All language subtitles for The Brain with Dr. David Eagleman - 01x05 - Why Do I Need You.AMZN.WEB-DL.English.C.updated.Addic7ed.com

What does
a brain need to be healthy?

Well, it needs nutrients
from the food you eat,

it needs oxygen from your blood,

plenty of water but there's something
else, something equally as important.

It needs other people. Human beings
are extremely social creatures.

We come together, we team up, we share
moments of intense joy and disappointment.

We don't just seek out other
people to have a good time.

Your brain function depends on
the social web that you're in.

Your neurons require other people's
neurons to thrive and survive.

I want to show you how our brains are
fundamentally wired to work together...

How this social network that envelops
us from birth is vital for our survival.

Yeah? Ok!

Understanding how
brains deal with each other allows us

to understand what bonds our species,
driving us to help one another.

And what makes us hate...
What allows acts of human violence.

It helps us to make sense of our
past and holds the key to our future.

There are 7 billion people living today--
7 billion brains moving, choosing, acting,

believing, and connecting
with other brains.

Brains are traditionally
studied in isolation.

But, in fact, much of circuitry of
the brain has to do with other brains.

We're fundamentally
social creatures.

And our society is
a complex web of interaction.

On any normal day, we intersect
with an enormous number of people.

Our lives are built on these intersections,

not just between us and our family
and friends and work colleagues,

but also between them
and the people they meet.

Even the most basic encounter...
Like getting a cup of coffee...

Relies on trust with a stranger.

- Can I get a latte, please?
- Definitely. Thanks.

Everywhere we look,
we see complex social interactions--

relationships forming and breaking, bonds
of love and support, social networking.

We clump into large groups
to share our knowledge.

We got all these random
spots in your brain

that get wired up into an
associative neural network.

We work to impress each other.

And we swap ideas. I'll stick around
for any questions that anyone has.

Thank you.

Most research looks at
one brain at a time,

but that misses the fact that a
great deal of our brain activity

is dedicated to communicating with
each other, interpreting each other.

Our social drive is deeply
rooted in our neural circuitry.

Take a look at
this film from the 1940s.

What do you see
happening here?

Is this just a simple animation
of some shapes or something more?

Do you see a chase? A fight the big one
seems to be pushing the little one around.

Seems like the two triangles are
in a little bit of a squabble.

There are relationships here in terms
of one is more dominant than the other.

Back in the 1940s, psychologists
Fritz heider and marianne simmel

created this film
as part of an experiment.

The ball doesn't seem
to want to be in there.

It's freaking out. It's scared.
It looks like a trap to me.

It looks like the small triangle is being
shut out and, like, trying to peer in.

They are paired in a
way that seems friendly.

- Yeah! This is really fun.
- It's fun, right? Ha ha!

What heider and simmel found, as I did,
is how easy it is to look at moving shapes

and to see meaning and motives and emotion
all in the form of a social narrative.

I kind of get the sense
that they're cats and dogs.

It seemed like the big one might have
been, like his, his dad or something.

Just call it more of, like, a mating ritual
two competitors going for one possible mate.

These are just shapes on a screen, but we
can't help but tell stories about them.

Why? It's because our brains are
so primed for social interaction

that we look for intention
and relationships all around us.

One way we navigate the social world is
by judging other people's intentions.

Is she trying to be helpful?
Are we a trustworthy team?

Our brains are good at making
these sorts of judgments.

And we do it constantly.

But do we learn this skill from life
experience, or are we born with it?

To figure out which one it is,

I've invited over some people who don't
have much experience with the world.

I've invited them to a puppet show.
These babies are all under 12 months old.

They're just beginning to
explore the world around them.

You could say they're all a
little short on life experience.

We decided to run a simple experiment
developed at Yale university.

Here's a duck struggling
to open a box.

One bear helps the duck.
The other is mean to the duck.

Ok, bowie, here you go.
There are two puppets...

When the show's over, I let the
babies choose a bear to play with.

...want to play with?

Yeah? Ok, is that the one
you want? All right.

Almost every one of them chooses
the bear that's been kind.

These babies
can't walk or talk.

And yet they already have the tools
to make judgments about others.

Yeah? Ok!

It's often assumed that
trust is something

that we learn from
our experience in the world.

But these experiments demonstrate
that even as babies, we come equipped

with social antennae for feeling
our way through the world.

The brain comes
with inborn instincts

for figuring out who's
trustworthy and who's not.

As we grow, our social challenges
become even more subtle and complex.

Understanding others is one of
the most demanding operations

that our brains perform.

They have
to interpret words.

And, more than that, inflection,
facial expressions, body language.

"Does she like me?" "Is he interested in
what I'm saying?" "Do they want my help?"

Society runs on our ability to
read each other's social signals.

Take that ability away and the
world becomes a very strange place.

Car enthusiast John robison has
always struggled to read other people.

When I was a little boy,
I was bullied and rejected by other kids.

And that didn't happen
with machines.

You know, I could stand, by,
a tractor on my grandparents' farm.

And I could learn how
to adjust it.

And it wouldn't tease me
or do anything bad.

It wouldn't run away.
It would always be there.

And I could count on it.

And i--i guess I learned to
make friends with the machines

before I learned how to
make friends with other people.

In time,
John's affinity for technology

took him to places
his bullies could only dream of.

By 21, he was
a roadie for the band kiss.

This was me back
with, kiss in the seventies.

I look older and fatter
and stuff.

I don't look the same anymore.

Surrounded by legendary
rock and roll excess,

his outlook remained
different from other people's.

People would come up
to me all the time.

And they would say, "what's this guy
like," or, "what's that guy like?"

I would say, "yeah, their stage setup,
they had sunn 2000s bass amps," or...

Or, "gene played sunn coliseums, "and
we had seven bass amps chained together.

We had 2,200 watts
in the bass system for that."

But I maybe couldn't
tell you the first thing

about the musicians
who sang through them.

Now I realize that shows that I did kind of
live in a different world all those years--

a world of machines
and equipment.

When he was 40, John was diagnosed
with asperger's-- a form of autism.

Many regions of the brain are
engaged during social interaction.

But in autism that brain
activity isn't seen as strongly.

And that's paralleled
by diminished social skills.

I didn't really understand that
there were complex messages in faces

until I was well into adulthood
and learned about autism.

I knew that people could,
display signs of crazed anger.

But if you, um, asked
about more subtle expressions--

you know, "I think you're sweet,
"and I wonder what you're hiding,"

or, "I'd really like to do that," or,
"I wish you'd do this..." Or that.

I...i had no idea
about things like that.

But then came a transforming
moment in John's life.

In 2008, he was invited
to Harvard medical school

to take part in an experiment on his brain
overseen by Dr. Alvaro pascual-Leone.

It was an attempt to try to
understand how activity in one area

affects activity in an area... In another
area and how that affects behavior.

The experiment was only meant to help
the scientists gain greater knowledge

about the autistic brain,
but then something unexpected happened.

John was given transcranial
magnetic stimulation or tms.

Magnetic coils
were placed next to his head

to generate minute electrical currents
in the brain and alter its activity.

The researchers targeted different regions
of John's brain to see whether interfering

with his brain activity
had any effect on his behavior.

They would
test me after the session.

I would go home kind of
not knowing what to expect.

At first there was no result.

But then they targeted the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--

a region involved in flexible
thinking and abstraction.

And something dramatic happened.
Somehow I became different.

He contacted us--very excited to say,
you know, "the effects of the stimulation

"seemed to have
unlocked something.

"And the effects is still
lasting.

And I now can do things
that I could never do."

After tms, I was able to,
sort of read signals from other people

and understand
what was going on.

So I listened to that, fascinated by
it, and thought, "ok, well, whatever.

It'll go away."
But it didn't. It...

It actually, um,
remains something

that--that had really
fundamentally changed in... In him.

Somehow, and entirely accidentally, the tms
had unlocked a whole new world for John.

...vegetable sandwich
to bring home.

What have
you got...

I'd be tempted to say,
"I couldn't read people and now I can,"

but that's not really true.

Ok. How about a
full-size one of them...

Sure.

It's more accurate to say I had no idea
there were these messages emanating

from other people.

Tms
showed me those messages.

And now that I'm aware that they're out
there, everything I do is different.

All of a sudden,
you can walk around and engage the world.

And it's a big, big thing.

Ok, thanks!

We don't know exactly what
happened neurobiologically. Um...

But I think it now
offers the opportunity for us

to understand
what behavioral modifications,

what interventions
might be possible

to learn from him
that we can then teach others.

John's transformation is a reminder that
all the activities of the human brain,

including the subtle interplay
of emotions and relationships,

are rooted in the detailed patterns of
trillions of electrochemical signals.

Somehow, humans can look
at each other and study

the arrangement of facial muscles
and then process that information

into an understanding of other
people's thoughts and emotions.

It's an astonishing skill
because the cues are so subtle.

And the processing is so rapid that the
whole operation runs under your radar.

It only takes 33 milliseconds for your
brain to process basic information

about someone's facial expression
and start reacting to it.

So we're gonna put one electrode right above
your eyebrow... So how does it do that?

And the other right
on your cheek.

Here we go.
Great...

I've invited a group of
people to run an experiment.

I've wired them up to a machine that
measures movements in their facial muscles.

And I've asked them to look
at photographs of faces.

When participants are looking at a
photograph with a smile or a frown,

we see this
activity on the graph

which indicates that their
own facial muscles are moving.

Why? Well, it turns out that they are
automatically mirroring with their own faces

the expressions
that they're seeing.

That was fun, right?
The last one?

- Yeah.
- Yeah, it was a fun test.

But what purpose does
this mirroring serve?

I've invited
a second group of people.

They're similar to the first
group, except for one thing.

This is the most lethal
neurotoxin on the planet.

If you were to ingest
even a fraction of this,

your brain could no longer tell
your muscles how to contract

and you would die
of total paralysis.

So it seems unlikely that anyone

would pay to have this injected
into themselves, but they do.

This is known as
botulinum toxin or Botox.

If you put it into your forehead muscles,
it paralyzes them to reduce wrinkling.

But there's a less
well known side-effect.

When our participants with Botox
went through the same tests,

their facial muscles
responded less.

No surprise there.

But replicating an experiment
out of Duke university,

we had both groups
look at facial expressions.

And now they were
asked to choose the word

that best described
the emotion they were seeing.

Panic. Panicked. Upset.

On average, the Botox group was worse
at identifying the emotions correctly.

Skeptical?

It seems that the lack of
feedback from their facial muscles

impairs their ability
to read other people.

The paralyzed faces
of Botox users

not only makes it hard for us
to tell what they're feeling,

those same frozen muscles make
it hard for them to read us.

And that tells us something.

When I'm happy or sad, part of that
feeling relies on the unconscious feedback

from muscles in my face.

And our social brains take advantage of
that-- so when we're trying to understand

what someone else is feeling, we
try on their facial expression.

This automatic mirroring of expressions is
just one way in which we understand others.

The brain also has a deeper way-- one
that's best explained at the movies.

One ticket, please.
Thank you.

When we go to the movie theater,
we know full well that it's make-believe.

The people on the screen are just acting.
And yet we still react.

We gasp and flinch and cry.
Why do we fall for it?

To understand why we care
about other people getting hurt,

you need to understand what happens
in your brain when you get hurt.

So imagine that somebody were to
stab your hand with a syringe needle.

That activates a network of areas in
your brain that we call the pain matrix.

There's no single spot in the
brain where pain is processed.

Instead, the perception of pain arises from
several different areas networking together.

Strangely enough, this pain matrix is at
the heart of how we connect with others.

Now, when you watch
someone else get stabbed,

your pain
matrix becomes activated.

Not the parts that tell you
you've actually been touched,

but the parts involved in the
emotional experience of pain.

In other words,
watching someone else in pain

and being in pain
use the same neural machinery.

And that's the basis of empathy.

To empathize with another person
is to literally feel their pain.

You run a compelling simulation of what it
would be like if you were in that situation.

And our capacity to do this is why stories
and movies and novels are so absorbing

and why they're so pervasive
across human culture.

Because whether it's about total
strangers or made-up characters,

you experience their agony
and their ecstasy.

You fluidly become them and live their
lives and stand in their vantage points.

You can tell yourself that
the stories aren't real,

but some neurons deep in your
brain can't tell the difference.

Our capacity to feel another person's
pain is part of what makes us

so good at taking
other people's perspective--

to step out of our shoes and into
their shoes, neurally speaking.

We can't
help but connect with others.

We're hardwired to be extremely social
creatures. And that raises a question.

What would happen if the brain
were starved of human contact?

In 2009,
peace activist Sarah shourd

and her two companions
were hiking in the mountains

of northern Iraq--an area
that was at the time peaceful.

But they accidentally strayed into
Iran, and they were arrested.

They pulled us apart and threw us in
separate cells and slammed the door.

And, um, that was the beginning of-- of
the next 410 days of my life in that cell.

Well, in the early weeks
and, really, months

of solitary confinement,
you're reduced to an animal-like state.

I mean, you are an animal
in a cage.

And the majority
of your hours are pacing.

And the animal-like state sort of eventually
transformed into a more plant-like state...

When your mind starts to slow down
and your thoughts become repetitive.

Shourd, voice-over:
Your brain turns on itself.

And it becomes the-- the source of
your worst pain and your worst torture.

I would relive every
detail of my life.

And eventually,
you run out of--of memories.

And you've told them all to yourself so
many times, and it doesn't take that long.

Extreme social depravation
causes deep psychological pain.

Without interaction,
the brain suffers.

Solitary confinement
is designed to eat away at

and really attack
what essentially makes us human.

Sarah's brain used the scant sensory
information it had to construct a reality.

The sun would come in at a certain time
of day at an angle through my window.

And all of the little dust particles
in my cell were illuminated by the sun.

I saw all of those
particles of dust as being

other human beings
occupying the planet.

And they were
in the stream of life.

They were interacting. They
were bouncing off one another.

They were doing
something collective.

And I saw myself
as off in a corner, you know,

walled off by--by myself
out of the stream of life.

In September 2010 after 410
days in solitary confinement,

Sarah was finally released
and allowed to rejoin the world.

But for a long time, she suffered
from extreme post-traumatic stress.

The philosopher Martin heidegger
said we can't talk about being.

We can only talking
about being in the world.

In other words, the world around
you is a part of who you are.

In a vacuum,
you lose your sense of self.

It's not easy
for science to study people

while they're experiencing
solitary confinement,

but a simple experiment designed by
neuroscientist Naomi eisenberger can give us

an insight into what's happening
in the brain when we feel excluded.

It's based on a game of catch.

While volunteers
played a computer game of catch,

eisenberger and her team
scanned their brains.

The volunteers thought the other characters
were controlled by other participants,

but, in fact, they were just
part of the computer program.

At first, the other
characters played nicely,

but after a while, they'd cut
the volunteer out of the game

and simply play
between themselves.

She found that being left out of
the game activated the pain matrix.

Not getting the ball might seem
insignificant, but to the brain,

social rejection is so
meaningful that it hurts.

But
that pain, in turn, is useful.

It pushes us in the direction of bonding
with others. We all seek out alliances.

We join with friends,
with family, with colleagues.

It could be
which team we support...

What style we go for...
What our hobbies are.

It gives comfort
to belong to a group.

And that gives us a critical clue
into our success as a species.

Survival of the fittest
isn't just about individuals.

It's also about groups. We're safer. We're
more productive. We overcome challenges.

The drive to work in groups has
helped human populations thrive

across the planet and
build entire civilizations.

And yet there's a flipside
to this drive to come together.

Because for every
"in" group, there are outsiders.

And the consequences
of that can be very dark.

History is plagued with examples

of one group turning on another that
was defenseless and posed no threat.

If you were to look
at my family tree,

you would see that most of the
branches end in the early 1940s.

This is because my family
is ethnically Jewish.

That small social marker was
enough to prompt Nazi genocide.

Under normal circumstances,

you wouldn't find it conscionable
to go murder your neighbor.

So what is it that allows hundreds or thousands
of people to suddenly do exactly that?

What is it about
certain situations

that short-circuits the normal
social functioning of the brain?

While the Nazi holocaust was on an
unprecedented scale, it wasn't unique.

Genocide continued
to occur all over the world.

And within a generation,
it returned to eastern Europe.

This time, it was in yugoslavia.

The Bosnian war from 1992 to '95
saw atrocities on both sides.

In one of the worst, more
than 100,000 Bosnian muslims,

known as Bosniaks,
were slaughtered

by serbians in actions
known as ethnic cleansing.

One of the most horrible incidents
happened here at srebrenica.

Over the course of just 10 days,
8,000 people were systematically killed.

How does something
like this happen?

Here in 1995, thousands of Bosniaks took
refuge inside this united nations compound,

because this village
was surrounded by siege forces.

But then on July 11th, the u.N. Commanders
made the decision to expel all the refugees.

And they delivered them right
into the hands of their enemies,

who were waiting
just outside this gate.

Women were raped, and men were
executed, and even children were killed.

And this was just
the beginning of what would be

the largest genocide on European
soil since the holocaust.

The Dutch were there. I mean,
the world was there. You know, the u.N.

The Serbs were there as perpetrators.
Everything was mixed.

The refuges were there,
the babies were crying.

I was there being protected
with that u.N. I.D. Card

that said "u.N. Language
assistant," whatever.

Hasan nuhanovic's status as a u.N Translator
made him part of a protected group.

But his family members were marked
out by their identity as muslims.

At that very moment when my family
was being sent out of the compound

to actually die, I lost my-- I lost
my mother, my brother, and my father.

You know, like, you are in a situation
when your family is being killed.

And I was thinking, my god...
I mean, why?

One of the most striking things is that
the perpetrators weren't strangers.

They were people with whom his family
had previously shared a great deal.

The continuation,
you know, of...

Of the killings, of torture, was
perpetrated by our neighbors. You know?

The very people we have been
living with for decades.

They were capable of killing
their own school friends.

I remember they said they arrested
a dentist who was a bosniak,

the best dentist
in the town.

They tied him up from a light pole,
like this in front of the post office.

He was hanging there like this.
And they beat him with a metal bar.

They broke his spine.

And he was there dying for days
while serb children went to school,

walking by his body,
you know?

I mean, there are
universal values.

And these universal values
are kind of very basic:

Don't kill... April '92,
this don't kill suddenly disappeared.

It was like, "go and kill." It
was, allowed to kill.

This is where
hasan's family is buried.

And each year, there are new bodies
that are found and identified,

and they're brought here.

Many of these graves
are fresh.

And across the human species,
this is just one genocide of many.

Genocides keep happening--
Rwanda, Darfur, nanking, Armenia.

And my interest is
in understanding why.

Traditionally we
ask this question

through the lens of history
or economics or politics.

And those are
all important vantage points.

But I think for a complete
picture, one more lens is needed.

We need to understand
genocide as a neural phenomenon.

I've been researching
this back in my laboratory.

And here is my main question,
when we interact with someone,

does our brain function differ
according to which group they are in?

For every "in" group we belong to,
there's at least one group that we don't.

And that division can be based on anything--
race or gender or wealth or religion.

We put 130 participants
in this scanner.

And here's what they saw--
six hands on the screen.

And the computer randomly
picks one of these.

And then that hand gets
stabbed by a syringe needle.

Now, that activates
the pain matrix,

which is what comes on line when you're
in pain or you see someone else in pain.

Now, here's the trick-- we now
added a label to each hand--

Jewish, Christian, Muslim,
hindu, atheist, scientologist.

Would they care as much when they see a
member of their out group getting stabbed?

So here's what we found:
Here's a subject.

And when he watched a
member of his "in" group

getting stabbed, there was a large neural
response in this area of his brain.

But when he watched a member
of one of his "out" groups

get stabbed, there was
essentially a flat line.

We scanned
a range of volunteers.

And there are individual
differences, but the trend is clear.

A single word label is enough to change
your brain's basic pre-conscious response

to another person in pain-- in other
words, how much you care about them.

Now, you might have opinions about
religion and its historical divisiveness,

but even atheists here care more about
other atheists' hands getting stabbed

than they do about other people.

So it's not really about religion.
It's about which team you're on.

This is just the first step in
understanding how we get to this.

To understand how groups
of people can commit atrocities,

it can help to look at the behavior
of individuals like psychopaths.

Some of the most callous,
inhumane crimes ever recorded

have been committed
by psychopaths.

But what's different about their brains
that allows them to act that way?

There are networks in the medial prefrontal
cortex that underlie social interaction.

When we interact with other
people, this area becomes active.

But in the brain of someone
with extreme psychopathy,

this area has
a lot less activity.

A psychopath
doesn't care about you.

He might be able to run a simulation of what
you're going to do or how you might react,

but when it comes to
an emotional understanding

of what it's like to be you,
he doesn't get that.

To him you're just an obstacle to
be worked around or manipulated

rather than
a fellow human being.

So what accounts for genocide?
Is it driven by armies of psychopaths?

Well, that can't be it because
psychopaths only make up

a small fraction
of the population,

but genocide typically
engages a wider community.

So here's the question: How do you
get ordinary citizens on board?

At the university
of leiden in Holland,

Dr. Lasana Harris has
been conducting an experiment

to understand a piece
of this puzzle.

So now we're going
to start the experiment.

What you're going to see is a bunch
of pictures of different people.

Your job is just to react
naturally to those pictures.

Lasana is looking at activity in the brain
areas involved in human social interaction,

in particular
the medial prefrontal cortex.

This comes on line when
we think about other people.

It's less active when dealing with
something inanimate, like a cup.

What lasana found is that this
region has a similarly low response

when we deal with
certain types of other people.

What he sees now are stereotypical images
of people from different social groups.

What we see here is at
this network of brain regions,

including medial
prefrontal cortex,

is less active when our participant
looks at the homeless people.

So what this pattern of activity
suggests is a type of mental avoidance.

They are not thinking about the mind of the
homeless person in the same way they thought

about the mind of the college students
that they saw or the businesspeople.

So if, for instance, you imagine that
interacting with a homeless person

will be unpleasant, it
will make you will feel bad.

You may feel some demand to
donate some of your money

and all of these unpleasant
pressures that come along with it.

By shutting off those systems,
you never experience those feelings.

To a brain that responds this way,
homeless people are dehumanized.

They're viewed more like objects.
And that can enable us to not care.

Of course if you
don't properly diagnose

this person as a human being,
which is happening here,

then the different moral rules we have that
are reserved for human people may not apply.

So under the right circumstances, our brain
activity can look more like a psychopath's.

But to understand
how we can get to genocide,

we need to understand one
more thing about group behavior.

Genocide is only possible when
dehumanization happens on a massive scale.

Not just a few individuals,
but whole sections of the population.

We're talking about a group
of people committing atrocities.

And if all the members of that
perpetrating group are complicit,

it's as if they've all somehow experienced
the same reduction in brain activity

when they think
about their "out" group.

This can be understood and
studied like a disease outbreak,

a kind of group contagion-- one
that's most often spread deliberately.

The perfect tool
for this job is propaganda.

It plugs right into neural networks,
and it dials down the degree

to which we care
about other people.

Just like all sites of genocide, that's
what happened in the former yugoslavia.

The people who went
on to torture and kill

their neighbors
were bombarded with propaganda.

State-controlled
broadcasters demonized

the Bosnian muslims
with distorted news stories.

I read you--from the beginning that somebody
is, helping muslims, and arming them.

They went so far as to claim that the
muslims were feeding Serbian children

to the lions at the zoo.

Across place and time, the language
of propaganda changes very little.

It always plays the familiar
tune of dehumanization:

Make your enemy less than
human, make them like an animal.

Propaganda is a weapon.

And over the course of human history,
it's become an art and a science.

And it's become
ever more dangerous.

In our connected age,
any extremist group

can reach millions of people
with a keystroke.

The Internet is the perfect
carrier for propaganda messages

to reach the people most likely
to act upon them-- young men.

The political agendas around us actually
manipulate the brain activity inside of us.

So is there any way to stop what's happened
in the past from continuing into the future?

One possible solution
lies in a 1960s experiment

that was conducted not
in a science lab but a school.

It was 1968, the day after the
assassination of Martin Luther King.

Is there anyone in this United States
that we do not treat as our brothers?

- Yeah.
- Who?

- The black people.
- The black people. Who else?

Jane Elliott was a teacher
in a small town in Iowa.

And she wanted to show her class
what prejudice really felt like.

How are
black people treated?

- They don't get anything in this world.
- Why is that?

Because they're
a different color.

These
two men were in that class.

This was Rex back then...

And this was ray.

How many in
here have blue eyes?

Ok. How many in here
have brown eyes?

Jane says we're going
to have this exercise.

And she right away
launches into the propaganda

of blue eyes
are better than brown eyes.

Blue-eyed people are better
than brown-eyed people.

Ray
and Rex both have blue eyes.

You brown-eyed people are not to play with
the blue-eyed people on the playground

because you are not as
good as blue-eyed people.

The brown-eyeds were denied
privileges given to the blue-eyeds,

and they had to wear
special collars.

You'll begin to notice today that
we spend a great deal of time

waiting for brown-eyed
people.

Do you remember... What your own
behavior was like when you were on top?

- I was tremendously evil to my friends.
- How so?

I was going out of my way to
pick on my brown-eyed friends

for the sake of
my own promotion.

What did you do?

I recall telling Mrs. Elliott, Jane,
that she should keep the yardstick at hand

in case those brown-eyeds
got out of control.

- I don't see the yardstick. Do you?
- It's down over there.

Hey, miss Elliott,
you better keep that on your desk.

Don't let the brown-eyed
people get out of hand.

At that time, my hair was quite
blond and my eyes were quite blue.

And I was
the perfect little Nazi.

I looked for ways to be
mean to my friends,

who minutes or hours earlier
had been very close to me.

But the next day,
there was a reversal of fortune.

Yesterday I told you that brown-eyed
people aren't as good as blue-eyed people.

That wasn't true.
I lied to you yesterday.

Boy... The truth is that brown-eyed
people are better than blue-eyed people.

A person you trust
stands before you and says, "I was wrong.

Now here's the truth," takes
your world and shatters it

like you've never had
your world shattered before.

You blue-eyed people are not to
play with the brown-eyed people.

Blue-eyed people go to the back.
The brown-eyed people come to the front.

Tell me a little more about what it was
like when you were in the down group.

You have such a sense of loss--
of personality and self--

that it makes it almost impossible to
function with what's going on in the room.

Should the color of some other person's eyes
have anything to do with how you treat them?

- No, no.
- All right.

- Then should the color of their skin?
- No.

Should you judge people... No...

- By the color... No... Of their skin?
- No.

If I were just gonna riff--
guess at it--it's that,

one of the most important things we
learn as humans is perspective taking.

And kids don't often get a really
meaningful exercise in that.

And when you're forced
into understanding

what it's like to stand
in someone else's shoes,

that opens up a lot of
cognitive pathways for you.

I remember saying something to my
dad about a comment he made, saying,

"no, that's
not appropriate."

And it did change
within the family.

But you talk about a little kid
making that statement, it's huge.

But it reaffirmed that you could do
that-- you could begin to change.

The brilliance of the blue
eyes/brown eyes experiment is

that the teacher, Jane Elliott,
switched which group was on top.

And that allowed the students
to extract the larger lesson,

which is that systems of
rules can be arbitrary.

They learned that the truths
of the world are not fixed,

and they're not
even necessarily truths.

And this is
what empowered the children

as they grew to see through the smoke and
mirrors of other people's political agendas

and to form their own opinions--

surely a skill that we should be
teaching to all of our children.

Should the color of some other person's eyes
have anything to do with how you treat them?

No.

When people are armed with an
understanding of how propaganda works,

the power of propaganda
is reduced.

As we come to understand the
deep importance of cooperation,

we stand a chance not only
of reducing dehumanization,

but achieving our
potential as a species.

Genocide
doesn't have to be the norm.

Instead our fundamentally social nature can
hold the key to our success as a species.

Our future, our survival is
intimately, permanently bound up

with that of the people
around us.

Our social
drive is at the root

of extraordinary acts
of bravery and generosity.

Who you are has everything
to do with who we are.

Our brains are so
fundamentally wired to interact

that it's not always clear where
each of us begins and ends.

Our species is more than just 7 billion
individuals spread out across the planet.

We're something more like
a single vast super-organism.

Because what your
friends know and love as you is

really a neural network embedded in a
far larger web of other neural networks.

In this age
of digital connection,

we desperately need to understand
the links between humans.

If we want our civilizations
to have a bright future,

we'll need to understand
how human brains interact--

the dangers
and the opportunities.

Because there's
no avoiding the truth

that's etched into our neural
circuitry: We need each other.