Full transcript
0:00[MUSIC PLAYING]
0:04Stanford University.
0:09This is BIO 150, isn't it?
0:12OK, just wanted to make sure.
0:15So we start off with a scenario.
0:1840-year-old guy-- quiet, suburban life.
0:22Married 15 years, two kids, 3.5 dogs.
0:27Everything's standard.
0:28Everything's going wonderfully.
0:29And one day out of nowhere, he punches somebody
0:33in the face at work.
0:35Totally bizarre, out of character.
0:37The guy is standing there by the water cooler
0:40and makes some comment on some baseball team,
0:42takes exception to it, punches him in the face.
0:45Utterly strange.
0:47Things are quiet.
0:49Three months later, his wife of 15 years happy marriage
0:52discovers he's having an affair with a 16-year-old checkout
0:55kid down at the Safeway.
0:57Really weird.
0:58Then three months after that, he absconds
1:02with all the money at work, embezzles it, disappears,
1:04and is never seen again.
1:06Three possibilities.
1:08First one-- this guy is a truly deep creep.
1:12Second, he is having the most immature midlife
1:15crisis you could ever imagine.
1:17Third possibility-- he has a mutation
1:20in one gene in his head.
1:22And what we will be seeing is this
1:24is exactly the profile that you get
1:26in a certain neurological disease
1:29where it's one gene that's out of whack.
1:31First demonstration of that.
1:33OK, just to get a sense of who's here,
1:36how many of you think there is a genetic influence
1:40on sexual orientation?
1:43OK, how many think it is possible for prenatal events
1:47to influence your political opinions 30 years later?
1:53OK, how many think that there is a valid way of using biology
1:58to understand who's religious and who isn't?
2:02Not quite as many hands there.
2:04OK, as long as we're in that terrain,
2:06how many people believe in God?
2:09How many people believe in souls?
2:12How many people believe in evil?
2:19How many people believe in free will?
2:24That's going to change.
2:25[LAUGHTER]
2:28Oh, I might as well ask.
2:29Is there anybody in this room who actually
2:31does believe in evolution?
2:35Just wanted to make sure.
2:36See what we're dealing with here.
2:38OK, how many think that there is a genetic influence
2:41and that there is a basic biological difference, sex
2:45difference, in levels of aggression?
2:49How many think there's biological basis of sex
2:51differences in intelligence?
2:55OK, who thinks it's all explained by nature?
3:00Who thinks it's all explained by nurture?
3:02Who thinks there's a magnificent, fascinating,
3:06nuanced interaction between nature and nurture?
3:08[LAUGHTER]
3:09Yay.
3:10OK, well everybody's going to get an A+ then.
3:14You already have the course under control.
3:17So we start off trying to find something in common.
3:22Look at these four events here-- or not,
3:27in terms of being scraped out there.
3:28But these are four circumstances that have
3:30something surprising in common.
3:33Having your period.
3:35Having a brain tumor.
3:38Eating a lot of junk food.
3:40Taking anabolic steroids.
3:42Those of you who are not oriented
3:43to with, that's the ones that build up your muscles
3:45like testosterone derivatives.
3:47OK, these all have something in common-- having your period,
3:51having a brain tumor, eating a lot of junk food,
3:53and taking a lot of anabolic steroids.
3:56Anybody want to fathom a guess what's the commonality
3:59amongst the four of them?
4:01Yeah.
4:02Hormones?
4:03Hormones.
4:04Good.
4:04OK, we're off and running with hormones.
4:07Good.
4:07Even more specific than that.
4:10Something they all have in common.
4:13Oh, come on, somebody want to guess?
4:17I see these brief movements of hands
4:19there as people change their mind.
4:22OK, it all has to do with hormones.
4:25They all have hormones in common,
4:26I say, trying to facilitate somebody making the next guess.
4:29Oh, come on.
4:30They all have something.
4:32OK, we gotta get outta here at some point.
4:34These all have four things in common.
4:36All of these have been used successfully in courts of law
4:40to explain the behavior of a murderer.
4:44[LAUGHTER]
4:47In the first case, a number of cases
4:52where the fact that a woman was having
4:55her period at the time of killing someone
4:57was part of what a jury said led them to exonerate the person.
5:01A literature showing that a disproportionate share
5:04of female aggression comes around the time of menses.
5:08Next one-- there is an area of the brain you will know so much
5:12about over the next three months called the amygdala
5:15that has something to do with aggression
5:18and has something to do with fear.
5:20And you get a brain tumor there, and in a number of cases,
5:23you get someone who is uncontrollably violent.
5:26And this has also been used successfully in a court of law.
5:30Junk food-- any of you who are San Francisco history buffs
5:34will know 20 years ago, 30 years ago
5:37that Dan White, a disappointed office seeker,
5:41assassinated the mayor of San Francisco along with Harvey
5:44Milk.
5:44And as part of his remarkably successful defense
5:48for a double murderer that led to a remarkably short jail
5:51sentence, was the famed Twinkie defense.
5:54The argument that his addiction to junk food
5:58caused wild fluctuations in his blood sugar levels,
6:01which caused him to do that.
6:03Finally, anabolic steroids.
6:06Any number of cases of people having uncontrolled violence
6:09arguing because they were weight lifters and a wildly
6:12abusive range of taking this stuff
6:14had something to do with violence.
6:16Put all four of these together, and we
6:18get the first of the two points of this entire course.
6:22Which is, sometimes the stuff that's going on in your body
6:26can dramatically influence what goes on in your brain.
6:30Second critical point-- tonight, when you've settled back down,
6:34and you're ready to go to sleep, and you're nice and relaxed,
6:37and your heart's beating nice and slow,
6:39think the following thought.
6:40You know, that heart isn't going to beat forever.
6:45Think about your lips turning blue after.
6:49Think about the blood flow slowing down.
6:51Think about your feet and your toes getting cold.
6:54And at that point, you will probably
6:56be increasing the rate at which that heart beats.
6:59And you will have just seen the second key thing
7:01in this course, which is sometimes
7:04what's going on in your head will
7:06affect every single outpost in your body.
7:09And what this course is about is the intertwining,
7:12the interconnections between your physiology
7:15and your behavior-- the underlying emotions,
7:18thoughts, memories, all of that, and the capacity of each
7:22to deeply influence the other under all sorts
7:25of circumstances.
7:27Now, what we're going to be doing with this
7:28is trying to understand this under fairly
7:31difficult circumstances.
7:32If everybody here was here because they really
7:36wanted to understand why all the wildebeest on earth
7:39mate in the same week each year, we'd
7:42have a fighting chance of figuring that one out.
7:44But that's not what we want to understand.
7:46We don't want to understand why birds
7:48migrate and don't get lost.
7:50We want to understand human behavior.
7:53Worse than that, harder than that, human social behavior.
7:57And hardest of all in some cases, some grossly abnormal
8:00human behavior.
8:02And if you're going to try to do that, there
8:04is a problem which is, officially, it's complicated.
8:08It is a huge, messy process trying
8:10to make sense of the biology of human social behavior.
8:14And just as all sorts of realms when
8:17one deals with messy, complicated problems
8:20that you need to think about in some wildly interacting way,
8:23we all have a strategy that we come up with.
8:27A strategy to make things easier-- which
8:30is that we think in categories.
8:33We think in categories.
8:34We take things that are continua,
8:36and we break them into categories.
8:38And we label those categories.
8:41And we do that in various settings
8:43because it could be extremely useful.
8:46For example, somebody give me an estimate on how long
8:51this line is.
8:52[INAUDIBLE]
8:55A foot.
8:56OK, people who said a foot, what is it that
8:59went through your head to figure it out?
9:02You imagined how long a ruler is.
9:05Is this 11.5 inches because and it's 11 inches-- an 8.5 by 11.
9:11But everybody in here has this category in their head things
9:15that are kind of the same length as a ruler.
9:19A continua of lengths, and there's a category for that.
9:22Suppose I'm telling you I have some friend who's a runner.
9:25He runs the mile.
9:26He's incredibly fast.
9:28In fact, he's one of the best runners
9:29in the country at this point.
9:31How fast does he have to have run the mile or better for you
9:34to be deeply impressed?
9:36Under four minutes.
9:38And thus, we have another categorical boundary
9:40there of there's an infinite variety of speeds
9:44with which you can run a mile.
9:45Yet we have in our heads this boundary-- people
9:48who are under four minute milers,
9:51you are very impressed with.
9:53OK, now I want to impress you with another friend of mine
9:56who's a painter.
9:57And this person is such a great painter
9:59that they paint with 11 different colors.
10:03That doesn't work because that's not a category that we have.
10:06We don't classify the quality-- hopefully
10:09not-- we don't classify quality of paintings along those lines.
10:14But we begin to see here is in the right areas,
10:17we have categories that we impose on things
10:21that are not categorical.
10:23Here's an example.
10:24Why should you do this?
10:26Where'd the example go?
10:27Here's one of the classic continua
10:29that we ever deal with, which is the continua of color--
10:32the varying wavelengths that take the rainbow from violet
10:36to red.
10:36And there's an infinite number of spaces in between.
10:39And what do we do?
10:40We have rules in English that you can divide the continua
10:44here and here, or whatever, and that's what you call a color.
10:49This is red.
10:50Everything from here is red.
10:52Everything here is orange, so on.
10:54You take a continua, and you break it into boundaries.
10:57Why do we do that?
10:59Because it makes it easier to store the information away.
11:03Instead of remembering the absolute features of something,
11:06you simply say, it's a.
11:08It's a sub-four minute miler.
11:10It's a line that's about the length of a ruler.
11:14It's the color orange.
11:16How do you know that's the case?
11:18Because go and take people from other language groups,
11:20where their language arbitrarily divides the rainbow
11:24at other points with completely different color terms,
11:27and they remember different profiles of colors differently
11:31than an English speaker might.
11:33Take a color.
11:34And if the color comes right in the center of somebody's color
11:40characterization, if it comes right
11:42in the middle of the range of what counts as that color,
11:45people remember whether they saw that color or not far better
11:49than if you show them a color at the boundary.
11:52And people will show that as a function of what language
11:55they speak.
11:56Taking a continua, and you break it into pieces,
11:59because it's easier to deal with the facts.
12:01Another example of it.
12:02Here we have four objects.
12:05And as drawn here, simply because we have categories
12:09to describe the first three, do one
12:11of those tests of show people a bunch of shapes,
12:14and they come back an hour later and ask them,
12:15Have you seen this shape before?
12:17And people are going to be far more accurate with this
12:20than whether they saw this or not because we
12:23don't have a word for it.
12:24We don't have a word that's at all sort of analytical
12:27that some squiggly whatever.
12:29We don't have a clear cut category.
12:31Thinking in categories makes it easier
12:34for us to remember stuff.
12:36And it makes it easier for us to evaluate stuff.
12:38So that's a classic sort of response
12:41that we have cognitively to complicated things.
12:44But there's a bunch of problems with categorical thinking.
12:48First example-- and first one you
12:51can see from a realm of language differences--
12:54in that not only is there a continua of infinite number
12:57of wavelengths, there is a continua of sounds
13:00that humans can make.
13:02And different languages draw boundaries at different points
13:05as to what count as similar sounds or different sounds.
13:09There's like two different T-H sounds in English,
13:12which apparently we're not very good at hearing.
13:15But there's other ones we are.
13:16And that will affect your ability
13:18to remember stuff-- what word it was-- depending on
13:22whether it is on a dramatically different boundary, whether it
13:25is a sound that sounds different to you or not.
13:27Example of this-- apparently in Finnish, people
13:32do not differentiate between the sound of a B
13:35and the sound of a P, whereas we have no trouble with that.
13:38But people from Finland do not make that differentiation.
13:41And I discovered this one day a number of years
13:43ago where, for reasons I don't even understand,
13:46I found myself needing to take to testicular biopsies
13:49on baboons.
13:52Not having sort of learned that in junior high how you do that,
13:55I called up this guy at urology the med school
13:57who happened to be Finnish.
13:59And I explained to him what I wanted to do.
14:01And he sort of took me through the paces
14:03and told me what thingy I needed to buy, and that sort of stuff,
14:07and holiday packages of those where you can get a dozen.
14:10And sort of telling me how to do that.
14:12And once we went through he said, What I want you to do,
14:15the thing to do at this point, is get some practice.
14:18I want you to practice on a bear.
14:21[LAUGHTER]
14:22And I said, What?
14:24He said, Yeah.
14:25Practice on a bear.
14:27And I said, Are you kidding me?
14:29He said, I know.
14:30I know it sounds crazy, but we have all the residents do that.
14:33It's a very good learning device.
14:36Either practice on a bear or an apple.
14:40Oh.
14:41Oh.
14:42Here we see the dangers of making mistakes
14:45about differences between B and P under certain circumstances.
14:50So we see one of the dangers there,
14:52which is when you are paying too much attention to categories,
14:56you can't differentiate two facts that
14:59fall within the same category.
15:01Next example.
15:02I remember back at various points of anxiety during exams,
15:06and such back when where there was
15:08a world of difference between getting a 65 on a test and a 66
15:13on a test.
15:14Not particularly different.
15:15But because there is this boundary drawn there
15:18between passing and failing, there is this dramatic
15:21differentiating we make.
15:23When you put up boundaries, you have
15:24trouble seeing how similar things are
15:27on either side of it.
15:29Next example, one additional problem
15:32that you get when you think categorically.
15:34And for this, everybody needs to turn
15:36over one of the pieces of paper--
15:37the paper you're going to hand in, the questionnaire.
15:40And what I'm going to do is read you a series of phone numbers,
15:44and I want you to write them down as accurately as possible.
15:50OK, ready?
15:52243-2649, 650-3260, 256-5779, 832-2449, 291-3171, 231-4026,
16:08593-2449, 743-8840, 831-5287.
16:18OK.
16:19Now what that exercise is-- and no,
16:22that doesn't count towards the grade.
16:24What that will show, I'm sure, when
16:27in some obsessive burst of procrastination
16:29I actually look through the answers
16:31tonight, what it's going to show is the accuracy
16:34is going to tank the second you go from the phone number
16:37pattern of three digits followed by four, break up that pattern.
16:42And suddenly we all get screwed up because we're saying,
16:44Wait a second.
16:45I thought it was a phone number.
16:46That was one digit.
16:47Now two digits.
16:48I can't.
16:49And it's gone, and you're on to the next one.
16:51And what we see there is the third example, which
16:54is when you pay too much attention to boundaries,
16:57you don't see the big picture.
17:00All you see are categories.
17:02All you see are, Wait a second, phone numbers
17:05are supposed to come with three digits followed by four.
17:08Another example where we use categorical thinking.
17:11OK, I'm putting up a number series here.
17:20OK.
17:21What's-- oh, my god.
17:26OK, what's the next number in this series?
17:31And why?
17:31[INAUDIBLE]
17:3442.
17:35How come?
17:36[INAUDIBLE]
17:42OK, so we're kind of oscillating all over the place there.
17:47OK, so that's as valid as anybody else's.
17:51Who else has a next number in line there?
17:53[INAUDIBLE]
17:54What's that?
17:54[INAUDIBLE]
17:5545.
17:56How come?
17:56[INAUDIBLE]
18:03OK.
18:03Are you going to take that?
18:0645.
18:07That's very-- OK.
18:08What else?
18:08Let me make it a little bit easier here.
18:17OK.
18:18So what's the next number in that series?
18:20And what I'm telling you is if you think
18:23about the world with a certain set of categories in your head,
18:27you will know the next number in the sequence.
18:29So what's the next one?
18:30[INAUDIBLE]
18:32Seven billion.
18:33[INAUDIBLE]
18:37OK.
18:38That one.
18:40OK.
18:41Seven billion.
18:42That's another possibility.
18:44Although presumably, it would be seven billionth.
18:47Anything else?
18:48Any other guesses here as to what happens next?
18:514th, 14th, 23rd, 34th.
18:54What's the next one in the sequence yes?
18:56[INAUDIBLE]
18:5744.
18:57How come?
18:58[INAUDIBLE]
19:11OK.
19:12But remember, it's got to be 44th.
19:15What's that?
19:16Ordinal?
19:16Cardinal?
19:17Whatever it is.
19:17What?
19:1842nd.
19:19How come?
19:20The subway?
19:21You were right.
19:22You were right.
19:23Anybody who is a New Yorker will know what the next one is.
19:29These are the subway stops.
19:31And you get a bagel with cream cheese.
19:33[APPLAUSE]
19:43So you get New Yorkers, and while everybody else
19:46is thinking logical things like 43, and 41, and 45,
19:50and seven billion, and all of that,
19:52you've got this whole world of dividing numbers by.
19:55Subway stops.
19:56We think in categories.
19:58We think in categories.
19:59But as you just saw, there are these problems.
20:02First one being, when you think in categories,
20:05you underestimate how different two facts are when
20:08they fall in the same category.
20:10When you think in categories, you
20:12overestimate how different they are
20:15when there happens to be a boundary in between them.
20:18And when you pay attention to categorical boundaries,
20:20you don't see big pictures.
20:22Now, what our goal in this class is going to be is
20:25think about this big, complex issue
20:28of the biology of behavior without falling
20:30into thinking in categories.
20:32What do I mean in this regard?
20:34Thinking categorically about a subject like this?
20:36There's some chicken.
20:39And the chicken is standing somewhere.
20:41And there's some rooster over there
20:43that does some sexually solicitive, exciting thing
20:47for the female.
20:48And in response to that, the female
20:50picks up and goes running over to the rooster.
20:53And thus, we have our first behavioral biology question
20:56here.
20:56Why did that chicken cross the road?
20:58To get to that rooster.
21:00So you could answer that like an endocrinologist
21:03and say, Well the female had certain levels of estrogen
21:05in her bloodstream, which made this key hypothalic areas
21:08responsive to the stimulus.
21:10Or you could answer it like an anatomist,
21:12saying, Well, because the fulcrum of her pelvis
21:15or whatever it is chickens have that allow them to run.
21:18Or you could answer it in the category
21:20of an evolutionary biologist.
21:22That over the millennia, chickens
21:24that didn't respond to sexually solicitive gesture from males
21:27left fewer copies of their genes.
21:29And there's all these different categories
21:31that we can use to explain what's going on.
21:34All of these different buckets.
21:37All of these different buckets which
21:38begin to pull you towards all of the problems we just saw.
21:43Now, having trouble telling how different or similar two facts
21:46are.
21:47Having trouble seeing big pictures.
21:49Over emphasizing the importance of the bucket
21:52you happen to live inside of.
21:54And thus, suddenly everything about this behavior
21:57is explained by a gene, a neurotransmitter, a childhood
22:02trauma, a living inside one bucket.
22:05Whet we are going to be doing over and over in here
22:08as the main point of the course is looking at how what goes on
22:11in your body influences behavior, emotions, memories.
22:14How what goes on there influences your body,
22:16looping over.
22:17And at every one of those points,
22:19resisting the pull to think categorically.
22:22Oh, this is the explanation for where this behavior came from.
22:27Here's what we're going to be doing instead
22:29throughout in terms of the structure of the class
22:31when we get to actual behaviors.
22:33For each behavioral category, we will start off
22:37by looking at what the behavior looks like.
22:39Because often, that takes a lot more objectivity
22:42than we initially assume.
22:44What does the behavior look like?
22:46Then we will say, Well, what went on in that organism
22:49a half second before that behavior occurred
22:53to cause it to occur?
22:54Which is the world of what's going on with neurons.
22:57What's going on with circuitry.
22:59Where's the explanation for the behavior.
23:02Aha.
23:02This behavior happened because this part of the brain
23:06got activated.
23:07But just as we're about to settle in happily
23:09into that bucket, we push back a bit
23:11and say, Well, what smell, what sound,
23:15what sensory stimulation in the environment
23:18caused those neurons to get activated
23:20and produce that behavior?
23:22And then pushing one step further behind.
23:24OK, well, what do hormone levels, various hormones
23:28in the bloodstream of that animal or individual
23:30for the past few hours, how do those hormones
23:33change how sensitive you are to those sounds, smells,
23:37et cetera, that cause those neurons
23:39to get activated and produce the behavior?
23:41And all we're going to be doing is working our way back,
23:44all the way through early development, fetal life,
23:47the genetic makeup up of an individual, the genetic makeup
23:50up entire populations, species, the evolutionary pressure
23:54on, all the way back to there.
23:56How do you explain each one of these behaviors
23:59in the context of those outposts?
24:01And how are they not really outposts?
24:04All they are, are different ways of expressing
24:07the same biological influences.
24:09If you say, Ooh, here's a hormone
24:12that explains this behavior.
24:13This behavior is caused by Hormone X. Hormone
24:17X is coded for by a gene.
24:19So suddenly you're not just talking about endocrinology.
24:22You're talking about genetics.
24:23And if there's a gene there, it has
24:25been the subject to selection.
24:27So suddenly you're talking about evolution.
24:29If you were talking about what smells, sights, et cetera,
24:33are the acute triggers for a behavior,
24:35by definition you're also talking
24:37about fetal development that determined
24:39how sensitive those systems were to those sorts of stimuli.
24:43What we're going to be having over and over again is
24:46any one of these buckets that we spend some time in,
24:50all we're going to do is think of that bucket is at that point
24:54the most convenient way of describing
24:57all of the influences that came beforehand.
25:00And in that regard, there's no buckets.
25:03All they are, are temporary platforms.
25:05And each platform is simply the easiest, most convenient way
25:10of describing the outcome of everything that came beforehand
25:14starting with millennia back in evolution.
25:18OK.
25:18So that sounds great.
25:20That's what we're going to do.
25:21We're going to do this.
25:22And we're going to be very sophisticated and fancy
25:25in our thinking about it.
25:26And we're not going to fall for categorical thinking.
25:29OK, this is a complicated subject, and we're smart.
25:32So we're going to try to think about it smartly.
25:34That's great.
25:35But like maybe this is just an irritating song and dance here
25:39of, Ooh, we're not going to fall for categorical thinking
25:42like people out there.
25:43Obviously when people are thinking
25:45about stuff like behavior, and they do this professionally,
25:48professional biologists, yes, and they understand also.
25:53This is just the strawman.
25:55Ooh, we're going to be more sophisticated in our thinking
25:57than endocrinologists, and geneticists, and all of those.
26:01They obviously know that these things interact,
26:04and there's not just one explanation.
26:06And it's just the area they focus on.
26:08They understand that.
26:09Let me read you a few quotes to show
26:12just how much some of these folks don't understand that.
26:17First quote.
26:19"Give me a child at birth from any background,
26:22and let me control the total environment in which he
26:25is raised, and I will turn him into anything
26:27I wish him to be-- whether doctor, lawyer,
26:30or beggar, or thief."
26:32This was John Watson, 1912, one of the founding fathers
26:36of the school of psychology called behaviorism.
26:40Behaviorism-- that sort of reached its apogee
26:42with this guy BF Skinner in the 1950s.
26:45This notion that if you could control
26:47the rewards, the punishments, the positive,
26:49the negative reinforcements, you could turn anybody
26:52into anything you want, whether doctor, lawyer, beggar,
26:55or thief.
26:56And we know that isn't the case.
26:59We know that's not possible.
27:01We know that.
27:02All you have to do is throw in one other factor
27:05and like a lot of protein malnutrition during fetal life,
27:08and you're not going to be able to do that.
27:11That being a crude example of just how wrong this guy was.
27:14You cannot have all the control over the environment and turn
27:18somebody into whatever you want.
27:20Here's a guy living pathologically in this bucket
27:24that behavior could be explained solely by understanding reward
27:27and punishment.
27:29Interesting factoid-- this John Watson guy.
27:31Shortly after that, he was driven out
27:33of academia for a wild scandal that he was involved in.
27:37And he spent the rest of his career
27:39apparently as an extremely successful advertising
27:42executive.
27:43Going to show you something-- he may not
27:44have been able to turn people into anything
27:46he wanted, but apparently he could
27:47make them buy all sorts of geegaw nonsense.
27:50OK, next quote.
27:52"Normal psychic life depends upon the good functioning
27:56of brain synapses."
27:58If you don't know what synapses are, don't panic at this point.
28:01They're ways brain cells connect with each other.
28:04OK. "Normal psychic life depends on the good functioning
28:06of brain synapses, and mental disorders
28:09appear as a result of the synaptic derangements.
28:12Synaptic adjustments will then modify the corresponding ideas
28:17and force them into different channels.
28:19Using this approach, we obtained cures and improvements
28:22but no failures."
28:25Synaptic adjustments.
28:27What do you suppose those little old synaptic adjustments are
28:31that this guy is referring to?
28:32Any guesses?
28:33[INAUDIBLE]
28:36Somebody shout it out.
28:37[INAUDIBLE]
28:38Electroshock therapy.
28:40Electroshock therapy-- you know, a little synaptic.
28:43You wish it were as gentle as electroshock therapy.
28:47This is even more dramatic synaptic adjustments.
28:50Any other guesses?
28:51[INAUDIBLE]
28:52Yeah, frontal lobotomies.
28:54You want to adjust somebody's synapses,
28:57so you slice off the front third of their brain or so.
29:01This was Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist who
29:05invented frontal lobotomies.
29:07It had a different name at the time.
29:08But was the person who started this,
29:10and something that was done to tens and hundreds of thousands
29:14of people who had absolutely nothing wrong with them.
29:18One of the darkest chapters of where psychiatry
29:21gets in bed with ideology.
29:23Massive criminal destruction of people's brains.
29:27This is what he had to say about the procedure on his acceptance
29:31of his Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine
29:33for having invented it.
29:35So here we have somebody pathologically
29:37living in a world of understand how synapses are working,
29:42adjust them.
29:43And with that, we obtain cures and improvements
29:46but no failures.
29:48Final quote.
29:49Worst one of all.
29:51"The selection for social utility
29:54must be accomplished by some social institution
29:57if mankind is not to be ruined by domestication
30:00induced degeneracy.
30:02The racial idea as the basis of our state
30:04has already accomplished much in this respect.
30:07We may, and we must, rely on the healthy instincts
30:11of the best of our people for the extermination
30:13of elements of the population loaded with dregs."
30:17Anybody want to guess who that was?
30:19[INAUDIBLE]
30:20Hitler?
30:21Hitler, that behavioral biologist.
30:23He was a little bit busy at the time.
30:24This was instead one of Hitler's main scientific propagandists.
30:29This was somebody living pathologically in a box--
30:33a box that doesn't even exist-- having notion of race,
30:37and ethnicity, and genetics, and all of that,
30:41saying let me fix that one.
30:43Let me exterminate the elements of the population loaded
30:46with dregs, and I'll fix up that little problem of fixing
30:49something that ain't broken.
30:50Who was this?
30:51This was a scientist named Conrad Lorenz.
30:55Conrad Lorenz, who probably a lot of us are familiar with.
30:58Conrad Lorenz was one of the founding fathers of ethology.
31:01We'll learn all about that.
31:02But he, like everybody knows him winding up
31:05in all the little kid nature books,
31:07Conrad Lorenz discovered imprinting in birds.
31:10And he'd be going around.
31:11He was this little Austrian guy with this cherubic white beard.
31:14And he'd always have these little Austrian shorts
31:16and suspenders.
31:17And there would be a whole bunch of duckies following him
31:20because they thought he was mom, and he was totally
31:22charming and irresistible.
31:24This sort of old imprinting with his ducky kids.
31:28And he also happened to be a rabid Nazi propagandists who
31:32went to his grave saying that there was
31:35nothing wrong with what he did.
31:37These are not crappy, fourth-rate scientists.
31:41These are not people working at the University of the Desert
31:45of Podunk or whatever.
31:47These are among the most influential scientists
31:50of the last century.
31:52These are people who influenced how people were educated,
31:55and when we decided it wasn't worth the effort of doing it.
31:58These are people whose influence led to the brains being
32:02destroyed of hundreds of thousands
32:04of people who had nothing wrong with them.
32:06These are the people who led to the notion
32:09that you fix up a problem that doesn't exist by exterminating
32:12nine million people.
32:13These are not minor scientists.
32:16These are the most influential people
32:18of the last century coming out of science in many ways
32:21living pathologically inside their own buckets
32:25and how they could explain the entire world.
32:28And thus, again, our goal is going to not fall for that.
32:33To think about human behaviors, and in some cases
32:36to think about some of the most disturbed,
32:38some of the most frightening, damaged human
32:40behaviors, and resist the temptation
32:43to think inside a bucket and find the explanation.
32:47Again, every level we're going to talk about-- genes,
32:51hormones, neurons, environmental influence, whatever it is--
32:54that point will simply be the easiest way
32:57of describing all of the influences that came before.
33:01They're not even temporary buckets.
33:03There's no buckets.
33:04That will be our goal.
33:06Now, in thinking about this and approaching
33:08human behavior, the biology of human social behavior,
33:11often the biology of abnormal human social behavior,
33:15we're going to have three intellectual challenges.
33:18The first one is recognizing circumstances
33:21where there is nothing fancy about us whatsoever.
33:25We are just like every other animal out there.
33:28And where the challenge is to accept that.
33:30Let me give you an example.
33:32You are a hamster.
33:34You are a female hamster.
33:36And you're sitting in your cage.
33:38And, as a female hamster, what you do
33:40is you ovulate every five days or so.
33:42And you're going about your business,
33:44and everything's great.
33:45Now, somebody puts another female hamster
33:48in the cage with you.
33:49And over the subsequent month or so, what happens is both of you
33:54will begin to lengthen your cycles
33:56and eventually synchronize them so that you are both
33:59ovulating the same afternoon on a regular basis.
34:04Amazing.
34:04This actually works this way.
34:07And menstrual ovulatory synchrony-- people
34:09understand how this works in hamsters.
34:11It is done with olfaction, with pheromones,
34:14with chemical airborne signals from one female to another.
34:18And you can prove this by electrically recording
34:21from olfactory systems.
34:23Or, if you don't have much funding,
34:24you could take like a paper clip over the female hamster's nose,
34:27and she doesn't synchronize then.
34:29It's all done with olfaction.
34:30And what's most amazing is you put the two females together,
34:34and there is a way of disrupting it.
34:37Put a male hamster in there, and suddenly the cycles
34:41desynchronize and shorten, and you break it up
34:43with male pheromones.
34:45And what's even more remarkable is you put the two females
34:48together, and it's not random who synchronizes the other one.
34:53The dominant female synchronizes the subordinate one.
34:57Totally understood.
34:58People have been working on this for years.
35:00And it works this way in goats, and sheep, and dogs, and cats,
35:06and pigs.
35:07Apparently, you could go to a 7-Eleven somewhere in Iowa,
35:11and you could buy a can of pig ovulatory synchronization spray
35:16and take it home, and just run wild.
35:18I have no idea why you would want to do that.
35:21But nonetheless, that's how you--
35:23it's up there with the cans of Cheese Whiz or whatever.
35:27And it's that well understood.
35:29And what's remarkable is it works exactly the same way
35:33in us humans, where it is known as the Wellesley Effect.
35:38The fact that over the course of freshman
35:41year, this was first shown in Wellesley, 1970.
35:44Over the course of freshman year, women--
35:47freshman year roommates-- tended to lengthen and synchronize
35:50their cycles.
35:51And it was done with olfaction.
35:53Women who had olfactory deficits didn't synchronize
35:56with their roommates.
35:57They would synchronize unless they
35:59were having close intimate relationships
36:01with a male, in which case they desynchronized.
36:04And what's most cruel of all is, it's not random
36:08who synchronizes to who.
36:10The studies tend to show is the individual who is more socially
36:14outgoing, extroverted, dominating, is the one who
36:17synchronizes the other one.
36:18And this is well enough understood
36:20that when I went in college, people
36:22would sit around at the dinner table and say stuff like,
36:24Oh, when we roomed together in the summer,
36:26I had her synchronized by August 1st.
36:30This is what happens if you hang out with biologists.
36:32But we're exactly the same.
36:35The challenge here is recognizing there
36:37is nothing fancy about us.
36:39At various points in the class, we
36:40will look at comparisons between the human and the chimp genome,
36:45and it's virtually the same.
36:47Some of the time, we are just a plain old off-the-rack animal.
36:51Second challenge is going to be circumstances where we appear
36:55to be just like everybody else, all the other organisms
36:59out there, but we do something very
37:01different with the similarity.
37:03Let me give you an example here.
37:05You have two humans, two individuals,
37:08who are going through a ritual.
37:10They are sitting at a table.
37:12They're absolutely silent.
37:13They're making no eye contact, and they
37:16do nothing more physically taxing than every now
37:19and then, one of them picks up their hand
37:21and moves a little piece of wood on the table.
37:24And if these happen to be the right two
37:26individuals in the middle of a chess grandmaster tournament,
37:30these people are maintaining blood pressure
37:33for six hours running that you only see in a marathon runner.
37:37These people are going through thousands of calories a day
37:41doing nothing more than thinking.
37:44And this is outrageous.
37:46Because you look at one of these chess
37:48grandmasters who's just taken down an opponent
37:50and took their queen, or whatever,
37:52and they will have the exact same physiology
37:55as some male baboon on the Savannah
37:57who's just ripped the stomach open of his worst rival.
38:00And we're doing it there just with thought.
38:03And some of the time what's remarkable about us is we
38:05have absolutely typical, boring physiology,
38:09but we use it in ways that no other animal could.
38:13We get stressed by the inevitability of our mortality.
38:17We get stressed by reading something awful that
38:20has happened to a child on the other side of the planet.
38:23We get stressed by somebody zooming past us
38:27in some sports car, and we decide that we are now
38:29economically inadequate.
38:31And you never even see the person's face.
38:33You just see the car.
38:34We get stressed reading about something awful happening
38:37to a character in a novel.
38:40This is a whole realm of things that we
38:43could do that nobody else does.
38:44And on the flip side, we can feel compassion and empathy
38:48for a loved one.
38:49But we can also do the same for someone
38:51on the other side of the planet in a refugee camp.
38:54We can feel compassion for a member of another species.
38:58We feel badly when our pets are injured.
39:01This is another realm where the physiology of the response--
39:05the empathy, the emotional bonding, all of that--
39:08it's the same boring physiology as every other animal
39:11out there, and we are using it in a way that
39:13is unrecognizable.
39:16Now, some of the time the challenge
39:17is the third category, which is when we are doing something
39:21that no other animal out there has
39:23anything remotely similar to.
39:26Let me give you an example here, a shocking example.
39:29You have a couple.
39:31They live together.
39:32They come back at the end of the day from work.
39:34They talk.
39:35They eat dinner.
39:36They talk some more.
39:37They go to bed, and they have sex.
39:38They talk some more.
39:39They fall asleep.
39:40The next day, they do the same exact thing.
39:44They come home from work.
39:45They talk.
39:46They eat.
39:46They talk.
39:46They go to bed.
39:47They have sex.
39:48They talk some more.
39:49They do this every single night for 30 days running.
39:53Hippos would be repulsed by this.
39:56Because hardly anybody out there in the animal kingdom
39:59has non-reproductive sex, let alone day after day.
40:02And nobody else out there talks about it afterward.
40:06And what we've got here is a whole novel domain
40:09of human behavior-- language use, aspects of our sexuality,
40:13this profoundly damaging human uniqueness
40:16of some individuals confusing aspects of sexuality
40:19with aggression.
40:21In some cases, we are going to be out there on our own
40:24trying to understand what's up.
40:26OK.
40:26So that will be the general strategy for the course.
40:29We will resist categorical thinking
40:31over, and over, and over.
40:32Not just because that's cool, and nuanced, and subtle,
40:35all of that.
40:35But fall into categorical thinking,
40:38and you can do unspeakable damage in a realm of science
40:42that makes the difference.
40:43We will do so thinking constantly about ourselves
40:47as a boring species just like all the others out there.
40:50As a species that has the same boring physiology,
40:53but uses it in ways that are unrecognizable.
40:56As a species that does some things that are simply
40:59without precedent out there.
41:00And constantly struggling with what does biology
41:04have to do with it?
41:05General structure of the course-- the first half
41:08of the course is going to be an overview,
41:11an introduction to the various buckets,
41:14the various categories.
41:16And what we're going to go through
41:17is understanding an introduction to evolutionary theory,
41:22an introduction to what molecular genetics has
41:26to do with behavior, behavioral genetics, ethology,
41:30the brain, endocrinology, each of these buckets.
41:33And you know what happens next, which
41:35is in the second half of the course.
41:37We will look at specific behaviors, and in each case rip
41:41apart the buckets.
41:42And in each case, do the strategy
41:44of what does the behavior look like?
41:46What happened a second before?
41:48The world of neurons.
41:50What happened with the sensory stimuli that trigger
41:52those neurons, et cetera?
41:54All the way back to the evolutionary selective
41:56pressures.
41:57So the first half of the course is
41:59going to be the introduction to the buckets.
42:01And I will tell you right off the bat
42:03it is a total pain in the rear.
42:04Because what we're going to be doing
42:06is like every 2.5 lectures-- just when you were getting
42:09the vocabulary down-- we're going
42:11to jump to a completely different bucket.
42:13It is going to be dizzying, and unpleasant, and all of that.
42:17And then second half of the course,
42:18oh, the rewards finally come of then putting all the pieces
42:22together, looking at individual categories of behavior--
42:26sexual behavior, aggressive behavior, parental behavior,
42:31schizophrenia, depression, personality disorders, language
42:36use.
42:36In each of these cases, what's going on a second before?
42:40What's going on 10 million years before?
42:42Where do all these buckets disappear in the interactions?
42:47So that's going to be the strategy for the course.
42:49Something critical about how the course was designed
42:52is it's got no prerequisites.
42:55Because I really think this is a subject that everybody on Earth
42:58should be forced to learn about it at gunpoint.
43:00And thus, it's a good thing, I think,
43:03to have this not be one of those upper level bio classes.
43:06Let me just get a sense of who's here.
43:07How many of you are bio types, bio majors, hum bio?
43:12Psychology?
43:14Anthro?
43:16Are there any English Lit grad students in here?
43:19Yeah.
43:20OK.
43:23Good for you.
43:23Thank you for coming here.
43:26See what you think in three months.
43:28But nonetheless, the class has been designed explicitly
43:31to have no background whatsoever.
43:33How are we going to do that?
43:35We're going to do the usual song and dance of weekly sections,
43:38and reviews, and all that sort of thing.
43:40But in addition, during this first half
43:43of the course when we're jumping from category to category,
43:46we're going to have each week additional sections--
43:48a catchup section-- which is for people
43:51who have no background in that area,
43:53getting you through the basics, and getting you
43:55up to speed so that you will be able to then know
43:58what's up during the lectures.
44:00So those will be posted.
44:01The first one of these is-- let me make sure I've got this.
44:05Yes.
44:05It will be Thursday at 7:30 in the room next door.
44:10And this is going to be the introduction
44:12to evolutionary theory and getting
44:14you ready for what will be the evolution lectures Wednesday
44:18and Friday of this week.
44:19If you don't have a strong background,
44:21go to these catchup sections.
44:23The TAs who will be giving that are really
44:26expert in those areas, lots of background, and this
44:29will be your chance to catchup.
44:31Look through the handout.
44:32I think I have a bunch of terms there
44:34or something where if you are not terribly
44:36familiar with those terms in some discipline, that's a sign
44:39that you should probably go for some of the catchup stuff.
44:42If you really are just doing this,
44:44sort of being very adventurous with no background, if you can
44:47take it pass/fail, that will take off
44:49a lot of the pressure as well.
44:51Because you could then actually pay attention to stuff here.
44:53And the whole point here is to be
44:55able to do this even if you don't have a science
44:58background.
44:59Because the obvious argument I would make
45:01is everybody has to learn behavioral biology
45:04because we're being behavioral biologists every time
45:07we serve on a jury.
45:08Every time we vote whether or not
45:11money should be spent on solving some problem,
45:14whether it's a problem, and whether it's solvable or not.
45:16Every time we try to make sense of a family
45:19member sunk in depression.
45:21Are they having a biochemical disorder,
45:23or are they just indulging themselves?
45:26We're behavioral biologists all the time.
45:28So it's probably a good thing that we be informed ones.
45:31So the catchup sections there-- take advantage of them.
45:35What else?
45:36We will have weekly sections, the usual type.
45:38People are not assigned to sections.
45:40There's going to be 18 of them or so a week at various times.
45:44Go to whichever works for you.
45:46There will be a midterm in the middle, the midterm coming
45:50as we finish the last of those categories, last
45:53of those buckets.
45:54There will be a final.
45:55There's no paper or anything like that.
45:58So that will be the pattern.
45:59What else?
46:00Other stuff here.
46:02Office hours-- my office hours are up on the handout.
46:05Other things-- breaks.
46:06We will, with any luck, be able to be
46:10able to be organized enough so that during each stretch
46:13of class, there will be a five minute break in the middle
46:15so you can stand up, and just get
46:17to the front of the line for the bathroom,
46:19and then we will resume promptly before you get in there.
46:22So just to let you clear your heads a bit.
46:24Assignments, books, reading.
46:26There are two books that I have assigned for the course.
46:29One is by me.
46:31And you don't even have to read it.
46:33Just go buy a bunch of copies of and bring me the receipt,
46:37and you've got a great grade in there.
46:39OK, so that's what is going to be
46:40pertinent to the second half of the course.
46:43We're going to give you a list of the chapters that
46:46make the most sense to read.
46:47The other book is a book by an author named
46:50James Gleick called Chaos.
46:52Chaos, year, after year, after year, in this class
46:55provokes the strongest opinions.
46:57A quarter of the people decide it
46:59is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that
47:01could possibly have been assigned in the class
47:04and hate it.
47:05About half the people never quite
47:06figure out what's up with it.
47:08And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed.
47:12They no longer have to meditate.
47:14They no longer have to have a-- they are at peace.
47:19At peace, I tell you.
47:20Because what this book does is introduce
47:23this whole radically different way of thinking about biology,
47:27taking apart a world of reductionism.
47:30For 500 years, we all have been using a very simple model
47:35for thinking about living systems.
47:36Which is, if you want to understand something
47:39that's complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces.
47:43And once you understand the little pieces
47:45and put it back together, you will
47:48understand the complex thing.
47:50And what Chaos as an entire field is about--
47:53and this was pretty much the first book that
47:55was meant for the lay public about it-- what Chaos shows
47:58is that's how you fix clocks.
48:00That's not how you fix behaviors.
48:02That's not how you understand behaviors.
48:04Behavior is not like a clock.
48:07Behavior is like a cloud.
48:08And you don't understand rainfall
48:10by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces
48:13and gluing them back together.
48:15So read through that book.
48:16A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than
48:19biological, so we'll just be suggesting
48:21the chapters you should read.
48:22I will tell you it is the first book
48:25since Baby Beluga where I've gotten to the last page
48:29and immediately started reading it over again from the front.
48:32Because along with Baby Beluga, it's
48:34had the greatest influence on my life.
48:36I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking
48:40about science since college.
48:42So that is a sign.
48:43There will also be a bunch of lectures
48:45in the second half of the course covering these fields of chaos
48:49and complexity.
48:50And if you really think about it,
48:52it is going to force a change in everything else
48:54that you bring to thinking about this subject.
48:57In addition, at this moment there is not a reader.
49:01Because I'm trying to avoid having to get
49:02you guys to have to buy a reader.
49:04I'm trying to redo all the assigned readings
49:07so that will just be from papers that are available online,
49:10that you'll be able to download.
49:12I'm about halfway through getting them there.
49:14With any luck, there will not have to be a reader.
49:16But if it does exist, it's not going to be big.
49:18It won't be terribly expensive.
49:20But there will be a bunch of readings online to download,
49:24and it will vary.
49:25In some cases, it will be reading the whole paper.
49:28In some cases, I'll be suggesting you just
49:31read the abstract.
49:32In some cases, it will be to understand what's happening
49:36in the paper in detail.
49:37In some cases, this is an example
49:39of how people in this bucket think about this problem.
49:43Just read the abstract.
49:44So all of that will be assigned and made clear.
49:47What other stuff?
49:48There's going to be a huge amount of information online.
49:51The coursework is going to be set up for the class.
49:54There will be copies of the handouts.
49:57There will be lecture notes.
49:58Lecture notes that I have that will be about five to 10 pages
50:02covering each lecture, which we'll get to about
50:05the middle of the course.
50:06And I suspect I will run out of steam by then.
50:09So they won't occur for the second half.
50:11There will be commonly asked questions.
50:13There will be a Q&A. There will be course logistics.
50:16Some of the slides will be put up in there.
50:19Make use of that.
50:20There will be announcements about time changing for office
50:23hours, and things like that.
50:25Make sure you make use of that.
50:26And people who are not formally enrolled,
50:28we are figuring out a way for you
50:30to get access to it as well.
50:32We've also made the decision that after this lecture,
50:35the handouts will not be on paper.
50:38And that is because roughly for each lecture,
50:42we will go through about 5000 pieces of paper,
50:45even double sided.
50:46All of this stuff will get posted on Coursework the day
50:49before.
50:50And if that's going to make it impossible
50:52for you to follow what happens in class because you are
50:55the last human on Stanford who was not living off
50:58of a computer screen, come and talk to me.
51:00And we will slip you an actual paper copy of the handouts.
51:04Most of them, with any luck, we can
51:06avoid using paper just because of how many people there
51:08are in here.
51:09Let's see.
51:10Other stuff.
51:13Sections will start this Thursday.
51:16The regular sections-- all of those will be posted,
51:18the times for that.
51:20Office hours won't start until next week.
51:23The midterm will be in an evening
51:26rather than during a class time.
51:27And if we are on schedule, the class time that day
51:30will be used for review.
51:32And anything else?
51:33Oh, a very good suggestion just now given that
51:35the class before here is humongous,
51:38and thus we have the impossible problem
51:40of a lot of people trying to get out
51:42of that while a lot of people are trying to get into that.
51:44It might work best for everybody to come in from the top
51:47so that you flow down the stairs seamlessly
51:50and drive out those other people before us out the door there.
51:54That might work a whole lot better.
51:56Final thing is we have a team of TAs here.
51:59And they are great.
52:01Here they are.
52:02TAs, stand up and be embarrassed.
52:04OK, stand up, guys.
52:08There they are.
52:10There is all but one of them, who is in transit.
52:13There you are.
52:13These guys are great.
52:15They have either taken the course before.
52:17In some cases they have TA'd the course before.
52:19They are grad students in various
52:21of the bucket specialties.
52:23I would strongly suggest taking advantage of the sections.
52:26What will evolve after the first few weeks
52:29is there will be the regular sections going over the course
52:32material in the usual way.
52:34There are also being more advanced sections for people
52:37who have stronger backgrounds.
52:39Take advantage.
52:40OK, you guys can sit down.
52:42Leaving them standing there awkwardly for hours afterward.
52:45Take advantage of the sections.
52:47Really greatly skilled TAs.
52:50OK so that's basically what we got going here.
52:52Are there any questions?
52:53[INAUDIBLE]
52:58Units.
52:59OK, somebody emailed about units.
53:02The class is five units, and it's
53:04because we are meeting for so many hours a week.
53:07Actually, for a while the class was a six-unit course.
53:10And that was because of Condoleezza Rice.
53:13Because when she was the provost here,
53:15she totally screwed the biology department
53:17by upping our teaching requirements
53:20under really nasty conditions.
53:22So what we all decided was to find ways,
53:25every single sleazy trick we could
53:27do to puff up the number of units
53:29we were supposedly teaching.
53:31So for a while, the five unit class
53:32here would get you six units.
53:34But eventually they caught us, so we stopped doing that.
53:37So first she did that, and then weapons of mass destruction.
53:41[LAUGHING]
53:41So it's a five unit class at the moment.
53:44Say hi for me if you run into her on campus.
53:47So five units.
53:50The workload, I think, will be commensurate with that.
53:53But it's mainly because of heavy class time.
53:55One additional thing-- lectures are
53:57going to be taped and put up online with a day or so
54:01on Coursework.
54:01The reason for that is given that this spans two hour
54:04block, a lot of people have to miss one of the hour blocks.
54:07And in the past, it has worked to be able to get the stuff up
54:11online.
54:11So that will be advantageous for some folks.
54:15OK.
54:15Question?
54:16Yes, there was a question up there.
54:18[INAUDIBLE]
54:19OK, you take it back.
54:21OK, any other questions?
54:24Bagel guy.
54:25Did you get your bagel, or did somebody eat it?
54:27[INAUDIBLE]
54:28OK, good.
54:30Good.
54:30The social contract comes through.
54:32Yeah?
54:32[INAUDIBLE]
54:34What's that?
54:35[INAUDIBLE]
54:38Yes.
54:40I don't remember.
54:41[LAUGHTER]
54:43May 3rd.
54:43May 3rd for the midterm.
54:467:30 in the evening.
54:48It is a Monday.
54:51June 4th for the final.
54:56OK, more questions?
54:57Yeah?
54:57[INAUDIBLE]
54:59What's the format of the midterm and the final?
55:02In an ideal world, given the whole emphasis
55:05here on no buckets, blah blah, et cetera,
55:08It would be long essays, and requirements of sonnets,
55:11and sensitive haikus about the hypothalamus.
55:14But simply because of numbers in here,
55:16we are reduced to sort of like the lowest common denominator,
55:20a lot of multiple choice questions,
55:22just to make things saner for the TAs.
55:24Because it is an unbelievable job
55:26to try to grade this many papers that quickly.
55:29Broadly, intellectually, what the midterm
55:31is going to be about is just touching base,
55:34making sure you understand the basics of each
55:37of those buckets, each of those disciplines.
55:39A little bit of forcing you to think across disciplines.
55:42What the final is going to be entirely about
55:45is forcing you to think across the disciplines,
55:48across the buckets there.
55:49So it's going to be some very different intellectual foci
55:52in there.
55:52Midterm-- have the facts down.
55:54Hopefully it won't be quite as mindless as that,
55:56but that's the main function of the midterm.
55:58OK, more questions?
55:59[INAUDIBLE]
56:10OK.
56:10TAs, did you guys decide to videotape the catchup section?
56:13[INAUDIBLE]
56:15Audio, OK.
56:16[INAUDIBLE]
56:19OK.
56:19Other office hours, or it's going to be taped and put up
56:23online on Coursework.
56:24And if there's critical handouts, visuals,
56:27those will be posted there as well.
56:29Good.
56:30More questions?
56:30[INAUDIBLE]
56:35Yes.
56:36And it's going to be for each.
56:38It's going to be in advance of the next three lectures.
56:40[INAUDIBLE]
56:45Final is at 7:30 for two hours.
56:47[INAUDIBLE]
56:48The final?
56:49Oh, the final, the final.
56:505:15.
56:51[INAUDIBLE]
56:5412:15.
56:54[LAUGHTER]
57:01Just to get that up there.
57:0212:15.
57:03More questions?
57:10For more, please visit us at standord.edu.