Hardwired

TED Radio Hour

NPR

Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Science, Technology

4.4 • 21.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2019

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Original broadcast date: August 25, 2017. How much of who we are is biology? How much is learned? And how much can we change? This hour, TED speakers on how genes and experience collaborate — and compete — to make us who we are. TED speakers include neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, epigeneticist Moshe Szyf, pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris, and psychologist Brian Little.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Guy here. So, have you ever wondered the kinds of things that influence our behaviors,
0:05.6	or even determine our personalities? Are they genetic? Are they learned? Well, on the show today,
0:11.5	we're exploring how our genes and experiences shape who we are. This episode is called HardWired,
0:17.9	and it originally aired in August of 2017. This is the Ted Radio Hour.
0:26.6	Each week, groundbreaking Ted Talks. Ted. Ted. Technology. Entertainment. Design. Design.
0:34.0	Is that really what's 10 for just a minute? I've never known the delivered at Ted conferences around
0:38.4	the world. It's the gift of the human imagination. We've had to believe in impossible things.
0:42.9	The true nature of reality beckons from just beyond. Those talks, those ideas, adapted for radio,
0:51.2	from NPR. I'm Guy Ross. So, most of us think we know ourselves pretty well, right? I'm sort of a
1:03.2	hippie pacifist in terms of general persona. That were good people. I'm an egg-headie scientist with
1:12.1	a large beard and, like, burkin stalks. Who make good choices? Give an error of equilibrium as much
1:19.3	as possible. But do we really know who we are and why we act in certain ways? And do we have any
1:27.4	control over that anyway? Um, nah. This is Robert Sapolsky. He's a professor of neuroscience at Stanford
1:37.5	University. We have very different potentials and sort of tendencies for behavior lurking in us,
1:46.4	and I think some of the most sort of surprising, shocking, appalling, wonderful cases of sort of
1:56.3	human behavior is when one side of it suddenly comes out from a person who never overexpected that.
2:04.5	At one extreme, you got the person who suddenly runs into the burning building.
2:10.2	People running into the fire to save a trapped man. While everyone else is sort of being headless
2:17.4	chicken, it's not knowing what to do. Wow, I never knew I had that in me. Oh, thank God.
2:26.0	I'm at the other extreme. You have people ranging from, like, the Abu Ghraib scandal.
2:32.3	By pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers. To, like, the famed Stanford prison experiment.
2:40.3	We're people turn out to do things never in their darkest moments with they've imagined they were capable of.
	...

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