Annotations for Speaker: Robert

I'm Robert Krulwich. And you know what this is.

Yeah.

Yeah, we were very worried about a lot of fake news—a lot of people are. But in the middle of doing that reporting, we were talking with a fellow from Vanity Fair.

And in the course of our conversation, Nick—and this had nothing to do with what we were talking about, by the way—Nick just got into a sort of a—well, he went into a kind of nervous reverie, I'd say.

[laughs]

This is not good. This is not good.

So that's a fairly compelling description of a—of a very dangerous future.

Right.

It may be that what Nick is worried about and what we were worried about 10 years ago have now come dangerously close together.

Well, you don't have to apologize for it. Those were great sound effects.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Okay.

You mean they're repairing the tracks?

This is unbeknownst to them, the trolley is approaching?

Okay.

Oh my God! [laughs] I—that was a horrible experience. I don't want that to happen to them.

So if the—so if the trolley goes on the second track, it will kill the one guy.

Well, I'm gonna pull the lever.

I hear the train coming in the—same five guys are working on the track?

Backs to the train, they can't see anything?

What do you mean, "there's a guy?"

[laughs]

And he stops the train.

Oh, yeah, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do that.

You mean, I'll save four people this way?

Yeah, but I'm—this time I'm pushing the guy. Are you insane? No.

And if having a moral sense is a unique and special human quality then maybe we—us two humans anyway, you and me ...

... should at least inquire as to why this happens. And I happen to have met somebody who has a hunch. He's a young guy at Princeton University. Wild curly hair, bit of mischief in his eye. His name is Josh Greene.

And he spent the last few years trying to figure out where this inconsistency comes from.

Josh is, by the way, a philosopher and a neuroscientist, so this gives him special powers. He doesn't sort of sit back in a chair, smoke a pipe and think, "Now why do you have these differences?" He says, "No, I would like to look inside people's heads, because in our heads we may find clues as to where these feelings of revulsion or acceptance come from." In our brains.

And it just so happens that in the basement of Princeton, there was this, well ...

A big circular thing.

180,000-pound brain scanner.

Have you ever worked with metal?

Anyhow, what Josh does is he invites people into this room, has them lie down on what is essentially a cot on rollers, and he rolls them into the machine. Their heads are braced, so they're sort of stuck in there.

Have you ever done this?

And then he tells them stories. He tells them the same two, you know, trolley tales that you told before.

And then at the very instant that they're deciding whether I should push the lever or whether I should push the man, at that instant, the scanner snaps pictures of their brains. And what he found in those pictures was frankly, a little startling. He showed us some.

The picture that I'm looking at is a sort of a—it's a brain looked at, I guess, from the top down?

And the first slide that he showed me was a human brain being asked the question, "Would you pull the lever?" And the answer in most cases was, "Yes."

When the brain's saying, "Yes," you'd see little kind of peanut-shaped spots of yellow.

The brain was being active in these places. And oddly enough whenever people said yes ...

... to the lever question, the very same pattern lit up. Then he showed me another slide. This is a slide of a brain saying, "No."

"I will not push the large man." And in this picture ...

... it was a totally different constellation of regions that lit up.

This is the "No, no, no" crowd.

Right. But when they answer, "No, I will not push the man," then you get a completely different part of the brain lighting up.

Mm-hmm.

Well he has a theory about this.

He suggests that the human brain doesn't hum along like one big, unified system. Instead, he says, maybe in your brain, every brain, you'll find little warring tribes, little subgroups. One that is sort of doing the logical sort of accounting kind of thing.

And that's the part that would glow when you answer, "Yes, I'd pull the lever."

But there's this other part of the brain which really, really doesn't like personally killing another human being, and gets very upset at the fat man case, and shouts, in effect ...

This is not a trivial discovery, that you struggle to find right and wrong depending upon what part of your brain is shouting the loudest. This is—it's like bleachers morality.

Hmm. You know, I just don't know.

I've always kind of suspected that a sense of right and wrong is mostly stuff that you get from your mom and your dad and from experience, that it's culturally learned for the most part. Josh is kind of a radical in this respect. He thinks it's biological. I mean, deeply biological. That somehow we inherit from the deep past a sense of right and wrong that's already in our brains from the get-go, before Mom and Dad.

Oh, so you're thinking then that the man on the bridge, that I'm on the bridge next to the large man, and I have hundreds of thousands of years of training in my brain that says, "Don't murder the large man."

And even if I'm thinking, "If I murder the large man, I'm gonna save five lives and only kill the one man," but there's something deeper down that says, "Don't murder the large man."

The "inner chimp" is your unfortunate way of describing an act of deep goodness.

It's the 10 Commandments, for God's sake! Inner chimp!

But something as basic as, "Thou shalt not kill," which many people think was handed down in tablet form from a mountaintop from God directly to humans, no chimps involved ...

... you're suggesting that hundreds of thousands of years of on-the-ground training have gotten our brains to think, "Don't kill your kin. Don't kill your ..."

So now we're getting to the rub of it. You think that profound moral positions may be somehow embedded in brain chemistry.

So there you are, you're huddled in the basement. All around you are enemy troops, and you're holding your baby in your arms, your baby with a cold, a bit of a sniffle. And you know that your baby could cough at any moment.

And you have the choice. Would you smother your own baby to save the village, or would you let your baby cough, knowing the consequences?

In the final M*A*S*H episode, the Korean woman who's a character in this piece, she murders her baby.

What Josh did is he asked people the question, "Would you murder your own child?" while they were in the brain scanner. And at just the moment when they were trying to decide what they would do, he took pictures of their brains. And what he saw, the contest we described before, was global in the brain. It was like a world war. That gang of accountants, that part of the brain was busy calculating, calculating. "A whole village could die. A whole village could die."

But the older and deeper reflex also was lit up, shouting, "Don't kill the baby! No, no! Don't kill the baby!"

Inside, the brain was literally divided: do the calculations, don't kill the baby. Do the calculations, don't kill the baby. Two different tribes in the brain literally trying to shout each other out. And Jad, this was a different kind of contest than the ones we talked about before. Remember before, when people were pushing a man off a bridge, overwhelmingly their brains yelled, "No, no! Don't push the man!" And when people were pulling the lever, overwhelmingly, "Yeah, yeah, pull the lever!"

There it was distinct. Here, I don't think really anybody wins.

[laughs] Well, that's a good question!

And now, is there a—what happens? Is it just two cries that fight each other out or is there a judge?

When you are in this moment, with parts of your brain contesting, there are two brain regions ...

... right behind your eyebrows—left and right—that light up. And this is particular to us. He showed me a slide.

So when we have a problem that we need to deliberate over, the light—the front of the brain, this is above my eyebrow, sort of?

And there's two of them, one on the left and one on the right.

And they are the things that monkeys don't have as much of that we have?

So looking at these two flashes of light at the front of a human brain, you could say we are looking at what makes us special.

A human being wrestling with a problem, that's what that is.

Well, he doesn't know for sure, but what he found is in these close contests, whenever those nodes are very, very active, it appears that the calculating section of the brain gets a bit of a boost, and the visceral "inner chimp" section of the brain is kind of muffled.

The people who chose to kill their children, who made what is essentially a logical decision, over and over, those subjects had brighter glows in these two areas and longer glows in these two areas. So there is a definite association between these two dots above the eyebrow and the power of the logical brain over the "inner chimp" or the visceral brain.

So in the long, long stream of time, I assume now you have three giraffes, two bobcats, and children?

Did you ever write the story differently?

Ooh!

Yeah.

I was thinking actually of a different thing. I was thinking even though you dramatically bring down the number of bad things that happen on roads, you dramatically bring down the collisions, you dramatically bring down the mortality, you dramatically lower the number of people who are drunk coming home from a party and just ram someone sideways and killing three of them and injuring two of them for the rest of their lives. Those kinds of things go way down, but the ones that remain are engineered. Like, they are calculated, almost with foresight.

So here's the difference—and this is such an interesting difference. Like, "Ah, damn, that's so sad that happened, that that guy got drunk and da da da, and maybe he should go to jail." But, "You mean that the society engineered this in?"

That is a big difference. One is operatic and seems like the forces of destiny, and the other seems mechanical and pre-thought through.

And there's something dark about a premeditated expected death. And I don't know what you do about that.

Everybody's on the hook for that.

Right.

Yeah, but you know how humans are. If you argue back that yes, a bunch of smarty-pantses concocted a mathematical formula which meant that some people had to die and here they are. There are many fewer than before! A human being, just like Josh would tell you, would have a roar of feeling and of anger and saying, "How dare you engineer this in! No, no, no, no, no!"

Yes and no. And that may be impossible unless you're a monk, for God's sake. [laughs]

Jad, you have to thank some people, no?

Yeah. I'll um ...

I'm not getting into your car.

If you don't mind. Just take my own.

[laughs]

[laughs] No you won't.

Yeah.

I'm Robert Krulwich.

I'm Robert Krulwich. And you know what this is.

Yeah.

Yeah, we were very worried about a lot of fake news—a lot of people are. But in the middle of doing that reporting, we were talking with a fellow from Vanity Fair.

And in the course of our conversation, Nick—and this had nothing to do with what we were talking about, by the way—Nick just got into a sort of a—well, he went into a kind of nervous reverie, I'd say.

[laughs]

This is not good. This is not good.

So that's a fairly compelling description of a—of a very dangerous future.

Right.

It may be that what Nick is worried about and what we were worried about 10 years ago have now come dangerously close together.

Well, you don't have to apologize for it. Those were great sound effects.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Okay.

You mean they're repairing the tracks?

This is unbeknownst to them, the trolley is approaching?

Okay.

Oh my God! [laughs] I—that was a horrible experience. I don't want that to happen to them.

So if the—so if the trolley goes on the second track, it will kill the one guy.

Well, I'm gonna pull the lever.

I hear the train coming in the—same five guys are working on the track?

Backs to the train, they can't see anything?

What do you mean, "there's a guy?"

[laughs]

And he stops the train.

Oh, yeah, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do that.

You mean, I'll save four people this way?

Yeah, but I'm—this time I'm pushing the guy. Are you insane? No.

And if having a moral sense is a unique and special human quality then maybe we—us two humans anyway, you and me ...

... should at least inquire as to why this happens. And I happen to have met somebody who has a hunch. He's a young guy at Princeton University. Wild curly hair, bit of mischief in his eye. His name is Josh Greene.

And he spent the last few years trying to figure out where this inconsistency comes from.

Josh is, by the way, a philosopher and a neuroscientist, so this gives him special powers. He doesn't sort of sit back in a chair, smoke a pipe and think, "Now why do you have these differences?" He says, "No, I would like to look inside people's heads, because in our heads we may find clues as to where these feelings of revulsion or acceptance come from." In our brains.

And it just so happens that in the basement of Princeton, there was this, well ...

A big circular thing.

180,000-pound brain scanner.

Have you ever worked with metal?

Anyhow, what Josh does is he invites people into this room, has them lie down on what is essentially a cot on rollers, and he rolls them into the machine. Their heads are braced, so they're sort of stuck in there.

Have you ever done this?

And then he tells them stories. He tells them the same two, you know, trolley tales that you told before.

And then at the very instant that they're deciding whether I should push the lever or whether I should push the man, at that instant, the scanner snaps pictures of their brains. And what he found in those pictures was frankly, a little startling. He showed us some.

The picture that I'm looking at is a sort of a—it's a brain looked at, I guess, from the top down?

And the first slide that he showed me was a human brain being asked the question, "Would you pull the lever?" And the answer in most cases was, "Yes."

When the brain's saying, "Yes," you'd see little kind of peanut-shaped spots of yellow.

The brain was being active in these places. And oddly enough whenever people said yes ...

... to the lever question, the very same pattern lit up. Then he showed me another slide. This is a slide of a brain saying, "No."

"I will not push the large man." And in this picture ...

... it was a totally different constellation of regions that lit up.

This is the "No, no, no" crowd.

Right. But when they answer, "No, I will not push the man," then you get a completely different part of the brain lighting up.

Mm-hmm.

Well he has a theory about this.

He suggests that the human brain doesn't hum along like one big, unified system. Instead, he says, maybe in your brain, every brain, you'll find little warring tribes, little subgroups. One that is sort of doing the logical sort of accounting kind of thing.

And that's the part that would glow when you answer, "Yes, I'd pull the lever."

But there's this other part of the brain which really, really doesn't like personally killing another human being, and gets very upset at the fat man case, and shouts, in effect ...

This is not a trivial discovery, that you struggle to find right and wrong depending upon what part of your brain is shouting the loudest. This is—it's like bleachers morality.

Hmm. You know, I just don't know.

I've always kind of suspected that a sense of right and wrong is mostly stuff that you get from your mom and your dad and from experience, that it's culturally learned for the most part. Josh is kind of a radical in this respect. He thinks it's biological. I mean, deeply biological. That somehow we inherit from the deep past a sense of right and wrong that's already in our brains from the get-go, before Mom and Dad.

Oh, so you're thinking then that the man on the bridge, that I'm on the bridge next to the large man, and I have hundreds of thousands of years of training in my brain that says, "Don't murder the large man."

And even if I'm thinking, "If I murder the large man, I'm gonna save five lives and only kill the one man," but there's something deeper down that says, "Don't murder the large man."

The "inner chimp" is your unfortunate way of describing an act of deep goodness.

It's the 10 Commandments, for God's sake! Inner chimp!

But something as basic as, "Thou shalt not kill," which many people think was handed down in tablet form from a mountaintop from God directly to humans, no chimps involved ...

... you're suggesting that hundreds of thousands of years of on-the-ground training have gotten our brains to think, "Don't kill your kin. Don't kill your ..."

So now we're getting to the rub of it. You think that profound moral positions may be somehow embedded in brain chemistry.

So there you are, you're huddled in the basement. All around you are enemy troops, and you're holding your baby in your arms, your baby with a cold, a bit of a sniffle. And you know that your baby could cough at any moment.

And you have the choice. Would you smother your own baby to save the village, or would you let your baby cough, knowing the consequences?

In the final M*A*S*H episode, the Korean woman who's a character in this piece, she murders her baby.

What Josh did is he asked people the question, "Would you murder your own child?" while they were in the brain scanner. And at just the moment when they were trying to decide what they would do, he took pictures of their brains. And what he saw, the contest we described before, was global in the brain. It was like a world war. That gang of accountants, that part of the brain was busy calculating, calculating. "A whole village could die. A whole village could die."

But the older and deeper reflex also was lit up, shouting, "Don't kill the baby! No, no! Don't kill the baby!"

Inside, the brain was literally divided: do the calculations, don't kill the baby. Do the calculations, don't kill the baby. Two different tribes in the brain literally trying to shout each other out. And Jad, this was a different kind of contest than the ones we talked about before. Remember before, when people were pushing a man off a bridge, overwhelmingly their brains yelled, "No, no! Don't push the man!" And when people were pulling the lever, overwhelmingly, "Yeah, yeah, pull the lever!"

There it was distinct. Here, I don't think really anybody wins.

[laughs] Well, that's a good question!

And now, is there a—what happens? Is it just two cries that fight each other out or is there a judge?

When you are in this moment, with parts of your brain contesting, there are two brain regions ...

... right behind your eyebrows—left and right—that light up. And this is particular to us. He showed me a slide.

So when we have a problem that we need to deliberate over, the light—the front of the brain, this is above my eyebrow, sort of?

And there's two of them, one on the left and one on the right.

And they are the things that monkeys don't have as much of that we have?

So looking at these two flashes of light at the front of a human brain, you could say we are looking at what makes us special.

A human being wrestling with a problem, that's what that is.

Well, he doesn't know for sure, but what he found is in these close contests, whenever those nodes are very, very active, it appears that the calculating section of the brain gets a bit of a boost, and the visceral "inner chimp" section of the brain is kind of muffled.

The people who chose to kill their children, who made what is essentially a logical decision, over and over, those subjects had brighter glows in these two areas and longer glows in these two areas. So there is a definite association between these two dots above the eyebrow and the power of the logical brain over the "inner chimp" or the visceral brain.

So in the long, long stream of time, I assume now you have three giraffes, two bobcats, and children?

Did you ever write the story differently?

Ooh!

Yeah.

I was thinking actually of a different thing. I was thinking even though you dramatically bring down the number of bad things that happen on roads, you dramatically bring down the collisions, you dramatically bring down the mortality, you dramatically lower the number of people who are drunk coming home from a party and just ram someone sideways and killing three of them and injuring two of them for the rest of their lives. Those kinds of things go way down, but the ones that remain are engineered. Like, they are calculated, almost with foresight.

So here's the difference—and this is such an interesting difference. Like, "Ah, damn, that's so sad that happened, that that guy got drunk and da da da, and maybe he should go to jail." But, "You mean that the society engineered this in?"

That is a big difference. One is operatic and seems like the forces of destiny, and the other seems mechanical and pre-thought through.

And there's something dark about a premeditated expected death. And I don't know what you do about that.

Everybody's on the hook for that.

Right.

Yeah, but you know how humans are. If you argue back that yes, a bunch of smarty-pantses concocted a mathematical formula which meant that some people had to die and here they are. There are many fewer than before! A human being, just like Josh would tell you, would have a roar of feeling and of anger and saying, "How dare you engineer this in! No, no, no, no, no!"

Yes and no. And that may be impossible unless you're a monk, for God's sake. [laughs]

Jad, you have to thank some people, no?

Yeah. I'll um ...

I'm not getting into your car.

If you don't mind. Just take my own.

[laughs]

[laughs] No you won't.

Yeah.

I'm Robert Krulwich.