, i- in the right conditions, a- and with the right amount of effort, can direct-

    2. KH

      Mm-hmm

    3. AH

      ... ourselves in ways that are really beneficial, learn from mistakes, be benevolent, a- all that. So I, I think I believe that. I think most people believe that. We want to believe that.

    4. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    5. AH

      If we step a little bit away from the extremes of, like, severe psychopathology and sociopathy and... You know, some people are more, um, mercenary than others.

    6. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    7. AH

      And our society, in certain careers, tends to favor that. When I was coming up in science, I don't know what it was like in psychology, but there was this cohort of scientists, neuroscientists in New York. They were called the New York Neuroscience Mafia.

    8. KH

      [laughing]

    9. AH

      One of them... Two of them have Nobel Prizes. I-

    10. KH

      [laughing]

    11. AH

      ... I'm friendly with these guys. Um, but you'd go to meetings, and, like, they would hold court in a way that was, it was all about them. It was all about their displays. They're brilliant. They've, they've done brilliant work. Um, but for a lot of people coming up, it was sort of a pressure test, like, "Do you think we could make it in this field? Like, we're gonna have to either wait till these guys die or, you know, somehow integrate with this scene."

    12. KH

      Yeah. Yeah.

    13. AH

      And they would pick favorites, and they would decide who was... who they'd go to drinks with, and who- I mean, it was, it was very hierarchical, you know?

    14. KH

      Every scientific field is like this [laughing] .

    15. AH

      Yeah, okay, good.

    16. KH

      [laughing]

    17. AH

      Okay. All right, so I'm both relieved and dismayed that every-

    18. KH

      [laughing]

    19. AH

      ... field is like that, and, um, very different than the West Coast version of it, 'cause we are a little softer on the West Coast, but on the West Coast, there was a more cryptic version of it.

    20. KH

      Yeah. Southerners are like that, too.

    21. AH

      Oh, is that right?

    22. KH

      It's, it's not that they aren't mercenary, it's that they hide it [laughing] -

    23. AH

      Mm

    24. KH

      ... right, under a, under a blanket of softness.

    25. AH

      Mm-hmm. Is the Midwest the only place where people are truly decent? [laughing]

    26. KH

      Have you ever seen that thing where it's like, it divides the country into quadrants, and it's like, "acts mean, is mean," like, "acts nice, is mean," that's the South.

    27. AH

      Okay.

    28. KH

      And then I think it's the Pacific Northwest is, "acts nice, is nice," but I d- I don't know about the Midwest, but y-

    29. AH

      What was California?

    30. KH

      I don't remember. [laughing]

  18. 1:36:15 – 1:40:36

    Relational Aggression & Girls; Male-Female Differences & Conflict

    1. AH

      don't know what it is for girls. I, I mean, I have a sister, and I mean, she's a very, very, very kind person. Um, and I was always shocked the way that, um, girls treated one another. So they can be really mean.

    2. KH

      Girls can be very mean.

    3. AH

      They can be really mean. [chuckles]

    4. KH

      Yeah, yeah.

    5. AH

      You know?

    6. KH

      I mean, relational aggression, there's, there's literature on this. You know, when we talk about aggression, we so often think in terms of physical aggression. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm punching you, I'm stabbing you, I'm hurting you. You know, relational aggression, where you're destroying someone's reputation or social standing or making them feel isolated, is just as painful as physical aggression, if not more so. I mean, there's few things that humans are more attuned to than that feeling of, "Oh, am I being pushed out of the group?" Right? 'Cause that means, like, ancestrally, that means death. And so what we see research is that the same genes that predict physical aggression in boys predict relational aggression in girls, and relational aggression can be every bit as damaging, but I think also kind of bewildering to the adults around it. Like, it's more covert, right?

    7. AH

      Mm.

    8. KH

      And it's hard to, to see it. I was shocked at how early that started.

    9. AH

      Hmm.

    10. KH

      I thought it was gonna be something I dealt with with my daughter when she got to be a teenager. Mm-mm, four years old.... Ellery said this, and, you know, Lily isn't my friend anymore. And I met with her preschool teacher, and I was like, "What is going on?" And she was like, "This is what four-year-old girls do. They make relationship conflict, and then they repair relationship conflict, and they do it all the time, every day, and that is why they are so much less bewildered by repairing relationship conflict than your average teenage boy is by the time they reach adolescence." And I was just completely thrown [chuckles] and fascinated by this experience.

    11. AH

      Yeah, boys sort it out in-

    12. KH

      Differently

    13. AH

      ... such primitive ways. I mean, I can remember dirt clod wars, where-

    14. KH

      [chuckles]

    15. AH

      ... somebody broke the fundamental rule, which is you can't throw rocks. They threw a rock, then someone gets upset, then they get into a, a, a scrap, and then sometimes somebody went home.

    16. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    17. AH

      And then, but the longest it lasted in terms of a-

    18. KH

      Mm

    19. AH

      ... fracture in the group or the relationship was, like, a day-

    20. KH

      Yeah

    21. AH

      ... maximum.

    22. KH

      Yeah.

    23. AH

      And then we'd just kind of forget about it.

    24. KH

      Yeah.

    25. AH

      Yeah, and it was kind of understood that someone was gonna push the boundaries.

    26. KH

      I'm not completely confident that I'm remembering this study correctly, so if you're on, you know, if your listeners are like, "No, Paige, you got this wrong," but I remember hearing about a study that was about marital conflict, where they had, um, married partners keep diaries of their interactions, and then also, I think, maybe like spit into a tube every morning and evening. And they looked at how long did men's cortisol remain elevated after an argument compared to the wives' cortisol. It was basically like they had the fight, his spiked up, and then it went down, like classic Trier curve of tsh. And hers was elevated for, like, 24 hours afterwards. And there, if you think about what that means for their psychological sense of what's happening in the relationship, she's like: I'm still amped about this. And he's like: What are you talking about? Like, we had that fight, and then my cortisol... Like, we're over it, right? So I do think there's some interesting sex differences in the relationship between our physiological arousal and our conflict styles and just the timeline that that plays out.

    27. AH

      Fascinating. Um, yeah, so many, uh, ideas [chuckles] and, uh-

    28. KH

      You're thinking of all the examples. [laughs]

    29. AH

      Uh, well, I'm thinking of some examples, and, um, yeah, and, and of course, what the, uh, what the evolutionary benefit is of those-

    30. KH

      Yeah

  19. 1:40:36 – 1:45:00

    Genes, Boys vs Girls, Impulse Control

    1. AH

      I think it's only fair that, uh, I ask about, you know, we talked about pathology as expressed in boys, and it always seems to come out as aggressive violence, um, e- et cetera. Um, in girls, you're saying that it, uh, the social dynamics, um, can be benevolent, right? Because you did say conflict and repair.

    2. KH

      Yeah.

    3. AH

      That sounds healthy.

    4. KH

      Yeah.

    5. AH

      But in terms of genes that predispose for addiction, um, do those show up differently in girls? Is it... You know, I think the assumption that some people have is like, "Oh, it's always gonna be promiscuity," but what- nowadays, especially because of access to prescription drugs... I mean, I was told this by a former guest, Keith Humphreys. You know, if you look at addiction, men and women, it, it tended to lean more towards men than women until you get to prescription drugs. Because there's something, I don't know, less seedy?

    6. KH

      The social opportunity is different.

    7. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    8. KH

      Yeah. Yeah, I mean, w- what we s- see in the twin studies and the adoption studies and then also in the newer studies where we're looking directly at people's DNA, is that the manifestations of at least the genes we've discovered so far are remarkably consistent between men and women.

    9. AH

      Hmm.

    10. KH

      So if you have, you know, a, a genetic liability towards disinhibition, problems with self-regulation, that can manifest as alcohol use, that can manifest as aggression and antisocial behavior, but it- there aren't really strongly sex-typed manifestations, where it always looks like this in, in women and always looks like this in men. You know, we haven't discovered all the genes, um, and we haven't looked at the sex chromosomes yet, so there might be something different. But, um, the theory so far that seems to have the best evidence [chuckles] is that the underlying etiology is remarkably consistent across men and women, and it's the m- just really the mean that differs between men and women. So you just get higher rates of all of these behaviors in men, but the underlying disposition is really similar across the sexes.

    11. AH

      So if we were to say sensation-seeking-

    12. KH

      Yeah

    13. AH

      ... novelty-seeking, equally distributed.

    14. KH

      Yeah.

    15. AH

      But men act out more.

    16. KH

      Yeah. So what you see is that men show slightly higher sensation-seeking, but the genes that predispose a man towards sensation-seeking seem to be similar in women. Um, a, if a woman has a fraternal twin who's a boy, his sensation-seeking will predict hers just as well as if she had a twin sister, so similar genes, just a mean shift. What you see is that actually in adolescence, boys and girls have very similar trajectories of sensation-seeking. Where they differ is in the evolution of their inhibitory control, so girls mature in terms of their im- impulse control faster than boys do. We did a study a cou- maybe 10 years ago now. It was basically, it took until men around the age of 24, until around the age of 24, to be as controlled as your average 15-year-old girl.... was. There's, like, a decade-long gap in the, the maturation of impulse control. You're nodding-

    17. AH

      That tracks.

    18. KH

      -and I used to be a 15-year-old boy. [laughing]

    19. AH

      [chuckles] I mean, I- yeah, that tracks. I think the point is that, um, men develop more slowly.

    20. KH

      Yeah.

    21. AH

      But presumably they catch up, but then they die earlier, so.

    22. KH

      Well, they go through puberty later-

    23. AH

      Mm-hmm

    24. KH

      ... and they have a more extended, you know, increase up to having adult levels of reproductive hormones. I mean, men's testosterone is increasing. Puberty is over, but their testosterone is still going up through their teen years and into their 20s. Um, and they die earlier, but they, they- women have that long, you know, they're al- they're alive, but they're not healthy for, you know, on average, at the end of their life. Like, their health-- the difference in health span is less different than lifespan, as you know. So there's, um, there's something interesting about the ways in which men seem to be sl- slower developing in uterus. They're, they're getting to reproductive maturity later, and they're getting to adult levels of personality later.

    25. AH

      We need more patience.

    26. KH

      [laughing]

    27. AH

      Women are all thinking, "We've given you enough patience," you know? Uh, "We require more patience"-

    28. KH

      Mm-hmm

    29. AH

      ... that's, that's the right phrasing. Let's talk

  20. 1:45:00 – 1:51:29

    Behavior Punishment vs Rewards, Responsibility

    1. AH

      about punishment.

    2. KH

      Yeah.

    3. AH

      Uh, but maybe also talk about rewarding good behavior. Um, a while back, I think it was Zimbardo at Stanford, was talking about, you know, that we're everyday heroes, you know, or that we were supposed to start orienting towards, you know, rewarding the everyday heroes of life. This was kind of a thing in the two th- early 2000s, as I recall, and there's the positive psychology notion, and I feel like psychology is kind of split into dark and light. The people who like to look at the dark stuff versus the light, and-

    4. KH

      Oh, that's probably true

    5. AH

      ... we call it morality, but I'm an outsider. I don't know, but, um, we spend a lot of time thinking about whether and how we should punish people.

    6. KH

      Mm.

    7. AH

      And of course, at the extremes, it's obvious, right? The, the, the legal- to the legal system, it's obvious, but the middle ground is the interesting ground. Penalty boxing people, um, maybe not even with social isolation, but, you know, who we reward and place into positions of leadership. I mean, this is very salient right now. Um, and it comes with a lot of assigning of labels about psychopathology from people that may or may not be qualified to assign those labels, right? [chuckles]

    8. KH

      Yeah.

    9. AH

      Um, how do you think about the genetic and evolutionary, but also the societal labels of punishment and forgiveness?

    10. KH

      Yeah. Oh, such a good question. So first of all, let's just define punishment, 'cause that actually can mean different things to different people. So as a, you know, a psychologist, I think about punishment is, um, applying an aversive stimulus in an attempt to reduce the frequency of a behavior, right? So it's, the rat is in its Skinner box, and every time it goes into this area, you give it a shock, and that's a punishment to make it-

    11. AH

      Mm

    12. KH

      ... not go into this area of the box.

    13. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    14. KH

      If you have a child, punishment is, "You're gonna be in time out," or, "I'm gonna spank you. I'm gonna give you some sort of thing that I know you're not gonna like," um, in order to try to reduce the frequency of this behavior. From psychology, we know from decades of evidence that punishing bad behavior doesn't work nearly as well for shaping behavior as rewarding the behavior that you want, right? So if you reward a rat for pressing a lever, it'll do that all day long. If you give a rat alcohol every time it presses a bar, and then you stop mid-experiment, and you start shocking it, some rats will stop pressing the bar, and other rats will actually increase their rate of behavior. They'll be like, "Maybe this time. Maybe this time it'll be..." It's the same thing with kids, right? We know from, uh, you know, all of our research on corporal punishment that children who are spanked do not behave better than children who aren't spanked, and if anything, they behave worse. So you, you've had Dr. Becky Kennedy on here. You know, she has been, I think, so influential in that you need to have consequences, but attempting to l- to, um, help your child behave b- better through harshness is, is on average gonna be a losing strategy. And then I think you said, you know, it does- uh, you know, maybe, uh, at the extremes with the criminal justice system, but we also see that in the criminal justice system, that, um, increasing the harshness of criminal penalties doesn't predict a decline in crime. The thing that seems to predict it is the likelihood of getting caught and having other potential opportunities to get the rewards that you want in your social structure. But just increasing penalties for crime doesn't, on average, reduce crime. Um, so I... You know, whether we're talking about rats or children or prisoners, adding more harshness is not, we know, the, the most effective way to get the behaviors that we want. This is also true back-- going back to dogs, right? Like, what is the best dog training method? It's never harshly punishing them or applying pain for behavior you don't want, right? It's firmness, boundaries, but rewarding the behavior that you do want, and also in the context of building, you know, trust in a relationship with your dog. So I feel like no luck doesn't obviate responsibility. Like, we are still responsible for the people that we are, even though we're shaped by factors that aren't in control. But in terms of holding people responsible-... punishing them harshly doesn't bring about what we really want, other than just satisfying that retributive itch. Um, it's giving them opportunities in the reward structure to be rewarded by the things we do want, that we, we know is the most effective strategy, um, all in all. So I think the slide that people make is, if someone's responsible, if someone had agency, then they deserve to be punished. And what I'm trying to, to separate is those two things. Can someone be responsible? They had agency, we wanna hold them accountable, but how do we do that without immediately jumping to, "And so therefore, they deserve to suffer, and so therefore, they deserve to hurt?" And there's no, like, one-size magic bullet to making that happen, right? Like, the, you know, that's how do we relate to each other as people. But as a mother, my strategy with my own kids has been really heavily influenced by thinking about, like, punishment is not the most effective way. That doesn't mean we live in a no-- a there's-no-rules, anything-goes household, right? Like, we have consequences, we have accountability, we have boundaries, but there's always space to say, "Reflect on what you did. Reflect on what needs to be different for your behavior to be different in the future, and how can we create an environment that helps you grow, helps you-- helps that happen?" I'm pretty anti-punishment. I'm pro-responsibility and pretty anti-punishment as a way of holding each other responsible.

  21. 1:51:29 – 1:53:03

    Sponsor: Helix Sleep

    1. AH

      I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers, and when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is, all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask you questions such as, "Do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach?" Maybe you know, maybe you don't. "Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night?" Things of that sort. You answer those questions, and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K, mattress. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four years now, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to twenty-seven percent off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with TrueMed, which allows you to use your HSA/FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to twenty-seven percent off.

  22. 1:53:03 – 2:00:01

    Accountability; Suffering, Cancel Culture & Punishment

    1. AH

      In the last few years, there's been a, a real shift, it seems, um, in how we hold people accountable for their behavior in teen years, and I think it's with all the cameras and everything. There have been a few examples, for instance, of text message threads were unearthed of people who are now in their twenties and thirties from their teen years. You know, I think in one instance, it was a group of friends, and people were making, um, [lips smack] uh, racist comments, and then I think the ultimate decision was, okay, if this person apologized, their whole life shouldn't be ruined on the basis of a comment made, you know, eh, earlier, uh, you know, five, six years earlier in a different context, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's how it moved forward. But there were people calling for, like: "Hey, this person is a racist. They should be, um, forbidden from having a government job."

    2. KH

      Hmm.

    3. AH

      And I think it, it played out pretty quickly, but, um, nowadays with social media, everyone can chime in. So we're not really talking about courtroom decision, we're talking about court of public opinion.

    4. KH

      Yeah.

    5. AH

      A different example, perhaps, uh, that I'd like your thoughts on is, um, like, Kanye had, l- a year or two ago, made a bunch of really anti-Semitic remarks. He was wearing s- SWAT stick- T-shirt-

    6. KH

      Mm-hmm

    7. AH

      ... and then recently published an apology. He said he was sorry, he wasn't in, you know, in the right state of mind, et cetera. He's talked about some, uh, mental health challenges and things of that sort, and he seems to be largely forgiven. Um, at least that seems to be the, the sentiment. Now, of course, he also brings something that a, a lot of people want, which is music that people, uh, love to hear. So there's always this kind of value add, value subtraction thing when we punish people, versus the anonymous person, right?

    8. KH

      Yeah.

    9. AH

      Um, what are the-- they're not doing anything for people, so they're more, uh, more quick to just say, "Well, just punish them. Lock them away." It's fascinating because we u- even though these are public-facing examples, we use these as a template for how to deal with, you know, someone who, you know, got too drunk at the dorm party on Friday and said something really stupid-

    10. KH

      Mm

    11. AH

      ... and you got a bunch of offended people. Do you kick them out of school? Maybe, or her. Or do you sit them down and go, "Hey, that was really insensitive," and they have to do a bunch of sensitivity training and, you know, and then you go, "Okay," like, "they're healed," [chuckles] you know?

    12. KH

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      I mean...

    14. KH

      Yeah, I mean-

    15. AH

      I don't have any answers to this, but this is how it seems to play out in the real world. It's sort of like very salient examples, not at the super extremes. I mean, racism's bad, but he didn't kill anyone, so then the, the punishment is either, do we keep him or do we isolate him? And then what happens does set the course of what happens at, at, um, more everyday levels.

    16. KH

      So I think what you're pointing to-... is America is an incredibly punitive, retributive culture. There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they see someone suffer, if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer.

    17. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    18. KH

      So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have anterior insula. It's like you're being shocked, too, unless that person is first portrayed as violating some moral or social norm, in which case, dopamine, you get a reward out of seeing that person punished. I think that it is a lust, just as much as lust for substances or lust for sexual partners. It is a desire. People want to see people punished. Nietzsche was an amazing observer of human nature before there was a scientific psychology, and he wrote about how, what- why do we use, um, monetary terms to describe people being punished? Pay their debt to society.

    19. AH

      Mm.

    20. KH

      People shouldn't get off scot-free. Scot is a word for tax. Um, what is that? And what he theorized is that what you're being paid back with is the pleasure of seeing a fellow human hurt. You hurt someone, and we can't undo that hurt. We can't magic it away. How does n- them being punished pay their debt to society? And he wrote, "Maybe it's that cruelty is a currency, and that all of us have a primitive desire to be the punisher, and that's what's being repaid." Blew my mind when I was reading it, and now that I see it, I see that everywhere. I think we see that in cancel culture mobs. I think we see that in politics. I think we see, um, in America, a real lust to make other people suffer, and finding ways that they're guilty, that allows us to feel entitled to that pleasure of punishing them, or entitled to that pleasure of witnessing them being punished, is absolutely runs through our culture, top to bottom, both sides of the political spectrum. One of my favorite books that I read when I was, when I was writing my book is this book called, um, One of Us, and it's about the Norwegian mass shooter who shot all of those children at a, a summer camp-

    21. AH

      Mm

    22. KH

      ... who was someone who was afflicted with terrible luck. From the time he was a child, he was described as someone who, um, had a temper, who was socially odd. His mother was very unstable. A lot of nature and nurture and circumstance conspired. And during his trial, they had this whole debate about, is he insane? Is he not insane? And they had a psychologist who gave testimony, and he said, "No matter what's happening, he's one of us. He's part of our society, so how are we going to deal with him without exiling him, throwing away the key?" And all of the examples that you described are people trying to make this decision about, like, who do we keep in our group? Do they have enough for us that it's worth keeping them, and who do we get to exile and then feel entitled to feel the pleasure of watching them suffer? And I think that's a fundamentally un- inhuman way to look at our... I think that we are a society, and that means everyone, even people who do terrible, terrible things, they're still one of us. They're still, they're still one of God's creatures. They're still part of, part of our human circle. Um, but how do we shift our culture away from this glee at punishment? I don't know. I, I think it's, I think it's... You wanna talk about sin? I think, I think that's the original sin of American culture, is our delight in punitiveness.

  23. 2:00:01 – 2:08:16

    Life Energy & Punishment, Prison

    1. AH

      Incredible. Um, incredibly sad, um, incredibly important, and an incredible opportunity for us, hopefully, to navigate out of what seems to be one of the deeper troughs of this that we've been in, at least since I've been alive.

    2. KH

      Yes. Mm-hmm.

    3. AH

      I wanna just ask about this cruelty currency-

    4. KH

      Yeah

    5. AH

      ... 'cause I, um, I learned a long time ago that one needs to be very careful about coming up with evolutionary just-so stories.

    6. KH

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      It's so easy to do.

    8. KH

      Yes.

    9. AH

      It's so seductive, and it can be oh-so wrong. [chuckles] So I, I, with that, um, stated, you know, you said that if somebody observes somebody else being harmed, it activates areas of the brain that are associated with empathy and presumably a surge of, of, uh, hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel bad.

    10. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    11. AH

      If that person was a perpetrator, and we're aware of that, then it feels good. It's, it's not just neutral, it's the-

    12. KH

      Right

    13. AH

      ... it's the in-

    14. KH

      Yes

    15. AH

      ... it's the inverse of that. And then you said that Nietzsche described it as a cruelty currency, and I've been wondering about something, and forgive me, I, I don't know if I can articulate this very well, 'cause I haven't thought about it out loud.

    16. KH

      Just think through it.

    17. AH

      If we return to the idea that every species, including our own, wants to make more of itself, care for its young, and propagate, that there's a, th- there are some forces there, clearly. I've often thought about dopamine as the universal currency of reward, and certainly-

    18. KH

      Mm-hmm

    19. AH

      ... there are other chemical currencies of punishment, and maybe drops in dopamine are punishment, and increases or, and et cetera. Uh, overly simplified, but I think we have enough data to support those statements. And then I think about how we punish people, and let's think about, um, on a, on a hockey rink, you put someone in a penalty box.

    20. KH

      Yeah.

    21. AH

      You take them out of play.

    22. KH

      Yeah.

    23. AH

      Um, in society, somebody could be canceled, either permanently or they're- they gotta, like, take a break.

    24. KH

      Yeah.

    25. AH

      Or somebody's put in jail.... they're taken out of society.

    26. KH

      Yeah.

    27. AH

      Several examples came up already today of people who, um, were able to propagate their genes or not propagate their genes, um, depending on honest, like finding a partner, making the decision about, you know, consciously or unconsciously, their genetics, their personality, et cetera, and, "Okay, I'm gonna create children with this person. I'm gonna create new life," versus the IVF doc who cheated in one of the most egregious examples I've ever heard, um, creating new life.

    28. KH

      Yeah.

    29. AH

      And I think about maybe the currency that is dopamine is about energy and the opportunity to create more life.

    30. KH

      Mm.

  24. 2:08:16 – 2:16:11

    Backward vs Forward-Looking Justice; Forgiveness, Retribution, Power, Choice

    1. AH

      forgive me for telling yet another story. I've been reading a, a history of the counterculture movement in, in mostly in California recently.

    2. KH

      Oh, interesting.

    3. AH

      But also the, the human evolu- the human psychology evolution movement, and, and it takes us to Big Sur inevitably.

    4. KH

      Yeah.

    5. AH

      Um, and some interesting, Joseph Campbell was there and, and worked there and wrote there, but Hunter Thompson-

    6. KH

      Mm-hmm

    7. AH

      ... was a security guard up there at a, a-

    8. KH

      A security guard? [chuckles]

    9. AH

      Yeah, he at 20 years old, he was hired as a security guard 'cause he had a gun, and he could keep order on, uh, this place where people would come to use the baths, and it was, it wasn't quite counterculture yet. But there's a story, and I believe it's true, that, um, uh, he was making some homophobic remarks, and there were some gay bodybuilders up from Venice, California. So the group decided what his punishment would be. His punishment would be that these bodybuilders were gonna hold him over the cliffs above the ocean-

    10. KH

      [chuckles]

    11. AH

      ... which is maybe 300, 400 feet to his drop-

    12. KH

      Oh, my God

    13. AH

      ... until he renounced homophobia.

    14. KH

      Uh-huh.

    15. AH

      Which eventually he did.

    16. KH

      Yeah.

    17. AH

      And then they let him back on, and then he was able to live on and work, and, like, they're like, "Okay, he's cured," you know?

    18. KH

      Yeah.

    19. AH

      So, I mean, it's a ridiculous example. On the other hand, everyone participated in this decision.

    20. KH

      Mm-hmm.

    21. AH

      And apparently, he was very frightened, and I don't know, I didn't know him, but apparently, he adjusted at least his behavior.

    22. KH

      Yeah.

    23. AH

      Kind of an interesting, silly-

    24. KH

      Yeah

    25. AH

      ... you know, funny enough, but serious enough example. Nowadays, it would be ve- very different, right? He would've lost his job, and no amount of apology would've rescued his job, which on the one hand, you could say, "Okay, well, he's homophobic. He's-" they didn't want anyone homophobic working there. On the other hand, the opportunity to potentially convert his thinking is lost, and so I think that's what you're talking about, that there are certain forms of punishment that give the opportunity not just to protect others, but to, um, to really help people evolve their moral concept.

    26. KH

      Yes. I think sometimes people talk about this as the difference between a backward-looking conception of justice versus a forward-looking conception of justice. So a backward-looking conception of justice, you're, you are often caught in this, again, this rescue blame trap, which is, um: Does he deserve to pun- be punished, or maybe he doesn't deserve to be punished that badly because of these extenu- extenuating circumstances. Oh, but he did this horrible thing. He made these homophobic con- co- um, comments. Whereas a forward-looking conception of justice is, given that we are, are where we are today, and given the harm that he has caused, and given the brain and the body that he has, how do we best maximize our chances of other people being protected from future harm and him changing, him having a... I- if even if he doesn't change in his heart of hearts, changing the words that come out of his mouth, taking responsibility for what he says? The rule in my house with my kids is, "You're not allowed to tell me about what your brother did. Your brother will tell me about what your brother did, and you'll tell me about what you did. And then we're gonna talk about what you want to happen in the future, and then we're gonna talk about what everyone needs to do so that we can not have this argument." But this constant, like, attempt to figure out, like, how much does he deserve to hurt? I feel like is a, it's, it's an abyss. You know, you just drown in it, and you drown in it with yourself, too. Like, you- if you've made comments that you regret yourself, like, how much do I deserve to be punished for that versus, but I can remember all the extenuating circumstances. No, it's what do I need to do better in the future, and what do other people need to know that they are safe around me now? Which might be, you know, might be a penalty box, but, you know, thinking about punishment not as... Again, this is- it's not about some, you know, justice for- attempt to weigh the scales in the past. It's about how do we make things better in the future? How do we keep people safe and repair things in the future?

    27. AH

      Before moving to reward, uh, one thing that occurs to me is people seem to integrate what people deserve now on the backdrop of all the shit they had to put up with in the past.

    28. KH

      Yeah.

    29. AH

      Not just from that person. I feel like we, uh, we're all integrating on the backdrop of how we were treated, um, how much pain and frustration we've had to endure, and that weaves in with how much forgiveness we have for when people screw up-

    30. KH

      Mm

  25. 2:16:11 – 2:21:59

    Reward, Unfairness & Inequality

    1. AH

      Okay, reward. [laughing] Um, the good stuff. When I was a kid, we'd go to dinner, and we didn't go out to dinner very often. We were... It just wasn't our family. But, um, when we did, we could get soda. We couldn't have it at home.

    2. KH

      Yeah.

    3. AH

      And I would drink some soda, then my sister would make sure that she drank a little less soda, so that at any point in the meal, she had more soda than me-

    4. KH

      [laughing]

    5. AH

      ... even though we started off with more soda.

    6. KH

      Oh, that's such a classic sibling thing.

    7. AH

      Okay, so she's a wonderful person. I adore my sister, and yet she had to win that competition.

    8. KH

      Yeah.

    9. AH

      And so-

    10. KH

      That's some primal stuff there.

    11. AH

      That's some primal stuff.

    12. KH

      [laughing]

    13. AH

      I don't know if it's the hypothalamus, but it's-

    14. KH

      [laughing]

    15. AH

      ... it's, it's definitely, um-

    16. KH

      Do my parents love me more?

    17. AH

      Yeah, exactly. And I, and if you feed two dogs at once, you know-

    18. KH

      Yeah

    19. AH

      ... 'cause I had a bulldog mastiff. My girlfriend at the time had a, had a pit bull, and whoever got food first, and the... I swear they're paying attention to the size of the little-

    20. KH

      Yes

    21. AH

      ... but, I mean-

    22. KH

      Yes

    23. AH

      ... I mean, they are processing that at laser speed.

    24. KH

      [laughing]

    25. AH

      Um, what's going on? We, we pay attention to how much people are rewarded.

    26. KH

      Yes, we do.

    27. AH

      And, and we get something about rewards that go beyond just the reward.

    28. KH

      I mean, again, we are a species that's evolved in cooperation, and there's really nothing worse for a cooperative society than freeloading-

    29. AH

      Mm

    30. KH

      ... someone being r- rewarded without putting effort into the collective.

  26. 2:21:59 – 2:29:49

    Punishment, Reward & Power; Online vs In-Person Communities

    1. AH

      days, uh, I love observing online behavior.

    2. KH

      [chuckles] That makes one of us.

    3. AH

      It's the sci-

    4. KH

      So dystopian!

    5. AH

      It's just the scientist in me.

    6. KH

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      You know, I just... Well, I, I feel like there's something to be learned from it if one has a little bit of, like, if you-

    8. KH

      If you can have some distance

    9. AH

      ... have some distance from it. And, um, I think, uh, I don't spend all my time in the comments section, um, but it's sometimes interesting things play out, and, and you can see this, you know? And it's, it's really, yeah, this, this concept of, of kind of who gets money, attention, et cetera-

    10. KH

      Who gets what

    11. AH

      ... which is really life energy, and gets to keep playing the game of life-

    12. KH

      Yeah

    13. AH

      ... versus who's getting batted back and penalty boxed. And I think fairness lets us rest. Like, the sense that there's fairness-

    14. KH

      Mm-hmm

    15. AH

      ... lets us rest.

    16. KH

      Yeah.

    17. AH

      I think that, um, uh, some people more than others, like the, the sense of, um, seeing injustice, feeling injustice, activates people, and it activates them in a direction typically that they don't get paid for, that is taking away from their other, um, life energy. I mean, the media-- I'm not gonna blame social media, but or the algorithms, that's no longer a good argument, uh, in my opinion. But I do think that there are monetization systems that try and hijack people's sense of injustice to drive more clicks and views-

    18. KH

      Mm

    19. AH

      ... more advertising, and that's how you r- that's how you get people moving forward. But they're not really m- the illusion is that they're moving forward. The... In fact, the b- the financial incentive there is to just keep people on a treadmill where they feel like they see more injustice, and they're angrier and angrier, and they just continue-

    20. KH

      Mm-hmm

    21. AH

      ... and nothing changes. And I, I, I'm not dystopian, but I think we're, uh, one has to be careful not to get caught up in that.

    22. KH

      Hmm.

    23. AH

      It's very different than a, a game, like a game of football, or who gets more soda. Um, I think that right now, who gets rewarded seems to be, uh, more under control than who gets punished. Like, we feel like the... I think a lot of people feel like the bad guys and gals are outside of our control, so now it's a question of just making sure people don't get rewarded.

    24. KH

      As you're talking, I'm thinking again about that study I was describing, where you have the two villages. And the people who are, who were, uh, most influential in setting the norms of the society that ended up thriving in this online game, were people who engaged in a lot of punishing and rewarding, public punishing and rewarding behavior from the very beginning. And again, I think this goes back to punishment and reward is, is a way of establishing power, right? What... It's, it is a way of asserting power over what are the rules. What are the rules in this society? Like, what are we doing here? I'm picking a society that has these rules, and I'm gonna enforce them. We now live in this, this community collapse, where we don't live in isolated villages, we don't live in small tribes, where we interact with each other reciprocally over time in dense kin networks. We are massively connected with a lot of one-time interactions between strangers. And as you were talking, I was just like, "Is that taking a psychology that's evolved to be in connection in a small community, where the purpose of rewarding and punishing is to establish the norms for your group?" But now there isn't a group, there's no one group, we're not a cohesive group, and so people are... They're essentially arguing about what are the rules are gonna be. But it's like they're playing a game, and they're arguing about what the rules are in the middle of the game. And if you feel like the only tool available for you is to just ratchet up the consequences and, and yell louder, right? But yell louder into the void, it's not a real community. Like, X is not a... It's, it's the internet, right?

    25. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    26. KH

      Like, that is not who you're living next to.

    27. AH

      I love doing this podcast, but the reason I continue it is for the opportunity to have conversations like this.

    28. KH

      In person, yes.

    29. AH

      Yeah. W- with you, I get more intellectual stimulation from this job, frankly, than I did when I was in my office at Stanford every day-

    30. KH

      Yeah

  27. 2:29:49 – 2:39:24

    Identical Twin Differences; Genetic Influence & Age; Sunlight & Genes

    1. AH

      I'm certainly immensely grateful for the work you do. It's, uh, you're a brave one-

    2. KH

      Oh, thank you

    3. AH

      ... uh, willing to go into these, uh, these corners of the psyche, corners of, uh, h- human, um, reflexes, for better or worse, and, and to be willing to, you know, talk about issues of morality, sex differences, reward and punishment. There's some questions from, quote, unquote, "the audience"-

    4. KH

      [laughing]

    5. AH

      ... from the dreaded internet.

    6. KH

      Speaking of the internet, that we've just been talking about-

    7. AH

      Yeah

    8. KH

      ... this whole time.

    9. AH

      I trust in people. They're like dogs. They just need to be treated right.

    10. KH

      [laughing]

    11. AH

      That's a compliment, by the way-

    12. KH

      Yeah

    13. AH

      ... uh, at least coming from me. Okay, questions from the interweb.

    14. KH

      [exhale]

    15. AH

      Always a fun and dangerous thing. Now, these are excellent questions, and you've answered, um, many of them in our conversation already. A couple people asked you: How can identical twins be so incredibly different?

    16. KH

      Oh.

    17. AH

      What's going on there?

    18. KH

      So this is not just identical twins. We see this in other id- uh, genetically identical animals. There's studies of inbred mice. There's studies of... We were talking earlier about armadillos, who give birth to four identical quadruplets. There's studies of clonal fish, and what there seems to be is what some scientists have called developmental noise, uh, which is this emergence of individuality that's neither nature nor nurture, but is something about the, like, initial chaos and then path dependence of development. Um, one of my favorite studies about this, they raised these mice, inbred mice, genetically homogenous. They raised them in identical rearing environments and then, at a certain point, put them together in this big vivarium where they could interact, and you saw almost immediately just very, you know, variability, which might have been initially random in activity levels, aggression levels, um, where in the cage they like to hang out, and then those differences started to stabilize. You basically saw the emergence of individual differences in mouse personality over time, and it's experience. It's experience that's... There's some randomness, and then there's a path dependence there, and then it's your nervous system responding to experience that leads, leads, um, paths to diverge. I actually think that's one of the most interesting things about identical twins is-

    19. AH

      Mm-hmm

    20. KH

      ... that they can be different. If you have one twin who has schizophrenia, you, there's only a 50% chance that the other one will. Fifty percent is way higher than 1%, which is the base rate, but it's not, not destiny. Um, if someone wants a fiction treatment of this, I Know This Much Is True, is a novel by the novelist Wally Lamb, and it's written by the perspective of an unaffected identical twin, whose identical twin has paranoid schizophrenia. And it's very scientifically interesting 'cause it captures a lot of the, did one of them get exposed to a virus? Did one of them get kind of singled out for maltreatment by the stepfather? So some things that might have gone into that difference, but also just the phenomenology of being genetically identical to someone who's having such a different psychological experience as you in life. [chuckles]

    21. AH

      Twins fascinate me. Um, just as, as, a, a nature-nurture thing.

    22. KH

      Yes.

    23. AH

      Which by the way, we are only saying now in this podcast.

    24. KH

      I know!

    25. AH

      Amazing, right? Are there specific periods in development when genetic influence is at its strongest, and how does that influence shift relative to environment across the lifespan?

    26. KH

      Oh, this is a really interesting question with a complicated answer.

    27. AH

      Mm.

    28. KH

      So in some ways, genetics matter most when they affect fetal development, because that's laying the groundwork for how the brain is wired over time. When you look at heritability estimates, so when you're estimating how much of the differences between people are due to genetic differences, you can estimate that using twins, by looking at how much more similar are identical twins versus fraternal twins. And what you see is actually, that heritability goes up with age. So the heritability of cognition, intelligence test scores goes up until around age 12, in which case, it stays pretty heritable from then. Heritability of personality continues to increase until around age 30. And so how can that be, that the older you are, the more your genes matter, 'cause you've been acri- acquiring experience all this time? And part of the answer to that is that people are picking their own experiences. So people are picking their environments, they're responding to their environments according to their genetically shaped temperament, personality, neurobiology. And what that means is that identical twins actually converge over time, even though they are acquiring experience over time. So, uh, [chuckles] when do genetics matter more? It kind of depends on what you mean by matter. When, when are genetic differences most predictive of your phenotype? Once you're an adult, 'cause you've had a chance to pick your own life experiences.

    29. AH

      There are several questions that I'm gonna merge into one.

    30. KH

      Okay.

  28. 2:39:24 – 2:42:02

    Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter

    1. AH

      Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden. To learn more about her work and to find a link to her new upcoming book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness, you can simply go to the link in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple, and on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than thirty years of research and experience, and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms, so that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms, and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one- to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email, and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden, and last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. [upbeat music]

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