Dr. David Eagleman

Here's the thing.

Even with pancreatic cancer –

There's a whole lot of experience from my lab and other labs that shows that sometimes when something happens to someone that we don't like, the reward system actually comes on.

This was – Tanya Singh had a Nature paper on this showing that you actually show reward system activation when something happens, which is awful.

But –

One thing I have always noticed in the movies is that you're watching the James Bond movie or whatever.

And the bad guy, you know, falls from a 500 foot building and splats on the ground.

And you like, you know, eat your popcorn.

You don't care at all that something awful happened to somebody.

Whereas if James Bond, you know, gets grazed by a bully, if you're like, oh, poor guy.

It's weird how much we can dial this around where we simply don't care when bad things happen to other people.

Right, because was that woman your protagonist or your antagonist?

And just like in the movies, we have a completely different empathic response based on that.

Yeah, that's right.

I don't know the answer to that, except that people clearly are wired differently on that in terms of whether they think it's a zero-sum game or there's infinite resources.

Do we see it in animals?

Yes, actually.

There are experiments on capuchin monkeys where the monkey does something and then gets a piece of banana.

And then the other monkey does something in the neighboring cage and gets a piece of banana.

And so they're doing this.