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I'm Alan Olava, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

A huge percentage of people are capable of shocking themselves at how crummy their behavior can be in the right unright circumstance, and how heroically compassionate they could turn out to be in circumstances where they may not have expected it.

This capacity for extremes of pro-social and anti-social behaviors is just without precedent in the animal kingdom.

Robert Sapolsky spent eight to ten hours a day every summer for 25 years on the plains of Africa in the company of baboons, and he came away from that experience with an amazing understanding of humans.

It's always a joy to talk with Robert Sapolsky, and I've had that pleasure a couple of times on the television series Scientific American Frontiers.

It's always very happy when he agreed to chat again on Clear and Vivid.

We spoke via a video link between our Manhattan studio and Stanford University, where Robert is a popular professor.

I'm so glad to be talking with you because you have studied your whole life, things that interest me immensely and deeply, and I'm spending this part of my life working on these things like communication.

One of the most interesting examples of communication that is part of your life, I think, is when you're in the museum and you saw African dioramas.

And the communication of the diorama, which I always thought was kind of sad and still and looked like a taxidermy shop, you wanted to live in the dioramas. Is that true?

Well, that shows you how sad and taxidermed Brooklyn was at the time.

Being a kid, yes.

I don't know, I guess I didn't see the spider webs and stuff on this Karl Ackley.

Karl Ackley was the explorer who was responsible for most of the taxidermed things in the African Hall of Museum and Natural History.

Yeah, they do look a little bit on the antique side.

Somehow it excited your imagination and you kind of devoted your life from that moment on.

How old were you when you got fascinated with those animals?

I think I was about eight when I decided I wanted to be a primatologist. It was sort of a natural transition from the, you know, how many T-rexes would it take to take down a Brontosaurus kind of stage of childhood obsession.

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