Listen, there are some great things
about our species, right?
MacBooks, the Moon rover-- I mean, Mozart.
Those things seem so uniquely human to me.
Well, now, they've recorded humpback whale song,
which has got cadence and tempo and syncopation,
so all of these elements that are very complex.
In fact, some scientists have turned it into sheet music.
- What? - It turns out,
the more we learn, the more we go in nature
and actually ask questions and do science, we learn
we humans are special, we're unique,
we're just not uniquely unique.
I am Dr. Horowitz's biggest fan.
She has taken two fields of medicine--
veterinary medicine and human medicine--
and she's decided to intersect them.
She talks about all the ways that we are not very different
from tarantulas or lobsters.
By learning about animals,
we can learn so much more about ourselves as humans.
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- Whoo! - Hello!
- So excited you're here. - I'm so excited to have
this conversation with you guys.
Dr. Horowitz, as you know, "BookTube" is a vibrant community
who come to YouTube to share our love of reading and books,
and you are a cardiologist, a psychiatrist,
you are on the faculty for Harvard's Medical School
in Human Evolutionary Biology.
You spent 15 years studying the natural world
and how it could help you better understand human physical and mental health.
And then it doesn't stop there.
You are a "New York Times" best-selling author
of "Zoobiquity,"
and you have another incredible book, "Wildhood."
Wow. You are a legend,
and we are so happy to have you here at "BookTube."
- I'm thrilled to be here. - Thanks a lot.
So, Barbara, for the viewers
who may not be familiar with your work,
would you mind telling us a little bit about it
and the path that led you here?
Yes, I started my career as a cardiologist, as a physician.
I was busy taking care of lots of human patients,
teaching medical students, doing research.
And then one day I got a telephone call
from one of the veterinarians at the Los Angeles Zoo
calling about one of their primate patients
who they thought had had a stroke.
Now, board-certified zoo vets can do
in many ways much more than physicians can do,
but on occasion they reach into the human medical community,
especially when it comes to great apes
because, you know, we humans are one of the great apes.
So, anyway, I went to the zoo, and what I saw
and the experience of being with the vets
and going on rounds with them really was the beginning
of what became a transformation.
The a-ha moment for me,
in my brain and my heart,
was how similar this was and how in all of those years
I never once thought about what other animals it might happen in.
And that changed my perspective not only on being a physician and looking at my patients
in heart disease and in cancer and whatnot,
but also behavior, mental illness.
So I would say that that telephone call changed my life.
- Wow. - So, I'm a pulmonologist,
and I would have conversations in the hallway
with some of my colleagues after I read your books.
And I'm wondering, when you were going through your initial phase
of everything that you are, which is a lot,
what were those conversations like?
As physicians, we're trained to be very skeptical,
so it was surprising to me to be discovering, you know, going to the zoo,
and I'm having one a-ha moment after another.
And then I'm driving back to UCLA
and I'm sharing it, like, in the cafeteria with colleagues,
and there's not a lot of recognition.
They're like, "Oh, really? I'd never heard about that."
So the book was written for physicians, to say,
"Hey, neurologists, you're dealing with all these football players
and athletes who have concussions.
You ought to talk to the scientists who understand how woodpeckers,
who have this repetitive concussive force,
they don't develop brain hemorrhage."
And, "Hey, OBGYNs who are trying to help women,
you know, retain their fertility into their 40s,
there are sharks that live into their 300s and 400s
where they ovulate for 250 years.
- So there's this rich, incredible-- - 250 years?
They go through puberty at 115 years
and then they are reproductively active
until they die, at, like, between 300 and 400, yeah.
That's absolutely incredible.
- Wow. - That was exciting in a way.
Like, there's an information gap.
But when it came to publishing the book, I started noticing
some things that I think speak to a real problem that we have,
which is something called human exceptionalism,
where we humans see ourselves as uniquely unique.
In medicine, we go to medical school. We learn so much.
And yet you think of what vets learn in veterinary school,
they learn all of that, but they learn about it in many different species.
Can we just take a second to acknowledge what a badass lady you are?
I can only imagine what would have had to happen
for somebody navigating through a new space, especially as a woman.
And I want to say you remind me so much of my godmother,
Jane Goodall, who also was a pioneer in this space.
I can't hold a candle to either of you,
but I know when I was in the middle of studying pre-med,
I had, you know, people question my abilities.
But I'm very interested to hear what your point of view is
and what your experience was like.
Well, first of all, Jane Goodall deeply inspired me in many, many ways.
One of my favorite stories about Jane Goodall
is how she describes taking the being a woman and turning it into--
really leaning into it, and seeing things
that might not have been seen by the male lens,
and I've really been inspired by that.
There's a long history of women being overlooked in research.
In fact, it wasn't until 1993
that the National Institutes of Health required
that women and minorities be included in their studies.
I'm interested in studying the experience of being a female across species,
this kind of-- this sisterhood of species.
Hi, how are you? I'm Hannah Stocking.
My audience looks at my content to laugh.
So, I really want to talk about murder hornets right now.
Who named them murder hornets?
And I try to hack that system.
So not only are they laughing, but they're learning, too.
How's it going over there, six feet apart?
- Oh, it's good. - I normally do
a rapid-fire question for you,
but you're going to quiz me about the animal kingdom.
- Are you ready? - Let 'er rip.
Um, yes, and you've studied?
- ( groans ) - Okay, here we go.
Ready. Number one, true or false.
Techno music helps dairy cows produce more milk.
False?
- Very good, it is false. It is false. - Yeah! Whoo!
However, it's true that music can actually
cause dairy cows to produce more milk.
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- Dieting is exclusively human. - False.
Excellent. At least in two species of fish,
uh, the subordinate number-two fish,
who know that if they get to be near the size of the number-one fish
will be attacked and cast out of the school,
and so even though there's food available,
they actually don't eat to keep their body size below a certain level.
- Wow. - Older, slower animals
are more prone to being roadkill.
- I'm gonna say true. - False.
- What? - It turns out, adolescent animals
are disproportionately more likely to become roadkill.
Empty nest syndrome doesn't exist in the wild.
- False. - Good.
So, there are the Spanish imperial eagles,
if their ready-to-fledge young won't leave,
they actually do this thing where they pull their talons together
and they-- it's called stooping.
They literally club their adolescents in the back of the head
until they get out of the nest.
I think that all of this is very, very fascinating.
I was particularly interested in the parts of your book
where you talked about mental health.
Can you tell us about the emotional similarities
that you found in humans and other species?
I should start off by saying the first part of my career,
because I was so steeped in skepticism,
I really wasn't open to particularly
or looking for evidence of mental illness in animals.
So, when I first heard about, for example,
self-injury in other species,
that seems so uniquely human, right?
Um, so, to hear that there are dogs and horses
and and bears and even reptiles who self-injure,
that there are birds who when they're stressed pluck out feathers, right?
This really started to transform everything for me.
Not just that it happened, but why?
Why is that neurobiology there?
What is possibly good or adaptive,
or what we say as evolutionary biologists, fitness-enhancing, right?
- What is it about that? - One of the things
I thought about reading the book
was the depression and anxiety
that takes place in animals as well.
Um, you want to take us through that?
What I learned was something fascinating,
something that I never heard about
in my entire residency in psychiatry, and that's status.
Status, which is an individual animal's rank in the group.
If you look at what happens to an animal
when they rise in status or fall in status,
it is a matter of life or death.
We know that this evolutionary goal in a sense is to survive.
It turns out, when there's a comparison between two animals, an assessment--
it could be a contest, like a fight.
A lot of what you see in the wild is animals kind of--
they kind of size each other up in advance of a contest,
and sometimes that up and down actually can prevent a contest.
You go like that and you're like,
"No, I'm gonna lose. I'm out."
- ( overlapping chatter ) - Thanks.
But, um, there's a lot of that assessment.
What's happening in the brains of those animals
is that these social brain networks,
these serotonin networks are being activated.
If you look at a group of fish, and there's a hierarchy,
if two fish come together and one of them wins
and one of them loses, we see the serotonin levels
change in the one that wins
and we see it change in the one that loses.
And along with that, their behavior changes.
What you see is the winning fish,
you see this kind of almost a victory dance.
But the loser fish starts to be less active,
eating less, and then sort of withdrawing.
So, all of a sudden, that looks a lot, again, like depression.
Again, we don't know how the fish feels,
but there's this parallel in what we see
in the behavior and the neurobiology.
What's remarkable is that this is seen
not just in fish, but also in other mammals and even in lobsters.
If you're a high status bird,
you are gonna be able to put your nest
on a branch that's safer.
There's a significant survival benefit to rising in status,
and falling in status can be catastrophic.
So, do you think that for humans,
social media plays a role in status?
Even if it's not true, we're comparing ourselves to one another,
so it's making people feel that they're lower status-wise.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, and here's the connection.
Start with pain and pleasure.
A young wolf who doesn't know any better
tries to take a bite out of a porcupine.
They get quills stuck in the palate,
and they're like, "Oh, that really hurts."
They're gonna be really careful the next time,
and it's gonna keep them probably safer.
Think of a toddler who, you know, puts their hand on the oven, right?
And it's-- pain changes the neurobiology,
those chemicals in the brain that then tell us,
and then we ascribe meaning to it and it changes our behavior.
So now let's take that and let's apply it to status,
and let's apply it directly to a 14-year-old
who's in her bedroom counting the likes of a post, right?
They act as though it's a matter of life or death
and it is physically painful.
That has been shown, that emotional pain hurts.
And for me, this research really unlocked that connection
of really thinking about the power of emotional pain
and the importance of status and how you feel
about where you are in your group.
Hey, guys, I'm Jamie, or Dr. J. Rutland,
from the YouTube channel Medicine Deconstructed.
Please stay tuned for future episodes
on COVID-19 and other medical topics.
I'm a pulmonary critical care physician in Southern California.
People who are related to me have had personal experience in addiction.
And so when I read your chapter on addiction
and I was reading about the wallabies in the field, right,
going to get high off of opium, it gave me pause.
Did you expect that when you wrote that chapter?
It boils down to sort of the same fundamental issue,
which is that addiction,
there's ancient evolutionary roots for it.
And I think like all mental illness,
once you understand kind of the animal side of it and the evolution of it,
it automatically changes how you feel about the people
who are suffering from those problems.
One thing that stood out for me
was the wild facts of sex and self-pleasure
amongst so many animals.
I will never look at animals the same way ever again.
I want to talk about what was going on in the researcher's head
who found krill having orgies
in the dark depths of the ocean,
how spiders masturbate.
That's crazy.
I had, like, a series of major mind-blowing moments.
Humans have sex for lots of reasons, right?
Yes, we have sex to reproduce,
but also for pleasure, for money, for revenge.
Well, animals, uh, they have sex to reproduce.
- Yeah. - And I never thought about it
other than that because, like, why would I?
"In the wild, it's all about getting down to that business of,
like, reproduction and surviving."
And it is. I mean, it's true.
But the single most interesting reframe on all of it
has to do with the reality that wild animals
engage in non-reproductive sex, right?
So, whether that's oral sex or masturbation,
and both of those are seen in a very wide range of species
and during different circumstances,
and probably for different sets of reasons.
But those are non-procreative.
The point is that we haven't been thinking about sexuality,
our sexuality, through this-- really, this lens of biodiversity,
and it's time that we did.
Hello, my name is Cydnee.
I have a YouTube channel, self-titled, Cydnee Black,
and I talk about beauty and lifestyle.
For today's makeup and mindset, I'm going to be talking
about some of the ways that I maintain my happiness.
We should appreciate books a bit more than we do,
my generation specifically, but I love books.
I'm obsessed.
Barbara, we're going to be doing a segment called The Last Line.
Would you be willing to read to us the last line
from your book "Zoobiquity" with co-author Kathryn Bowers?
I'd love to.
"Our essential connection with animals is ancient and it runs deep.
It extends from body to behavior,
from psychology to society,
forming the basis of our daily journey of survival.
This calls for physicians and patients to think beyond the human bedside
to barnyards, jungles, oceans, and skies...
Love it. I love that.
Why did you decide to end your book that way?
The experience of moving from being a physician
taking care of a single species and having a rather human-centric lens
to someone who thinks about her world
through this species-spanning lens
has really just transformed me and given me a sense
of real responsibility for helping to take care
of the world in which we're living,
and not just human beings, but other animals,
and of course, the planet.
The thing that I really wanted to ask here
was where do we go from here as physicians and as humans?
How do we apply this new lens going forward?
One of the things that I wrote about in "Zoobiquity" with Kathryn Bowers,
who has been my partner in all of this,
the fact that large animals like elephants,
who have all of this cell division,
you might expect that they would have
lots and lots of cancer, but they don't.
Large animals have these cancer-suppression mechanisms.
We're carrying around all of this physiology
that we share with our common animal ancestors,
and we're just one of 8.7 million plus other species on Earth.
Contained in those, all these other species, is this biodiversity,
all these solutions lying in plain sight,
and can solve so many human issues,
from infertility to cancer.
So, this is so relevant to human health.
- Yeah. - Wow, it's really exciting
to think about how this new lens
can really expand our knowledge on human beings,
but also how closely connected we are
to the natural world, all thanks to you.
Oftentimes, books are better
when they're shared with friends,
and that was definitely the case here.
Barbara, I can't say it enough.
You're a legend, and thank you so much
for talking with us here on "BookTube."
You know, been a tremendous pleasure and so much fun.
I just want to talk with you guys all day.
How did she decide to go down
one of the biggest rabbit holes
that you possibly could?
Zooquil-- zoo-- zooquility?
Oh, my gosh! Why did I say "false"?
We just had a whole conversation about status.
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