Nigel's Robert Sapolsky total fawning fangirl thread.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

OK, I will start with a brief introduction to my current #1 favorite neuroscientist. Robert Sapolsky is pretty much your archetypal biologist; you have probably all seen him on teevee without realizing it, in the savannahs of Africa darting baboons with anaesthetic blowgun darts so he can take samples of their precious bodily fluids. He's been using those fluids to study stress in primates for about 30 years, and he has helped us to learn a tremendous amount about human neurobiology as a result.

He's also an amazing lecturer. He's one of the most engaging, fun, informative lecturers I've ever seen.

And, he's just a little bit of an asshole, in the good way that makes people think and argue and LEARN. He doesn't afraid of walking a little too close to the ugly truth, and that often kind of pisses people off, so you will find lots of angry bloggers on the web talking about things like his take on schizotypal personality disorder. Needless to say, he's my hero.

OK, gooey fangirling part is over. Now, here's a gloriously accessible interview with him on Boing Boing:
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/23/robert-sapolsky-on-stress-an.html

Another interview that I like a lot because it captures his impatience with bullshit:
http://www.scu.edu/visitors/2008speakers/sapolsky_transcript.cfm

If you have not yet seen the documentary "Stress: Portrait of a Killer", you really should. Here's the website, you can usually find the whole thing on Youtube:
http://killerstress.stanford.edu/

Stanford University has been kind enough to put a raft of his lectures online, and this is a good place to start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

Also, watch this one on depression:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

Now you all know why I think Sapolsky is so awesome, and hopefully you do too.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Can't see it from here, but now I have my Friday night entertainment. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You won't regret it, I promise! He's as entertaining as he is educational.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

You won't regret it, I promise! He's as entertaining as he is educational.

Good.  Hell, Feynman's who got me into science, for the same reason.  As with Tyson, and a bunch of other geniuses who felt secure enough about their own intelligence to explain things in layman's terms.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You won't regret it, I promise! He's as entertaining as he is educational.

Good.  Hell, Feynman's who got me into science, for the same reason.  As with Tyson, and a bunch of other geniuses who felt secure enough about their own intelligence to explain things in layman's terms.

Feynman was a wonderful lecturer too! I haven't gotten into Tyson yet, but I will get around to him.

[Kai]

I need to watch these.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I need to watch these.

He makes me LOL on a regular basis.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

From the University of Santa Clara interview:

Saum: That said, where I want to go with this is: The fact that you're a MacArthur Fellow, recipient of a "genius grant," was back in the news recently, not just because it's a matter of your resume, but because, when the Foundation was looking for new ideas for programs, you wrote a letter suggesting that they might look at how neuroscience can transform the judicial system. Tell me about that.

Sapolsky: I wrote a very disinhibited letter, since they assured me the whole idea was, "Give us your craziest ideas"—a very disinhibited letter that I think I'm pretty close to being serious about. But, in all the meetings since then, it is treated as "Oh, this was a great, sort of provocative..."  I think I called it something like, "Should We Abolish the Criminal Justice System?"—which I kind of think we should. Nevertheless, what's come out of all of that is something much more sobrietous. You know, the level at which I was taking it to it is: ultimately, a system of culpability and such is completely incompatible with what we understand about neurobiology—and what we know by now we don't understand but are likely to at some point in the future.
That's not to advocate we get rid of prison; we need to do something about dangerous people. The sound bite I always have is: Like a car whose brakes have failed is incredibly dangerous and we have to protect people from it. "Oh, my God, that's horrible. Turning people into just mechanisms in that way." It's a lot better to mechanize somebody into having a broken brake than to moralize them into having an evil soul, or something like that, when it's neurobiology.

[LMNO]

Hell yes.

[Junkenstein]

Hey Nigel, Only watched the "Depression" lecture so far, and damn is this guy good. 5 minutes in I was interested, 10 minutes and I knew I was watching the whole thing. Nice find. Will have thoughts on this later.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Baboons are perfect models for the ecosystem I study. They live in the Serengeti in East Africa, which is a wonderful place for a baboon to live. They're in big troops, so predators don't hassle them much. Infant mortality is low. Most importantly, it takes baboons only about 3 hours of foraging to get their day's calories. Critical implication of this - if you are spending only 3 hours in a day getting food, that means you have 9 hours of free time each day to devote to being miserable to some other baboon. Like us, they are ecologically privileged enough so that they can devote their time to generating psychological stress for each other. If a baboon in the Serengeti is miserable, it is because another baboon has worked very hard to bring that state about.

Well, there goes me getting anything done at work today...

[Junkenstein]

The baboons making each other stressed makes a lot of sense. Absolutely terrifying really. Also hilarious.

On the depression one, I would suspect that I wouldn't be the only one on the board with some familiarity with it. I've found more use out of that lecture than most other "advice" you get offered. The breakdown of factors and explanation is excellently presented. 

Any related book recommendations?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm glad you guys are enjoying him!

I do recommend his books, they're written incredibly accessibly: A Primate's Memoir, Monkeyluv, and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers would be my top picks but I don't think you can go wrong with anything he's written.

[GrannySmith]

He sounds VERY interesting, I'll definitely watch this as soon as my english-Verbot is over, after the german exams are finished. In fact, I shouldn't be reading that or writing this... see you in ten days

[GrannySmith]

aaahhh, finally i found this and secured my evening with a documentary ritual