Revising the Fault Line

Oh, wait, you're listening to Radiolab from WNYC. So we're going to start with a story from our producer, Pat Walters, about a couple of times. Oh, my word. Okay, so I mentioned a couple of episodes ago, by the way, this is Jad, Radiolab, that we'll be bringing back some episodes back into the flow from time to time, episodes that we haven't stopped thinking about, that feel truer to us now than before, maybe the opposite, you know, episodes that we still end up getting to fights with people about.

And a couple of years ago, we ran a story about a guy named Kevin, and a little bit more recently. Hello, Robert, are you there? Yes. I'm right.

Yeah, I'll be here in just a sec. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, who Robert Prulich and I have had on the show many times, he recently wrote a book in which he makes an argument that really tries to kind of just explode that story in a way that we found sort of interesting. It was just my hunch that it plays near a lot of your buttons. It sure does.

So what we did was we sent him that piece, had him listen to it, and actually what we'll do now is replay that piece, and then at the end, we'll come back and have a little bit of a fight about it. So we're going to start with a story from our producer, Pat Walters, about a couple. Oh, my word. That's the lady.

I'm Janet. This is the guy. I don't need you to introduce yourself. That's usually the thing we do, but we're not talking about who you are.

So this one starts a few summers ago. It was July 2006. Janet and Kevin were at home. And some people you don't know show up.

Maybe I'll start with you. When they show up at their door. So we were getting ready to go down the shore. It was a Friday.

So we're in the kitchen, and they come to the back door. I thought that they were fundraising. I thought they met a fireman just by the blue shirt, and then realized that they were law enforcement. Two women, and I think two men.

More came up from around the other side of the house. And they showed us their badges. Were they cops, or...? They were Homeland Security.

They took me outside. And they asked me to stay in the kitchen, and they had a woman with me. I didn't know what was going on. Meanwhile, when they showed up, I got to the door.

They said, you know why we're here? I said, yeah, I do. I was expecting you. And I showed them where everything was.

This story about Kevin and his wife, Janet, inspired us to do the entire hour. Because one of the most basic things that we do as people is we judge. We judge one another. We judge what's right.

We judge what's wrong. But this story and the two that follow, they will make you judge how you judge. Or at least they had an effect on us. And we're calling our show, Blame.

I'm Janet, I'm Ron. I'm Robert Crowley, and we'll go back to bed. Before we do, you should know that this show contains some graphic, difficult descriptions in a few spots. If you're not in the mood or if you have kids around, you might want to sit this one out.

Okay, so what happened in that first scene and what happens next only makes sense if we go back a little first. About 15 years. It's just an ordinary day. Kevin's going home from work.

And I was driving home, going about 65, 70 in the fast lane, when suddenly there was a thump in my chest. Then heat, just a heat burning. After that, he said suddenly he had this thickness in my tongue, in my throat, then a valve taste in his mouth. Then my hearing faded out.

And he thought, it's back. Well, I finally did come to. He sees his car is smashed into the side of an apartment building. I do recall the officers telling you, you've been in an accident.

And he remembers one of them insisted that he smelled alcohol. And I was talking through clenched teeth because I had bit my tongue and my cheeks. I was saying over and over again, I had a seizure. I had a seizure.

Kevin's got epilepsy. He's had it since he was a teenager. But two years before this all happened, he'd had surgery to remove the part of his brain that was causing seizures. And it seemed to have worked.

He was doing great. Essentially wasn't having seizures anymore. Until suddenly you, he was. Lost your license?

I lost my license for a year. Things had kind of taken a nose dive. But here he is. He's 35 years old.

I'm living with my brother. I'm divorced. And I have to call my daddy and ask him now to drive me to and from work. And you think, I need to do something.

This is not sustainable. No, no, don't need that. So I walked into the office. That's a HR person where he works for a list of all the employees.

Give me a list of everybody on the front. So she pulled it up. I go down the list and I get to Janet Woodruff Bloomfield. Only when it's really close to me, five minutes away.

So I walk to her cube, knocked on the wall, and introduce myself. Like, hey, my name's Kevin. I also work here. I've got this thing, though.

It's kind of awkward. I can't drive. And I was wondering if you'd give me a ride. And she said yes.

I really passed by his street. I mean, on the way to work. So it was right on his street. Pretty much.

Like, I made it clear. You know, I'll do it when I can. And as they drove together, they started talking, finding out a little bit more about each other. Notice pretty quickly.

We like the same music. And that was unique because I sort of liked music that was probably more in his era. Kevin was seven years older than Janet. What kind of music were you listening to?

Jackson Brown, mostly. A lot of Jackson Brown. James Taylor. Um, Bonnie Rae.

You know, Elton John. They found themselves singing along to the lyrics. You cannot sing with somebody day in and day out and not have something happen. We wound up, as the spring came, you know, it's getting nice out.

So now it's like, well, let's not go home as well for a beer after work. We're becoming good friends. We liked each other. For Kevin, he was a little more serious than that.

I'm thinking about her. And I'm starting to wake up at night. And one day in May, as Janet is dropping him off, Kevin turns to her and he says, Hey, I really appreciate what you've done for me. Let me take you to dinner.

Just as friends. Just as friends. Janet says, sure. So, May 30th, 1992.

Highland Pavilion. Nicest restaurant in town. So your friend takes you to a four-star restaurant. You're thinking right away, he thinks this is a date.

We want a date. Come on. So now I'm panic-stricken. We have our dinner.

We leave. We had a wonderful time. She drops me off and I handed her the poem. What did the poem say?

You still have it? Yeah, I do. Okay. This is a little slower.

Each time we sing on the way home, I pray that traffic backs up so we can sing together just a little longer and the harmony can go on forever. And each time we reach my door, I feel robbed because we're always in mid-song or mid-thought. He gets out and goes inside and probably thinks, ah, Janet gave her the poem. She's going to be so smitten with me.

And you go home and what? I want to throw up. I just thought, oh, God, you know. Next day.

I just looked at him and said, listen, we got to clarify. This is clearly just going to be a friendship. He was seven years older than me. He had his brain, you know, surgery.

He has epilepsy. He's divorced. He has two children. You're catching the compassion here?

I'm trying. And he's just like, I'm not asking you to marry me. I'm asking you to go out on a few dates. Exactly.

To go out with me like four times in the next six months. I'm ahead of the game. He just handled it. And I don't think it was long at all.

I can't even remember, but it wasn't long at all before we were like a couple. Hey, Kevin. I'm dopey. Dopey in love.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm doing romantic things for her all the time. Flowers, poems, and... I'm an illustration of the Jackson Brown cover.

And within a year, we were engaged. All the while, Kevin is having seizures. Yeah. I think the car accident more and more.

There was a point where we were obviously dating. She's helping to make his bed. And he says she pulled off the pillowcase. It's covered with bloodstains.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You can count the number of seizures that I had in between my tongue and blood. I knew nothing about epilepsy. I had never seen anybody have a seizure.

In my past, those would have been big red flags that I would have just walked away, but I just went with it. And they both went with it for a few years. Until finally, Kevin and Jan decide, this is enough. I wanted to be done with it.

I just needed to be done with it. So they scheduled a brain surgery. So that happened the first time. Kevin had actually gone through a brain surgery much like this one once before.

And he came out pretty much the same guy. He was still himself. In fact, he made sure of it. I was awake for the surgery.

That's crazy. It was, I had to be awake. It had to do with music. Kevin is a musician.

And the doctors told him, They said that if I lost anything, I was going to lose my appreciation for music. That it would be like music would be white noise. I said, you know, no. For me, music was, you know, is part of my personality.

It was how I coped with my darkest moments in dealing with epilepsy and seizures. At 18 years old, I'd have a seizure. I'd take my harmonica and I'd find a place with decent reverb somewhere and be right where I need it to be. I didn't want to lose that part of me.

So as the doctors were doing the brain surgery, they had his head open. They asked him to sing. Remember what he sang? End of the innocence.

St. James Taylor. And while he sang, they would tickle different parts of his brain. And if they ever touched the part that made him stop singing, they say, okay, that's the part we cannot take out.

Wow. Yeah. And in the end, I think they ended up taking out like four and a half centimeters. Like a little bit bigger than a golf ball.

Wow. But afterwards, as he was recovering, I had my keyboard in the room. And I tried playing right away. And it worked.

The part of him that he really cared about was still there. Exactly. Yeah. He's a man I fell in love with after the first surgery.

So I thought, well, you know. Now that he's got to do second surgery. He's already been down this road. We're fine.

And after that second surgery, he did seem fine. Janet didn't have her brother sneak my keyboard up to the room again. He was very, very adamant that he wanted that keyboard. I played a little.

Just noodled a couple of notes, played a couple of things. And it was like, okay, I'm there. Still me. I was ready to go.

So you go home and like, it seems to have worked. Yeah. As far as teachers go, we thought, okay, this is it. We're home free.

And I was just happy to have some normal sleep. But then in the winter, By beginning of the middle of January, Kevin noticed he wanted to eat my physical appetite a lot more than usual. Got like insane. This is a guy who didn't eat breakfast.

He had minimal lunch. He'd have a sensible dinner, maybe a snack. That was it. But now I can eat the couch.

It just was odd. It was not him normally, but you know, you're like, okay. She thought, maybe it's just a side effect from the medications. But then.

The piano. He played piano for hours. The same song as he used to sing in the car together. He had stuck on a piece.

He would play it for hours. How many hours? Eight. Eight, nine.

And then there was sex. You know, we were a happy, healthy couple. Kevin's nodding. Yeah, it was fine.

But what was abnormal was it was anywhere. Clearly it wasn't like, oh, we're in the supermarket. Let's have sex here. I mean, it wasn't like that.

But I mean, it was like, I could just walk in the kitchen. I'm out of work. And he'd be like, oh, let's go here. Which struck her as weird.

But then again. We were thinking, you know, let's try to have a family. So the timing made things confusing. And more than that, it wasn't like any of this stuff was out of character exactly.

In fact, it was all stuff that she liked about him. Yeah. Except now it was all turned up to 11. All the things that were wonderful became chores.

And that's pretty much where things were at when those federal agents showed up in July of 2006. I was just completely blindsided. He said, you know why we're here? I said, yeah, I was expecting you.

Kevin, the agent's upstairs. I took him right into here where my computer was. And they arrested him for what was on that computer. I gave it up to him right away.

Warning, this next passage contains some graphic imagery. I mean, I hadn't, I don't know if I had fully like, I think I had just like let child porn be this kind of vague thing that meant someone younger than 18. But then I read some of the court documents and they were like toddlers. They were picked videos of two, three, and four-year-olds.

These sites had the most despicable, disgusting things you can imagine. Infants on throw, you know, preteen and adolescence. And you bought these things and put them on your computer. I, yeah.

Yeah, it bothers me. It bothers me. Like I said, initially it was, you know, it was just your basic, you know, heterosexual, playboy-like, penthouse-like sites. And then windows would just start to open up.

And pretty soon he says, he was going everywhere. There was gay sex. There was bondage. There was defecation sex.

There was animal sex. Xeno sex. I went everywhere. That button came up to push.

I still don't understand it. I still don't understand it. He said, disturb you and you feel terrible. But I just like wonder, like, how do you, do you tell yourself, like, that wasn't me?

Like, how do you explain it to yourself so that you can kind of, I don't know, not feel like you're as bad as the person who goes there without a brain injury is, you know? Like, I, I, I, I, say that again. Yes, I guess I'm just wondering. I don't know, like, knowing that that's the thing that you did.

And it sounds like obviously you know that that was bad. It was a wrong thing. It was a terrible thing. Um, but it was, it was you who did it.

Or was it not? I don't know. You know what I mean? No, it, it was, it was me who did it, but it was me with a complete lack of neurological control.

Now, I mean, I, I, I know, I know who I am. I did idiotic things that I couldn't stop myself from doing. I didn't want to do it. It would be nice where it would be four, five, six hours of going to the same site and, and, and downloading one or two files and then deleting them.

Going back a minute later, downloading the same files, deleting them. I would download those files a dozen times and delete them a dozen times because I didn't want to be there, knew I shouldn't be there, and couldn't help myself from going back. I'm not an idiot. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a smart guy.

I'm not an idiot. But I know I had no control. And after he would argue in court, Kevin would plead guilty, but at the sentencing hearing, he asked the judge to be lenient, arguing essentially that the person who did all those things, in some sense, wasn't him. It was some other part of his brain that he couldn't control.

In the hearing, he called one witness. Oren Davinsky, I'm a neurologist and epilepsy specialist at NYU Medical Center. He's been treating Kevin for decades, 20, 20 some odd years. And he says as soon as he found out what Kevin had been doing, had a terrible sense of, of responsibility.

This is because of the brain surgery, the surgery Oren recommended he have. And he argued in court that this was not Kevin's fault. I remember looking at those agents right in their face and saying to them and to the judge, this could be anybody. This could be those agents, judge.

This could be you. This could be me. This could be anybody. And we would have no control over what we did.

And explain to the court what the biology was. That the way the brain is organized is that there are parts of our brain that are way deep down. That control like base desires. Like hunger, sex.

Keeps us alive, but it's teeming with the nastiest thoughts. We all have these crazy thoughts in our head. Now most of us, those thoughts are kept in check because there are other parts of our brain that sit on top and act like a lid. But in Kevin's case, the brain surgeon who did that surgery removed part of that filter.

And suddenly, the court was off. I mean, there was just no lid on his sexual desires. He says scientists have known about this condition for a long time. They first thought in monkeys.

In rhesus monkeys. When monkeys would lose roughly the same part of the brain that Kevin lost. They became very hypersexual. Males that would only previously be sexually involved with females.

Now we're ten times more sexually active with both males and females. It feels to me like there would be a brighter line before kids, you know? I think there is a line for quote-unquote normal individuals. But in a brain disorder case, those lines get blurred.

And he told the court, that's what happened here. It was black and white. Kevin was sick. And his behavior was out of his control.

Well, that's not what the fact showed in this case. This is Lee Vartan, who was the prosecutor. We saw no evidence of impulsivity. He says if you're claiming that he had no control over his brain, then how come he had all this child porn on his home computer?

I believe it was 52 videos and 125 images. And yet on his work computer? There were zero images. Zero videos of child pornography on his work computer.

And he worked a lot. He held down a job. He was working every day. If he truly lacked impulsivity, control i would think you would see child pornography on both computers and so what he argued back was what was the lid on at work and off at home seems to me to be an easy out so the answer is that this is common with neurologic disease they tend not to be 24 7.

he says take something like Tourette's some people when they're engaged in playing sports they tend not to have tics whereas when they're sitting around board or stressed they do tend to have tics so you could say well Tourette's clearly isn't a neurological disorder but no Tourette's is a neurologic disorder we understand some of the brain things that go on in Tourette's the prosecution didn't buy it they just thought it was hogwash what was hogwash was his level of certainty the prosecution asked that kevin be sent to prison for five years he isn't paying for child porn he's supporting an industry that does terrible things to kids kevin hoped he'd avoid jail time altogether and instead he placed on house arrest i asked for janet um right after the arrest i had to imagine that you were in shock a little like yeah you've gotten to see a lawyer and one of the questions he asked was is this marriage going to survive this and i said i don't know and at that point i understand i didn't even know the level of pictures but she says the moment she heard orrin say that this was a brain disorder with the name top gluver bucey syndrome once i was able to get that for me it clicked like she couldn't blame him we have these experts saying that it was a disease and i kept thinking they'll understand not to mention that after kevin was arrested and got on a bail or give him some medication and janet says it was like flipping a switch that's exactly what it was it was like i got him back i was able i was able to sit and watch a movie with her you know normal janet actually says in a lot of ways those few months between the arrest and the sentencing hearing they've been the best months of the marriage he now was just so much easier calmer uh you could just talk the hearing took about three hours and when it was over the judge took a recess went to her chambers when she came back to deliver her decision and we'll hear that decision when we come back after a quick break this is amanda darby calling from rockville maryland radio lab is supported in part by the alfred p sloan foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world more information about sloan at www.sloan.org hi lulu here and this episode is sponsored by better help may is mental health awareness month and as someone who reports on mental health who likes talking to people about their mental health and what they look to in science in the natural world in faith in friendship wherever it may be to help guide them through the rough patches of life i just wanted to take a moment to say what seems to help people turn corners find relief get out of ruts and even flourish is having someone with you as much as we can feel private about our mental health struggles you do not have to go it alone so this may why not treat your mental health to a buddy and who better to talk to than a fully licensed mental health therapist with over 30 000 therapists available better help has someone you can talk to available at pretty much any time that's convenient for you at the push of a button and because finding the help you need often depends on the therapist client vibe rest assured with better help you can switch providers at any time remember truly your mental health matters and you don't have to go it alone find the support you need anytime with better help sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash radiolab that's better h-e-l-p dot com slash radiolab each story you hear on money starts with a question what happens if we refund tariffs why are groceries so expensive npr we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to seek follow npr's kind of money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works hey i'm janet and ron this is radiolab we're revisiting pat walter's story about kevin and when we left the judge was just about to render her decision she actually wouldn't talk to me about the story but i have the transcript from the uh hearing and uh if you remember the prosecutor leave our tan was asking for five years 63 months or kevin janet were hoping for house arrest i mean no jail time there's no way they're gonna put him in jail this is clear-cut and here's what the judge does she says i do agree with horn it is a neurological disorder no question so we can't be hopefully responsible for his behavior she was getting it on the other hand she said the prosecution did have a point that he was very much in control of his impulses at least some of the time and so the question for the judge was how does the legal system assign blame when a person is sometimes themselves in control and sometimes not well this is a crime she said a crime which ultimately leads to children being harmed considering that you did have moments where you were in control that in those moments you had responsibility you could have done something you could have asked for help you could have told the people around you what you were doing so even if you couldn't have stopped yourself they could have stopped you she made it very clear that we have to do something here his sentence 26 months at a federal prison and 25 months of house arrest and i i believe i believe that she was she was fair and i believe she was compassionate about a week before christmas in 2008 janet drove him to prison how long was he in jail for about two years and she was even though the judge said you know he is responsible did that change her attitude toward him at all no they totally stuck together she visited him pretty much every weekend the whole time i knew the route and i had my own little routine down in between visits she'd send up notes and i'll never forget he could send me mail they had a store where he could get some cards super hallmarky and he would like alter them and i remember the very first card i got it was it's very you know beautiful supposedly it's supposed to be beautiful but it was like you know if you need anything you know anything at all just let me know and then he writes of course if it's pressing you might want to ask someone else because i was going to wait 24 months and i remember getting that and just laughing and then that became our thing like listen this is a horrible situation but we're gonna make the best of it tell me a little bit about like where things are at now i think things are almost normal i i am still on probation but he's home um he's working life is going on we have our normal routines can still take those medicines that keep that other part of him in check i i have no libido at all but i know who i am i know what i am um i'm disturbed by that portion of my life but i'm i'm trying i'm trying to move on so i know nothing about what your reaction to that will be it was just my hunch back to uh neuroscientist author robert sapulsi that it sort of it plays near a lot of your buttons sure does yeah and uh while we always felt like at the end of the story the sentence that kevin gets from the judge was this kind of interesting and nuanced balance between you know the idea that he just had a brain disease and the idea that there's some still some sort of personal responsibility involved well right out of the gate sapulsi had a different reaction on the poll by that judicial decision and the underlying worldview really yeah completely and for him it all centered around that sort of key argument that swayed the judge that some of the time he can control these urges and some of the time he can't the example there was that never once it worked if you do anything like that and yet he obsessively spent hours each night at home and the fact that he could control it in other circumstances does that mean there is a separate me inside there that's able to get to the control panel some of the time but not others and thus that's punishable yeah it's like he's in a kind of pitched battle with some inner urge that he has maybe it's a biological urge uh but sometimes he wins maybe in the morning when he's had some coffee and he's like nicely sugared up but then at night we all know this when we get out of time a little bit well let's let's translate what you just said into sort of nuts and bolts biology your frontal cortex which is making you do the harder things when it's the right thing to do is one of the most expensive parts of the brain to operate and when you're starting to get hungry or you're starting to get tired your frontal cortex doesn't work as well and that's simply why uh we have less regulation of our behavior in at night than in the morning and the perfect neurological example where nobody would invoke free will in this one is you look at somebody with alzheimer's disease if they have early stage alzheimer's disease they show a sundown or syndrome which is in the morning they can tell you what their name is and by night they can't tell you on the next morning they can tell you again whoa are we seeing here sort of a choice okay so they know their name and if they're not telling you at night they know their name they can tell you their name in the morning if they're not telling it to you at night they're choosing not to no what happens at night is blood sugar levels drop and the brain is tired and the frontal cortex which has to do the like what was my name again with three and a half remaining neurons can't do it as well nobody looks at that and says there's volition oh they can do it part of the day they should be expected to be able to do it that's that's because it's a different issue i mean this is what are you talking about memory okay so let me let me let me go through a sequence here that i may obviously prepare for the occasion in the in the kevin segment they made mention of the syndrome that he has which is called the cluder-bussy syndrome and this was first shown in the 1940s you go into monkeys and you take out the same part of the frontal cortex as they did with kevin and you get monkeys that eat themselves into obesity now they can't stop eating they're hypersexual males trying to mount everyone and everything on earth okay right off the bat we see some broad similarities aha you will say though but kevin has a moral system kevin has meta control kevin as we saw could control it in some circumstances but not in others we've left the world of blameless monkeys far behind yes yes yes goodbye but hello blame we have not you've got a monkey there who's got frontal damage and now is hypersexual he's attempting to mount infants he's attempting to mount water bottles in his cage completely out of control but nonetheless he doesn't try to mount the alpha male obviously what we have here is a monkey who has free will because in some circumstances he could not do this bad inappropriate thing because he's got free will somewhere no that's ridiculous okay let's it's not that he could control his behavior some of the time it's that in this instance he was under the influence of something else that he couldn't control fear fear of the alpha male activation of fear circuits override the feeble attempts of those four and a half remaining frumple neurons regulation in one circumstance but not in others not because there's free will or rotten choices or bad values this biologically broken system manifests its brokenness under some circumstances but not others and there's a logical biological explanation for why you get those exceptions okay but you're talking about monkeys in one situation okay so let's take it closer to home now okay so you sit down somebody with damage to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and you put the frontally damaged patient now in a circumstance where they're in a situation where there's a smarter more disciplined better payoff thing to do and they can do it just fine but then you get them emotionally aroused over something or you get them tired they're horrible terrible compared to regular folks in other words we've just progressed from okay the monkey if it's scared of the alpha male okay fear can override the neurons that it has remaining in there and they're swamped now we've seen in a human more in general strong emotions can override but so so far what you've told me though is sometimes i have the resources to choose and sometimes i don't but it's about the resources but the choice doesn't not exist just another choose in there next step next step closer in so for my mind you've been prepared for this how many rounds i even have a clipboard here i've got a clipboard sitting in front of me that's how much i prepared for this okay um okay here's an example you take a judge and like this classic important study and you look at the single biggest predictor of whether or not this parole board judge and this was on the whole panel of judges whether they will vote for somebody being paroled or not the single best predictor was how many hours it had been since the judge has eaten what you mean that a hungry judge will not give parole to someone but a full and happy coming in the judge will make the judge more gentle you look at the study and right after a meal uh convicts had about a 90 chance of being paroled and right before a meal they were down to about a 10 chance it was a virtually straight line going down that's messed up and you know the single biggest we actually look the study up and it turns out if the judge was making the decision right after a line from their full the parolees had about a 60 chance of getting paroled okay not as bad as he said but if the judges were making the decision right before the next meal like when they were hungry the parolees had close to a zero percent chance of getting parole what's interesting about that number one the biology makes perfect sense what are you doing there when you are a judge trying to judge somebody from a completely different world from you to reach a point of deciding there's mitigating fact you're trying to take their perspective you're trying to think about the indirect ways that you're using your frontal cortex and when you're hungry and your frontal cortex isn't as working as well it's easier to make a snap emotional judgment this person's rotten the second amazing thing which exactly addresses this issue is you get that judge two seconds after they made that decision you sit them down at that point and say hey so why did you make that decision and they're going to quote i don't know emmanuel connor alan dershowitz at you they're going to post hoc come up with an explanation that has all the pseudo trappings of free will and volition and in reality it's just rationalization it's totally biological no no that's why you lose me on the word totally okay so it's muchly biological mostly biological i might meet halfway there but totally no why does it have to be entirely why do we have to go like all the way because if you're not going to go all the way here's the things that you're asserting i'm just gonna jump in here because this part of the conversation got a little dense and long but spolsky's basic point was that you just have to look at the sort of arc of scientific discoveries 500 years ago we would have said the epileptic seizure was like bad demonic possession no no no we learned that's biological up to the mid-1950s if your like adolescent child suddenly started having hallucinations and hearing voices and thought disorder and you would say you the mother of this child would say where did this disease come from and the best of science at the time had an answer they would say you it's your fault it was called schizophrenogenic mothering a mothering style that generated schizophrenia you caused your child schizophrenia and then in the mid-50s the first anti-psychotic drugs were developed and it emptied out the psychiatric wards all over the country and everybody in the field said oh my god it's a biochemical disorder and he says same thing happened with dyslexia we used to think it was just kids were lazy oh that's biological also and his contention is that this is just going to keep happening like as science progresses one by one all of the things that we think are under our control that we should control and if we don't can be blamed for one by one all those things are going to get chalked up to screw-ups in our biology screw-ups that we couldn't have controlled even if we wanted to so what you're going to have to do at that point is either say starting tonight at midnight there will never be a new scientific finding pertinent to this area we've learned everything there is or you're going to say free will is just the biology that we haven't learned yet what do you in your heart in your deep in that even center of your like you know do you really believe this do you really think for a second not for a second and that's the whole thing this is like my like huge conundrum i have like zero belief in free will at this point yet at the same time i cannot for a second imagine what the world is supposed to look like with people believing there is no free will i don't know how to imagine it and i'm constantly this hypocrite i'm this terrible hypocrite because like i'll put on like my blue t-shirt instead of my gray t-shirt one morning and later in the day someone will say oh whoa nice t-shirt and i'll say thanks oh my god the hypocrisy of it here i am taking credit for it in that circumstance i'm not able to stop and say well actually i have photoreceptors that you know because of this gene variant and that gene variant in my rhodopsin gene so that i'm particularly good at noticing colors or you combinations, and thus I can get the matching, and, like, oh, I pick the fresh fruit here because my olfactory receptors allow me to, like, be able to smell the pineapples that are fresh, and the luck of my socioeconomic status has me in, like, some, like, organic market and gives me that, like, ability to do that while listening to, like, fake Peruvian music playing in the background. No, you say, when they say, oh, wow, you really know how to pick good pineapples, and I say, thanks. And when it happens to me, oh, this is, like, totally incredible. Well, does this throw a little bit of shade on the intellectual side?

I mean, if you believe that every behavior, not just of Kevin's, because what you're really saying is that the deep lesson of the Kevin story is that everyone is a Kevin. All of us are Kevin's all the time. For our worst and our best behaviors. Yeah.

That everything we choose to do is, in some sense, chosen for us. That if you knew enough stuff about anyone, you know what they're about to do next. Yeah. No.

No. But I readily admit... I'm not getting on board with this. At least we've done it in a few rounds, so we are able to do it.

When you look, I don't want you to be a futurist here, but when you look 500 years ahead, let's say that the things keep progressing in the way that you imagine, where we just keep etching, like, sort of chipping away at this idea of volition and free will. What do we do in that point? Do we not hold anyone accountable for anything, but we simply prescribe... Treatments?

I mean, what does that world look like to you? Treatments and or constraints. You fix the things you fix, and the ones that can't be fixed, you constrain things so that the damage can't be done, but it's done in a way... A car with broken brakes is incredibly dangerous and can't be on the streets.

And if you can't fix the brakes, you put the car in a garage, and, you know, you've intervened. But you don't invoke the concept of punishment of the car in there. And if at that point you say, oh my god, that's so dehumanizing to be that mechanistic, that's a hell of a lot better than sermonizing people into having free will over stuff that they have no control over. And we've done it.

People with treatment-resistant epilepsy, they're not allowed to drive. But you don't sit there and say they deserve not to be able to drive. You don't get, like, mobs of goiterous Yahoo peasants cheering as the driver's licenses are burned. No.

It's not their fault that they have this thing called a seizure. Nonetheless, if it's uncontrollable, they shouldn't be driving cars. And we have a therapeutic intervention here that's completely outside the realm of blame, justice, deserve, anything like that. Let's go back to Kevin.

At the end of the story, Pat asks Kevin what sense he makes of his punishment. I assume, A, that you wouldn't have punished him. Is that right? Correct.

But you notice what Kevin says. Kevin says, well, I thought the judge was a good judge and was... Fair. Fair.

He called it fair. So isn't it troubling to you that this person somehow was able to somehow feel blameworthy, I guess? But what this justice system is doing is it's sort of saying, you were bad. Maybe I was.

I feel sorry. I've got remorse. That's okay. And now we give you your freedom back.

Like, there's been a conversation here about your morality or immorality which you do not apparently want to have. I'm wondering whether that's a healthy thing. Healthy, mental healthy, healthy, or societally healthy? You feel bad by saying thank you to your shirt choice.

So there is some human need here. I don't know whether you might call it biological or not, but there is something the justice system is addressing that you seem to be taking out of the system. Yeah. Punishment is pleasurable.

It feels good to do the righteous thing. And it feels good to do that in a punishing, blaming way if you're brought up culturally, as most of us are, to have this notion of agency. But I think, Robert, this Robert, I think, Robert, let me know if I'm wrong, is that it doesn't just feel good personally. It's good for society on some level.

Like, do you want to live in a society where the concept of justice has been tossed out and we're in a mechanistic place? Well, how about taking it further? Don't we need to have belief in a moralizing and punishing God? Because why else would people be nice to each other?

I don't need to take it all the way there. I can go ahead. But we have laws. Laws are sort of in their way God-like and they rule over us.

So why not just say laws instead of God? You're right. They work better. As soon as you introduce the possibility of punishment into economic games, you evolve cooperation.

You do cross-cultural studies. And the more there's a belief in a punishing hell in a culture, the more generous people are in economic games. Yes, that stuff works. Yet, over and over, we've learned at least one domain where we've stepped outside of all of that, the epilepsy example, where nobody thinks of it in terms of it being like justice is being meted out when the driver's license is being taken away.

Yet, 500 years ago, somebody who would have been just as smart and just as introspective and just as reflective and maybe even had like a nice bleeding heart liberal NPR tote bag would have said, I'm sad about this, but who told them to? Oh my God, I thought we were on Fox. And that person nonetheless would have said, this is tragic and I feel so sorry for their family and all of that, but who told them to go sleep with Satan? Well, let me try it this way.

Is there anything in the Kevin Pack Walter story? Is there anyone in there who is being harmed or hurt by what you heard now? Well, he's paying a price. His wife paid a price.

Shame, imprisonment, you know, a terrible price here for what was simply a biological problem, but it's still very hard to imagine a world in which you don't get pissed off at people who do like crummy things and where you don't feel vaguely pleased when somebody says, whoa, nice t-shirt. So what you said is that the feelings that you have about the story, the loss to her of her husband's time, the shame of being put away for a while, you think that later on when the deeply biological explanation for this gets fully revealed in 100 years, say, people will be able to listen to the story we just heard and think, if they only knew. Absolutely. Big thanks to Robert Spolsky for chatting with us.

His latest book is called Behave, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, which has an extended argument about how there's no such thing as free will, definitely worth reading. It's called Behave. Thanks also to Pat Walters for recording that story and for Kevin for allowing us to air it again. And thanks to you guys for listening.

I'm Jad Abumrad. For Robert Kralwich and I, we will see you next time. Hi, this is Will Zodba and I'm calling from sunny Seattle, Washington. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrad.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor. Our staff includes Simon Adler, David Gebel, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielte, Robert Kralwich, Annie McEwan, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Arian Wack, and Molly Webster. With help from Soham Pawar, Rebecca Chasson, Neegar Fatali, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson.

Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. We'll see you next time.