Ep62 "Is it possible to rehumanize the enemy?"

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

iHeartPodcasts

Mental Health, Science, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Education

4.6 • 524 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

The brain easily forms ingroups and outgroups – and shows different responses when viewing one or the other. At the extreme, the brain stops seeing outgroup members as people, but more like objects. But are there ways to rehumanize? And in this context, what do heroes look like? In this episode, Eagleman talks with two men -- Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah -- one Israeli and one Palestinian. The two men, full of pain and sorrow, are fighting. But they are fighting side by side. They are fighting to repair the future. Learn what peacebuilders are, how they function, and what this has to do with the neuroscience of dehumanization, ingroups, outgroups, and the possibilities -- both political and neural -- for rehumanization.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why does the brain so easily form in groups and therefore outgroups?
0:10.9	And what differences do we see in the brain's circuitry when it thinks about the members of one group or the other?
0:17.7	Does dehumanization have a basis in the brain? And are there any ways to
0:23.7	rehumanize? And in this context of human behavior, what do heroes look like?
0:32.7	Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author.
0:38.3	And in these episodes, we launch from the brain to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about conflict and in groups and out groups and dehumanization.
1:03.4	And I want to take this on in a very human way by talking with two people who I have come to admire greatly
1:10.4	because they are living deep in the
1:13.2	middle of terrible conflict and they find themselves on opposite sides, but they're striving to do
1:20.2	something rare. And we're going to meet them in just a moment. But first I want to set the context.
1:27.0	The difficulty that we always see with human
1:30.0	societies is that we are all strapped to our most basic neural drives like anger and fear
1:37.1	and suspicion and an appetite for revenge. And the question that I want to wrestle with today
1:43.2	is whether there's a pathway to rising
1:46.8	above that. Is there a higher level of rationality by which we could operate? Are there roads to get
1:55.3	ourselves out of the networks in our brains that care only about short-term thinking and somehow allow the long-term thinking networks in our brains that care only about short-term thinking and somehow allow the long-term
2:03.1	thinking networks in our brains to gain a foothold. Because I suspect that humans getting better
2:10.2	at this is probably our only meaningful solution to all the conflicts that constantly convulse our world. Now, if you've been listening
2:21.5	to this podcast for a while, you know that I speak often about in-groups and out-groups.
2:27.1	Specifically, brains seem to be highly predisposed to form these. We attach to particular groups, whether by accident of birth or by
2:38.3	political momentum, or just from the preferences of our circle of friends or mentors or neighbors
2:45.7	or parents or whatever. Now, neuroscience works to understand how individual brains work, but what we summarize
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