Whatever you do in a moment goes back a million years, says renowned Neuroscientist

Someone does something. Why? It is the simplest question in the world, and Robert Sapolsky has spent a career showing that the honest answer runs far deeper than almost anyone wants to admit.

The easy reply, he told Pakistan TV, is that it came down to the brain: "this part of the brain activated, that part was quieter than usual." 

But that only moves the question back a step. 

What made that part of the brain fire that way? The sights and sounds of the previous minutes. 

What shaped how sensitive the brain was to them? The person's hormone levels that morning. And before that, years of experience rewiring the brain, one's childhood, even one's life as a fetus, then one's genes, then the culture one's ancestors were inventing five hundred years ago, all the way back to how we evolved as a species.

Every human act, Sapolsky argues, is the product of "events from one second ago to a million years ago," and not a single link in that chain was chosen by the person acting. Follow it through honestly, he says, and free will becomes "a pretty questionable concept."

Why his verdict carries weight

Few people in the world are better placed to make that claim. Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, and one of the world's leading authorities on the biology of human behavior. He spent thirty years in Kenya studying wild baboons, tracking how stress and social rank wear down the body — work that made him a rare figure who has watched behavior unfold both in the African bush and under the microscope.

A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, he is also the author of the international bestseller Behave, which was named the best science book of the year by LA Times, and, most recently, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

That combination, decades of field biology and a deep grounding in neuroscience, is what lets him make his central argument not as philosophy but as a claim about how living machines actually work.

There is no "I"

Push the logic far enough and even the self dissolves. The "I" we each defend so fiercely, Sapolsky said, is simply "the collection of atoms that happened to come together for 30, 40, 50, 90 years before dissipating back into the universe." We are made of cells and molecules, running on the same rules as any other creature. "We have the same wiring," he said, "the same rule as a snail does, as a hippopotamus does."

When we insist that "I" woke up, "I" made the coffee, "I" chose this, what we are really naming, he argues, is a shorthand. "I is just an easy shorthand for all of those things that came before."

Why zebras don't get ulcers

Sapolsky's early fame came from a deceptively simple question, the title of one of his books: why don't zebras get ulcers? Because, he explained, our stress response evolved for a short, sharp emergency, "running away from a lion," and the hormones behind it are perhaps 100 million years old. A zebra escapes and, three minutes later, is calmly wondering "what blade of grass is it going to eat next."

We are not so lucky. We switch that same ancient alarm on for purely psychological reasons and leave it running for weeks. "The punchline of the whole field," he said, "is that's not what it evolved for. If you do it chronically, you're going to get sick."

Why letting go of blame is humane

Here Sapolsky makes his most counterintuitive move. A world without free will, he insists, would not be colder. It would be kinder, and history is on his side. Four centuries ago a failed harvest was blamed on a witch, and the answer was to burn her at the stake. We stopped once we understood we do not control the weather. We learned that epilepsy was "a neurological disease," not the work of Satan; that dyslexia was not laziness; that mothers do not cause schizophrenia. Each time, he said, the world became "a more humane place," because "when we hold people responsible for things they have no control over," they are treated cruelly.

Taken to its end, he argues, the view transforms everything. "It never makes any sense to blame or punish someone," he said. "It never makes any sense to praise or reward someone." And, most strikingly: "It makes no sense at all to ever hate anybody. Hating somebody is like hating an earthquake. It's just what the world has brought about."

The murderer and the broken car

When we asked him what to do about those who do terrible things, Sapolsky was emphatic that the answer is neither to do nothing nor to punish, but to contain the danger while dropping the hatred. A car with failed brakes is dangerous and must come off the road, but "you don't go in every day with a heavy hammer and smash the car over the hood and tell it it has an evil soul."

He points to a stark finding: among men on death row in the United States, "60 to 70% of them have a history of a concussive head trauma" to the prefrontal cortex, the brain's seat of self-control. "This is not an evil soul," he said. "This is someone where the brakes don't work." His model looks less like a courtroom than a public-health quarantine: constrain only as much as safety demands, refuse to moralize, and work hard to understand where the danger began.

When we asked whether superintelligent AI systems, once they come online, would have free will, his answer was unequivocal. A machine, he said, has "no more room" to defy the laws of physics "than we can have a neuron that decides it is going to ignore the last 50 years of its history."

But where, in such a world, do we find meaning and purpose? To this, Sapolsky's reply was candid: "Don't ask me. I'm just a scientist. This is where the philosophers come in. This is where the poets come in."

His parting advice was disarmingly gentle. "If you think you understand why a person did what they did, you're probably wrong." So, he said, be careful with your judgments.