Dr. Sunita Sah

speaker

332 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 6 Feb

Dr. Sunita Sah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Sunita Sah (on defiance) · 22 Jan 2025 podcast

So I got the grades and it's like, why wouldn't you want to do medicine? Yeah. And I was like, well, I'm not sure it's really for me. But in the UK, it's a combined undergraduate and graduate degree. So you basically start at the age of 18 medical school and you finished. I was on the wards in my early 20s.

Biology, we had to do as eight levels before you go in. At that point, it was five years. That's it. But when you say first seen a patient, the first two years are preclinical. So you're learning things. Then the third year, you're on the wards and you're a clinical. By the time you're 22, 23, you're qualified. You're on the wards. Wow.

Here, you have to work so hard. I got all my education for free, which is pretty impressive. There's a small cost now in the UK, but I went through the whole of medical school. I mean, earning peanuts once you start as a junior doctor. But that aspect of working earlier is great. So you can get through. Making the decision so early, questionable.

Although I say my career is perfectly planned. Yeah. It was perfectly planned how I ended up here. But suddenly there was a lot of pressure and I lived up to those expectations of going to medical school and then finishing medical school and ended up working as a doctor.

I knew it wasn't for me. There were certain aspects I really loved, like the analytical part. I'm always analytical. I was always thinking, always questioning.

I'm really fascinated by people as well. So just talking to people, meeting people, learning about their lives. So that aspect was great. I wasn't actually into the blood and gore aspect. I remember talking to my teachers about that, like, oh, I don't know about medicine. And they were like, it's just two years preclinical. You're going to do that fine.

And then just get through the clinical years and then you can end up doing research.

So I was always interested in psychology. So when I was at medical school, I did my two years preclinical and then I took a year out to do what they call an intercalated degree in psychology. So they basically throw you in the fourth year of psychology and you catch up on the four years in that one year. But that was... Such a wonderful year. It was amazing.

That's when I started reading about Milgram Stanley's famous experiments, Obedience to Authority. I became fascinated with that, who did what we call the electric shock experiment. Yes, yes, yes. So Stanley Milgram was really fascinated by why the Nazis in World War II always kept saying, I was just following orders afterwards when they were being investigated for war crimes. Yeah.

And so he decided to set up this experiment, which was quite elaborate, where he would bring people in from the community and they would be an actor. It was designed as an experiment on memory. That's what they thought they were coming into. And whether giving someone electric shocks would help them learn better. Wow. So that was the setup.

First experiments were conducted at Yale in their basement, I think. So people would come in, they would meet somebody else that they thought was another participant, but it was actually an actor that they had. And they would rig it so the actor would be what they call the learner.

So then he would go into this room and the participant who was the teacher would see him being rigged up to what looked like an electric chair. And they would feel one of the shocks, 15 volts or something. So it all looks really real And then the teacher would go to another room and they would be sat in front of this box that was sort of labeled from 15 volts to 450 volts. Right.

And it would go up in 15 volt increments and it would be labeled. So right at the end, it was three X's, danger, huge shock.

There can be lethal shocks at that point. Then the teacher had to read out some word pairs and the learner had to memorize and repeat them back. And if they got something wrong, they would get a shock and then it would go up 15 volts.

So they had to read out the word pairs and the experimenter was usually in the room just sort of overseeing. And if the teacher protested, they would tell them, you know, please go on with the experiment. They had like four prompts to tell them, please go on. It's essential that you continue. The experiment requires that you go on.

And when psychiatrists predicted beforehand what would happen, they thought that most people would not go past 150 volts. And in fact, every single participant in the first experiment went past that.

ah and the actor is screaming about 150 volts there's thumping on the wall and there's verbal complaints i don't want to go on with this i don't want to go on oh my god get me out of here i refuse to go on with the experiment and it was also told to the participants he had a heart condition oh my god this is like Really horrifying. They predicted only about one in 1,000 would go up to 450 volts.

But they found that everyone pulled the lever for 150 volts. Everyone pulled it for 300 volts. And 66% went up to 450 volts. Holy shit. Even Milgram was shocked. Yeah. He was shocked at the results because he didn't think that he would find that. And he was like, I really thought this was something unique about German culture. But everybody is doing this.

As I said, I was always known for being an obedient daughter and student. But I was fascinated by people who could defy. And I was good friends with someone at high school. Let's call her Clara. She was able to defy. I started at St. Joseph's College, which is an all-girls Catholic school at the other side of town.

My dad thought that I'm going to get a good education there, so I would catch two buses to go to St. Joseph's. It was the roughest school I've been to. Oh, wow. So I don't know what he thought, but it was also a lot of fun.

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