Ep131 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 2: Rehumanization

me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is part two of the question of what our brains have to do with politics. Last week, in episode one thirty, we talked about polarization, why brains are so predisposed for us versus them, for

in groups versus outgroups. We set the table pretty thoroughly with that, but this week we're going to talk about how we might be able to fix that. So quick summary from last week so that we're aligned the human brain is disturbingly good at polarization and dehumanization, and this is why societies across history keep falling for the same psychological tricks. Last week, we began with Rwanda in nineteen ninety before, where constant radio messages calling the Tutsi cockroaches

reshaped how people perceived their neighbors. That kind of language bypasses rational thought and dampens the brain's ability to recognize others as humans with inner lives. The same pattern appeared in Nazi portrayals of Jews, in American World War II propaganda characterizing the Japanese, and even in ancient Rome's use of the word barbarian. Across cultures and eras, the first step toward violence is always a separation with some group,

comparing them to animals, or pests or pestilence. Why because normally, the medial prefrontal cortex activates when we consider another person's thoughts and feelings, but when we view some group as less than human, this social cognition circuitry quiets down. Dehumanization is nothing but the dimming of these circuits in your brain, and once that happens, that makes harming others psychologically easier. And the reason it's so easy for this to happen

is because we are experts at tribalism. Our ancestors survived in small bands, and our brains still automatically sort the world into us and the potentially dangerous them. Even arbitrary labels create favoritism. Many studies show that all you need to do is divide some group of people at random and assign labels, and you can watch things escalate from

group bonding to aggression. And brain imaging studies from my lab and others show the neural basis of this, which is that empathy circuits respond strongly when in group members suffer, but that response weaker for outgroup members. Sometimes outgroup pain even activates reward pathways. So last week we also talked about how easily political identity fuses with our sense of self. When people encounter political statements that challenge their beliefs, brain

regions involved in physical threat become active. This is why facts rarely change minds. The brain interprets disagreement as an attack on who you are. I have long suggested that education is our strongest defense against all the tricks of polarization. If young people can learn the basics of propaganda, they can recognize it and resist it before it takes hold,

and we'll get more into that today. So in this week's episode, we're going to focus on the good news, such as it is, how we can channel tribal tendencies for better societies and reignite the circuitry of our empathy. It can sometimes feel like polarization is an unbreakable law of human nature. It's a reflex wired into the brain, fueled by emotions, amplified by technology, exploited by propaganda. But if neuroscience teaches us anything it's that the brain is

not fixed. It is live wired. It's always changing, it's always adapting, and that means that polarization is not destiny. When we get to the end of today's episode, I will hope to have convinced you that a polarized society is not destiny, because brains are capable of much more, and I'm going to propose some brand new ways that we might turn down the heat. So last episode, we saw lots of things to be depressed about regarding the

tribal nature of our neural machinery. But here's the hopeful part. Our notions of who is in and out of our tribes. This is not fixed. The line of us them is malleable, and under various circumstances, it can get redrawn. So here's an example. Last week we talked about the Robbers Cave experiment in the nineteen fifties. This was a group of eleven year old boys who got divided into two arbitrary groups and given names, the Rattlers and the Eagles, and

the experimenters watched how quickly tribal conflict formed. Once the two groups developed their own identities and were put into competition. They escalated from friendly rivalry to open hostility, despite having no prior differences. So this was a famous demonstration that even arbitrary group labels can trigger us versus them dynamics. But what I didn't tell you last week was the important part, the turning point. Once hostility reached a fevered pitch,

the researchers changed the game. They introduced problems too big for any one team to solve alone. These are called superordinate goals. So think of a truck that stalled and needs to be moved, but it takes all the boys to get the job done. Or think of a broken water supply that requires all hands on deck to fix it. When these problems were presented, now the boys found themselves in a situation where they had to cooperate. They had to pull together to move the truck or get the

clean water. And slowly, grudgingly, they began to soften towards each other. They worked side by side. Then they ended up sharing meals together, and by the end of camp, the boys insisted on riding home together in the same bus. The same circuitry that had driven them into conflict was rerooted by collaboration. And this is one of the key points we see in the research is that who your

tribe is is pretty flexible. So one strategy is to create goals which become superordinate identities that are larger and more encompassing. This is what happened when Franklin Roosevelt introduced the New Deal. This was in the early nineteen thirties. The United States was fracturing under the pressures of the Great Depression. Unemployment was that record highs, the banking system was collapsing, and regions and classes were turning inward, and

everyone was blaming one another for the catastrophe. It was a moment of deep polarization. But instead of leaning into division, Roosevelt pulled a robbers Cave maneuver on a national scale. He created superordinate goals projects that were so large and so urgent that no single group could solve them on its own. He launched massive public works projects like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority and the

Works Progress Administration. And these required Americans from very different backgrounds to cooperate. You had far and city dwellers, You had immigrants and veterans and young people. All these people suddenly had to work side by side to build dams, to restore forests, to pave roads, to electrify rural America. The Social Security Act gave everyone a shared stake in the same national project. These programs obviously don't erase every division,

but they did expand the sense of us. People who might have seen each other as competitors or strangers now became teammates in a collective effort to rebuild the country. In exactly the same way that the campers bonded over the shared struggle to move a stalled truck. Americans began to feel that their fate was linked to the fate of others across the country. The New Deal created a broader identity. It wasn't rattlers versus eagles, It wasn't farmers

versus city workers. It was now citizens cooperating under a common banner to climb out of disaster. So with the robbers Cave experiment and with the New Deal, we see that groups can shift identity boundaries. You might be conservative or progressive, but you're also an American. You might be religious or secular, but you're also a human. The larger the circle, the more empathy gets extended in the brain.

When we expand the category of who counts as us, the circuits involved in seeing others as humans start to crank back up. These empathy networks brighten, and the silhouette we made of the other person regains a mind. We see this throughout history. Think of the Apollo program in the nineteen sixties. America was deeply polarized at that point, divided over civil rights, over Vietnam, over generational change. But for a moment, the space race offered a superordinate goal.

The effort to land a human being on the Moon pulled together scientists and engineers and politicians and ordinary citizens into a project bigger than any one side. When Neil Armstrong took his first steps in nineteen sixty nine, millions of Americans, regardless of party or identity, celebrated the same story.

And consider what happens after natural disasters. Whenever societies get hit with earthquakes or hurricanes or wildfires, people who might otherwise mistrust each other suddenly find themselves working side by side. They're clearing debris, they're distributing food, they're searching for survivors. The amygdala recalibrates to the new, bigger threat, and the reward circuitry fires. When cooperation succeeds, the brain recognizes in real time that the circle of us has to expand.

The general story from decades of research is that when people from different political or racial or religion are put into situations where they have to collaborate solving puzzles or building structures or managing scarce resources, their biases towards one another's shrink. Their medial prefrontal cortex, which I keep mentioning, dims for outgroups. This reactivates the circuitry of humanness comes

back online. Of course, this is not easy, and we'll come back to this in a bit, And the challenge is that in everyday politics there aren't that many superordinate goals. Partisanship thrives on smaller battles of taxes and policies and culture wars. It's rare that we face a problem so big, so undeniable, that it forces us to see the humanity

on the other side of the aisle. But when those moments come, and they always do, we need to recognize them as opportunities for repair because the circuitry is there. The same brain that DIM's empathy for rival can reignite it when cooperation is necessary, the same biology that fuel's

division can, under the right circumstances, fuel unity. And when we understand that, we can design more moments of shared goals, like Roosevelt did with the New Deal, not just wait for the moments to arrive in the form of disasters or wars. So when we ask what pulls us back from the brink, one of the answers is this problems too big for any one side to solve alone. If history is any guide, our best shot at healing polarization won't come from continuing to shout at each other, but

instead finding the trucks that won't budge unless we push together. Now, as I flagged a moment ago, it's not just shared goals that can bind people. This also happens with shared threats. So let's unpack what this can look like. I told you in the last episode about an experiment we ran in my lab where we had people lie in a brain scanner fMRI and they watch images of six hands on the screen, each labeled with a different religion. The computer randomly selects one of the hands, and you see

that hand get stabbed with a syringe needle. And what we find is activity in the brain's pain matrix, this network that generates empathic responses when we see others in distress. This comes on when you see the hand getting stabbed. But the key finding was that the brain reacts more strongly when the stabbed hand has your religious label, and it reacts a lot less when the hand is labeled

as any of your outgroups. In other words, even though all the hands look exactly the same, just adding a one word label causes the brain to care more or less. And this reveals how deeply and automatically our neural systems follow in group and outgroup boundaries. Okay, but now I want to tell you about the second part of the experiment. I wanted to see how flexible these responses can be.

So now imagine this. You're still in the scanner, but now you see a line on the screen that says the year is twenty thirty two, and these three religions are teamed up against these three religions. So you're seeing the same six hands on the screen with the same six labels. But suddenly you've got teammates religions that you didn't care about a minute ago. They're now on your side. And the question becomes what happens in the brain when a hand is stabbed that belongs to an outgroup that

you've just been told is now your ally. And what we see is that this pain matrix responds to this newly formed alliance. Five minutes ago, you had no empathy for that outgroup, but after a single sentence establishing them as a shared team with you, your brain cares a little more when their hand is harmed. So what does this tell us? Even though religious labels run deep, the

brain's empathy boundaries can shift surprisingly quickly. Now this is not particularly wonderful news for the world because your new in group is still defined by a common enemy. But the important clue I want to surface for now is that outgroups can change. They're flexible. Now, sometimes this sort

of shifting allegiance is going to have strange consequences. For example, in the world of fiction, there's a comic in a movie called Watchmen, which unfolds in an alternate nineteen eighty five where aging superheroes who are now outlawed or retired. They're grappling with the looming threat of nuclear war between

the US and the Soviet Union. Now, one of the characters believes that humanity is on the brink of self destruction, and so what he does is he stages a catastrophic fake alien attack and he kills millions of people in New York. And his logic is that that only an overwhelming external threat can shock the warring superpowers into unity with each other. And in the end, the US and the USSR do in fact halt their march toward nuclear war and they join forces against what they believe is

a common enemy. So again this taps into the idea that ourtgroups are flexible and that with a common threat, suddenly enemies can end up on the same side. And all of this leads to an idea that I've been working on for a while, and that is, can we build a better society by complexifying our allegiances? So let me explain this. I've been proposing for several years now that one of our best defenses against polarization and dehumanization

is clever social structuring. So to explain this, let's turn to the Iroquoied Native Americans who lived up around what's now upstate New York. Own currently is the League of Peace and Power, but they weren't known as that four hundred years ago. Four hundred years ago, they were made up of six tribes who were always fighting with each other, really bloody battles. But then in the sixteen hundreds, they were brought together by a man named Deaganaweda, who became

known as the Great Peacemaker. He combined them into one nation. But of course that's not enough. If you simply push people together that can fall back apart easily. Degan Aweda did something much more clever. He structured clans so that each tribe member ended up belonging to one of nine clans. So I might be a member of the Seneca tribe, but I'm a member of the Wolf clan, and you're a member of the Mohawk tribe, but you're also a member of the Wolf clan. The key is that the

membership to tribes and clans cross cut. So how is the Seneca tribe going to fight against the Mohawk tribe? Vibe when I'm a wolf and you're a wolf. And by the way, my Seneca friend is in the Hawk clan, and your Mohawk friend is in the Hawk clan too, And so when we all consider waging war, we think, I don't want to do that. I got friends over there, I've got fellow clansmen. So by cleverly structuring things in a society, by making cross cutting ties, that tamps down

people's natural predilection for easy outgroups. In other words, you can complexify our allegiances. On the other side of the Atlantic, this kind of cross cutting allegiances. This was common. European royalty often married their daughters to husbands and neighboring countries, or even in enemy countries, and this was done to cement alliances, as with the marriage of Charles to Isabella in fifteen twenty six to bind the rival kingdoms of

Spain and Portugal. Sometimes these marriage contracts were to strengthen a power base, but more often they were designed to constrain a contender from attacking. If you force two groups to intertwine, that can subdue the antagonism in the same way that the clash between Shakespeare's fictional montagues and Capulates was overshadowed by a relationship between their children. I think that it's likely to be naive for us to think about everyone in a society getting along, because we're very

hardwired in groups and out groups. But we can structure things carefully like the Iroquois chief did, so that things have counterbalance, so that it's not so easy for people to raise arms against one another. So I'll give you a very specific way that I'm working on this right now with social media algorithms. So currently these algorithms are optimized for engagement at any cost, but they surface increasingly

extreme content. They push users into political echo chambers. They amplify outrage and division, and what we get out of that is a slightly more fractured society. We get diminished trust across the aisle, we get reduced ability for people to engage constructively across differences. So, as a neuroscientists have spent a lot of my career studying how the brain forms bonds and how social identity shapes perception, and how

we might build trust across these divides. And one of the conclusions is that when people first connect over non political shared interests like sports or hobbies or art or music or brands or locations or whatever, they develop these multi dimensional relationships, and later, when political differences emerge, the relationships are more resilient. People are far more likely to converse than dehumanize. So my recent research is in how to redesign social media to match the realities of the

human brains. So I just patented an algorithm that flips the traditional method on its head. Instead of inadvertently clustering users by political alignment as happens now, the new algorithm surfaces information to users through shared interests like running or gardening or surfing, or classic films or chests or sports

teams or baking or whatever. In this way, the algorithm builds bonds, creating a rich web of shared interests, and then at some later point users might come to see that there are differences in political stances, but they've already established connections and that's what allows them to converse. When we like each other and then find out that we have opposite views on some hot button issue, we both tilt our heads and we're more willing to hear the

perspective of the other person because we're already pals. So by taking advantage of the common threads that bond, it makes it less easy to write off the other person. It's just an issue of temporal sequencing. The idea is bond first and debate later, and in this way you meet the whole person. You're not just distracted by the

flash of their politics. This algorithm isn't hiding anything. It's simply spooling out information in a particular order so that you have a chance at having a complexified relationship because you generally like the person, and now you're slightly more likely to lean in and listen rather than write them off. So this whole idea of complexification and new ideas for social media algorithms, these are some of the things that

I'm working on to reduce polarization in society. But the good news is there are lots of approaches that researchers study. For example, one approach to break the cycle of polarization comes from psychology's contact hypothesis, and the idea is just that, under the right conditions, if you have personal contact with members of an outgroup, that reduces prejudice. But and this is crucial, it's not just any contact. If two groups are forced into contact where one holds power over the other,

then hostility usually increases. The key is to structure the contact so they have equal status, cooperation, common goals, institutional support. When you meet those conditions the brains social cognition circuits, like the medial prefederal cortexs and the temporo pridal junction, these begin to reawaken. For the outgroup, people stop seeing the other as an abstract category and start seeing them as individuals. The silhouette of the other person regains a mind.

There are lots of real world examples. For example, there are several beautiful projects where Israeli and Palestinian kids are in musical groups together or go camping together, and that's the kind of future we need. More generally, there have been lots of studies run in schools where children from different backgrounds work together on collaborative projects. And biases shrink in neighborhoods where police officers live and interact with residents,

trust grows. In workplaces where heterogeneous teams share responsibility, you can measure that stereotypes fade. Obviously, none of this happens overnight, but repeated contact under the right conditions chips away as division. And there's another avenue that people have studied called compassion training.

For example, Tanya Singer and her colleagues have studied what happens when people deliberately practice extending compassion not just to their loved ones, but to strangers and even to rivals. They do this for some weeks of training, and you can see their brains change. The regions involved in empathy begin to fire more broadly. The medial prefedal cortex shows stronger activation for outgroups. In other words, compassion can be

practiced like a muscle. Now, the problem is that most of the world is not going to sign up for compassion training right because that requires an active investment on your part. But I'll tell you another thing that has been studied, which I think is much easier to sneak in, and that is simply about perspective taking. So lots of experiments show that when people are asked to write about a day in the life of someone from an opposing group,

their biases soften. The act of imagining another person's experience recruits theory of mind circuits in the brain, in other words, circuits that make the others inner life visible. Now, if you can't get people to do compassion training, how are you going to get them to do perspective taking? Well, that is not so hard. This is what I teach about in one of my classes at Stanford called Literature

and the Brain. The trick is that stories give us a way to see the humanity of the other side by seducing us into perspectives we would otherwise never occupy. You read these books, or you watch these movies, and you are in the shoes of the protagonist, and that reawakens this circuitry that you have for understanding another person. You're cranking up this neural machinery that lets you imagine another person's inner life. Think about the impact of a

book like Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book was written at a time when half of America viewed enslaved people as property, and Harriet Beecher Stowe drew readers into the home of a slave family. Now readers got to inhabit their fears and loves and losses and moral struggles. The book allowed readers to feel the emotional spectrum of people that they

had been taught to see as less than human. And while historians debate the exact effect of the book on the Civil War, they all agree it had a really profound impact on public opinion and helped intensify the national debate over slavery. Or think of a movie like Dances with Wolves, where you're with Kevin Costner who's a Union

Army officer in the Civil War. He gets sent to a remote frontier outpost and he's isolated and cut off from the army, and there he gradually forms deep relationships with the Lakota Sioux Native Americans, and ultimately, over the course of a year, he adopts their way of life and becomes an honorary member of their tribe. So the film starts off with the Lakota as the outgroup, but as you watch the movie, you come slowly to identify with them, and so it softens the mental boundary of

us versus them. So the fact is you can't really force people to do perspective taking. Your psychology resists when it feels threatened, but you can sneak people into perspective taking through compelling stories, stories bypass defensiveness, and before you know it, you are having empathy with some group that you hadn't yet thought to humanize. So generally, one of the ways to think about building a less polarized world

is to have better models of other people. And there's a generally smart way that we can build in that direction, and that is understanding ourselves in relation to other people and being aware of the differences. So let me unpack this. One of the most fascinating discoveries of the past few decades is that polarization isn't always about facts or even identities. Sometimes it just comes down to this strong sense of morality, to the foundations on which we build our sense of

right and wrong. But here's the thing. You've probably noticed that it can be difficult or impossible to convince someone of your moral view. You both just see it differently. So my colleague Jonathan Hite has studied this and gives a metaphor that captures this really well. He says, morality is like a tongue with multiple taste buds. Our tongues pick up sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and new mommy. And in the same way, our moral sense comes with its

own flavors care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Now here's the key. Some people have stronger sensitivity to sweetness or to bitterness, and in the same way, different people emphasize different moral flavors. So speaking, very generally, liberals tend to put the greatest weight on care and fairness. Conservatives, on the other hand, spread their attention more evenly across all five, including loyalty

and authority and sanctity. That means when a liberal and a conservative argue, at the heart of their disagreement is that they're tasting different flavors of morality. So let's make this concrete. Take the issue of immigration. A liberal might frame the moral question as one of care. How can we ensure that families are treated humanely? How can we protect vulnerable people who are seeking a better life? A conservative, on the other hand, might frame the moral question in

terms of loyalty and authority. How can we protect the integrity of the nation. How can we enforce the rules fairly? Both of these are moral arguments. Both come from genuine ethical concern, but they're tasting different flavors, and so they end up talking past each other. Or take the debate over healthcare. A liberal might frame it primarily in terms of care and fairness. How do we make sure everyone has access to life saving treatment? How do we reduce

inequality in health outcomes? A conservative might highlight authority and loyalty. How do we ensure people have the freedom to choose their own doctors and plans. How do we maintain a system that reward lord's hard work and personal responsibility. Both arguments are just leaning on different moral flavors. Or look at discussions around school curricula. Liberals might focus on care and fairness. How do we make sure that students from

all backgrounds feel represented? How do we teach history in a way that acknowledges harm and promotes inclusion. Conservatives might emphasize loyalty and sanctity. How do we preserve national traditions and shared narratives. How do we protect the core values that hold society together? Again, both sides are approaching the issue from sincere moral commitments, but they're sensitive to different

moral taste buds. And this is what makes polarization so slippery, because when you're speaking from one set of taste buds, the other set can feel incomprehensible to someone focused on fairness, appeals to sanctity can sound medieval. To someone focused on sanctity, appeals to fairness can sound naive. It's not that either side is blind, it's that they're tasting a flavor the other one barely registers. And you can see all of this in brain skinning. When people are asked to make

moral judgments. Questions of care activate regions linked to empathy, like the anterior insula. Questions of fairness activate networks associated with reasoning about equality and justice, like the dorsilateral prefrontal cortex, but questions of loyalty and authority these pull in areas tied to social emotions and deference to hierarchy, like the amigdala and orbit or frontal cortex, and sanctity, which is often connected with disgust, lights up the same region that

flares when you smell something rotten. I mention all this to say that the way to understand moral foundations is not that these are abstract concepts. These are embodied experiences, they are felt in the body, and when two people debate morality, they are experiencing the world through different sensory lenses. History gives us lots of examples of this sort of clash.

Think about prohibition in the nineteen twenties. To its supporters, banning alcohol was a matter of sanctity and authority, protecting families, upholding moral order, and forcing discipline. To its opponents, it was a matter of fairness and care. Adults should be able to make their own choices, and the band created more harm than good. The nation was split along moral taste buds, and the result was one of the most

polarized eras in American social life. And today we see this in debates over climate change and vaccines, and gun rights and repri auctive rights. Each side emphasizes different moral foundations. Each side insists they are on the side of morality, and both are correct within their own moral framework. So what does this mean for polarization. It means that part of our problem is translation. If you are speaking fairness to someone who cares most about authority and social order,

your words are not going to land. If you are speaking sanctity to someone who values care, your message falls flat. It's not enough to be moral. You have to speak in the moral language of your audience. There's a study in which researchers reframed arguments about environmental protection. To liberals, they emphasized care protecting vulnerable species, preventing suffering. To conservatives, they emphasized sanctity, protecting the purity of nature, keeping the

earth unspoiled. And what they found was that conservatives were more persuaded by the sanctity frame, while liberals were more or moved by the careframe. Same issue, different taste buds, different results. When we recognize that the person across the aisle is not immoral, but simply tasting a different flavor, it opens a small space. It doesn't mean we're going to agree, but it means we can see the clash for what it is, not good versus evil, but sweet

versus salty. Of course, this recognition doesn't immediately solve everything. Our taste buds are stubborn and they're shaped by our culture, are upbringing, our religion, our genetics. They don't shift easily. But understanding our own taste buds and other peoples can help us navigate polarization with a little bit more humility, because one thing that should be clear to all of us is that moral battles are rarely one by shouting

louder in your own language. They are one by learning to speak at least a little bit in the language of the other side. In other words, the recognition that while we made agree, we're both chewing on the same world, we're just savoring it differently. And if this sort of thing can become part of education, not just on a podcast, but in junior highs and high schools and colleges and all over social media, then we might be able to

get even just a small foothold against polarization. One of the most powerful tools we have is simply teaching people how the brain responds to political language, to group identity, to dehumanizing cues. When we understand the machinery operating under the hood, we are far less likely to be manipulated

by it. Students and of course adults too, need to learn to spot the warning signs when rhetoric starts collapsing some group of humans into pests and parasites, When headlines caricature opponents as monsters, when memes flatten entire populations into jokes or stereotypes. These are triggers designed to bypass empathy and pull these really ancient levers in the brain. It is critical for young people to learn how to recognize

these moves, because propaganda is not going anywhere. Human brains are wired for tribalism, and there are always going to be individuals and movements and institutions who are ready and willing to exploit that wiring, sometimes out of ideological convictions, sometimes for power, just because it gives them a sense of belonging. The motivations might vary, but the tactics of dehumanization are the same, and that's why awareness is our

best defense. Once you can recognize these psychological maneuvers from a distance, they lose their magic. You are no longer a passive recipient of whatever emotional current someone is trying to generate. You become an active observer who can say, hold on, I know this trick, and that small moment of recognition can be enough to keep the spark of empathy alive even when someone is trying very hard to snuff it. And of course you know that. My favorite

topic is brain plasticity. The brain is not a machine of fixed circuits. It's more like a living city. It's always building and demolishing pathways in response to its experience, which means the grooves of polarization are not permanent. They can be reshaped by new experiences, new rituals, new narratives. And the good news is we see this kind of thing happen all the time. Think about South Africa after apartheid.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission wasn't perfect, but it was an attempt to rewire the national circuitry, to create a space where stories could be told, where victims and perpetrators could see each other as humans again. It was a

giant experiment in perspective taking. Or think about Germany after World War Two, a country that had been saturated with dehumanizing propaganda, to spend decades deliberately teaching the opposite memorials to the Holocaust, education about Nazism, cultural rituals of remembrance. The goal reached beyond just the teaching of fact. It was about retraining empathy, to keep the circuits of humanness switched on. You can see this in more local programs.

Think about restorative justice programs where offenders and victims meet face to face in those encounters, stereotypes degrade because now the offender is no longer just a criminal and the victim is no longer just a statistic. Both parties become people again. Possibly they become worthy of empathy again. Now none of this is easy. The grooves of polarization are deep, and they are constantly being reinforced by politics and media and our own psychology. But the point is they are

just grooves. They're not permanent, and they can be redirected. Now, one of the challenges is scale. It's one thing to soften polarization in a classroom or a workplace or a neighborhood. It's another to do it across a nation of millions. But the same principles apply, shared goals, complexified relationships, structured contact, perspective taking. This is what we need to concentrate on if we want societies to survive their cycles of division.

And I want to say that at the individual level, each of us has a role because every time that we resist a caricature of the other side, every time we choose curiof over outrage, every time we practice perspective taking, even if we don't agree, we are nudging our own circuitry. Towards rehumanization. And if you imagine these small shifts in the brain multiplied across millions of people, we may just

be able to slightly bend the arc of polarization. Okay, so we've spent these last two episodes talking about polarization and what we might do about it, and one of the lessons is that we are always looking to our congresses in our social media to analyze our situation, but we're not looking nearly hard enough at our own neural circuitry. What we find when we look there is that our tribal wiring predisposes us to divide into us and them.

When we think about polarization, red versus blue, rural versus urban, team, stir versus robber, baron, woke us versus magastan whatever, we have to remember that what's firing in our brains is ancient machinery. It was designed for survival in a world of scarcity and danger, and there's absolutely nothing new or

surprising about polarization. In last episode, we began with propaganda across nation and time, and we saw how quickly the brain can switch off empathy when the right metaphors are deployed. When you call other groups animals or pestilence or viruses. We followed that circuitry into the lab where our empathy gets stoked up for in groups, but it dims for rivals. We saw children at summer camps turn into enemies in

a matter of days when they're given different labels. We traced the amplifiers of emotion, the pull of identity, the power of disgust, the shadow side of the neurochemicals that bond us but give us sharper division with our groups. And we've seen how history again and again has weaponized these vulnerabilities. But we also saw today that this doesn't have to be our destiny. The same boys at summer camp who threw rocks at each other ended up sharing meals.

We saw how superordinate goals can redraw the boundaries of us, like the way we always see when natural disasters turn

strangers into collaborators. We saw how perspective taking, for example, through books and movies, can bring silhouettes back to three D. And we saw how complexifying the relationships around us so that we have cross cutting ties can bind a tighter social fabric that doesn't have a weak direction that it tears along in other words, I assert the challenge is not to abolish tribalism, because we probably can't, but to

entangle it with lots of cross cutting knots. And one of the main things I can't emphasize enough is the importance of education. Just imagine if all students learned about the variety of moral taste buds, so that as they grew up, they just understood that someone who disagrees with them is not necessarily a troll or misinformed, but instead someone who perhaps puts emphasis on different parts of the equation.

It doesn't mean that two people are going to definitely come to agreement, but it'll damn sure give them a richer understanding that can reach beyond the naive notion that each of them has exclusive access to the truth and Lord only knows why the other side is so deluded. And obviously, everything I'm saying about students applies to all of us at every age. A basic education about polarization

means recognizing propaganda when it strips away humanness. In other words, refusing to let caricatures do the work of collapsing other peoples inner cosmosis down to points that you can snuff out it means asking how we can leverage our technologies to build bridges instead of simply amplifying outrage. And most of all, it means holding on to that simple, sometimes difficult truth that the person across the divide possesses a

brain like hours. They are predicting, they're fearing, they're hoping, They have the agony and the ecstasy just like you do. Polarization thrives when we forget this, when we let the circuits of empathy dim, when we allow the metaphors of vermin and parasites and mobs to overwrite the complexity of human beings. But if we can remember, if we can keep those lights on, then we have a chance of changing the story, of letting the candle of empathy flicker

back to life. The task for each of us is to guard that can, to shield it against the winds of propaganda, to tend to it in the storms of outrage. Because if disgust and fear and anger can make us see our neighbors as contaminants, just remember that recognizing propaganda and taking a different perspective and surfacing what we have in common can make us see our neighbors again as fellow travelers. Improvising their way through the same noisy world.

Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join our weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.