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I interviewed Darren Schreiber on February 23 rd .  This is part one of a two part interview. Here's a link to the audio podcast.

Thanks to Don Caldarazzo   for doing the transcript.

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Eric Schreiber Bio:

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Rob Kall:   And welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 A.M, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored by Opednews.com .  My guest tonight is Darren Schreiber.  He is a Neuropolitics researcher. He's affiliated with the department pf Political Science University of of San Diego, but I'm not talking to you there, now.

Darren Schreiber:   Now, I'm in Budapest, Hungary actually.

Rob Kall: .  Cool!  You've just recently published a very interesting article, and it is just the tip of the iceberg of your interests, and where you're going, and what you're into, so I'm not sure where to begin.  You've got such a wealth of ideas and material here.  You've got a book coming out, and that /

Darren Schreiber:   Yeah, the book is entitled Your Brain Is Built for Politics.

Rob Kall:   Your Brain is built for Politics; yes.  That is based on the idea that the brain evolved to deal with politics.  Now, how did that work when people were living in bands and tribes and sitting around a fire?  There were no National Parties. What do you mean by that?

Darren Schreiber:   What I mean by politics specifically is what I call "Coalitional Cognition," and that means "Thinking about us or them." So humans, one of the interesting things about us is that we can change our group membership all the time, and we do.  When we're in the office, we're in one group, but we're maybe part of "I'm a male" in the office, but I'm also "Part of the faculty, instead of being a student."  We have lots and lots of different coalitions that we're members of simultaneously, and it seems that you need a really huge brain if you're going to manage being a member of a lot of different coalitions and navigating all of the different memberships simultaneously, which is what we have to do as humans.

r  Now I wanted to kind of stay with that indigenous, tribal picture there, though.  What are the coalitions there?  Have you looked at it from an anthropological point of view?

Darren Schreiber:   I haven't as much in my own research, but I've read a lot of the people who have, and what they find is across species; so not only early humans, but in dolphins.  In fact, there's a story in the news today in my former home, San Diego: there was a giant superpod of dolphins spotted in the ocean today, and this superpod is a collection of lots and lots of smaller pods of dolphins.  Dolphins, like humans, have coalitions that are changing in dynamic and at multiple levels.  So A couple of dolphins will go hunting together today, but another pair might go hunting tomorrow; and they not only hunt in pairs or in small groups, but even in larger groups, and even in these superpods they can get together for bigger forms of sociality.  What we share in common with dolphins is changing coalitions. 

So if we were humans, we would maybe go hunting with a friend for some rabbits tomorrow, ad if we're going to go in a really big group, we need to get a lot of people together to go hunting an elephant.  And if we're going to live in a village to protect ourselves from other villages or other tribes that might be out there against us, we ally in villages and in tribes and in ever larger organizations; and then we're members of all of those simultaneously and in different ways, and even in different times, we change alliances within groups.  And that's true for humans, for chimpanzees, for dolphins, for hyenas; all of these animals that I call "Political Animals."  So it's not just humans, but many other political animals.

In contrast: ants?  If you're an Argentinian ant in San Diego, you are going to remember that Argentinian ant coalition for the rest of your life, and that never changes.  And all the other ants can tell by the sounds that you give off.

Rob Kall:   So what you're saying then is that, because you're looking at brain function, you're suggesting that parts of the brain that tie us to political behaviors existed long before humans, and that they are existent in mammals and maybe birds and things like that?

Darren Schreiber:   That's exactly right.  We see this in common again, if you look at - one of the most fascinating features of this is to look at what is called the "Dunbar Numbers.'  So, this researcher named Robin Dunbar did a series of studies, and what he discovered was: the larger your social network was, the number of other members of you're species that you're interacting with on a really regular basis, the larger that number of members in that social group is, the bigger the brain is relative to your body size. 

So dinosaurs, for instance, have massive bodies, like the brontosaurus (which is not what the dinosaur people call them anymore, but), those huge dinosaurs, remember, from learning about in childhood, had brains that were trivially small, the size of a walnut.  Now you could run a giant dinosaur on a brain that's the size of a walnut because it doesn't really require that much computational power.  An elephant, by contrast, the largest land animal that's around now, it has a huge brain; but that huge brain is not devoted to running the big old elephant, it's really because elephants also are political animals.  They form coalitions, they have social structures that change in our dynamic, just like humans, and that requires a lot of mental effort. 

This mental capacity for forming coalitions is what our national politics of the 21srt century relies on.  But the brain evolved for politics, this tribal politics that has been around for a very, very long time, even before we had tribes that we would recognize as humans.  When we see these superpods in dolphins, it's a parallel kind of evolutionary strategy that has developed.

Rob Kall:   So, you're talking about politics like, "Who's turn it is to do the dishes," or "Whose turn it is to hunt for the mastodon," eh?

Darren Schreiber:   Exactly.  The term that anthropologists use for this is called "Everyday Politics."  The politics of the office, of the church, of the communities, of the family - all of those are examples of politics.  I take sports as an example: as a former Philadelphia resident myself, people are very frequently talking about politics in sports.  When I hear a bunch of guys at a local bar in Philly just sitting around talking about sports -- me, as a political scientist, I'm hearing them as if they're talking about politics.  Coalition memberships; which team do they like better, why do they like them better?  How are they connected with each other?  And that tension that we find there is really a modem manifestation of this ability we have to think as political animals. 

Aristotle got it right a couple thousand years back:  "Man is by nature a political animal."  And it comes out in all these different ways: whether it's talking about sports, whether it's talking about the dynamics of who's going to do dinner tonight, whose going to do the dishes, and all of that constant coalitional navigation and negotiation that we're doing is using the political brain, that's how we can do it.  It's because we have this brain built for politics.

Rob Kall:   OK.  You use one word, and I just want to get really clear about it.  You talk about the word "coalition" as a major part of your model.  So could you define it, talk about that a little bit, what that means?

Darren Schreiber:    Yes.  So one of the things that's incredibly fascinating that psychologists have described is what they call the "Minimum Coalition Model."  Very simply, if you get three people together, and you give two of them blue stickers and the third one a red sticker, just that minimal level of an intervention, is enough to get the people who get the blue sticker to act together against the person who has the red sticker.  We have this tendency as humans to cooperate on any dimension that we can see as being salient, as being something that will help us to build a friendship. 

If I say, "Hey, you've got a blue sticker, I've got a blue sticker.  Let's go after that third person who has got the red sticker," that's as trivial of an indicator - even as random as it is, that psychologists just assigned the colors randomly - it doesn't matter.  People will team up and engage in beneficial relationships with that person that just happens to have the same kind of sticker as we do.  What's also fascinating about this experiment, though, is that not only are we building a coalition based on something as trivial as a sticker, but also based on that trivial sticker, we're changing all of the other coalitions that people would also be members of.  So, I might be White, he might be Black, and yet a simple of a manipulation as giving somebody a sticker can get them to work together to benefit that group.  So, we change group membership really, really quickly.  Shockingly quickly, in fact.

Rob Kall:   Now, looking over some of your research, or maybe it's the preview you gave me of the first chapter of the book you're working on, you talk about the idea that racism is more involved in stereotypes than the actual race?  Could you - this sounds like the kind of thing you're talking about.

Darren Schreiber:   Yes.  So, Rob Cursans, who is a researcher at University of Pennsylvania and a good friend of mine, did some fantastic work a number of years ago.  People had thought for many many years that racism was just hardwired, that we were somehow fundamentally built to be racist and to discriminate against others.  And what Rob did is, in this one very clever experiment, he had people pay attention to two scenarios, one in which there was a conflict among two basketball teams. 

And in the first instance of it, the basketball teams were divided between Whites and Blacks, and in the second, the basketball teams were intermixed,  the Jets and the Sharks.  The first experiment there, the Jets are all Black and the sharks are all White, and in the second experiment they're mixed by racial grouping, and so there's Black and White on both teams.  And what Rob showed in his very clever experiment in a paper called Can Race Be Erased? was that when race was no longer tied to team membership, people paid attention to team membership rather than to race, and that, essentially, in a very quick experiment, in a few minutes, you could erase the cognitive effects of race in this narrow type of context.  And people paid attention to "Are you a member of my team or not?  Are you a member of the Jets or the Sharks?" rather than "Are you White or Black?" 

As I've gone through that step in the fifth chapter of my book, talking about this idea of race and how it interplays, the way that I see it is as a modern manifestation of this coalitional cognition.  Me trying to figure out "Are you an us or are you a them?"  And from that perspective, racism, the idea of racism as being hardwired just doesn't make sense, because we change coalitions really frequently.  I've got some brain imaging studies that show that when people are looking at faces of Whites or of Blacks, there is a tendency to have a stronger activation in the part of the brain called the amygdala. 

The amygdala is the part of the brain that is involved in fear and threats and all kinds of other social types of cognition, so I don't want to oversimplify the issue, but one way people who have looked at this have done studies of looking at the amygdala when they've showed faces to both whites and blacks, and there is a tendency I think because of pervasive racial stereotypes in our culture, to have this threat-related reaction to African American faces.  And that's true, again, for whether the subjects are White or Black.  When they seeing Black faces, there is this internal offensive threat in varying levels. 

When you change the experiment a little bit, and you don't just put faces, but you put people in real context (which is what I did), what we find is that, all of a sudden, well, in the first instance, where I showed that, again, people have these amygdala reactions to Black faces; when you shift, and you show faces of Black police officers, or Black politicians, or Black businessmen, or Black families, Black students, what you show is that, that membership of those people who are consistent with mainstream social norms, they don't activate the amygdala.  So in a very quick context, just in context, when we see a person in a context, that context can give us more information that can trump out initial racial prejudices.

Rob Kall:   Kind of the "Hoodie Response."

Darren Schreiber:   Exactly.  When I saw the Trayvon Martin story coming out in the news, I thought "Wow, this is really powerful."  Because we have this tendency to use that context, whether it's a hoodie, whether it's the other types of clothing that people are wearing, to change the stereotype we have for somebody. 

There's a great quote from Jesse Jackson, where he was talking about how he hates that he lives in a country where, if he is walking down the street and hears footsteps behind him, he starts thinking about robbery, and if, thinking about robbery, he turns around and sees that there is a White guy behind him, he feels relieved.  He said he hated that.  And he hates that because he was recognizing an implicit association he made in his own mind between race and threat, between African American and the threat of being robbed, and that if he turns around and sees a white guy, that this makes him feel relieved, and he said he hated that. 

What's really telling, though, is to then think through the experiment: if he had turned around and seen a White guy with a gun, would he have felt relieved?  Well, no!  We don't expect he would have.  If he had seen a White guy wearing the hood of a KKK member, we don't think he would feel relieved; and if he had turned around and had seen a Black man carrying his baby in his arms, again, we don't think he'd feel threatened. 

So, in our coalition membership we have implicit associations (all of us, just like Jesse Jackson did) that connect people to different stereotypes.  But the good news of the research I've been doing shows that we can override those stereotypes.  And while we do have these stereotypes, they're important, they change our behavior, they change, in particular, our automatic reactions to situations, we can override that by making good choices.  I think that's great news.

Rob Kall:   Isn't it true, though, that the amygdala can actually kick in before a conscious response?  Before you even realize what you're seeing, the amygdala sees and responds.  Doesn't that happen?

Darren Schreiber:   That is true.  One way of thinking about it is that we have two brain systems.  Another one of my colleagues, Matt Lieberman, that I've done research with when I was at UCLA, talks about the brain as organized in the reflective and reflexive systems.  So in this model, the amygdala is part of the reflexive system.  It automatically kicks in, as you said.  Maybe Jesse Jackson is walking down the street, he hears footsteps behind him.  He has this automatic, instantaneous association of "Somebody is behind me; threat; and maybe it's a Black person."  This is a great Civil Rights leader talking about his automatic association in these things. 

And yet, we have also a reflective system.  And so, while we do have these millisecond fast reactions to phenomena and to stimuli, we can override that.  And that's the great thing we have as humans, a massive neocortex that allows us to reflect on a situation, and to hold down our amygdala's automatic impulse.  We have tons of automatic impulses all the time, and yet, we as humans have the ability to choose, to really think through things. 

An example of this from my friend Matt Lieberman's work, is he did a series of studies where he had people matching faces.  So you see one face, and then you have to match it with either a Black face or a White face.  So they'd maybe show a Black face, and you're supposed to match it with another Black face to show that, OK, you recognize that's a Black face and match it with a Black face.  Or he would show a Black Face or a White face, and he'd ask you to match it with the words "African American" or "Caucasian American." 

It turns out that in the first condition, when people are matching faces, their amygdala activates.  In the second condition, when he showed the word matching, and you were supposed to match the name, the amount of frontal cortex, of (I think it was in this case) central lateral pre-frontal cortex, this frontal part of the brain, the part of the gray matter of the brain, the more active that is, the less active the amygdala was.  So he was showing that, basically, you can check yourself; you can increase the activity in that frontal lobe of the brain, and decrease the amygdala response, and in his experiments it's as simple as: by labeling something with the label "African American" or "Caucasian American."  That's a simple enough path to downgrade the amygdala automatic reaction.  So we're not just our amygdala.  We've got this big brain.

Rob Kall:   And the amygdala a much more primitive part of the brain.  The frontal cortex is the gray matter, the most sophisticated, most recent part of the new brain, right?  So it makes sense that the override would come from there, and that it would override the more primitive amygdala.  Right?

Darren Schreiber:   Yeah, although I think we've got to be careful when we're talking about these things, in the sense that the amygdala is very old, so it does have older origins; and it's the neocortex, that, as you said, "The New Brain is a more recent evolutionary advantage."  But that amygdala that we have as humans evolved over time along with the neocortex. 

So they're really intertwined, and we don't want to too oversimplify.  It's an older structure, it's been around in our evolutionary history for a long time, but the amygdala we have now is the amygdala of the 21st century, that has evolved along with the rest of that brain, and knows how to get instruction from the neocortex and these other parts. So they're /

Rob Kall:   It's kind of like saying you've got a 2013 car; the carburetor you have with that car, is a lot smarter than the carburetor from a 1940 automobile.

Darren Schreiber:   Exactly.  And it's evolved to fit the human condition, so another interesting thing about the amygdala is, the bigger your social network is, apparently, the larger your amygdala is, also.  So, the amygdala has gotten a kind of bad rap in the past, because it does so consistently activate when there is a threat that we're exposed to, but it also has a lot of other functions.

One of ways I always lecture about this when I'm talking to a group of students or to an audience is I mention the fact that the amygdala is also very active when you're sexually stimulated.  If your partner is bringing you to orgasm, your amygdala is activated.  So it's probably not a threat response, it's many, many other things that are entwined in social cognition; and we don't want to oversimplify how complex the brain is.  It's connected in a lot of really nuanced ways.

Rob Kall:   Hmm.  Sex and fear, they come from the amygdala.  That's an interesting combination. 

Darren Schreiber:   But also, like I said, our social connectedness.  A bunch of different things are tied in with the amygdala.  Also, I should be careful, but - you can get rid of the amygdala and you can still have fear.  There was a study done in the last couple weeks that just got published.  A few women that didn't have an amygdala, and yet when they gave them CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) in a mask and made them feel like they were suffocating, the women still had panic attacks, because they didn't have an amygdala, but they did have other parts of the brain that allowed them to feel an internalized sense of fear.  So again, it's an argument against the amygdala just being the fear center of the brain.  You can still have fear even if you don't have an amygdala.

Rob Kall:   Well, you talk in your book about the incredible plasticity of the brain, how the brain has redundancy built over it like an onion: over, and over, and over, and over again, so that you can lose major parts of your brain, and still have function that gets be picked up by something else.

Darren Schreiber:   Yeah.  One of the classic ways that Psych professors always talk about this with their undergraduates is the story of Phineas Gage, an individual who, many, many years ago, I think over a hundred years ago, was tamping down some gunpowder or some explosive as he was working building a railroad, and as he tamped down this metal shaft, and tamped down the explosive, it ignited it, a spark ignited and shot this rod through his forehead.  And nonetheless, even though he didn't have a big chunk of his frontal lobe, he was able to continue functioning.  Like I mentioned: this woman who doesn't have either of her amygdala is still living a pretty normal life. 

People can have a severe stroke.  My own grandmother had had a series of strokes over the course of the latter part of her years of her life, and for a while lost sensation in half of her body, but with great help from modern neuroscience and from therapists, she was able to regain most of her independence and live just fine.  What was funny was, she had to do some other tricks; she had to do things like, when she put her keys away, she would say out loud, "I'm putting my keys into my left pocket," so that she would would tell herself, help her brain to remember, "Hey, my keys are going into my left pocket."  And ever since I heard her talking about that, when I was a much younger college student, I would think to myself "OK.  Now I'm going to tell myself, 'I'm putting my keys in my left pocket so I don't lose them.' I don't have any brain damage, my brain is healthy, but there are these tricks that we can use, because we have this multi-modular mind that has lots of different pieces working together. 

Rob Kall: .  Let's get back to Phineas Gage for a second.  Now, when he had that railroad rod go through his brain, he changed.  He was able to function, but he went from being an administrator to being a scoundrel, a foul-mouthed, nasty guy.  So, when he lost frontal cortex, he was not quite the same person at all. 

Darren Schreiber:   That's true, and he did really change his personality, although I'm just reading my way through Stephen Pinker's new book; he's a psychologist at Harvard who has got a book titled The Better Angels of Our Human Nature, and he mentions and discusses Phineas Gage in one of the chapters, and says that the story of Phineas Gage has been a little bit overblown.  That, he wasn't quite as bad in his reaction as the kind of re-re-re-re-re-tellings that have come out, and that it looks like he also actually gained back a lot of his function.  So, again, even with Phineas Gage we see that neuroplasticity coming back as he's able to remodulate, and change, and re-adapt. 

Also, certainly alike are the examples of modern wounded warriors who are coming back and experiencing traumatic brain damage or PTSD; even if they're having initially difficult reactions from the brain trauma or from the psychological stress, the great news of neuroscience in the last 20 years is that there is neuroplasticity, we can overcome the way that our brains change.  And if people are dealing with addiction, they can go through recovery programs.  People that have had traumatic brain injuries can, like my grandmother having her stroke, can recover and work around it. 

We can learn new habits.  You can teach an old dog, if it's a human dog, you can teach an old dog new tricks.  And this makes sense in the context of being a political animal, because if we couldn't rewire our brains, we couldn't have that kind of neuroplasticity, we wouldn't be able to survive as the political animals we are, we have to be able to change with the changing times.  That's an essential part of what it means to be a human being in a political world.

Rob Kall:   OK, now, I call my show the bottom up radio show because I believe that we're transitioning from a top down culture to a more bottom up culture.  I also believe that for hundreds of thousands of years, humans and their predecessors lived in a more bottom up way, and that it's only since the onset of agriculture and civilization that our culture has become more top down.  But, when you talk about top down and bottom up when it comes to brain processing, it's a little different. 

Still, it's interesting to look at the way the brain functions from top down and bottom up ways, and it seems to me, especially from what you've described as the nature of the amygdala, top down brain function is where you impose upon your experience what you've got in your brain.  Bottom up brain function is where you open up and allow whatever you're experiencing to be processed with the least amount of influence based on your past.  Does that make sense?

Darren Schreiber:   Yeah, I'm not so sure.  I mean, the thing is, that we are always thinking with our whole brain.  So these brain imaging studies, one of the things that felt a little funny with them when you're looking at the data is we don't look at the difference between when your brain is working or when it's not working.  We look at very small differences in blood flow. 

So the technique that I'm using in my studies, and that many neuroscientists are using, is called fMRI.  This is the same MRI that they're using when they're looking at my knee.  It's Magnetic Resonance Imaging; you're getting a giant magnetic pulse and seeing "Hey, what 's the structure there?"  You can use that because it's a magnet, and because there are magnetic properties of blood.  Blood has iron in it, and that iron magnetizes, and if it's oxygenated blood, it has a different magnetic signal than deoxygenated blood.  And the brain imaging can pick that up.  But it picks up differences that are fractions of a percent, and then is able to extrapolate about the amount of the changes in neuro-activity that are taking place when that blood flow changes. 

What's fascinating, though, is that the brain is always active, everywhere.  There isn't a part of the brain that just, as far as I know, that just shuts down completely, and a bunch of neurons that are completely quiescent; in fact, your whole brain is working together all the time,.  It just changes how much activity is taking place in one part versus in another, and that's what neuroscientists are paying attention to.  So, there is a constant interplay between these reflexive processes and these reflective processes: they're constantly in a conversation.  Neither one is completely shut out at any given time.

Rob Kall:   That's a very general kind of a statement, yet, you have a study.  Your study, and I'm going to read a brief excerpt from it:  "...concluded that amygdala activations associated with externally directed reactions to risk are stronger in Republicans, while insula activations associated with internally directed reactions to affective perceptions are stronger in Democrats.  These results suggest an internal versus external difference in evaluated process." 

Now, I don't think my listeners are going to understand that, but it's my way of transitioning to get you to talk about your study.  But what I am reading in that is there were some real specific differences, and can you tell us about what the study was, how it worked, and what you found?

Darren Schreiber:  Sure I'd be glad to.

Rob Kall:   All Right, now wait.  First, we have to do a station ID, and then we'll be right back with it.  This is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM reaching metro Philly and South Jersey out of Washington Township, sponsored by Opednews.com .  I'm talking with Darren Schreiber.  He is a neuroscientist who is studying neuropolitics, and he's got a very interesting study that has just recently been published, and he's going to tell us about it.  And that study apparently differentiates registered Republicans from Democrats better than most of things.  So tell us about, hmm?