Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry & the Culture, Mind and Brain Speaker Series
What is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design
By Peter Sterling, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Zoom
ABSTRACT:
Human design is constrained by natural selection to maximize performance for a given energy cost. The brain predicts what will be needed and controls metabolism, physiology, and behavior to deliver just enough, just in time. Preventing errors (allostasis), rather than correcting them (homeostasis), saves energy.
Our ancestors survived in challenging environments by learning across the lifespan. Our brain guides learning with an optimal rule that rewards each positive surprise with a pulse of dopamine, which we experience as a pulse of satisfaction. But we now obtain food and comfort without surprise and are thus deprived of frequent dopamine pulses. Lacking them, we grow restless and are driven to seek new sources. One route is through consumption: more food and drugs that produce great surges of dopamine. But the surprise that follows more can only be still more. Moreover, our systems adapt to more by reducing their sensitivities, which drives them into damaging spirals.
Standard medicine promotes drugs to treat addictions by blocking the reward circuit. But strategies, to prevent satisfaction, cannot work. Standard economics promotes “growth” for more “jobs”. But “jobs” devoid of long-term challenge are what now drive us to despair. To restore mental and bodily health, we must re-expand opportunities for small satisfactions via challenging activities and thereby rescue the reward system from its pathological regime.
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BIO:
Peter Sterling was born in New York City in 1940 and reared in a northern suburb. He attended Cornell University (1958-61), then a year in medical school (New York University), then earned a PhD in neurobiology (1966) at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Sterling next moved to Harvard Medical School (1966-69) for postdoctoral study and finally reached the University of Pennsylvania where he established his own laboratory to study fine scale neural circuits (1969-2009). Since closing his laboratory, Professor Sterling has wintered on a small farm in the mountains of western Panama (November-May) and summered in an agricultural region in the Connecticut River valley in western Massachusetts.
Beyond the laboratory, Sterling has been a social activist, for example, participating in the Freedom Rides (1961), and visiting various indigenous communities in Central America. These experiences led him to explore the neural mechanisms by which racism and social inequality impair health. He has written two books, Principles of Neural Design (2015, with Simon Laughlin) and What is Health? (2020). The origins of his social activism are described in reflection, "Why I Joined the Freedom Rides" in Current Biology (June 2021). Most recently he published with Michael Platt, "Why Deaths of Despair Are Increasing in the US and Not Other Industrial Nations—Insights from Neuroscience and Anthropology (JAMA Psychiatry. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.4209 Published online February 2, 2022).
