https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=V6xBtZ3KKro
Well, I can tell you a little bit about the regulation of aggression. One of the things I studied, especially when I was in Montreal, was the development of antisocial behavior in children and in adolescents. Antisocial children, so they tend to be aggressive, antisocial children tend to turn into antisocial… there’s conduct disorder, technically speaking. Conduct disordered children tend to turn into conduct disordered adolescents, and then they tend to turn into antisocial and criminal adults. And so I can tell you a little bit about how that progresses, I think, because it’s quite interesting, and it isn’t what people generally think. So, the first thing is, if you want to be criminal, the best way to do it is to be really low in agreeableness and really low in conscientiousness. Because low in agreeableness means things are for me and not for you, and you’re not going to get me to do a damn thing that I don’t want to do, and I’ll stand my ground. And low in conscientiousness means you can do all the work, and I’ll sit back and take the benefits. And so if you have someone who’s really disagreeable and really unconscious, you have someone who’s starting to border on psychopath. And if you add high intelligence and high emotional stability to that, then you have someone who won’t work but will reap the benefits, who doesn’t give a damn about you, who’s assertive as hell and who’s smart. And a person like that’s also going to be charismatic, because extroverted, disagreeable people are kind of narcissistic. But they’ll put themselves forward strongly, and if they don’t show any signs of fear, that also indicates that they’re confident, and it’s easy for people to confuse that with competence. And that’s how psychopaths get away with what they’re doing, although they have to move from person to person, because their relation, their reputation will track them. So anyways, back to the development of aggression in children, the development of criminality in adults. Here’s how it seems to work, at least in part. It’s more complicated than this, but I’ll put in some of the sociological elements as well. So, if you take children and you group them together in age, age, in groups defined by age, so let’s say you have 32 year olds, 33 year olds, 34 year olds, all the way up to 18. And then you watch them interact, and you code their behavior for kicking, biting, fighting, and property theft, then what you’ll find is that the two year olds are by far the most aggressive of the lot. So that’s pretty interesting, you know, because you think, well, children are naturally peaceful, and if they’re aggressive it’s because they learn it, it’s like, no, that’s true for a small minority of children. But there’s a substantial number of children who are aggressive at two by nature. Most of them are male. Now that doesn’t mean most children are like that, because they’re not. Even if you look at two year olds who are the most aggressive human beings, most two year olds aren’t aggressive, but some of them are, and most of those are male. Okay, so then let’s say you identify this cohort of aggressive two year olds, and you track them across time, track them for the next two to four years, or the next, track them until they’re four years old. What you find is the vast majority of the hyper aggressive male two year olds get socialized perfectly well. So by the time they’re four, they’re temperamentally probably still more aggressive, but they’ve become civilized little monsters, so other people can tolerate them. And that means that they’ve had parents, or peers, or educational experiences, that enabled them to learn how to interact productively with other kids, and to bring their aggressive nature under control. Some of that seems to be mediated by the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play. And that’s one of the things that we know that that helps socialize rats, for example, it’s vital to them, but it also seems to really be good for socializing young kids, and rough and tumble play, which is something that adult males particularly like to do with young kids, by the way, not before nine months, because they’re just too little, but once they become ambulatory, and you know, kind of puppy-like, so that they’re a little bit more robust, then you can play a lot with them, and you can play with them right at the edge of danger too, which kids absolutely, they absolutely go nuts for that, they love that. So when I had little kids, I made this kind of wrestling ring out of these two couches that we had that would hook together, and I’d bring them on there, and you know, toss them up in the air and catch them, you know, eight, ten feet, no, no, no, no, a foot in the air and catch them, and they’d go like this, and then, you know, I’d catch them, and they’d laugh, and I’d throw them up, and they’re all freaked out, and then they’d laugh, and you know, so they’re learning trust with that in an embodied way, and they’re also learning, and this is from stretching them out, and wrestling them, and twisting them around, and letting them pull on your hair, and hit you, and all of those things, they learn deep in their bones exactly what can hurt them and what doesn’t, and you want to kind of push them to the edge, you know, so that they can tell the difference between what hurts and what’s still within the realm of the game, and you do the same thing when they’re wrestling with you, so they learn not to, you know, awkwardly stick their thumb in your eye, or do things that are actually painful, like grab your lip and pull it, you know, it’s like, no, no, you let go of my lip, you know, and so that seems to help regulate the aggressive impulses, and help the child find a more appropriate embodiment, you can think that what you’re doing in some sense when you’re rough and tumble playing with kids is teaching them how to dance, because that is what you’re doing, you know, you’re making them comfortable in their bodies, in all of its extension, and building in that kind of body fluency that you see in people who are well situated inside themselves, and so that’s something to really think about, you know, and it’s appalling, we know that the ability to engage in rough and tumble play among rats inhibits aggression, impulsive aggression among rats, we also know that if you deprive rats of the ability to, of the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play, they show prefrontal cortical developmental deficits, and manifest behaviours that are akin to attention deficit disorder, which you can then treat with Ritalin, and so one of the things that’s happening with boys, because they’re way more dosed with attention deficit disorder medication than girls, is that their natural proclivity to engage in robust and troublesome active play isn’t appropriate for a school environment, where you’re just supposed to sit down and shut up, and so the kids get hyperactive, and instead of letting them out to run around until they fall over half exhausted, which is exactly what you should do, you know, you medicate them so that their exploratory systems, which are, the activity of which is facilitated by the dopaminergic agonist, that’s the ADHD medication, suppresses the play function. It’s absolutely appalling, there’s no excuse for it, you know, but it’s a good indictment of the education system, because why in the world would you take six year old kids and get them to sit without moving for five hours, unless you want them to grow up fat and stupid, why in the world would you train them to do that?