Essentials: Understanding & Controlling Aggression

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are discussing aggression. I'm going to explain to you that there are several different types of aggression. For instance, reactive aggression versus proactive aggression, meaning sometimes people will be aggressive because they feel threatened or they are protecting those that they love who also feel threatened. There's also proactive aggression where people go out of their way to deliberately try and harm others. And there is indirect aggression, which is aggression not involving physical violence. For instance, shaming people and things of that sort. It turns out that there are different biological mechanisms underlying each of the different types of aggression. And today, I will define those for you. I'll talk about the neural circuits in the brain and body that mediate each of the different kinds of aggression. Talk about some of the hormones and peptides and neurotransmitters involved. I promise to make it all accessible to you, even if you do not have any biology or science background. I'm certain that by the end of the episode, you will come away with a much more thorough understanding of what this thing that we call aggression really is. And when you see it in other people, I think it will make more sense to you. And when you observe it in yourself or the impulse to engage in aggression, verbal or physical or otherwise, I hope that you'll understand it better as well. And of course, the tools that I will describe should allow you to modulate and control aggressive tendencies or predispositions to aggressiveness and just generally be able to engage with people in a more adaptive way overall. The context of aggression really matters. So there are instances where aggression is adaptive. For instance, a mother protecting her children. Of course, other forms of aggression, like unprovoked proactive aggression, somebody simply being violent to somebody else, even when unprovoked. Most of us cringe when we see that kind of behavior. It can even evoke aggression in people when they observe that kind of behavior. Many of you have probably heard the statement that I believe arises from pop psychology, not from formal academic psychology, that aggression is just sadness. It's a form of sadness that's amplified and it shows up as aggression. But when we look at the underlying biology and the peer-reviewed literature on this, nothing could be further from the truth. We have distinct circuits in the brain for aggression versus grief and mourning. Those are non-overlapping. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't be sad and aggressive or in a state of mourning and aggressive at the same time. But the idea that sadness and aggression are one in the same thing is simply not true. And by understanding that, or perhaps by understanding that irritability and aggression are not the same thing, you'll be in a much better position to apply some of the tools that we will talk about in this episode in order to be able to reduce or eliminate, or if it's adaptive to you, to modulate aggression. And yes, there are cases where modulating your aggression in some cases, even amplifying aggression can be adaptive. One of the names that's most associated with the formal study of aggression is none other than Conrad Lorenz. Conrad Lorenz studied so-called imprinting behaviors and fixed action pattern behaviors, patterns of behavior that could be evoked by a single stimulus. The idea that you can get a whole category of behaviors, like looking to somebody for comfort and only them, the idea that you could get a huge category of different behaviors in a bunch of different contexts triggered by just the presence of that person is remarkable because what it suggested and what turns out to be true is that there are neural circuits, not just individual brain areas, but collections of brain areas that work together to engage a pattern of behaviors. And that's the first fundamental principle that we need to define today, that when we talk about aggression, we're talking about activation of neural circuits, not individual brain areas, but neural circuits that get played out in sequence, like he's on a piano, but that playing out in sequence means that aggression is a verb, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it's a process, it's not an event. And as you'll see, that turns out to be very important in terms of thinking about how one can halt aggression, prevent it from happening before it's initiated, or maybe even prolonging aggression if that's what's needed. Now, Conrad Lorenz had no real knowledge of neural circuits. I mean, obviously he knew there was this thing that we call a brain and a nervous system, and he knew that there were chemicals in the brain and hormones and things of that sort that were likely to play a role, but he really didn't take any measures to define what the neural circuits were. But he did think about what sorts of underlying processes could drive something like aggression. And he talked about one particular feature that's especially important, and that's this notion of a pressure, the idea that, yes, certain hormones will bias somebody or an animal to be aggressive. Certain neurotransmitter states, and you'll learn what those are today, will bias somebody to be more or less aggressive. And yes, of course, there will be historical features based on their childhood, et cetera, et cetera.