 Welcome everyone. My name is Annie Murray-Close. I'm a professor in the Department of Psychological Science and I have the honor of introducing our distinguished speaker today. So as you know this is one of our speakers in the series of the president's BIRAC lecture and so as a reminder this is sponsored by the BIRAC lecture series. Also sponsored by the Department of Psychological Science and the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning and it also contributes to the UVM faculty development series supported by the associate provost for faculty affairs Dr. Jim Vigaro. So it's really an honor to be the person who gets to present our speaker today, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University and she also has appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is a pioneer in research on emotion. She has over 200 publications in the top journals in the field. She's been awarded over 20 million in research grants and fellowships including a National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award. These are multimillion dollar awards that support exceptionally creative scientists with pioneering research approaches. So this gives you a sense of how accomplished Dr. Feldman Barrett is. She's an elected fellow in numerous professional associations and she's a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. This is the most prestigious fellowship for scholars in Canada. She's also the president elect of the Association for Psychological Science which demonstrates that she is about to take on a massive service assignment for the field overall. Her most recent book you can see up here is titled how emotions are made the secret life of the brain and it's been selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2017. She has given a very popular TED talk. She's testified before Congress. She's been on several television shows including the Today Show. If I were to go on and on about her accomplishments it would take the full hour so I'm going to stop there but it gives you a sense of how distinguished Dr. Feldman Barrett is and what an honor it is to have her. So today Dr. Feldman Barrett's talk is entitled why words matter lessons from neuroanatomy and please join me in welcoming Dr. Feldman Barrett to UVM. Thanks. Thank you for the is it on yeah okay so first of all Annie thank you for that lovely introduction and thanks all of you for being here today on such a gorgeous day and I had to close the blinds you can see the slides so hopefully I will say something that is worthwhile or at least that will keep you awake actually I'm sure I'll keep you awake for the next hour but let me just say let me start actually with more thanks I would like to join Annie in thanking the Bureau lecture series for sponsoring this talk Susan Davidson for organizing the Department of Psychological Sciences including Annie for hosting me today I had a set of wonderful conversations including with someone who actually set me on the path you know Mark Bowden who sent me on the path actually to neuroscience which he probably doesn't even know but there is and also the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning it's a real pleasure and honor for me to be able to be here and talk to you today you know normally I give talks to academic audiences and to public audiences about the nature of emotion but when this invitation came in I was asked to talk about free speech so here I am up here talking about free speech that's me that's what I've been asked to do and I should say in this talk today it you know it's I'm going to show a little data to you but I'm going to show it at a pretty high level because really this is more meant to have a conversation about what the data mean for having important discussions and making important decisions but who gets to speak at a university and this is a topic that is currently you know the I would say being debated debate is kind of a kind word for what is going on right now so I'll say that if you have any questions about the data specifically that I'm presenting I'm going to hold it to the end I think that would be best okay so so again you know I was invited here to talk about free speech I should say I'm often invited to talk about free speech now and I turned down almost every invitation for reasons I think that will become clear but I decided to do this one because of the way the invitation was issued and I should say I've never actually given this talk before in public so many times in front of the mirror you know or my husband my daughter she would listen to me but yeah okay so suppose so I was invited to speak to you today and suppose that the university had decided to invite somebody else to speak to you today instead of me would this be an example of me being censored of me being of my my right to free speech being challenged no I don't think so all it would mean is that you guys would have decided to invite somebody else my free speech would not be violated because I could go to a public park and I could stand on a platform and I could talk very loudly about my views I could hop onto Twitter for free at a public library and I could tweet away that would be assuming that I knew how to tweet really effectively I could publish a self-publish a book on Amazon I could even have a worldwide audience on Facebook and the same is true for every other person who was not invited to speak to you today they are not having their free speech violated at issue here when we are making decisions about who to invite to speak to our students at a university at issue here is not really freedom of speech it's actually freedom of choice people at a university like yourselves choose who is invited to speak people who produce television shows choose who are invited to speak to their audience confusing freedom of choice and freedom of speech is where many arguments about free speech go horribly wrong actually right now in today's popular culture and I'm going to use myself as the example rather than call anybody else out about a year ago I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times now I should tell you I write I write several op-eds a year for the New York Times which usually garner a lot of email and are you know forwarded around but this one was I think distinctive in its impact basically the the op-ed said that students need to grapple with ideas that they don't like and that even might offend them that is a necessary component of a university education and something that all of us should be committed to as educators at the same time I presented evidence some evidence biological evidence that it matters how you exercise your freedom of choice in who you invite it matters who you invite to speak to ensure that students will have this important educational experience and so that is actually what I'm going to talk to you about today most of the research I'm going to present to you is not mine it's research that I've read authors some of whom I've talked to I will be showing you one or two pieces of my own research but more generally the point today is to show you a body of literature just give you some examples and then think about what the consequences are of this science if any for how we conduct ourselves around this issue of exposing students to you know challenging and sometimes shocking and offensive ideas and it begins with the the the insight that humans all of us in this room are social animals we form long-term pair bonds we care for our offspring over an extended period of time we cooperate with each other and we reciprocate and there is another important way in which we are social animals and that is that we regulate each other's nervous systems and we do it automatically and effortlessly without any awareness that we do it and that has implications for how we interact with each other now we are not unique as social animals on this planet there are many many social there are many species of social animals insects for example some are social and they regulate each other's nervous systems using chemicals like this baby and the mama ear wig look she's cleaning her baby isn't it sweet seriously no seriously it's I think is adorable actually and I hate insects mammals also use chemicals to regulate each other's nervous systems so with that will faction as well as sound and touch primate mammals add vision and human primate mammals like us also use words and concepts so here I'm showing you a photograph of my daughter Sophia when she was five and her dad and they were going trick-or-treating as two superheroes that they invented Brainiah in speed now in our house Brainiah and speed have starred in many movies many short movies where they have solved mysteries and fought super villains and so when I say the word Brainiah in my house to these two it has an immediate impact on their nervous systems in fact I can text I love you to my best friend who lives in the Netherlands right and without ever her hearing my voice or seeing my face I can change her heart rate her breathing rate and her metabolism you know in an instant similarly I could send a critical text or an uncertain text to any of you even if you don't know me and I would bet that for many of you that would have an instantaneous impact on your nervous system might not last very long but you know research shows that we can impact people's nervous systems really quickly in this way so we regulate each other's nervous systems all the time without realizing it just by speaking words to each other most psychology experiments or I should say many psychology experiments actually depend on this reality so words are powerful it may seem very far-fetched to you right now it may seem like almost unbelievable what I'm saying but I'm hoping that by the end of this talk you know it won't seem that unbelievable to you we might then still disagree on what the consequence of this truth is but it is nonetheless a truth so let me just give you one example from my own lab what I'm going to show you here is this it is an example of the power of words to influence the human brain this is from a brain imaging study and what you're looking at here are two images of the brain with blobs color blobs on them where the color blobs refer to changes in in brain activity while people are participants test subjects are listening to short narrative descriptions of situations in the scanner so they're basically listening to words and that's it they're lying still their eyes are closed and what you're looking at here for those of you who are not familiar with brain images this is a medial view of the brain so you have two hemispheres and if you crack the brain open like an egg you would be looking at the inner surface of one of those hemispheres this is the front that's the back this is a lateral view so if you were to look at the side of a brain and then just go in a little bit this is what you would see and the reason why we go in is that we want to be able to see this part of the brain here which is called the insula and it's usually hidden between the frontal and the temporal lobes so we've just chosen a sort of a view that will let you see that so despite the fact that subjects were lying still in the scanner with their eyes closed we see let me just back up we see activity in brain regions that are involved in movement even though they're not moving involved in touch involved in vision even though their eyes are closed and in the regions of the brain that control your heart rate your breathing your metabolism basically your autonomic nervous system your immune system and other systems of your body just by processing the meaning of words okay so here we see increased activity in motor cortex and in somatosensory cortex in primary and secondary visual cortex in primary and teresceptive cortex that's for representing the sensory changes inside your body and we also see increased activity in the thalamus and the hypothalamus and in a whole set of subcortical nuclei that regulate your autonomic nervous system your immune system and your endocrine system your metabolic systems and so on now here what I want to show you is what the language network looks like in the brain here again we're looking at a lateral view of the brain right so the front of the brain is on the front of the brain is on the left back of the brain is on the right and again it's that lateral view with a depiction of the language system and it's most important nodes most important parts the Broca's area and Wernicke's area and so if you are understanding the words that I am speaking to you right now this network is getting a bit of a workout okay now what I want to do is show you some real data again from our lab where what we did is we searched for all of the brain regions that are connected to Wernicke's area and Broca's area so we can recover the brain's language network and so what I'm going to show you first is so that you understand what you're looking at is a brain that we blew up so that you could see the folds of the cortex more easily and then the blobs here indicate the regions of the brain that are connected to Broca's area and Wernicke's area so this is the language network this is in actual data from over 700 subjects and again you know if you're understanding the words I'm speaking right now then you have this network in your brain and it's working pretty well now here's the spatial overlap for the language network and the network that regulates those systems of your body your autonomic nervous system your immune system your metabolism and other systems basically they overlap almost completely so let me be really clear what this means the same regions of the brain which help you process language control the systems of your body they make your heart rate go up and down they change the ease with which glucose gets into your blood they change the extent to which chemicals are secreted so that you can have an immune reaction and in fact in studies of non-human brains like birds for example we can show in fact data shows that the same neurons that control the body are also important for processing the sounds that animals use to communicate with each other that is their vocalizations and these the neurons of these regions actually became the language network in humans so this is not a the fact that we have an overlap that that is the very same network the very same regions that are working together so that you can understand language are also controlling your body is not an accident of like you know the sort of spatial imprecision of brain imaging because even when we look at individual neurons we see something very similar so the punchline so far to this is that words you can think of words as tools for regulating the physiological systems of the body to meet the changing demands of the world around you if you doubt this think about the last time you gave comfort to someone who was in distress you probably spoke words to them in addition to doing other things right maybe pat them on the back maybe rub their arm maybe give them a hug but words to also have an impact and similarly think about the last time someone spoke words to you and you had a reaction that was unpleasant I had I just had one of those I checked my email which I should never do before I give a talk and you know there was something from my co-authors you know of a manuscript who were unhappy with the review of a manuscript that so I can tell you that my blood pressure felt like it changed in that moment not because of my co-authors who were fantastic but basically the idea here is that words are an important way that we impact each other's nervous systems right the best thing for a human it is another best thing for your nervous system for a human nervous system is another human and the worst thing for a human nervous system is another human because the words you speak have a direct effect on another person's physical state and the words that they speak to you has an effect on yours whether you intend it whether you mean it whether you feel it it's really not relevant it's just really how we're wired so when you encounter ideas that you may find insulting your heart rate might change your blood pressure might rise you probably won't feel your blood pressure rising really you probably won't really feel your heart rate changing most of the sensations from the body that we we that make it to the brain we don't actually feel directly because we're not wired to do that if you were wired to feel you have an orchestra of movements going on in your body right now and if you were wired to experience those directly you would never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again anyone who's ever had a GI illness knows exactly what I am talking about there were not enough laughs to that joke it wasn't actually a joke but okay right so normally we actually feel the sensations from our bodies as comfort or discomfort feeling pleasant or unpleasant feeling distress or unpleasantness and so if you were faced with someone saying something objectionable to you you might have a moment of unpleasantness that would go along with some physical change so it might be unpleasant but the question is is it actually harmful can it hurt can words hurt you you know sticks and stones break your bones but names can never hurt you but cat is a true well yeah more or less it is actually I mean all things being equal you know your brain actually benefits from periodic bouts of stress and stress is a moment not a moment of subjective experience of distress but a moment of stress if we define it biologically is where there's some kind of imbalance here you know your your heart is racing unexpectedly your brain is struggling to try to to to prepare the body to act in a way to deal with a particular important event so periodic bouts of stress our nervous systems evolve to the periodic bouts of stress are necessary for keeping our nervous systems healthy this is why it's important to exercise you burden your body and then your body recovers and it's good for you so on average there is no harm to your brain or your body if you encounter a couple of instances where people talk about things that you don't like maybe even insult you and maybe even say something about you directly or about a group that you belong to that makes you fear for your physical safety in a momentary way right periodically if this happens once in a while you're going to feel uncomfortable for a moment and then it will pass but what if you are stressed over and over and over and over again what if you are treading water in a simmering sea of stress where your nervous system is out of balance frequently and never given the opportunity to recover then any kind of stress including words can slowly eat away at your brain and cause illness in your body so if your nervous system is already encumbered like you know from not sleeping enough from not exercising enough from not eating healthfully from being socially evaluated in an ambiguous way oh this is out of order from financial hardship from being ill physically ill or frankly from just being an adolescent and having hormonal changes or you know being on a puzzle and having hormonal changes you guys are totally not laughing at any of my jokes it's like gonna be an impossible talk to get through for all of us of you are not going to cooperate so you know these are the sorts of conditions that are pretty common in American life if you experience if your nervous system is stressed by any of these things on a regular basis then you're going to be more vulnerable to the biological effects of words that are not designed to offend you but that are designed to threaten you or bully you or torment you and frankly it doesn't matter what your mindset is it doesn't matter how positive you try to be if you have biological signs of stress in your brain and in your body and you encounter someone who is threatening you it will you will have an effect it will have an effect on you not because you are a snowflake but because you are a human so let me give you just a taste of the literally hundreds of experiments that have been done to prove this point so here's an example of data of a study where the experimenters were looking at the effects of childhood maltreatment on ratings of anxiety depression and anger this was a 554 young adults aged 18 to 25 they were asked to rate their exposure to ongoing parental and peer verbal abuse when they were children as well as physical abuse by someone a member of their family sexual abuse from someone outside their family and they and the experimenters looked for a relationship between the reports of abuse and maltreatment in childhood and current concurrent symptoms of mood disorders so what I'm plotting here so on the x-axis here is just the effect size and for those scientists in the room who care this is a Cohen's D so the bigger the numbers the bigger the effect and then on the y-axis are the types of maltreatment and so here they are and so what we can see from this study is that verbal abuse has an impact sustained verbal abuse throughout childhood by parents and peers or parents and or peers actually has an impact that is on mood disorder symptoms that is equivalent to sexual abuse by a family member outside of the body sorry sexual abuse by someone outside the family and actually there's also a cumulative effect of this impact now what about something that's not self-report so here's a study that measured the biological impact of growing up in a harsh family environment that it contains lots of verbal criticism and conflict so where your parents are basically criticizing you and each other frequently this is 135 female adolescents who are measured on four occasions as you can see across the x-axis across 1.5 years and on the y-axis we are plotting two biological markers on the left we're plotting IL-6 which is a measure of immune dysfunction the higher the number the more the dysfunction and on the right we're plotting cortisol again the higher the number the more the dysfunction so for girls who grew up who are growing up in a in a sort of a toxic family verbally toxic family environment there's no physical abuse going on in these households they show more immune dysfunction and more metabolic function dysfunction as time goes on and these are the girls these are the adolescents who later in life in middle age we're are more will be more likely to develop metabolic illness like diabetes and heart disease they will be more likely to and to develop physical mental illnesses as well and on average people who have any form of childhood adversity are their mortality is actually decreased in adulthood that amount that is decreased depends on what their exposure is girls who were at you know the sort of the at had the average level of experience the average level of a verbal aggression from from parents and peers there's a green line and the blue line basically showed no real change over time and girls who were in a family environment actually showed without less significantly less low levels of verbal harshness actually showed over time relative health that's just one study actually there are an increasing number of studies that consistently reveal a link between sustained social stress involving verbal aggression and an increase in the incidence of psychiatric and physical disease so for example there's evidence that verbal aggression can produce alter sustained verbal aggression can produce alterations in immune response that's sufficient to reactivate a late in herpes virus it will reduce the benefits from common vaccines and it will slow the healings of wounds and I should point out these are not studies this is just a handful of studies right there this is like a sample of studies I just pulled these are not studies of vulnerable people these are studies of average people across the political spectrum and I should point out findings like these hold whether or not test subjects say that they are experiencing distress this is just exposure repeated exposure to verbal aggression whether people report feeling distressed or not here's a discovery that I'm going to show you that I find remarkable actually as a scientist I find it incredibly cool as a person I find it sort of horrifying unsaturated fats like fish oil and avocado and nuts are indeed healthy for your body unless you've been exposed to stress during that day if you've been exposed to stress during that day your brain and body metabolize this healthy meal filled with healthy fats as if it were filled with unhealthy saturated fats now when I first read this I thought okay so is this like a license for me on a stressful day to eat french fries which is what I really want to do when I'm stressed it I can't tell you what to do you have to live with your own conscience there I'm just saying you know if there's no difference you might as well you know or this exposure to stress within two hours of a meal adds a hundred and four calories I know right I know I know I know I know I honestly think I let out that kind of when I heard a Janice Kiko Glazer present these data the first time I I made a noise like you I was like are you kidding me so imagine that you are living the typical American life you don't sleep enough you don't exercise enough you don't eat healthfully all the time you know maybe you're dealing with some financial issues maybe you read the newspaper to me read the front page of the newspaper too much before breakfast if you're dealing with daily stress this adds 11 pounds a year to your weight I'm gonna mention the fact that we have an obesity crisis in this country but so just before you're you know you know you might want to dismiss this out of hand I would just ask you to hold on with me for a couple of minutes because maybe there's something to this okay and then here's this so there's a lot of data that could show you really beautiful data about brain atrophy in in in response to stress but in in animals where really very specific very detailed neural work has been done but here we're talking about words and words may not be relevant to a rat so I'm gonna show you human data so here what I'm showing you is part of the network in your brain that controls your body and this looks a little different from the last one because it's a different sort of depiction so again it's a medial view of the brain so if you crack the brain open and you look at one hemisphere you're looking at the inner surface and in this case here is the front and here is the back and the blobs here are connectivity and here is brain imaging research showing where we see atrophy brain atrophy due to prolonged and chronic stress including social stress which involves verbal aggression so there is a decrease in cortical thickness and there is a decrease in connectivity in parts of the brain that are important for regulating your body when you are chronically stressed which is the reason why one of the reasons why not the only reason why it has an impact on your physical health but I should also point out that these parts of the brain in the yellow there are not specific to regulating your body and processing language and to you know so they're also important for learning and cognitive flexibility in fact they're important if this were different talk I could show you they're important almost every in there they should these brain regions show an increase in activity in almost every psychological domain that we've ever studied frankly but specifically for learning and cognitive flexibility and planning for the future they're important so other people's words don't only affect your health they also affect your ability to learn and if you think that that is an example of me being a little bit you know a little bit of hyperbole you will see in a minute that I am not actually that is a direct quote so here's an example there's a study where 20 healthy adults and these were I have to tell you not to scare you but in this particular study it was medical interns in residence I know right wait one they experienced one month of social stress so conflict you know involving verbal aggression and conflict they showed at the end of this one month reduced connectivity in a variety of brain networks including the networks I showed you and they showed reduced the reduced ability to perform cognitive control tasks which means they were less able to pay attention to important information they were less able to shift their attention and they were less able to learn new information so think about that the next time you're in an emergency room the good news is that actually after one month of where of a period of reduced stress this return to normal they're actually their brains return so what we're talking about here is you know a single bout of even really horrible something that's really horrible and stressful from someone that you from another human basically will won't necessarily or just a couple of instances are not going to have a lasting effect on your nervous system but prolonged stress will and even if the prolonged stress isn't verbal if you are already vulnerable because you are living in a if you are living in American culture then the likelihood that any of those you know stressors might affect you is is higher and that actually makes you vulnerable to actually having an effect a larger effect to sustained verbal verbal aggression so I want you to consider what these biological findings mean for those of us living at this particular moment in time in our culture you know right now we live in a culture of casual brutality where people regularly say horrible things to each other in newspapers on television on the radio in emails on Facebook on Twitter you know Twitter and so on and so forth each instance on its own may not have a lasting effect on your health but when they are strung together over time particularly when other stressors are present they can have a slow cumulative effect that can persist and if you are an adolescent or a young adult this effect can persist into middle age and make you more vulnerable to the diseases of aging so does mindset matter here well of course you know of course it's better to turn a potential stressor into something humorous by reframing it or I would say recategorizing it to get some distance from it so here is a a clip that I pulled from Jimmy Kimmel where Barack President Barack Obama is you know actually this is a longer clip and my husband said you can't show them the whole clip it's going to really bore them but I I love this clip because I think it's really Is there any way we can tell Obama to some golf course half way around the world and just leave him there? Well RW is surf for a girl I think that's a great idea you know nasty tweets and then he makes clever you know comments and it's really funny and so you know of course that's a great example of having a positive mindset and you know that it can it can buffer you a little bit right but mindset matters less when someone is verbally aggressive to you directly to your family to a social group of which you are a member in a way that directly threatens you now I'm going to show you a series of emails and text messages and tweets and so on from my own personal experience I'm not gonna I'm not gonna expose anybody else to this that were published after my op-ed these came to me after my op-ed was published and that and after an appearance that I made on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox and I'm gonna read them to you out loud because I want you to see what it feels like to have words spoken to you like this hey liberal scumbag and I'm not gonna do it with like you know I'm not gonna read it like hey liberal scumbag I'm just gonna leave the prosody off just so that you can get the words right hey liberal scumbag you're gonna pet we're gonna pay a visit at your home I hope you're using I hope my use of free speech offends you you're a fucking leftist cunt Jewish entry into prestigious fields must be restricted in the latest example the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett with my name in Perens does anyone know what that name in Perens means anyone it's a code it marks you as Jewish on you are in the bullseye so I when I the first time I got one of these I was like what the hell is this this means you're Jew and you're marked I didn't even know this existed frankly and I should point out to you these are not this is not like I'm not picking the couple of worst examples of the information of you know the the messages that were sent to me I'm picking randomly I picked out of thousands of them the person who helped make this slide these slides for me you know was really upset by them because he hadn't ever seen anything like this before hey Lisa you're ugly stupid and ain't probably a carpet munching dike your clothes look like they came from Goodwill that one really hurt your your specialty is a bunch of leftist bullshit if you were near me I'd spit in your eye you can't speak extra I've tried this word so many times extemporaneously for shit you're un-American and your agenda is never going to be never going is your agenda is never going to come to be over our dead fucking bodies bitch and then so on and so forth please kill yourself your life is not worth living fuck off cunt and murder yourself you're nothing more than an ignorant cunt that needs to be put down like a fucking dog socialist garbage such as yourself will be killed off go ahead smirk a thousand meters and a clear line of sight so over the course I'm still receiving emails like this actually and sometimes tweets and I turned my Facebook I've turned I made my Facebook private so people can't comment on it so over the course of a number of weeks I received thousands of these because I wrote an op-ed that people actually misunderstood but that's sort of beside the point they they you know it wasn't an op-ed about free speech it was an op-ed about freedom of choice but still they disagreed and that's what I got not you know you're I disagree with you and here's why not even like your ideas are stupid no I guess what I want to kind of point out is that I should point out that this is pretty typical stuff for anybody who is in the public eye these days so it turns out as this was happening to me pan America the literary guild in the United States came to me because they had I was some people had read my book because it was nominated for an award and and there's a part in the book where I talk about stress and it turns out that many journalists and people in the media and academics are actually receiving messages like this on a pretty regular basis and they wanted me to help them design a survey to help figure out how many people are suffering and does and if anybody needs actually to talk to a therapist or see a physician and so now we're actually doing research on to try to you know look at the linguistic structure of these emails for a bunch of reasons and I did help them you know put this together in the survey but the thing I want to say is I don't when did it become okay to talk to people like like when did it be okay that we talked to each other like this it to debate right casual brutality has become the norm open your newspaper listen to the radio it's routinely and it's routinely fed to us on on as entertainment on television so in movies so for example here's a clip this is going to take about a minute and a half but I want you to watch it I'm through this is a clip from a popular sitcom that adolescents watch cats Eli back and Tori okay let's give them a place home home real creative you be quiet and now we need a situation big news Andre nobody wants to see big nudes news I will that's different big news why don't you go wait in the hall okay okay at home big news and action hey babe how was work today I got fired oh again it's okay I have great news it'll cheer up this whole family I went to the animal shelter and got us I'm the new family dog wolf psycho weights will you please tell this amateur that dogs can't talk and that they don't walk on two legs so I'm sorry I was sucking the milk of this coconut but it's true Tori if you're gonna play a dog be a dog action I went to the animal shelter and got us a dog looks like this dog has bugs in her fur this is just one example of what happens in situation comedies both those designed for children and for general audiences analysis have been done by the papers I reference here which shows that some episode of verbal or relational aggression occurs in over 90% of the programs that were sampled from mainstream television sitcoms actually that's actually more than reality TV shows which come in at about 71% and in 50 TV shows that were the most popular with children adolescents for they were on average 14 different incidents of verbal aggression per hour or one every four to five minutes to a laugh track where the victim is basically not showing her distress or his distress and the adults either are don't notice they're basically you know depicted as idiots who don't notice or actually inadvertently play along why does this matter because evolutionary biologists and anthropologists for a number of years have been studying the fact that humans you know are successful as a species because we model each other's behavior this is called selective cultural learning and we particularly are inclined to copy other people who are successful who are higher in prestige who are high in social status like movie stars on television and or on in movies or you know I don't know the president of the United States and indeed evidence shows that teens actually report that they are more likely to imitate this aggression themselves after they view it on television and actually children who were observed were actually were more likely to model this relational aggression at school now there's a positive side to this too right it's also the case there's a wonderful research to show that by Betsy Palick that if you go into a school and you find the highest status kids in that school and you do bully training you know anti-bullying training on them it actually eventually changes the whole tenor of the school right the point is that we observe each other we model each other this is actually part of how we coordinate with each other and and so if we are speaking horribly to each other and our kids are watching it then they're gonna do that too and suffer the consequences frankly the biological consequences so all of this together creates a culture of casual brutality and you know what are the consequences well we can speculate we can just do you know we don't know anything causal but we can look correlationally we have an opioid crisis in this country people are self-medicating their distress with opioids they might start to take opioids to deal with the pain that comes the you know what we would we would call it no-susceptive pain that comes from tissue damage or injury but they often continue to take there are biological reasons that they continue to take opioids which are highly addictive but it does actually medicate it does actually reduce distress feelings of distress we have record high levels of obesity and metabolic illness in this country and we also have a high level record high levels of depression and suicide particularly in adolescents and young adults and according to the World Health Organization depression is on track to become the leading killer worldwide in another decade or so and will outstrip heart disease depression is also a metabolic illness so the why are people suffering in this way you know and what does this this sort of culture of brutality have to do with it well we can't say for sure like I said this is just correlational and it may have no impact at all but actually if you look at the data and you understand the biological impacts on biological embedding as it's called of stress then it's suggestive not because of the people who are suffering from these illnesses and discomfort distress are snowflakes not because they're socialists or communists not because they have certain political beliefs not because they believe in political correctness but because they are human they are human and they have human nervous systems and humans are social animals who when we speak words to each other have an impact on each other's brains and bodies human nervous systems are wired this way we wouldn't we couldn't live if it wasn't if that wasn't the case right the people around you the you're close the people who are close to you the people who you love and who love you help to bear the burden of your the metabolic burden of your nervous system and you help to bear theirs and in fact if when you lose someone who passes away because you know who who feel who was very close to you and you feel as if you've lost a part of yourself it's because you actually have you've lost someone who helps to keep your nervous system regulated and you feel the effects of that for some period of time so no matter who you are no matter how tough you are no matter what you believe this scientific evidence can apply to you and it can apply to your students and so if you have a brain then that brain can be harmed by prolonged exposure to verbal aggression including but not limited to the casual brutality of everyday life so what does this mean about you choosing speakers at a university which is actually what my original op-ed was about well let's suppose that shouldn't be hard for you that you actually work at a university we all most of us do we're here and the part of your mission is to expose students to ideas that they disagree with or that they even find offensive and maybe even shocking and let's say you have a choice between choosing between two speakers one speaker presents arguments that students find offensive which prompts them to engage in vigorous debate to come up with arguments maybe against the what the speaker is saying and in the process become critical thinkers that would be a successful educational outcome successful educational outcomes don't aren't indexed by people feeling good all the time sometimes feeling bad is okay sometimes feeling bad is an indication that you're doing something important I always tell my graduate students that it's a way of inoculating them I always say if at some point in your educational career you aren't completely miserable and in tears and just feeling like you need to you just don't know what you're doing here you're not doing it right because a PhD is should help you challenge your deeply your deepest health beliefs should be challenged and that is a profoundly unpleasant process however you have another choice maybe it's another speaker and this speaker hurls insults and marginalizes groups of people and overtly threatens the safety of someone maybe or is deliberately incendiary in our culture of brutality where nurse systems of so many people are even a little bit under load the second type of speaker merely adds to the burden without any educational benefit at all so the message of this talk and the message of that op-ed was to exercise your freedom of choice and invite the first speaker you are not violating the first amendment rights of the second speaker when you do this I thought this was a pretty straightforward argument frankly granted you know I only had 800 words I didn't have a whole hour to talk about it and that was the message but that's not the message that people read and in fact I was invited on to appear on the Tucker Carlson show last year to talk about this op-ed that's this show is helped to engender all of those lovely comments that you saw earlier Mr. Carlson framed my op-ed as if it was about anti-free speech while in fact it was not about free speech at all it was about freedom of choice I made a number of mistakes appearing on this show but the biggest one was my confidence that I could persuade this guy to have a spirited debate with me and right out of the gate he began asking leading questions and putting words in my mouth which I refuse to answer questions when people do that I just won't you know it's like you know it's like that old you know example from a courtroom drama you know when when did you kill your wife you know the answering the question affirms the assumption I'm just not going to do that so we never actually had a conversation and this was a missed opportunity to debate the idea that science can offer some suggestions for how to exercise freedom of choice in deciding who to invite and who not to invite to speak at a university or any public forum and this show is a perfect example of what happens when the media serves up entertainment as if it were actually information so here is the argument really briefly and then I'll be pretty much done US tort and criminal law invokes the concept of the reasonable person to denote a hypothetical person in society who has average reactions to things and who exercises the average amount of control in situations and therefore serves for a standard for behavior so we can apply the reasonable standard the reasonable person standard to guide our freedom of choice of who to invite to speak in a public forum like a university so consider inviting a speaker who'll expose students to ideas even offensive ideas that will prompt a debate I chose this example because I'm Jewish I might as well pick on myself people do say this so have a debate about it consider not inviting a speaker whose statements are sufficiently verbally aggressive that the reasonable person will find them threatening this comment fuck off you Jewish cunt I'm coming to your house to shoot you and is an example of what over time in sufficient quantities will hurt your brain and your body it also happens to be against the law this is an example of assault the intent to harm specific intent to harm but what about a statement like this this is in the middle somewhere it's actually not assault it comes close but it's actually legal to say this to someone and so this is where the concept of the reasonable person could come in except the reasonable person is a fiction there there are no hypothetical people there are real people right and so this is where science can be helpful because in science we define the hypothetical average person in actually concrete statistical terms if you've sampled well then the average of your sample is a statistical instantiation of the hypothetical you know a reasonable person except it's not hypothetical we've estimated it so in the studies that I showed you earlier if you can measure a group of test subjects who are systematically exposed to verbal aggression like the middle quote and they show biological markers of illness and even some brain changes then and those studies replicate then you have a really good example of science acting like a guideline for who to invite and who not to invite and I should point out to you that the studies that I showed you where we see a relationship for example between verbal harshness and you know cortisol and inflammatory dysregulation we're not as harsh as that statement so to me it just seems really clear that we should consider the fact or at least debate the fact or debate the suggestion that research the research that we discussed earlier can be can offer some guidance in choosing who to invite namely people who do discuss controversial topics that are important for teaching students how to learn how constructive ways of critical debate and critical thinking even if it's around topics that they don't like and it's not necessary to use overt verbal aggression to do it and in fact they'll probably think better if you don't so this talk was I'm wrapping up now and I just want to make a couple of more very brief comments one is that this talk was not about free speech but since people keep inviting me to talk about free speech and keep putting words in my mouth about free speech that I don't believe I might as well tell you exactly what I do believe which is that in our culture we face a fundamental dilemma we have strongly individualistic values but we are wired as social animals free speech is important it's necessary to a democracy but we are we are also wired to be social animals who impact each other that's one of our evolutionary adaptations as a species and some biologists and anthropologists think that's why we dominate the earth unless we compare ourselves to bacteria but you know so how do we cultivate personal freedoms when we are physiologically dependent on each other this dilemma is the source of virtually every problem that we have in this country right now and it's not a partisan issue it cuts both ways consider gun ownership conservatives want personal freedom and liberals want control consider abortion liberals want personal freedom and conservatives want control nobody owns this debate right it just is persistent like it or not we impact the brains and the bodies of those around us with the words that we speak and they return the favor for us so how do we deal with this fact well this is what I think when it comes to any kind of freedom we don't need you know if we want to preserve freedom we don't need more laws we do not need to restrict personal freedoms we should protect free speech we take individual freedoms in this country very seriously and we absolutely should I think the way to deal with this fundamental dilemma is by realizing that freedom always comes with responsibility you are free to act and speak but you are not free from the consequences of what you say and do you might not care you might not agree but it actually doesn't matter because one way or another if you contribute to this culture of casual brutality you will pay one way or another you will pay if other people are harmed by your words how will you pay you will pay with increased health care costs due to metabolic increases metabolic illnesses like diabetes and depression and heart disease you will pay because of ineffective a government because people have lost the ability to compromise by spewing crap at each other instead of having reasoned debate and finding compromise which is what I understand the founding fathers actually intended when they wrote the Constitution you will pay with reduced innovation in the global economy because when students are stressed they don't learn as well and they don't have the resources to be creative which often involves failing and picking yourself up and trying again failing fast and frequently is part of innovation no one has the resources to do that if they are already encumbered and as we discussed today you will pay by creating a citizenry that can't effectively discuss or debate difficult topics which puts our democracy at risk so the bottom line is we're educators it's crucial that we create a context for students to engage with all sorts of ideas even those that they find challenging and offensive we don't want to coddle students it doesn't serve their education or our democracy but when choosing speakers to invite to a campus or in any public forum choose wisely choose debate don't choose hate periodic bouts of conflict when handled responsibly are an opportunity to listen and learn which science shows you can't do when your nervous system is already encumbered and this is only one example of the many things that maybe we want to think about doing to vanquish this casual brutality that currently plagues our culture freedom of choice in who we invite to speak at our university is just a small piece of that puzzle to protect our democracy and to avoid the mistakes of the past I think this is a place where science actually has a role in public discourse you might disagree with me and that's okay we can debate that but that's my my position that you know we're always being told the scientists that we have to make our science useful to the public this is a place where I think our science is really useful to the public your choices your freedom your words have a consequence and they have a price and that price is a basic responsibility for your impact on other people your the wiring of your brain and and everyone else's to you know guarantees that this is true and with that I will I want to thank my lab who has you know weathered many storms with me as I have ventured out into the public to share science and also who helped to conduct the studies that that were from my lab that I from our lab that I showed you today and some of these ideas particularly about the role of that we have as social animals you can find in this book I also have as Annie mentioned there are a number of talks and podcasts and things where I've discussed this online on my website free speech and freedom of choice is not discussed in this book and it is not there aren't isn't too much on the website necessarily about that so I'll thank you for your patience and I'll take questions okay so I did want to let people know after we'll do a couple of questions we can also then move out there's a reception in the fireplace lounge but I thought we could do a question or two while we're in here so please raise your hand I will bring the mic over to you thanks for your talk your take on race and ethnic relations where there can often be a situation where because of sort of privilege and obliviousness a statement without any intent to be aggressive comes across that way and may as far as I know register on some of the physiological tests that you have devised sure so I yeah I didn't devise them I wish I had but I'm not that clever so so yeah so here's what I would say so I'm sure we all say things at times that have an unattended effect on other people but I don't think that's what we're talking about here you know I'm not talking about I'm not talking about the I guess let me just say two things one is that when I'm thinking about it inviting speakers I'm not talking about people who I think people should talk about race and I think people should talk about what bought what what people what could be potentially stressful to members of minority groups and that's not just true for race it's true for many forms of ethnicity and even gender that being said I think if you're lecturing in a class for example or you have a student who says something in a class and says something that another person finds stressful and it's a single event first of all but there's not going to be any harm to the person might experience a momentary change in in their nervous system but they're not gonna there's not gonna be any lasting harm but you know hopefully somebody else will point that out to you or you can take the other student aside the student who said something that was inadvertently insulting or that another student found insulting and you can use it as an educational experience I've actually not right then you have to ask the students permission to do it but invite them to do it in class we've done I've done this I actually talked about this in my op-ed when I came to the United States I'm from Canada which makes me a socialist right off the bat apparently but you know I was sort of flummoxed by race relations here I mean you know we have our own issues in Canada and we talked about this last night of dinner we have our own issues in Canada but they and I actually can't speak about Canada currently because I haven't lived there for more than 25 years so I have no idea but when I was living there and I should say I've worked on indigenous reservations you know in January north of Winnipeg I mean I've lived in harsh conditions with indigenous people and not I don't live there all the time obviously but I've seen what they have to contend with so in our in Canada it's things about language and things about you know whether you're indigenous or whether you are European of European descent but so when I came to the United States I sort of tripped into I'm just used to treating everyone by the same set of standards but the university where I went to work had an African American training program training program for African Americans in in graduate school and the students had concerns about the fact that I was holding them to a standard that they felt was unfair because they didn't have access to the preparation before they arrived and so instead of berating them I were saying anything about it I went and did the only thing that I knew would that I thought would be useful which I found the only we only had one African American faculty member and I was an assistant professor and I was new so I went to him and I said can you please explain to me what's going on like I completely don't understand what's happening and he did explain it to me and we did actually talk about this in class and we actually engaged in debate in class around issues related to race because it was relevant to the class and I invited my now new friend into the class and this was a class where we were teaching something about intelligence testing which has a quite nefarious history related to eugenics particularly for African Americans and so we debated we debated the youth we debated eugenics in the classroom you know he took the he this my newfound friend who was African American took the pro position I took the con position and then halfway through we switched now was that stressful to people I'm sure it was did they dislike it yeah absolutely I disliked it too but it was necessary so I think if you say something that's inadvertently harmful and ends up being inadvertently harmful invite your students to talk about that with you and own it and discuss it and explain why it's important you know that you that you do such things that may sound like a trivial nice guy kind of thing to do but I think that is the only way that we can handle such situations okay let's do one more question then we will move ourselves out hi so I came in a little late so I'm sorry if you touched on this before but I was wondering in terms of conversations there's obviously a difference between interactions that you're having in person versus online because there's differences in tone and facial expressions and kind of a different interpersonal context and I'm wondering if you could address I guess the potency of the effects you see as they differ according to online versus in person interactions and maybe if there are other contexts online that kind of iterate those facets that we see in person yeah so here's the I'll make I'll try to make this short I think when someone sends you an email that says I hope you fucking die doesn't really matter whether they say it over email or it doesn't matter whether it's said over social media I'm gonna come to your house I'm gonna hunt you down which is actually you know we had to get to police forces involved because you know we had things like that so I don't think that matters very much I think what matters where it matters is that anything which is a social communication which is ambiguous is hard ambiguity is expensive for a human nervous system uncertainty is just expensive for any nervous system because you don't your your brains having to you know try to figure out how to prepare to act and also what it means it's just metabolically expensive and it's very stressful for humans in particular social evaluation especially if it's ambiguous or unclear or uncertain is like the worst it's actually even worse than having someone tell you that they don't like you and so from that perspective here's the here here's what I'd say in person conflict is actually the easiest to deal with from a nervous system standpoint these are all the context is there so if I say if you know if I'm in high school and I say hey bitch you're looking fucking ugly today which actually kids do say if we're face-to-face and I say it like that maybe maybe you kind of know I don't I'm actually greeting you and then wait maybe you don't but you know but what if it's set over the phone where there's less context right or or even you know even video there's not complete context there or the phone or Facebook or YouTube or not you like YouTube comments or or Twitter I mean Twitter or even like texting texting is almost to some extent the worst because you can see when the other person has read your message and then when they don't answer back you don't know why right so it's filled with tremendous ambiguity what is a human brain do when there's it's filled with all that ambiguity and there is no tone to any text message or email it fills in it uses past experience to fill in and simulate that missing information which is why we have emojis right partially it's extremely stressful actually so one of the reasons why social media is very stressful for for everybody if they stay on it too long is because it it heightens the uncertainty and ambiguity and social interactions