Producer: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host Sucheta Kamath.
Good morning, my friends, today, you’re going to tell us about going to the zoo.
Sucheta Kamath: Yes, Todd, so taking your little ones and going to the zoo is a staple of a family life. When we were raising our boys, many a time, we planned our trips based on whether the city had a zoo or not. In 1996, during the month of August, one such family was visiting the Brookfield Zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio. No one knows how but a three or four-year old little boy escaped from his family and climbed through the nearby barrier and guess what? Unfortunately, he fell nearly 15 feet into the western lowland gorilla pit and it was certainly occupied. So as you can imagine, the zoo goers and the employees were horrified, they all fixed their gaze on the gorilla in the captivity and what happened next took everybody by surprise. In the pit lived Binti Jua, an eight-year old female gorilla. By the way, she got her name which is in Swahili means “Daughter of The Sunlight.” She picked up this unconscious boy and cradled him in her arms for quite some time and then took him to the doorway and placed him gently at the feet of the paramedics who were just waiting. Interestingly enough, Binti Jua had Koola, her own 17-month old baby on her back the whole time she was helping this little boy. Other than cuts and a broken hand, the boy was unharmed and just after four days of hospitalization, he was sent home.
So when we hear stories like this one, they always fascinate me. We are moved by acts of compassion and nurturing. In fact, human-like behavior by animals but there’s more complex story to be told. So if I say power, sex, violence, and kindness, you might think I’m talking about human behaviors but we share these range of responses with animals and that’s what we’re going to talk about and learn about today.
Today, we have a very, very special guest who is a world-renowned primatologist whose passion is primate behavior. Dr. Frans De Waal is a Dutch-American biologist born in the Netherlands and has lived in the US for the last 35 years. Currently, he is a Candler professor in the Psychology Department of Emory University and he’s the director of Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Center in Atlanta. Through his body of research, Dr. De Waal champions for the sophistication of non-human intelligence which has helped us to learn about our own human society.
Dr. De Waal is a prolific writer. Here are some of this books that are my favorites: Chimpanzee Politics, Our Inner Ape, The Bonobo and the Atheist, and The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lesson for a Kinder Society, and the most recent book which has just come out, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? I highly recommend them, they are brilliantly written and the science is fascinating. The books are completely transformative. Dr. De Waal’s accomplishments are enumerable, but to name a few, in 2007 he was selected by TIME as one of the world’s 100 most influential people today and in 2011, by Discover as among 47 all-time great minds of science. I myself had the privilege of meeting Dr. De Waal on a few occasions, particularly during his TEDTalk which has gone viral. We will have links to his TEDTalk and his bookstore site.
So I can’t wait to have a conversation with Dr. De Waal.
Producer: Wow, I am very much looking forward to this, Sucheta. It promises to be very interesting, very different for this show. It’s going to be very, very intriguing, so let’s get to it, here is Sucheta talking with Frans De Waal.
Sucheta: Welcome to the show, Dr. De Waal. I am very excited and honored to have you. Before we get started with the interview, do you mind taking a minute to tell our listeners a little bit about your background and your expertise?
Dr. Frans De Waal: Well, I’m a biologist by training. I’m from the Netherlands, I trained in the Netherlands, and became an ethologist. An ethologist is the biological approach to animal behavior/human behavior. It’s quite different from let’s say the psychological approach which is more Skinnerian and focused on learning. The biologist, the ethologist, they usually look more in the – in the old day, they looked at the instincts and nowadays, we look at what we call natural behavior and how animals adapt to the environment. That’s my background and from there, I moved into the primates very early on and started working with chimpanzees and then later, with Bonobos also with monkeys, and so for the rest of my life, I’ve mostly worked with the primates and usually in captive settings like zoos where they have large colonies or primate centers. I’ve always worked with primates in group settings because I’m interested in social behavior, so I work on the social relationships, their conflict resolution, the cooperation. I’m very interested in empathy, that kind of phenomena, and so I’ve always worked on social behavior in the primates.
Sucheta: Terrific. My work in the area of executive function training centers around two distinct idea. One is cognitive social emotional regulation and second is future-oriented thinking, and I’m particularly excited because the conversation with you will deepen my own understanding but more importantly, it will also help our listeners take a much more of a bird’s eye view on these complex issues.
So to get started with our understanding of prefrontal cortex is evolving by the minute, but last 20 years, I would say, we have gotten to know a lot about it. When training executive functions, I find that neuropsychologists or neuroscientists call this ‘executive functions,’ the developmentalists call it ‘self-regulation’ in the learning context, for example, in pre-school, we call it ‘effortful control,’ and others, layman, for example, call it ‘work-related skills.’ How do you define executive functions from your lens?
Frans: I’d say it’s a term that I never use, I’m sorry about that. I am not a neuroscientist, and so for me, I don’t think in that kind of processed-matic way. I observe animal behavior and we do usually experiment at some point where we test out what the contingencies are and under what conditions do they show the behavior or don’t show the behavior.
We got involved into emotion regulation, actually, when we worked on empathy in bonobos and that’s maybe a long story to tell but we were interested in emotion regulation at that point, but usually, since I don’t do neuroscience at all, except for a recent study that I did with Larry Young of Emory on the voles. Other than that, I don’t work on the neuroscience side. I work entirely on the behavioral side and what the regular contingencies are of the behavior that they show, so for example, I’m interested in how chimpanzees reconcile after fights, they kiss and embrace after fights, under what conditions do they do that? I look at bonobos, they have sex after fights to reconcile, and so reconciliation is an area in which I have worked very extensively, but the neuroscience of for example, reconciliation, is completely unknown. Also in humans, in humans, we know behaviorally less about reconciliation behavior and neurologically less about it.
So for empathy, of course, that is a different picture – for empathy which is that you are interested in others and sensitive to their emotions and that you share the emotions and so on. for empathy, we have a lot of neuroscience coming up at the moment, both in humans and other species, and so that’s an area where the behavioral approach is that I usually follow and the neuroscience approach is now sort of merging and informing each other. That’s very interesting that that’s going on.
Sucheta: Got it, and so I think maybe we can also take this social regulation piece and talk from your work as well as the kind of observations I make. We use executive functions to build consensus and we do that through tolerance, for example, and you know, we humans control impulses, delay gratification. We rein in our desires, reaction, or even emotionality, so we are better accepted in the group, and that’s a kind of social regulation which is also part of executive functions. So what have you learned –
Frans: Wait a second. Wait a second. Yeah, so wait a second. So the emotional control, self-control, there are very interesting studies on animals on that, and so there are studies, for example, the marshmallow test which is sort of a traditional test on children, and so the marshmallow test has been done on a range of species, and some species like some of the monkey species, they have basically no control in the sense that they can’t control themselves for 15 seconds or something like that, but the apes, they have just as much control as human children, so the apes they have done tests. For example, you put an orangutan or a chimpanzee in front of a container that has candies and the candies drop out at a regular basis, say you every 20 seconds. If they take the bowl in which the candies drop, they can eat all those candies, but the proposal then stops, and so the ape has an interest in letting it go as long as he can, so that’s sort of the setup of the test and they have found that the apes can wait 20 minutes which is a bit like the children do in the marshmallow test. Recently, they did a test with a parent and the name of the parent is Griffin, named after Donald Griffin, and the parent also was able to wait 20 minutes. So then the self-control to wait for a better reward like in the marshmallow test is just as well-developed in the parents and on the apes which both are large-brained animals, as it is in children.
Sucheta: So you’re saying that there exists this delaying gratification piece. Do you then agree that we use that delaying gratification as a tool for social outcomes that are better for us?
Frans: Well, that’s, of course, delays of gratification is what a lot of social animal life is all about. If you are high-ranking, you may be able. If you’re the Alpha male, you may be able to take your food whenever you want or to make females whenever you want, but if you are lower-ranking, that’s not a possibility, so a lower-ranking male chimpanzee will have to wait for the right occasion. He may make a secret appointment with the female, the sort of things that chimpanzees, they arrange rendezvous behind the bushes and things like that, or hey, you’ll have to just wait until the Alpha male falls asleep or has walked off and wait for his right opportunity. That’s all of the rank orders because I found in fish and birds, and all sorts of species ever have hierarchies. As soon as you have a hierarchy, you have to have self-control in the lower-ranking individuals. Otherwise, they get constantly into trouble. So self-control is an absolute essential part of social life of many animals.
Sucheta: When we talk about high-ranking and when we talk about power. Is that power asserted through might or is this also intellectual or cognitive power of being able to strategize more or out-strategize others, how does that work? Because if I’m the strongest male in the group, and then I can take the first bit and everybody has to wait, then I’m really not exercising my self-control and other people have to work around my habits. So is it kind of set up substitutes might that you don’t self-control?
Frans: No, it doesn’t really work that way. So in chimpanzees, you only become an Alpha male if you have support from others.
Sucheta: Oh, I see.
Frans: So it is a really a political system.
Sucheta: Political system.
Frans: Yeah, I wrote the book Chimpanzee Politics long ago which is about the fact – it is not necessarily the biggest, strongest male who’s the alpha male. It’s the male who has the most political skills. Now, so if you have supporters and you reach the top position with your supporters, you have to keep your supporters happy which means you cannot do anything you want, and if you are a brutal dictator which sometimes happens in chimpanzees, if you have a bully at the top, that is often not such a great strategy because the bully may end up being either chased out by the whole group or being killed – sometimes, they are killed by the whole group. So bullying and terrorizing everybody is not really such a smart strategy and most of the time what you see is Alpha males who have supporters and the supporters need to be kept happy, and so for example, the Alpha male may want to mate with a certain female but if his buddy who supports him all the time wants to mate with that female, he has to tolerate that and he has to inhibit his impulse of trying to claim things for himself, and so even high-ranking individuals always have to have certain inhibitions and there’s always the danger of the whole group ganging up on them. That danger is not just for chimpanzees that exist in many primate groups, is that if the Alpha male goes too far in what he claims and what he does, he may be in deep trouble.
Sucheta: That’s so fascinating. So we understand that social learning is culturally transmitted so could you comment on how the culture has a role in learning these by observing others, these skills of self-regulation?
Frans: Yeah, there’s now an enormous field of people studying cultural transmission in the primates, and so we have done quite a few experiments on that, is that how they learn from each other, so under which conditions do they learn. Initially, some of these studies were negative, not just by us but people would claim that actually, chimpanzees are not so great at imitating others, but the initial studies were done by having models that are human, and so if you have a human model who demonstrates something to a chimp and the chimp is not always imitating it, but if you have chimpanzee models, then that’s much more difficult to arrange but they did that where they learned from other chimpanzees, they’re actually very good at it, and so the chimpanzee is a great imitator and that’s maybe why we have developed ‘aping’ for imitation because they great at that, and also, imitation is found now in many other species of monkey studies and dog studies, and so on. And so learning from others is a huge area. There’s even fish studies on fish culture among fish. Certainly, song learning in birds is a very old area of study where birds learn the song from other birds and have dialects from region to region, and so on, and so that whole area is very well-developed at the moment.
Sucheta: So how do humans differ from animals in their capacity and approach to learning through culture? Human cultures are much more evolved. Is that one distinct feature?
Frans: I think the big difference for humans is the symbolic culture and that’s where humans are special, is that we label things and we transmit linguistically a lot of knowledge, the university, of course, based on linguistic transmission of knowledge, and in that regard we are special but in terms of, let’s say learning how to use tools or how to move, or under which circumstances does it show what kind of habits. In that regard, I don’t think the differences are that great, and so there’s now a lot of study of animal culture. What human culture does is since it is linguistic, it can become cumulative, so for example, our technological revolution at the moment where we have iPhones and so on, and then airplanes and all of this. All of that is made possible by the fact that we can write down ideas, we can publish them, I can read a book that was written 500 years ago and still learn something new from it that I didn’t know before even though the person who wrote it is long gone, and so linguistic transmission of knowledge allows us to accumulate that knowledge and to get to the point where you have, let’s say, an iPhone. An iPhone is not an invention of a single human. The iPhone is accumulation of maybe 3,000 that’s sitting in there, but we are capable of doing that and that’s very special, I think. That capacity of linguistically transmitting and accumulating knowledge, that’s really something and that’s not something we find in other species.
Sucheta: Another area I’m deeply interested in is Theory of Mind or mind-reading, the knowing about others’ knowing. You write about in your book, work of Menzel, the famous American primatologist and his studies particularly the story that I loved was about Belle. Do you mind sharing that with our listeners what he observed as well as how you reference it?
Frans: Yes, so Emil Menzel was a primatologist. He died a couple of years ago, who was the first actually to work on Theory of Mind and we should not forget that all the Theory of Mind studies that we have on humans also, it all came out of chimp research because the first one to coin the term was David Premack who also worked on chimpanzees. Now, Menzel worked before Premack and what he did is he would have, let’s say five or six, let’s say juvenile chimpanzees in a large grassy enclosure and he would take one of the chimps by the hand into the enclosure and would show them a location where he had hidden food or where he had hidden a toy snake, and then he would bring the chimp back to the rest of the group and then he would release them all together, and his interest was to see if the other chimps would know from the behavior of the first one, what is going on? So would they understand that the other one knew that there was attractive food there or that they knew that the other one had seen the snake, and indeed, the chimpanzees were very perceptive and they clearly understood whether there was something attractive or something negative out there and where it was, and then you got the whole interplay that was going on where the one who had the knowledge, usually had the knowers and the guessers, so to speak, but the one who had the knowledge, he would start manipulating the others in the sense that if that was a low-ranking individual, she could not just walk up to the food and take it because she would get into trouble with the high-ranking ones, and so she would lead them to a spot where there was either a small amount of food or there was nothing. So she would try to mislead them and we recently repeated some of these experiments with our chimps where we had a setup where a low-ranking individual knew where two items were hidden, either a cucumber or a banana. Now, a banana is 100 times better than a cucumber, so what that chimp would do, it’s the second chimp who was dominant who had no knowledge, she would always lead the dominant first in the direction of the cucumber and the dominant would then discover the cucumber and be occupied with that, and then she would race off quickly to get her banana. So they played these games of deception which is a form of Theory of Mind. Of course, the chimp who does that knows that the other one doesn’t know, and the other one has learned over time in the experiments that the low-ranking one has knowledge that they don’t have, and so that whole game is being played and that was developed by Emil Menzel long before we even had the term of ‘Theory of Mind.’ Now, at the moment, we have a new study that just came out in France, I think, a couple of months ago on the false belief task that was done on chimpanzees and bonobos, and orangutans. It’s actually on three species of ape. Until now, people had believed that – and certainly, I believed that the apes have Theory of Mind but we never could clinch the false belief task which many psychologists consider the critical test, really, and so they were not happy with our findings. They thought of us suggestive but it was not sufficient, and the false belief task is almost impossible to do on the apes, of course, but now, they have a team from Leipzig and Japan, so an international team has found a way of doing it, so eye-tracking, and so the same thing has been done on children. In children, it was found that the false belief task, most people assume that children can pass that at four years or five years, but actually, when you do it with eye-tracking children of two years have an understanding of false belief, and now, on the apes, with the eye-tracking method which was very well done, I think, that study, they find that all the apes have the same false belief understanding that children have.
So now, if you ask me, is there a different in the understanding of Theory of Mind in apes and children, I’m not sure anymore but there is a difference and it’s…
Sucheta: They’re almost overlapping on each other. So in human world, when this capacity for theorizing what other people’s thoughts, beliefs, ideas are and based on that, we formulate a map of intentions, what are they going to do? How do they feel? How are they going to react? And we use that knowledge to relate and there are certain impairments or disorders such as autism and Asperger’s, and ADHD where such skills are impaired. Do you see such impairment in animal kingdom?
Frans: Yeah, people have sometimes speculated about that, like autism. I don’t know any cases that has convinced me. I do know cases of trisomy like Down’s Syndrome-like phenomena certainly in apes and also in monkeys but that’s different. I think there’s a chromosomal abnormality that I think that’s quite different. So no, I don’t know about that. It’s also – I must say that the whole concept of Theory of Mind, I don’t like it at all because you also mentioned the word theorizing. I don’t think the animals have theories about each other. I don’t think humans have theories about each other. I don’t think it’s at the theoretical level. Most of this is done at the bottom level and that’s also why the eye-tracking study was so interesting, because they skipped the language. When you do an eye-tracking study, you don’t need to explain to children what the problem is, you just see where they look and with the apes also, we skipped the language completely, of course, in the eye-tracking study. The eye-tracking study is entirely a bodily study. It’s like where do you look? Where do you think the other one is going to look? So it is very much body to body in the action and I think that’s where everything happens and that’s why the term Theory of Mind is a very unfortunate term because it makes it seem like an abstract process where you are mentalizing as they call it sometimes.
Sucheta: Mentalizing.
Frans: Yeah.
Sucheta: And I think we also have studies now that have shown that as you said, the visual element where you can see actions of avatar walking towards the box and the lifting movement can tell us whether the avatar is pretending the box is heavier than it is or avatar is lifting a heavy box, or the avatar is lifting a light box. You can tell by the motion and that’s the kind of prediction you are talking about, right? That’s not dependent on language, we can theorize or – no, one of the most amazing component I found was when the avatar pretends that the box is heavier than it actually is can be detected and that’s another way we can get into somebody’s head at whether they want us to think that the box is heavy. So would you help us tie this concept of mind-reading and its relationship to empathy and compassion, or that consoling how we get into imagining hurt of other people, imagining how they might be suffering?
Frans: Yes, so the empathy part also. In empathy, I think the main part is that you relate to the body of the other and so the basics of empathy are that you are sensitive to the emotions of others. You sometimes adopt the emotions like the other one is afraid, you’ll get afraid or the other one is happy and you are happy, and so both basically, who facial mimicry and bodily mimicry, we adopt many of the states of the other. So I think the basics of empathy are body to body communication, and later, when children grow older and also later in evolution like with the apes and the elephants and so on, you get more advanced forms of empathy where some cognitive components comes in to it where you can take the perspective of the other. But to understand the suffering of somebody else, if that’s the specific question, so do you feel the pain of the other and so on, we have now evidence in mice that mice have pain contagion, so studies our of McGill came out, I think 10 years ago where they found that mice who have observed another mouse in pain, they become more sensitive to pain, so pain contagion which is a body to body process is not limited to humans, and I think that’s the basis, actually, of a lot of – for example, humans who cannot feel pain, so who are insensitive to pain, they have a lot of trouble understanding the pain of others because they have no internal reference in their own body to understand what pain is. So it is really a body to body process, most of it, empathy, and sort of downstream, you may get these cognitive processes that we all like to talk about, like taking the perspective of somebody else or putting yourself in the shoes of somebody else, but I think that comes much later.
Sucheta: I see. I would like to get into the last two thoughts that I was thinking about is, one is, what is our understanding about capacity of animals to think about the future and how far can they see their own future?
Frans: Yeah, there’s many interesting research on future planning. Now, of course, everyone who works on the apes know that they pick up tools sometimes that they’re going to use hours later, so for example, chimpanzees may walk through the forest and they pick up grass helms and they put them all in their mouth and they walk around with these grass helms and then two hours later, they arrive at a place where they’re going to use them to fish for termites which means that two hours before, they must have been thinking, this is what we’re going to do today, and people have started testing this out in the laboratory so they have done experiments on the chimpanzees and other apes, do they hang on to tools that they can only use the following day or something like that? So that kind of experiments have been done. There’s experiments on corvettes – that’s the crow family – where they have looked at how far ahead they can think. Usually, these experiments – but this is purely for experimental reasons, usually, we were not looking for weeks or months, or years where we do experiments and so we do it maybe the next day or maybe in a couple of hours, and so we are not testing the limits of the planning capacities in that sense state. Who knows, they may be planning ahead for a much longer time, so there’s a very interesting study that came out on orangutans in the wild where they found that make orangutans which dominate the whole territory, basically, the male orangutans, before they go to sleep, they build a nest like all the apes do – they always build a nest at night high up in a tree, and the male orangutans then call and they give very loud calls that everyone can hear a mile wide, and they call in a particular direction and it’s always the direction that the next day they’re going to travel, so it’s almost as if they call to the whole forest and all the females then will know that the next day, that male was going to travel in a particular direction which allows them to stay close to the male if they want to do that or to move away from him if they want to do that, and so they get that information, but that means that that male knows where’s he going to go the next day.
Sucheta: Wow, that’s so fascinating. My last question was about executive functions from my work and in the neuroscience field can be improved through self-awareness, self-observation, and self-redirection. What have we learned about animals and self-correction? Do they correct their mistakes or do they learn from their mistakes?
Frans: I’m sure they learn from their mistakes. I’m not sure that they see it as a mistake. It’s called trial and error learning but yeah, some things work out and some things don’t work out, and I’m sure they learn from both the positive and the negative outcomes. So in that sense, yes, but they consciously classify certain behavior as the mistake, I don’t know. There was a recent paper on rats where they said that rats have regrets which sounds to me a bit like they have made a mistake and they are aware of it and people have been studying that in rats but other than that, I don’t know how we would get that kind of knowledge, whether they consider a bad outcome a mistake or whether they just move on and don’t repeat the behavior that lead to it.
Sucheta: Got it. Well, thank you so much for this most amazing and fascinating conversation. I hope it’s not too techie but I was going to tell you a quick joke about primates. What did the gorilla call his first wife? His prime mate.
Frans: Oh, okay, okay.
Sucheta: That’s probably the silliest joke. Do you have a primate joke for me?
Frans: No, no, no, but of course, the word ‘primate’ is also used for church leader, huh?
Sucheta: Oh, really?
Frans: I always find that interesting, is that church leaders are primates.
Sucheta: Oh, I haven’t heard of that. Well, what is your next interesting project that you’re excited about?
Frans: We’re doing work at the hospital on human behavior so I’m studying humans in the operating room as a primatologist, basically. We’re also involved in a study of personality and empathy, and the empathic personalities in the apes. We’re doing good at the moment.
Sucheta: Oh, how beautiful. Well, thank you so much. Before I let you go, if anybody wants to know about your work and your writing, where can they find you or find your work?
Frans: Well, I have a Facebook site, there’s a lot of followers and they can look for my name and the public page of it at Facebook, and other than that, there’s a TEDTalk on the internet that they can watch –
Sucheta: Which is highly, highly recommend.
Frans: I’ve listened to a few of those things on the page that you have, yeah.
Sucheta: Once again, thank you for your time and precious advice, and insights. I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Frans: Thank you. Yup, thank you.
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Producer: Alright, well, that was Sucheta’s conversation with Dr. Frans De Waal. Wow, what an amazing conversation. He is so incredibly talented and knowledgeable, Sucheta, and his work obviously speaks for itself. Walk us through and give us a quick overview of some of the things, his views and his work.
Sucheta: Sure, Todd. For ages, humans have taken pride in claiming that they are better than animals. Dr. De Waal’s work has come along to help us see that we are not so different after all. Dr. De Waal is known to describe humans as bipolar apes with incredible possibilities of moving in two yet completely opposite directions. In worst case circumstances, humans are capable of being power hungry, domineering, pro-violence, unkind, self-serving, and consumed by in-group affinity. He says if humans operate from this perspective, they are likely to be worse than any animal we know. On the other hand Dr. De Waal also notes that when we rise above through sharing, caring, and giving, humans are capable of stretching their sense of altruism and extend their moral compass to care for those that they have never met. Only humans have the capacity to think and say every single life matters. In such way, Dr. De Waal believes humans are capable of being better than any animal we know.
So my takeaway, Todd, is that with grace and humility, only we as humans can inhibit our selfish and self-serving ways to say the whole universe is one family and all the differences are imaginary. Dr. De Waal’s work truly pushes us to strive to transcend ourselves beyond ape-like traits, and I love that about his work.
Producer: Yeah, absolutely. As he hinted there, Sucheta, I mean, I gather that there are a lot more similarities to animals than differences. Can you walk us through and summarize how Dr. De Waal characterizes human traits versus animal traits?
Sucheta: Sure. Dr. De Waal’s work points out that the human psychology is a primate psychology. It is just that it may be a bit more complex. We share many similarities with the animals. Both human and animals are social beings and have developed traits of cooperation, reconciliation, and coalition formation to gain access to a group and then eventually thrive there. With that in mind, one can clearly see that humans and animals share attachment towards their own kind. They express love and that attachments through actions such as hugging, kissing, grooming. Furthermore, animals mourn the loss of love ones just as humans do. Animals and us share aggression, fear, desire, and jealousy with other fellow primates. These emotions in humans and animals are hardwired. They are shaped in a way to produce specific responses which are innate, automatic, and reflexive.
Now, let’s talk about the differences. Animals don’t really have the self-oriented process that forms our sense of self. Animals don’t feel shame or guilt as humans do. What really separates the animals from humans is our symbolic system which we call language. Humans don’t feel but they express it through their actions and words which animals can’t do. This has allowed us to evolve into complex species who communicate through spoken words, language, sign language, or even pig Latin, for example. It’s of course a myth for humans to think that they are rational and therefore, they are better than animals. The true challenge for us as humans is that we are not acting using our rational thought but we are operating on deep-seated emotional auto pilot and I just have found this wisdom to have meaningful connection to my own work as well as my own understanding of our race in general.
Producer: Fascinating stuff, so I guess the question that I have been looking forward to asking you is, as we conclude today’s episode here, how would you link your work in the area of executive functions with Dr. De Waal’s research with primates?
Sucheta: Yeah, that’s a very good question, Todd, and I’ve done a lot of thinking as I kind of studied his work one more time, and took a careful listen to his discussion with me as well as his writings. The prefrontal cortex in humans has developed to act as a mental stop or pause button. It stops us from being too quick to judge, too quick to react, or too quick to dismiss. The evolved brain has given us language to negotiate our world and self-talk to self-direct. When these self-control systems don’t work, we say that the individuals have executive dysfunction. They often suffer from impulsivity, lack of mental flexibility, disorganization, failing to take perspective of others, insensitivity to the needs of others, and general difficulty in redirecting themselves and their own self-serving attitude. Those with such problems are perceived to be difficult, argumentative, and sometimes, even uncooperative. Negotiating learning space or home life, or work place with these individuals with executive dysfunction can become a daunting proposition. Dr. De Waal says that morality is not a human invention. It is rather an old and pre-existing capacity but it must be furthered with teaching so that we can take better decisions, better moral decision. The connection I see between what Dr. De Waal says and humans and animals’ shared emotional structure is that it is deeply wired and our decision-making machine in the brain needs guidance and training, otherwise, we humans are naturally going to gravitate towards selfish thoughts and less introspective actions. That way, I see that it is our collective responsibility to expend our moral emotions towards those who are different from us. That means we must learn tools to become patient, less impulsive, tolerant, selfless, and more concerned with the welfare of all. Parents, teachers, and society can teach to these pre-existing capacity for moral emotions in each human being, and when it is taught explicitly and methodically, we are equipping the next generation with skills to take better decision for themselves. So this is a connecting-the-dots that I have done which I find in my work where we are teaching kids, adults to self-regulate and to self-correct, and his calling to shape our moral decision-making process, I see them kind of distantly but deeply connected.
Producer: Alright, well, once again, it was an absolutely fascinating conversation with Dr. Frans De Waal and grateful that we had the chance to have him on the show.
So that’s it for today’s episode. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening and tuning in today. We look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal.