Listen especially to the part about food and exercise.
'Follow your instincts' - it's that old adage we all hold true. Well, don't. Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues our ancestral minds are leading us astray in a 21st century world. From obesity to beauty, warfare to television, it's time to use our big brains better.
Natasha Mitchell: Okay, put on your Stone Age head, you're back on the savannah, 10,000 years ago. Things look radically different to what they do today and of course they are.
But my guest today thinks what isn't that different are your instincts. And what's more, we shouldn't be following them. They're making us come unstuck in ugly and deadly ways.
Deirdre Barrett: There's a group of researchers in the United States that have started to try to promote the term sedentary death syndrome because they think that it's so much scarier. It just means you're going to get all these illnesses and potentially die sooner if you don't exercise and you eat too much. Sedentary death syndrome that everybody's at risk of gets your attention.
Natasha Mitchell: Sure does. All in the Mind with Natasha Mitchell coming to you today from the Royal Institution of Australia, the RIAUS Science Exchange in the heart of Adelaide. Our guest is Dr Deirdre Barrett a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School's Behavioural Medicine Program and past president of the International Association of the Study of Dreams, a research and clinical focus of hers.
She also writes books and her latest is called Supernormal Stimuli - How Primal Urges Overran their Evolutionary Purposes. And so yes, it's all about your urges today. Last week we heard about the psychology of that urge to eat to the point of obesity. And for Deidre it all starts with the notion in evolutionary psychology that we house Stone Age minds in a 21st century skull.
Do you think that is how it really is though, I mean are we really stuck back on the savannah when we think about our mind and our behaviours and our dispositions, our instincts?
Deidre Barrett: Yes, I think our instincts are there, I mean one thing that is different about humans that we did evolve long ago is much more flexibility in our behaviour because we are such a long-lived species with such a large brain, much less it's rooted in really simple instincts so we have much more cortex than most animals and this whole prefrontal area that does all this abstract thinking. So we can override instincts more easily than most animals but yes, I do think our basic instincts are there for that hunting/gathering lifestyle and the phrase that at least in the US is popular just trust your instincts, or listen to your body, that would really lead you toward the right thing if you were in a small tribe on the savannah and it may lead you towards food that's really bad for you and spending all your time in front of the television instead of with real people and all kinds of things in today's modern, technological society.
Natasha Mitchell: So that's what we want to unpick today, why you think there's this really powerful disconnect between our Stone Age minds and our contemporary environment. So you draw on this idea of supernormal stimuli, tell us about the chap who originally coined that phrase and the extraordinary work that he did. He was a Nobel Laureate for it.
Deidre Barrett: Niko Tinbergen came up with the phrase and he was studying animals mainly birds and fish actually, insects sometimes, their behaviour and he was interested in what their instincts were actually coded for. And he approached this by creating dummy objects to vary one thing at a time and this picture up here is he made fake birds' eggs, varied the size, and the colour, and the markings and basically he found that bigger was better, that whatever the natural colour of the egg was a more intense colour was better. If it had any little grey dapples big black polka dots were better so he could get a bird that laid a pale blue grey dappled egg to sit on this giant bright blue/black polka dot egg that it would slide off and ignore its real eggs because it wasn't coded for the gestalt of the healthy egg, it was coded for blue polka dots big.
Natasha Mitchell: Come and get me.
Deidre Barrett: Yes.
Natasha Mitchell: It was almost comical some of the things that he observed. Tell us about the volleyball and the goose.
Deidre Barrett: Yes, it's sitting for most types of bird but for ground nesting birds if their egg gets dislodged from the nest they have a natural instinct to roll them back with their beak and just like with which eggs to sit on the healthiest egg gets rolled back first if multiple ones are out. And for certain kinds of geese that lay medium brown eggs they will choose a volleyball over the egg to roll back first.
Natasha Mitchell: Where's the survival instinct in that trying to give birth to a volley ball?
Deidre Barrett: As animals don't very often encounter supernormal stimuli that look like the thing their instinct is coded for but are more intense, if there had been sort of big fake eggs sitting out there their instinct probably would have evolved somehow to rule them out. But animals only encounter the supernormal stimuli when some evil experimenter starts making them but we're making them for ourselves. From the start of technology we've reversed the relationship between instinct and object and instead of relying on our instincts to lead us towards the objects they're supposed to we've begun to manufacture objects to optimally appeal to the instinct and that ends up being the supernormal object, the equivalent of the giant polka dotted egg that's not at all necessarily good for us.
Natasha Mitchell: So this supernormal, so normal but super stimuli seems to explain quite a lot of behaviour in the wider animal world doesn't it?
Deidre Barrett: Yes, he did experiments with mating instincts, he could get a male butterfly to mate with a cardboard butterfly if the stripes were more dramatic down the side, it didn't even need wings, it needed something shaped like the female butterfly torso with the stripes on it and again, ignoring the real receptive female there, it would go for the better striped cardboard torso.
Natasha Mitchell: How depressing.
Deidre Barrett: And the eggs led to all kinds of things, after the eggs hatched the parents would prefer to feed a fake beak on a stick if it was wider and/or a brighter red inside than the real chicks, it didn't matter if there was a chick attached. And the chick would try to beg food from a fake adult beak if it had exaggerated size and markings. So for just about every instinct he could get the animal to try to nurture, try to be nurtured by, try to mate with, try to fight with some really silly looking object to our eye that had a more intense version of whatever was the releaser for that instinct.
Natasha Mitchell: Which brings us to humans because you think we are also seduced by supernormal stimuli and that's a big worry for you.
Deidre Barrett: Yes, I mean the reason I wrote this book is evolutionary psychology has picked up a lot of Darwin's ideas and some ethology ideas which is the kind of Darwinian branch of animal behaviour that Tinbergen was a part of but somehow evolutionary psychology never adopted the idea of supernormal stimuli and I really think of all of the evolutionary concepts it's the most important and the most directly relevant to human behaviour.
Natasha Mitchell: And for you it starts with food.
Deidre Barrett: So I actually three years before Supernormal Stimulus I wrote another book which actually my work title was Don't Feed the Animals but it got entitled Waistland by the publisher and it was basically just applying the concept of super normal stimuli to what's wrong with our health, to eating, to exercise, to some of the things that have gone wrong about our physical health. And although I think everyone is aware of what's wrong with our modern refined food, what's not healthy about it we may not take it seriously enough but we are aware of it. When you look at it from an evolutionary standpoint it started way before that, it really started with agriculture. Humans on the savannah were eating this vast array of food, the majority of their diet being leafy green vegetables and little bits of meat, little bits of seeds, little bits of fruit when it was in season but just lots and lots of vegetables. And as soon as people began agriculture, grains became the vast staple of the diet whereas seeds and their equivalent had been a small part.
Natasha Mitchell: So rice and wheat and...
Deidre Barrett: And they started growing the grains to have more and more calories and somewhat by accident less and less of any of the other nutrients so that here it seems...
Natasha Mitchell: Just for the radio audience we've got two, just to describe the picture we're seeing.
Deidre Barrett: The ancestral teosinte which is the plant which corn came from has these narrow seed pods that are lots of fibre, lots of vitamins and antioxidants and relatively little simple starch. And then you have corn...
Natasha Mitchell: But it looks revolting.
Deidre Barrett: It looks dry and chewy and not many people would we choosing that they want to eat the teosinte but it's much better for you. The corn has lost most of the fibre, most of the antioxidants and vitamins and has gained just all the starch, it's got more calories than that.
Natasha Mitchell: And it tastes so sweet.
Deidre Barrett: Yes, more sugar, more starch but less nutrients and agriculture sort of refined foods into lots of sugar and starch even before modern technology started refining it further.
Natasha Mitchell: If we're thinking about our behaviour and our eating behaviour back on the savannah we were drawn to the same things weren't we, we were drawn to fat, sugar all the things that gave us energy?
Deidre Barrett: Fat was scarce, it was nuts or certain meats although animals were much leaner then so getting a little fat was important and that's why it was hard to find, we're really coded for that. Sugar was basically mainly in berries and other fruits which were only around in smaller supplies at certain times of year. Salt was relatively hard to come by we weren't mining it out of the earth and yet we need to have some in our body. So these are the things that we're really coded to look for because they were hard to find. And it's not that humans didn't eat lots of green leafy vegetables and have a mild draw toward that but they were not hard to find so they were not the prioritised good taste.
Natasha Mitchell: But if we've got these big brains why are we so hell bent on eating what kills us? Are we really that stupid or is it our instincts that are stupid in the modern context?
Deidre Barrett: Well instincts are what are leading us towards eating cheeseburgers, drink the milkshakes, just follow the simple instincts but I think another issue is that we're much more coded for threats that will kill us right now. If a lion walked in the room that is something your savannah instincts know what to do about and the idea that there's a correlation with getting cancer and type 2 diabetes 20 years from now is not really as coded in.
Natasha Mitchell: In terms of our health it is the equivalent of a lion walking into the room.
Deidre Barrett: Yes, there's a group of researchers in the United States that have started trying promote the term sedentary death syndrome because they think that it's so much scarier that it just means you're going to get all these illnesses and potentially die sooner if you don't exercise and you eat too much. But sedentary death syndrome that everybody's at risk of...
Natasha Mitchell: That is fantastic.
Deidre Barrett: It gets your attention. So I think we don't perceive the risk and we don't think about it realistically.
Natasha Mitchell: Are people paying attention, I think obesity is on the rise if we look at the latest data in Australia?
Deidre Barrett: I'm optimistic long term. In the States we've really turned around on tobacco and smoking and it took a long time after the statistics were there on how much lung cancer and other causes of death were related to smoking and it kind of started with not advertising cigarettes to kids and I think that you just see the preliminary hints of that with people getting more aggressive about not advertising junk food to children. So I think one can make that shift and people do it when they really appreciate the danger. Like take most really dramatic illegal drugs, people know that snorting cocaine or shooting up heroin would feel really good right now but we're not all doing it, or seriously considering doing it because we really recognise that that's not natural and that's not good for us and that might result in our deaths down the road. And you don't hear people saying oh, 'I know my kid shouldn't take heroin but he likes it so much how can I deny him?' So if we just really get it through our head that certain eating habits really will kill you and they'll really shorten your child's lifespan if you encourage them to eat a certain way, I think that we have the cortical equipment to put the brakes on just simple instinct stuff, once we really perceive the risk and take it seriously and we're not there for food yet but...
Natasha Mitchell: We're sure not it's amazing isn't it?
Deidre Barrett: But we weren't there for tobacco 30/40 years ago.
Natasha Mitchell: Dr Deidre Barrett is my guest on All in the Mind on ABC Radio National and Radio Australia, author of Supernormal Stimuli - How Primal Urges Overran their Evolutionary Purpose. After food the next best primal urge is surely sex starting with your first crush. Deidre draws on a large study from the 1930s and others since which have looked at what sparked people's first crush. Was it personality, physical characteristics or moral character?
The results of most surveys like this produce the stereotype - that more women than men are drawn to personality and intelligence, more men than women drawn to physical attractiveness and not much chop for either on moral character as it turns out. So we're putting that question now to an anonymous electronic vote here at the Royal Institution's Science Exchange in Adelaide.
And here's the vote - you liars.
Deidre Barrett: Much closer to even than in most crowds, that's very interesting.
Natasha Mitchell: So let's spell it out, we've got personality - we've got 55 per cent of men voted on personality versus 51 per cent of women.
Deidre Barrett: There would be statistically insignificant differences in each column but the main thing that's interesting is that there's not a gender difference.
Natasha Mitchell: Well more women than men 47 per cent of women voted on the hot and sexy versus 45 per cent of men you're just trying to get us all in the sack aren't you and 2 per cent of women thought good morals.
Deidre Barrett: And that is the one way in which this is a completely typical group.
Natasha Mitchell: A zero percent of men so we really have a totally amoral audience of men here at the Royal Institution.
Of course not, and in my books anyway stereo types are made to be broken only perhaps our instincts don't know that.
So what's this got to do with supernormal stimuli?
Deidre Barrett: That crushes are a sort of supernormal stimuli. Very few people in either group but especially the modern group just described crushes on their peers but most of them were on celebrities. For the modern group that was pretty much singers, actors and sports stars.
Natasha Mitchell: Which is a desire that will never be fulfilled so in a sense this is a stimuli that's gone astray.
Deidre Barrett: In the older group it was sometimes just prominent people in the community who they really didn't know but they at least physically saw in the 1930s but it was still old screen actors and things too. And so crushes at least in our modern sense are pulling on something that was there for beginning to establish real relationships with a member of the opposite sex but they're really being pulled off towards those things that don't achieve that.
Natasha Mitchell: Which is why you find it rather extraordinary that some people want to have sex with a paper centrefold rather than a real human being.
Deidre Barrett: It's rather like that paper butterfly which looks so bizarre to us that doesn't have wings, it just has stripes down the side and we'll ignore the real live female but that's not very different than what goes on sometimes with pornography. I mean a flat nine inch image of a woman as sometimes more attractive than a real woman is really just as bizarre as what butterflies do.
Natasha Mitchell: Well if we were to make a dreadful assumption and draw a dreadful stereotype and say that well it's fairly obvious what men might find to be supernormal stimuli about women, it's probably about as clear as the nose on my face times two, what about women. What are your conclusions about women and supernormal stimuli in terms of the attraction states?
Deidre Barrett: Well one thing that's different in judging one's own gender people like all the things that seem to be signs of health like facial symmetry, and smoothness of skin, these things are valued for both genders. But then for the opposite gender anything that's very specifically a sexual characteristic of that gender that correlates with oestrogen and testosterone levels that's where women rate sort of men having broad shoulders and muscles and a defined jaw and men start liking that small jaw, big eyes. Things that are kind of fertility indicators rather than just health.
Natasha Mitchell: So that's the evolutionary side.
Deidre Barrett: It might be better if they looked healthy and friendly.
Natasha Mitchell: And will have our children and will carry them to....
Deidre Barrett: Well specifically for the opposite gender we want them to look high in testosterone or oestrogen.
Natasha Mitchell: Do you buy that? Do you buy all that sorts of evolutionary stories about beauty and attraction, is it all just about getting a bonk and having a baby?
Deidre Barrett: Well again I think a lot of it is about detecting friendliness in others and health in others and some other things. But then yeah, I think that choosing a mate who you want to date, who you want to whatever is very much about detecting fertility, detecting cues about who may be good in raising a child, yeah.
Natasha Mitchell: Very interesting indeed, I mean from nurture you also thread war into this theory and you have a hypothesis here too. There's a lovely quote, it's really not a lovely quote it's actually quite a devastating quote but it's a very powerful quote that you pull from Plato which says 'only the dead have seen the end of war' which is very confronting isn't it? It says that war is always with us. Do you think war is essentially a core part of human nature?
Deidre Barrett: Yes, at least violence and aggression and especially defensive threatened by violence I think it very hard wired into us and short of genetically engineering humans differently I don't think we'd ever see the end of war but I definitely think that just like with these eating and mating and everything else behaviours that the stimuli out there have a lot to do with how much other there is.
Natasha Mitchell: How so? I mean what you do point out which is very striking is that humans are the only species that kills our own species en mass.
Deidre Barrett: Yeah, I mean you see wolves fight and they really hurt each other for a while but as soon as it's clear that one is winning the fight the loser actually bares its throat and the stronger one stops the aggression and they've established that the one that lost will be subordinate in behaviour to the one that won. But he doesn't have to be killed to stop trying to better the alpha wolf. And I think that what's happened with human aggression and defence is that we magnify threat symbols, that media kind of...I mean the United States before invading Iraq was just hearing this they're building up weapons of mass destruction; they're going to be lobbing chemical biological warfare at you.
Natasha Mitchell: We were hearing it too.
Deidre Barrett: Just any sign of real threat gets broadcast a lot, fake threats get broadcast a lot and then surrender signals don't really get seen. I mean when we're dropping bombs on another country we don't as immediately see the graphic images of the effects, much less are we shown the people who are trying to give up, we are showing the people who are still fighting us. So I think part of that is just inherent in technology and media and then part of it is very intentionally manipulated by leaders, politicians, the military to sway opinion.
Natasha Mitchell: And there's an evolutionary story here too in that it was appropriate for us to look after our own kin so that we could kind of convey our genes into the next generation without the sort of threat of them being diluted by others. So that's where some people have said that sort of territoriality comes from and that kind of defence of our own but we've taken it to another extreme you suggest.
Deidre Barrett: Yes, there's another ethology concept I talk about in the book of the idea of pseudo species which only humans seem to - all animals have one set of behaviours for any other species, you know rules about when they'll kill other animals and not that they never kill their own but there's a very different set of rules that apply to fighting with their own species versus another. And humans sometimes seem to get into modes of thinking of their own as just the people of a certain nationality or just the people of a certain religion or just the people of a certain language. And in the lead up to almost any war you see people starting to come up with slang terms for the other side which kind of implies not quite human, or sometimes it doesn't just imply, in the genocide of the Tutsi's they were being called cockroaches.
Natasha Mitchell: And broadcasting it over the radio.
Deidre Barrett: Yeah, that was the slang for Tutsi's was the word for cockroach. So sometimes it's as exclusive...
Natasha Mitchell: To evoke the feeling of disgust against the other.
Deidre Barrett: Yeah, or the idea of not human, something else. I think the internet is very helpful for this sort of threat war issue because I think the conventional media has always been somewhat specific to a country and tended, at least at times, of big conflict to follow the dictates of its government and the internet doesn't do that. It's completely international and it's not following anybody's orders so I think that we may begin to see surrender signals and begin to get more overt messages about how much people on the other side are just like us than this kind of propaganda about differences. I think the internet may definitely make some difference.
Natasha Mitchell: So the internet is OK but you think television is a big boo boo in this conversation about supernormal stimuli? You think telly has just roped us in with terrible consequences?
Deidre Barrett: Well I think it's a supernormal stimulus for social impulses for a few others also, but mainly for social impulses, that we're coded to like sitting around talking and listening with smiling, happy, friendly people and this establishes social bonds and television can just with its laugh tracks and its actors who can just look happier and friendlier and more vivacious than any real group of people.
Natasha Mitchell: But they really are my friends those people on the telly.
Deidre Barrett: But they don't know you're alive and they don't care about you and you're not establishing real social networks that will support you and in fact you're taking time away from doing that. And then sort of back to the sedentary death syndrome you're not getting any exercise while you're doing that not that all socialisation involves a lot of exercise but we get really abnormally still when we sit and stare at a television in a way that we don't when we talk to real people. So yeah, I mean people emphasise the content in television as bad but I think really just that there's a lot to the medium that is very bad for us. Whereas I think the internet is much more of a mixed bag, it's almost as bad for us in how sedentary it is in terms of lack of exercise but socially I think it both promotes certain real things and also has some TV like super normal...
Natasha Mitchell: Clearly not all supernormal stimuli are bad for us, you know we are stimulated by extreme beauty and art and music and things that might not feel like they're terribly pragmatic ways to use our time but they inspire us so. So we kind of need our supernormal stimuli as well, we want to soar to great heights?
Deidre Barrett: Certainly things like visual arts and literature are somewhat supernormal stimuli but I think the greatest literature may actually condense some of the benefits of real social interaction that you might actually in reading a great novel learn more per hour about human relationships than you would relating to a real human being which is not the case for the television that pulls the social instincts equally strongly. But many of them I think do no more than potentially waste time but then others are potentially quite deadly.
Natasha Mitchell: So follow your instincts at your peril. Dr Deidre Barrett's book is called Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran their Evolutionary Purpose and another is Waistland: The Revolutionary Science Behind our Weight and Fitness Crises which explores some of the same themes.
So what do you think of all this - do you think you're captive to your ancestral instincts? Head to abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and look for Add your Comment look forward to hearing from you there. And more audio from this event including the audience Q and A up on the All in the Mind blog. Thanks to Maria Tickle, Kiran Shettigara and sound engineer Gil Harman. I'm Natasha Mitchell, next week - getting nuclear.
No comments:
Post a Comment