Translator: Krystian Aparta Reviewer: Anna Obarzanowska
(Applause)
Good morning. Aggression and empathy
are a destructive mix.
And these two behaviors seem like polar opposites.
But I would like to show that is not the case.
Aggression and empathy control us, control the world,
and I want to talk about how they also control similar parts of the brain,
and also dictate our behavior
and shape our legal systems.
Aggression is a type of purposeful behavior
intended to harm what it is directed towards.
Empathy would be the opposite.
It is our inborn inclination
to help another being in trouble,
be it a member of our own species, or another.
So, these two behaviors really seem like total opposites.
But let's look at what happens in the brain.
As it turns out, the same parts of the brain are activated
when we are experiencing aggression and empathy.
They both stimulate the prefrontal cortex,
our first warning bell,
and the part that allows us to experience the world.
They also activate the amygdala,
which processes our emotions,
both the good and bad ones.
They both act on the frontal cingulate cortex,
which holds many of our cognitive functions
and allows us to get our bearings on the situation at hand.
And finally, they activate the mysterious insular cortex,
which enables us to distinguish between what's pleasant and unpleasant.
So, they activate similar parts of the brain.
I will first talk about aggression,
which serves a very important biological role.
It enables the survival of the individual,
but is equally essential to the survival of the species,
simply because, in order to survive,
the species' genes must go into the next generation,
and aggression is very important in this regard.
So first of all, we all need to eat,
and we have predatory aggression for that.
But the prey must often defend itself in turn,
and aggressively fight back.
A horse can kill a wolf with a kick.
That would be defensive aggression.
Territorial aggression is another matter.
Animals fight for their territory.
Even the butterfly featured in one of the talks
fights for its territory. People do it.
Our country has often seen ethnic cleansing,
but it's not really that common here.
This took place at the border of Kosovo and Macedonia.
It's a fairly recent event.
Obviously, one important type of aggressive behavior
is the competition for mates.
It's a struggle for reproductive success.
Why is it that important?
Thanks to the competition, only the best males will breed
and pass on the best of genes.
This type of aggression shapes the future of our species,
and every other species.
Our species also competes for social position.
This is about finding the best leader.
In primitive societies, it will be the strongest and most cunning.
And we fight for it.
We often fight in a ritual way.
It's not about killing the opponent,
but just overpowering or humiliating them.
But let's look at the modern, totalitarian states.
There, it's much worse. The terror eats its prey.
This charming shot was taken
on the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution.
Just a year later, two of these guys, Shvernik and Chubar, were dead.
All the others were assassinated too,
apart from Mikoyan, Molotov and Stalin.
But this aggression improves our chances of survival.
And since it helps us survive,
it is considered a good thing, and we reward it.
What follows is that we like to be aggressive.
Aggressive behavior is a source of pleasure,
as long as we don't cross the line
and get beaten by somebody stronger.
Aggression is normally released in wars, in battle.
There are many examples.
What do we do in a time of peace?
We do sports.
And I don't mean chess, but things that happen on a mat.
(Laughter)
In truth, chess players can also be pretty aggressive.
But I mean brutal sports.
But is it only the athletes that get their release?
No, many other people act out the aggression using sports.
(Laughter)
Sports fans like that.
Here, the aggression is built up quite intentionally.
But we don't only see aggressive behavior in sports.
This is a protest in Gdansk.
The unioners versus the police.
And we know what is happening in Greece.
There are many forms of aggressive behavior,
different degrees of aggression.
They are all useful in some way.
It's important to point out that aggression can be aroused,
and that we can cultivate it and breed for it.
For example, there are many breeds of attack dogs,
which we train to be violent.
So it's not only a matter of genetics.
It's also about the upbringing and culture.
Children can be raised to be aggressive.
There have been many groups, like the Hitler Youth,
or Młodzież Wszechpolska, that train kids to be violent.
Aggression is also what we use to reach our goals.
It is interesting that while everybody is aggressive in some way,
aggression is expressed in different ways across cultures.
Some cultures are extremely violent.
The Yanomami are an example of that.
It's much worse than with the Polish Mountain People,
who believe a wedding is a flop without a dead body.
(Laughter)
The Yanomami youth's standing
is based on how many enemies he killed.
It's like pilots marking their planes with the number of enemies they shot down.
The Yanomami are like that.
Their average lifespan is 22-23.
They are constantly waging war,
fighting for practically no reason,
just to kill one another off.
The other extreme would be the Semang of the Malay Peninsula.
They are an incredibly gentle society,
who even used to lack a word for "murder."
The most benign people.
But somebody managed to stir up aggression in them, too.
During the Japanese invasion,
British military training instructors taught the Semang how to murder,
and the Semang turned out to be bloodthirsty soldiers.
Once the political correctness was gone,
they became the most ruthless fighters.
They would not stop and loot the bodies, just went on slaughtering.
The terms "aggression" and "violence" cover many different phenomena
and can be categorized in various ways.
We can distinguish between intra-species and inter-species aggression.
When we punch a guy, that's intra-species.
When we slaughter a pig or calf for burgers,
that's inter-species violence.
But we also have defensive and offensive aggression.
The defensive kind is considered more moral,
and for that reason, even if we intend to attack,
we always explain it away as defending ourselves.
"It's the bunny's fault, scrunching his face like that!"
(Laughter)
"The dog had no choice but to off it."
(Laughter)
But what I wanted to talk about a little more
is the difference between predatory and emotional aggression.
Two types of aggression.
One is when we calmly work towards our goal,
emotionally disconnected, but eventually kill someone, for example.
The other kind is about rage, yelling, losing control,
and being less efficient.
In some studies, they tried to find different areas in the brain
that control these two different types of aggressive behavior.
And they did.
Allan Siegel put electrodes into cats' brains,
and found that if you stimulate the lateral hypothalamus,
then the cat exhibited this predatory aggressive behavior.
For example, a rat would calmly approach the cat,
the cat would seize it by the neck without so much as a meow,
shake it, throw it around, kill it, and act calm all the way.
However, if you insert the electrodes into the amygdala,
or the medial hypothalamus,
or the periaqueductal gray,
the cat enters into a defensive rage, behaving violently, hissing,
and mangling its prey instead of killing it immediately.
A totally different kind of emotion.
And like before, the cool reaction is helpful in reaching an objective,
and then, there is rage,
which serves to give us an emotional release.
I do not want to give you a detailed description
of how the complex system of neurotransmitters works,
but I do wish to point out one thing.
These two systems, in the lateral and medial hypothalamus,
inhibit each other.
So if you are a sniper, you have predatory aggression.
You can't be emotional.
You don't want to kill the enemy in a fit of rage,
but you want to accomplish a task, stay cool, and hit the target.
Emotional aggression rules out predatory aggression.
It can be dangerous when one transforms into the other.
Like when the police assigned to calmly disperse a crowd
loses control and succumbs to rage.
This is what happened in the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Now, let's talk about empathy.
Empathy is the propensity to help another being.
It's a very beneficial thing,
and it is not unique to humans.
It provides a survival advantage to other social species as well.
Monkeys and apes are one example,
and they don't only empathize with other apes.
This story was photographed by onlookers,
and it took place at a Chicago zoo.
When the little boy fell into the gorilla enclosure,
a female gorilla named Binti Jua ran to the child,
gently picked him up,
dipped him into a little stream of water they had there,
as if trying to wake the unconscious boy,
and then left him by the door.
She did all she could,
and all that a human female could do in those circumstances.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Not to say that men can't be emphatic.
(Laughter)
There are two types of empathy.
Cognitive empathy is where we help out of a rational decision,
and there is emotional empathy, which some would call true empathy.
When we employ cognitive empathy,
we try to understand the other person's thinking,
and use that to help them.
But when emotional or affective empathy is at work,
we try to feel what the other person feels.
Our brains have specialized systems,
called mirror neurons,
which produce a sort of motor resonance.
They make us imitate the way others move, including their facial expressions.
When you smile, I will smile back.
And when I smile, I will feel happier.
We can tell what other people are feeling just by looking in their faces.
Even with these very simple images,
we easily tell what the feelings are, thanks to our mirror neurons.
And the mirror neurons also make behavior propagate.
If everybody's laughing, you start laughing too.
Yawning is also contagious, but unwelcome for the speaker.
(Laughter)
Sadly, mirror neurons also react to aggressive behavior,
and may make it spread through a crowd, which can be dangerous.
Now, let's come back to cognitive empathy.
It's based on a theory of mind, understanding another perspective.
And emotional empathy is about understanding feelings.
And we can test for these faculties.
This is a theory-of-mind test.
The question is: "What will he use the umbrella for?"
Of course, being a short fellow, he'll use it to open the door.
And this is an emotional empathy test.
How would you interact with a grieving person?
Should you come closer?
And we can monitor what parts of the brain flare up.
And based on this research,
we know that with the theory of mind, or cognitive empathy,
specific regions of the brain will fire when we use it.
Look at the blue area.
This is the connection between the temporal and parietal cortices.
If that is damaged, we can't understand others,
we can't form moral judgments.
And a completely different area is activated in emotional empathy.
Finally, let's talk about empathy and aggression.
We generally think that empathy inhibits aggression.
We're not aggressive when we empathize.
And indeed, some positions of the human body
signify vulnerability, humility, and impede aggressive behavior.
You usually don't shoot people who surrendered.
We see that in animals as well.
This dog is expressing submission towards another dog.
He's exposing his belly and the carotid artery,
making himself easy to kill.
And this works to impede an attack.
Now, although they may seem total opposites,
empathy and aggression often mix.
And their coming together
results from the most beautiful feeling, motherly love.
Because a mother's love and empathy towards her young
creates aggression against any threat to the offspring.
As anybody whose dog had puppies knows,
putting your hand into the whelping box will get you bitten.
Here, a duck is fighting away a swan.
Birds and mammals protect their young,
and to protect the young, you need to be aggressive.
We also use aggression as a means of education.
Agata didn't talk about that, but many educators would agree:
spare the rod, spoil the child.
And it works wonderfully, although we may not like it.
[Castrate pedophiles | Test the Prime Minister]
(Laughter)
Due to our empathy towards the victim,
we want to punish the criminal harshly.
And everybody joins in: "Castrate the pedophiles!"
No matter the political divide.
And 80% of Poles agree with that.
This is because we feel so sorry for these children
that we want to punish the pedophiles as hard as we can.
And this is why capital punishment is accepted.
We use capital punishment to get our revenge,
acting out of pity for the victim.
One experiment used a simple computer game,
where you were supposed to treat the wounded and shoot the aliens.
So this is the normal response.
But in our excitement, we can have an abnormal response:
we shoot the wounded, and bandage the alien.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But it turned out that in both cases,
the same parts of the brain would flare up.
And recently, we saw what the mixture of empathy and aggression
can do to a crowd.
What happened in the protests
against removing the cross in front of the Presidential Palace
was that most of the people actually felt compassion
for the dead president, his wife, and all the victims.
But aggression was high, they were looking for a perpetrator.
"It was no accident!" I would show you the banner,
but TED did not buy the other photo.
The demonstrations were so terrible
because empathy and aggression are a volatile mixture.
So to sum up, I would just like to say
that when we intend to do good, we must always be careful
not to do something bad.
And what's important is that all legal systems
are based on this mixture, on exacting punishment,
on revenge, and that is a dangerous thing.
Our justice system either tries to be too harsh
or to have too much empathy for the prisoners.
And from a neuroscientific perspective, a good legal system
should achieve a balance between punishment and aggression,
and our compassion for the victims.
And here, I would like to quote Adam Smith,
who said that we can only achieve social progress
if our future society should have a fair and just legal system.
Thank you.
(Applause)