 I'm delighted to welcome you to today's lecture as part of the series on ethical issues and neuroethics, a series that was organized by John Moncel, the director of the Grossman Institute, by myself and Dan Salmezzi and Peggy Mason. Today's speaker is Peggy Mason. Professor Mason is in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. She received both her BA in biology and PhD in neuroscience from Harvard and has been on the U of C faculty since 1992. Professor Mason has taught undergraduate, graduate and medical students and has received numerous awards for her teaching using her nearly 15 years of experience teaching medical students. Professor Mason wrote a single-author textbook, pretty rare these days, single-author textbooks designed for medical students on the topic of medical neurobiology, published by Oxford in 2011. In the spring of 2014, Professor Mason taught a massive open online course, MOOC, that was entitled Understanding the Brain, the Neurobiology of Everyday Life. It was an effort to educate the public about the brain and its function. Over 41,000 students enrolled in this 10-week course, which included modules on neuroanatomy, neural communication, and neural systems. In 25 years, Professor Mason's research focused on the cellular mechanisms of pain, pain modulation, addressing questions such as how morphine works. However, within the past five years, Professor Mason's research has shifted to examine the biological basis of empathy, helping, and pro-social behavior. In 2011, Professor Mason and her colleagues were the first to demonstrate evidence of empathy and rodents. In a most recent work, her lab team used rats of two different strains to see if they would only extend empathy to rats that they had previously interacted with. Today's topic, which relates to some of the work I've just mentioned by Professor Mason, today's topic is racism. Is it biological? Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Peggy Mason. Thanks, John. Well, thanks a lot. When I agreed to do this, it was a long, long time, and this moment was very much in the distant future at that time, so I thought, hey, okay, I'll do this. And then last week, I've been, what the heck was I thinking? And these three slides out on a very tenuous limb, walking a tightrope, and on a thin sheet of ice that's not so much ice right here, these are the metaphors that have been in my waking hours and my dreams. And yet, I persist and I am doing this, and why am I doing it? Because if we don't exist in a wider context, really, what is the point? We exist, University of Chicago exists in a wider context. We are part of the city of Chicago and this country and the world. And we don't have to go downtown to find that wider context. They come to us. We get students from all over, from all different backgrounds. This is a group of great students that I taught in Paris, all joining. And one of the things I love about this is that it has both brains, well, it has brains, it has students, and it has original Chagall prints. Really can't get much better than that. Okay, so the reason I decided to talk about this, I don't really know, but I've been thinking since the Rachel Dozel Cuffuffle about whether the rats can tell us something, the rats that we've been studying can tell us something about this issue. And the Rachel Dozel example in particular is fraught with all sorts of issues that I don't want to go into, so we're going to never touch upon this again. But we will, at the end, come back to a really pertinent ethical question that was in The New York Times just a couple of weeks ago. So I want to start by defining racism, and this is an edited definition from the OED. It's the belief that one's own racial group is superior, that other groups present a threat to one's racial integrity, prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against people of other racial groups, especially based on such beliefs. So this is a very human kind of thing. Rats are not going to have beliefs. They're not going to have racial integrity. This is something that we can only study in rats, I'm sorry, in humans. And yet the humans have races, and so here is an OED definition of race, which is it's all the descendants from an original stock, a single line of descent. And in biology, when we think about race, what it is, it's a group of individuals who descend from a reproductively isolated population. So in America, that doesn't so much exist. I don't know if Carol Ober is here, but maybe there are a few communities in the United States that aspire to reproductive isolation, whether they achieve that or not. I have my doubts. So in the United States, we don't have enough reproductive isolation to produce races. And we haven't done so, and even in the world, it's pretty darn rare to find a reproductively isolated population. So the genetics of people are all mixed up. It's a big melange. And this was realized way, way back in the beginning of the 20th century by W.E.B. Dubois, who realized that races are social construct. And beautifully and wonderfully, as it turns out in a very recent issue of science, these individuals wrote a perspective suggesting that race should be taken out of human genetics, that race does not have any genetic meaning when it comes to humans. And I just want to go through a couple of the reasons why they assert that and why I think that is correct. Racial groups are genetically heterogeneous, and there is no clear cut genetic boundary between what is commonly called different races. Racial classification simply do not make any genetic sense. So this is a lot of words, and I'm just going to show you a couple of examples that illustrate this. On the left, we have the aptly named Walter Francis White, aptly named by Jelani Cobb. He was the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1931 to 1955. And this is his own writing from his own autobiography. I am a negro. My skin is white. My eyes are blue. My hair is blonde. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me. And this is John Boehner. He's very good at tanning. So race is, in fact, a social construct. And it's important, as we think about this, to distinguish race from ancestry. So I put two things that might have come to your mind. If race is a social construct, how come people can go into 23andMe and find out that they have genetic signs from various different geographic areas? And that is true. It tells you about what genes an individual has. It does not tell you that that individual belongs to and is alike to others of the same genetic makeup. So race, on the other hand, is a pattern-based concept which connects one individual to other individuals in a larger group. And another thing that might come to mind is this AJ Jacobs, who's this fellow who's going through and trying to assert that he has millions of cousins, which may very well be true. OK, so what about rats? Is there race in rats? Well, in rats, we've got a whole different ball game because in rats, there is reproductive isolation. There's been reproductive isolation in laboratory rat lines for, we're in 2016, so for about 110 years. So this is the history of laboratory rat lines. In 1909, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia bred some wild rats. How they became albino, I really just don't know that. But Wistar is an albino line. It's an albino stock. And about six years later, several of these females were made into one wild male, and the descendants of that became a non-albino strain called Long Evans. This is a black-caped rat. Another 10 years later, we went back to the Wistars, and they were made into a male of completely unknown heritage. This is a very murky time in scientific history. The details of this are not known. And the result of that was this line of rats, albino rats, called Sprague Dolly, which is one of the most used types of rats today. And that's what we use. We use the descendants. And since 1925, lots of different people have made money by breeding these rats and selling them to people such as myself. And we get our rats from Charles River, which has since 1992, used a method to ensure that they have a genetically diverse group of rats, but that there's a wall. They're diverse within. They do not all have the same genes. It's not like an inbred strain of mice. They are genetically diverse. And yet, they are different from non-Sprague Dolly rats. So this would legitimately constitute a biological race, a group of animals that is reproductively isolated from other groups. So what I'm going to do over the next so many minutes is to try to use rats to talk about how race relations operate from fundamental biological principles. The rats are not going to, they don't go to Sunday school. They don't go to, they don't have parents telling them what to do. They don't have teachers telling them what to do. They are operating out of what is in their brain. So they are a very fundamental expression of something that we share with them. We share the mammalian plan of a brain. And it can give us insight into our own cells by seeing how they act. And I wouldn't be telling you this if this didn't work. So I'm going to just take a couple side, a couple tangents just to set this up. What we started to do actually in 2008 with involved enemy Bartal was to look at whether rats would help each other. So helping is pro-social behavior, extending yourself to help another individual, is something that, when it happens, it breeds social cohesion. This is a big deal. And there had been no really good demonstration that rodents would do this. There are lots of anecdotes. And actually, after we published this, heard from a lot of people in the public who said, yeah, well, I knew that. And OK. But this gives us a way to systematically look at it. So what we ended up doing was simply making an arena that's about yay big. And in the center of the arena is a plexiglass tube that we call the restrainer. In the tube is placed a rat. The rat doesn't want to be there, but it can't get itself out because the door to the restrainer is turned around so that only the rat on the outside can open the door. The rat is not an engineer, has no clue how to do this, doesn't know which side is the door, doesn't know what the counterweight is there for. But the rat on the outside is very bothered by the trapped rat's distress and therefore goes into the center of the arena, which is totally not typical rat behavior because the center of the arena is a very scary place. But they're motivated enough to go in there and to mess around with this until they somehow figure out, by mistake, typically, how to open the door. Well, then what happens? They open the door, the trapped rat gets out. Ooh, that felt good. So the next day, do it again. They get the opportunity again. Well, it felt good, so they're going to do it again. And in fact, that's what they do. They get tested for 12 days. And over the course of 12 days, more and more of the rats figure this out, and they open the restrainer at a shorter and shorter latency. And this simply, this will be a cute picture, cute little video. So here, we color the rats so we can follow them on our computer. Doesn't know. Ooh, yes. So that's one example. And here's the original data from 2011. This was about, I don't know, 30 animals or something. And what you see in blue is the percentage of rats that open their strainer from the first day of testing to the 12th day of testing. And over here, the latency, how long did it take them? In the beginning, they don't open. They go to the cutoff point. But by the end, it takes them a minute or two. Now, this was done on cage mates. So they live together. How they felt about each other, your guess is as good as mine. But what I'm going to show you now is that we can use this paradigm, which we set up on cage mates, to actually interrogate how the rats feel about strangers, strangers of the same stock, strangers of a different stock. So the first experiment that we did in this line was to say, OK, well, if they're tested with an SD cage mate, do they help? And the answer is yes. What about if they get tested with a stranger, a rat that's of the same stock, but they've never met him? In the human world, we help strangers all the time. We also decide not to help strangers much of the time. So we can weigh these options. In this paradigm, with the level of distress that the rat is in, it turns out that they do help. They do help a stranger, a rat they've never met, but a rat of the same stock. And this, I think, is evolutionarily advantageous as Charles Darwin predicted 150 years ago. OK, so are they only going to help rats of their own type? And this is where it started to get really interesting. So I was surprised by the fact that they would help a stranger of their own type, because the literature on human empathy is rife with the idea that people are very unempathic towards strangers. And so as we thought about it, we realized that, in fact, the strangers of the same stock, they're so similar. They're kind of like walking like the duck, talking like the duck, smelling like the duck, and everything else, that maybe the rat just says, well, you're my fifth cousin, twice removed, so I'm going to open for you, no problem. You're a stranger, but you're so bloody familiar, we're good to go. So that was our working hypothesis. And to try and test that, we decided to go to a different type of rat. And we chose this very attractive rat, the Long Evans rat, which I told you about before. It's been different from the spray golly since the spray golly rats were originally derived in 1925. And this is a non-albino rat. It's a black-caped rat. And so we had two different experiments, one in which the spray golly rats were just kind of regular. They lived with spray golly rats from the time they were born to the time they were tested. And they were then tested on the 12 days of testing. They saw a different Long Evans rat each day. The other possibility was that they lived with a Long Evans cage mate. And then on that day, they were tested with this cage mate. So in one condition, they are familiar not only with the type of rat, but with the individual rat that they're going to be tested with. And what we found was that if they are tested with their cage mate, they help him. But if they're tested with a stranger that they've never met a Long Evans rat before, no go. Big no go. Well, that suggests that either they have to be individually familiar or they have to be individually familiar and familiar with the stock. And so we wanted to test whether would it be sufficient for them just to be familiar with the type of animal but not the individual? Can they meet this one animal and then generalize to strangers that are very similar to that animal? That was the question. And we call this the LE familiar, the Long Evans familiar condition. And this is how it worked. A rat, a albino rat was housed with a black cape rat for two weeks. It was then rehoused with another spray dolly rat, another albino rat. So it's known one black cape rat for exactly two weeks. That's it. Now it gets tested with the stranger Long Evans. What's going to happen? Well, as it turns out, these are terrific openers. They are great openers. So OK, well, that's amazing. That pretty much says, I actually once gave a talk and at the end of it, a woman came up to me and I'll never forget this because I'd never thought of it but I think she's right. She says, you know, back in the 60s, they used to say, if you let one in, they'll all come in. And I think this is exactly what this tells us, that there's a fundamental truth to that, which is a good thing. OK, and so they are taking information from one animal and applying it to all these strangers. And what do we call that? Well, we can call it stereotyping. So what is stereotyping? It's when the group's characteristics are true of every member of the group. So in this case, it's a little bit confusing because the group is one. The starting group is one, but nonetheless, this individual's characteristics are applied to all the individuals that they've never met. So they're retaining this idea of this Long Evans, this black cape rat, and they're assigning that same idea of that one individual to 12 different other individuals. So I want to now take a brief foray back into humans for a moment to talk a little bit about stereotyping. And this is very informed by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, and the author of Thinking Fast and Slow. But even without Kahneman, what we know about stereotyping is that it is from a neurobiological point of view, is that it happens all the time. It's a fast way to move about in the world, to perceive things in the world, to match what you expect to have happen, what is most likely to have happen, to use what's most likely to have happen in order to navigate more quickly and more effectively in the world. It's neutral, it's fast, it represents a best guess expectation, and it happens all the time. And Kahneman says that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments, and while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, it is not scientifically defensible. So these expectations are neurobiological facts, whether that's uncomfortable or not, they're neurobiological facts. And I want to illustrate our ability to quickly generate these. So this is another slight detail. I have to explain this to explain the next piece. So this is a book by LaTanne and Darley. It's called The Unresponsive Bystander. It picks up on the bystander effect that was originally popularized by a slightly incorrect version of the Kitty Genovese story. Nonetheless, the bystander effect is a very strong effect, and I just want to illustrate it with one of their studies. So what they do is they bring in people into a room. They have some distractor task that they're filling out a form. As the subjects are filling out a form, smoke starts to come into the room. Now, if they are filling out the form and they are the only ones in the room, 73%, 75% of them leave the room and say, there's smoke coming into the room. Seems reasonable. If they are in that room with two other people, 13%, 13%. So it's the same smoke, but they do not do it. Now, you can, and people say, it's a defuse. There's a lessening of responsibility. There's a diffusion of responsibility. Whatever the underlying mechanism is, this is a very consistent finding. And Latana and Durley showed it not only for the smoke in the room. They showed it for a large number of scenarios that are all incredibly entertaining, one of which was a group of people on a conference call, while one of them who has had a history of epilepsy has a seizure. Do they go and report this person's having a seizure and is choking to death? And the answer is no. So Nisbet, who has also provided some really beautiful examples of this type on his own, but he took the Latana and Durley result, the one dealing with epilepsy in particular, and he taught it to a psychology class. So he says, there's this bystander effect, and here's how it works. And here's what the people did. They didn't help. They didn't leave the room. They didn't say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go help this person. And very dutiful psychology students learned the bystander effect and could repeat it, could write it down. And then they were shown two short videos. These were original videos of the participants. They were completely bland. They said nothing. But they put faces to these participants. And then they were asked, do you think these two participants that you just saw the video of, do you think they helped? OK? So we have two different groups getting this question. One got taught the bystander effect, and one did not get taught the bystander effect. Is there any difference in how they answer the question? Is there any difference? No, zero difference. No difference. And this is burgers of Calais. A beautiful excuse to show that. So you can just imagine Nisbet going, oh my god, I'm trying to teach psychology here. But both predicted that the two in this video, these completely meaningless information that they garnered from the video, had actually helped. So they say people, and this is a quote from Nisbet, people quietly exempt themselves. They exempt themselves, they exempt their friends, they exempt their family, and they even, apparently, exempt complete strangers that they've seen a video of for one minute. But can we go in the other direction? So can we use particular knowledge to generate a general prediction, an accurate stereotype? And in this situation, Nisbet just reversed the situation. He sort of turned this onto the other end. So first, he shows the psychology students these bland videos. Then he informs them that in this situation, they did not help. And then he asked the psychology students, do you think that, in general, people help when they're in a group or not? And now they get it. So what the answer is in humans is that from a particular situation, you can derive a general principle. And in the other direction, I have an arrow here. I really want this to be a no arrow, but all I did was make it the smallest arrow. And this is another quote from Nisbet saying, subjects unwillingness to deduce the particular to excuse themselves or their friends or the video strangers from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular. And what I think I can say is that's what the rats are doing. They are doing this latter. They are inferring a general principle from a particular experience. So this drive that we have is one that we share with rats. And that somehow does not surprise me, because things that are very robust should have antecedents in our mammalian cousins. OK. So what we have here is a lot of learning, a big role for experience. And now the question is, if all you have to do is meet another rat of a different type in order to help it or anyone like him, well, what about genetics? Is genetics part of this equation or is it completely irrelevant? Well, in a human population, we can't do that experiment. But this is rats, and we can. So it's really awesome. It's a really awesome experiment to do is one of the most fun experiments that I've ever done. What we did to answer this question was we made rats unfamiliar with their own type. So this is essentially Jungle Book reenactment. We're going to take them, and we're going to do it better. Jungle Book, I think he was a toddler when he went off. But we're going to take them on the day of their birth, and we're going to switch them into a different environment. And we're going to control their lives so that they never see another animal of their own type. And then when they grow up, we're going to ask, will you help other animals of your own type? Yes or no? Will you help other animals such as those you were fostered with? Yes or no? How do we do this? I just had to show this, because the rats are really cute. So we had to get these rats that they gave birth on the same day. Here's a Sprig Dolly mom, her pups. Here's Long Evans mom, her pups. And then here we are doing the little switcheroo. And the moms, the rodent moms are fabulous. They just go right on over that we wear gloves, obviously. But with that caveat, they just go right on over there and they care for them. We could not discern that either the moms or the litter mates cared. So now this albino rat grows up, never seeing another albino rat, only seeing other black cape rats. And when it's an adult, we're going to test it with a black cape rat or with an albino rat. And the black cape rat test is a control. They've lived their entire lives with black cape rat. We totally expect that they're going to help them. And that's indeed what happens. So what you can see is that this is the albino rat. It's been raised in the black cape rat environment, never seen another albino rat in its life. And here is the black cape rat. And now what you'll see is I want to get you free. Yes, lick, lick, and we are good. And now here's an albino rat. This albino rat was fostered in a black cape environment. This is an albino rat directly from the vendor. And here is the reaction. Very interesting wall. Let's explore that wall so they don't help. They do not help. And these are the data. They just don't help. So this is really remarkable. We were excited by this. What it tells you, what I think it confirms for you, is that a person, the rats are people to me, but I'm not supposed to admit that, the rats get their, and I'm going to say identity. But by identity, that's a shortcut. I have no idea what their identity is. But they get their who is worthy of helping. That's what identity is here. So the helping identity is shortcut for who is the rat willing to help. And they get that identity from who they see around them, from the other rats. They do not do a DNA fingerprinting upon themselves. They do not get it from their own DNA. They've got no clue what DNA they have. So they derive their sense of identity from seeing who they have around them. And that makes a lot of sense. It's a much more flexible system, not to mention a much more feasible system. We have a hard time figuring out people's genetic identities, fingerprints. But we use our sensory systems to understand the individuals around us, and so do they. And should something happen to mom, they're flexible. They can go find another mom. And they're not going to say, oh, you foster mom. You don't have the right genes. I am not going to take your milk. So this is just a flexible. It makes way more sense to do it this way for both of those reasons, teleological, though they may be. And I just want to reiterate, because oftentimes this is a confusing point for people, because in today's world, genetics has somehow come to mean biology. And genetics is a great, big, important part of biology. But there's lots more. And in particular, this learning piece, the way that we learn from our experiences, the way that we remember, is dependent on this organ right here, the brain. This is a human brain. This is a Lincoln penny. That's a rat brain. So yeah, there's a size, there's a degree difference. But they're very similar. So rats and humans are using the same basic mammalian plan for a brain to learn the rules of the world. And so what I think is true is that for both rats and for humans, we are very adept. And we tend to learn from the particular to make a generality. It serves us, apparently. And it's a fact of life that we can, once we know the biological truth, we should accept it, whether we like it or not. And so it's not something where politics comes in. It's simply what is the biology of the situation. So now we're going to come with all of that prelude to the ethicist dilemma from a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times. This is, I don't know if you read the ethicist in the New York Times magazine, but it's always highly entertaining. So here was the problem. This is a woman. She's a white woman. She's married to a black man. She cannot have children. They agree to adopt an embryo. The embryo is then implanted in her. She gets pregnant. She has these kids. She learns from the bank that the kids, the embryos, were mixed Hispanic in Caucasian. She's asked, of course, in our society about the kid's race. And she doesn't know, what do I put down? So the question is, do I get to put, when there's no mixed race, so that would be one option, can I put down that these kids are black? And she did. She decided to put down that her kids were black. Was this the right choice? There's a person here in Chicago. And the ethicist's answer, he talks about the one drop rule. He talks about what would happen if they looked black. And then he comes to the, finally, he comes to the question of, well, I'm assuming that the children don't look black. And that's essentially why you're asking me this. And he says, there's no good answer. I certainly can't see any harm in raising them as black, though your kids will look just as black as Walter White. This is the wonderful people in my lab that have done all this work. And I want to end with just encouraging you that everything, even politically fraught questions such as racism, can be viewed through a lens of neurobiology. We don't have to be scared. We can venture in. And I think we can learn something from applying an understanding of neurobiology to even the most toughest questions that our society faces. And for those of you who want more, here I have a blog, thebrainistsocool.com. And for those of you who might be undergraduates, we'll be teaching two colleagues of mine. And I will be teaching neuroscience at the Paris Center. And you, too, can dissect sheep brains under the watchful guidance of Chagall prints. And with that, thank you very much. That's that. That's that. Yeah. Lainey. In the case where you put the albino rat with the long-haired rats, and you gave the albino rat a mirror, would he then view the albino rat in the tube as same or other? So reports, I've never done it, but reports are that rats don't do mirrors. I mean, so rat, different mammalian species are divided into I do mirrors and I don't do mirrors. And the mirror species are mostly primates, not all primates, and elephants. And dogs, OK, dogs. Rats, I can tell you from personal experience, cats, no. I've tried really hard. And rats, apparently not. But here's a different way to look at the same experiment. I've thought about this. So is it that you have to see them? Exposure? Is it exposure? Is that it? And to do that, what I would love to do one day is raise them in a cage that has a barrier, so a mesh barrier, chicken wire. So it's pretty big. They can see each other, maybe even touch each other's noses, but not play together. And is that sufficient? And my hunch is no. My hunch is that they get their feeling about the other from an actual social interaction that involves physicality. But that's complete speculation. We haven't done the experiment. Yeah. Stimulated by your lecture today. Laney's question is really close to mine. So you showed the line and the mirror. And the line actually seemed to be going from the nose to the mirror. And all I can think about is chemosensory signaling and the role of olfaction in all of this. And I would have had the opposite hypothesis that as long as they can smell each other, through that that is the critical interaction. To me, that responding to the rat in the tube is about responding to the chemosensory stress signal that is familiar versus not. And could you do this work, or has anyone done this work, having altered or worked with rats that have no olfactory sense? So this is an experiment that we're not doing it quite that way, but we're doing it this summer. Wendy Tong is an undergraduate. He'll be doing her honors thesis to see whether it's sufficient. The smell is sufficient. We don't know. My hunch is that the rats are going to get all this sensory information from multiple modalities. And the idea that they toss one out is very, that doesn't make any sense. So I think that they're going to get olfactory, auditory, not much visual. They're pretty poor. Their vision's pretty poor. And then there's this tactile information. As you can see from the restrainer, there's lots of holes. And if you watch the rats, you get the sense that they're essentially using taxion as an electric eel would use its electric field. That they can build up this beautifully detailed picture of the world using taxion. So my bet, personally, is that the most important of them is the whiskers. But again, conjecture. Bob. Is there a difference? Well. Yeah, so the sex. So those of you who know me know that I would never say he for she. That when I say he, I mean he. And so these are all he's. We've done almost all this rat with male rats. That was initially historical. And then at this point, I give everyone who comes into the lab the opportunity to choose whether they're going to do females or males. Most of them are still choosing males. There's a little catch up to do on the females. So moving forward, it's a little easier to do it on the males. We have done a bunch of experiments on females. And in general, they're good. They do this. They do it a little bit better. But nothing to get too excited about. Javid. So the question is, do we ever paint the white rat to change, see if the behavior would change? Well, as you can see, we did color them. We color them red and blue. They don't care. They 100% don't care about that. I don't think that. I certainly don't think color is factoring into it. Andrea. So the question is, what about aggression? And we did a bullying experiment. And what we essentially learned from the bullying experiment is the rats don't want to help if they are in what I would call personal distress. So bullying kills helping. It really, really kills helping. If we don't try to stress them, there's no aggression. We don't see any aggression. But we're not monitoring their home cages. And the truth of the matter is that two rats that live together, do they like each other? I have no clue. I'm not sure that like is the right word. Is it that they're familiar with each other? That seems to me a little bit more likely than actual like. But we don't know that. It's a little bit hard to do. That was sort of the intention of the bullying experiment. But let's say you make a rat really scared. What are rats do when they're scared? They don't do anything. So that doesn't tell us that it's anything specific about helping. It just means that they're really scared. So we need them to be able to act. Yeah. Yeah, Lisa. Oh, how do you make sure that the rat's not opening just because they like opening it? So I mean, you have one rat who's just really good at it and keeps liking to do it. And so how do you filter that out? Yeah, I call that mastery. And I was really worried about mastery. Because I did it. I made a physical effect on the world. That's a big deal. I feel good about myself. And so how do we know? Number one, they don't do it for an empty restrainer. Number two, they don't do it for a restrainer that contains a toy rat. And the third one is unpublished. But we also know that they don't open for a rat that's chill. So if we give a trapped rat a valium-like drug, it's like, what's the problem? They don't open. So no rat wants to be in the restrainer, except for if I pharmacologically treat them. And how do I know that? That is if we reverse the door. So now only the trapped rat can open the door. The free rat can't. What happens? Trapped rat opens the door right quick on the first day. Boom, gone. They don't want to be in there. And that's a legitimate question, whether they do, despite hundreds of papers on restraint stress, it's still a question, do our rats, maybe our rats like to be in the restrainer. The fact of the matter is they don't. They all want to get out. Yeah. Good afternoon. My question kind of piggybacks off the question that you just had over here. I've seen a documentary with Killer Whales. And it's like a reward program. So basically, they're disciplined when they don't do the tricks. They don't get the fish or whatever. And then they find out that kind of towards the bullying perspective that when they're left alone, they'll attack the whales that didn't follow the tricks that or whatever. My question is, did you try a reward system with the mice, like mice and cheese? If they did certain things, they got a piece of cheese and if they didn't? Well, there is a reward or else the rat wouldn't do it. The rat would do it on the first time. The first time is presumably an accident, an accidents of opportunity, opportunity born of concern, but nonetheless an accident. But then why do it again? Why go into that scary center of the arena on the next day? And the answer is because there's a reward, but the reward is internal. We don't provide it for them. They are getting what we think they are getting, the warm glow of helping. Now, as it turns out in children, if you instead of allowing a child to get that warm glow of helping, you say, pay them. I'll give you a quarter every time you do something nice to your sister. When they fast forward a year, they are less likely to help. And that is a very intriguing result, which suggests that if you externalize the reward, you've just undone all the power of the brain. The power of the brain is to have this internal reward from helping out another individual. Yeah? Maybe it's a little bit close, but maybe the reward is they're empathically in distress. So when the trapped rat relaxes, they relax. Absolutely. Or maybe when they enter the restraint and they touch noses, they get some positive reinforcement from the formerly trapped rat, which would be kind of external. Well, I think that there's no question that the effect of the trapped rat and the effect of the free rat are yoked. That's not a mistake. That's the easiest way to design the system. And that's how it evolved. It evolved to say, your pain is my pain. Therefore, if I can resolve your pain, if I can resolve my pain, I resolve your pain. And that's, I mean, I think that's what fuels it. I think that's what fuels it. But does that make it any less, I guess there's the idea that that makes it less altruistic. And the fact of the matter is there is no altruism, not in a biological sense. There's no helping without cost, and there is no helping without reward. These are biological impossibilities, whether the cost is a few million ATP molecules or, and the reward is a few jolts of something, some neurotransmitter and a specific part of the brain. There has to be both a cost and a reward to every action, including helping. Courtney? So speaking of costs, I understand that going into the middle of the arena is a bit aversive for these guys. But have you ever placed any other aversive stimuli between the rats? No, but I have all the equipment and all the desire to control the temperature of the floor as they approach. And so in that way, it's possible to ask in degrees centigrade, what's the value of helping another individual? Well, we can use a fox urine. But again, when you stress them out too much, they're going to freeze. And it's a very uninteresting experiment to watch rats not move. It's not going to tell us anything. So we have to get them to a place where they're willing to play our game. Yeah. Peggy, the question for your lecture was racism. Is it biological? Mark, I can't believe it, man. I thought I was going to escape without saying. So what's the answer? Have the implications. The answer in my mind is everything in this world is biological. And remember that biology is much, much more, much, much more than genetics. So is racism, is human behavior, is the stock market, is the housing crash, is it all biological? Yeah, it's all biological. I'm not a dualist. So in that sense. But that's a cop out, and I readily admit it. I know you work probably exclusively in a world of rats, but you no doubt look and read and think about worlds beyond that. So I'm wondering, there's almost a real world experiment that could have been done and maybe has been done. In the 60s when busing started, the idea was in part to give equal opportunity to good education, but also in part to make people more familiar with one another, black and white people. And so I wonder if anybody has ever done some experiments looking at kids. Oh, tell me about them. I haven't done an experiment. So much do experiments as you do assessments. And so indeed, children that have grown up in a more diverse or have gone, I'm sorry, children that have gone to school in a more diverse environment are far more tolerant of different types of people. That has not been done. That's the kind of thing where we could do it in a heartbeat in rats. We could raise rats in a little menagerie of different types of rats, and then say, now this type of rat is meaningless to you, but you can't do that in humans. So you were talking about how and when a rat would attempt to save the other rat, it would be stressed out before it would act to attempt to save that rat. I was wondering in the instance in which it chooses not to act, and you showed a picture of it, or the video of it touching the walls of its enclosure, whether or not you were monitoring the relative stress of that rat, and if it's simply that it was feeling no stress or that it was not enough stress to act? Right. So not in that particular situation, but in the situation where a normal rat, say, doesn't help its cage mate. About 25% of them don't help. And there are two possibilities. Number one is they don't care. They're essentially rat psychopaths. And number two is that they care too much, and they're completely overwhelmed by their caring, which is very much in line with what you would expect if you look at the human literature. And we have this. Should go be submitted for publication this week that, in fact, it's the latter. They have a larger Korkasteran response to the first observation of a trapped rat than a rat who eventually helps. What's that? It's that they know it's HPA reactivity. And in general, with humans, the more overwhelmed and full of affect that a person is, the less apt they are to have an other-oriented motivation. And helping is quintessentially, obviously, other-oriented. Thanks, everyone.