ESPECIAL: O cérebro e o racismo

·55 min·5 clips

A journalist investigates how a neuroscience study on white individuals watching racist videos sparked her quest to understand the brain's role in prejudice.

Host Mônica Herculano, a journalist with a neuroscience postgraduate degree, introduces the episode by recounting how a 2022 study by Instituto Locomotiva sparked her interest in the brain's role in racism. The study exposed white, middle- and upper-class individuals to three videos depicting racial discrimination, measuring emotional impacts. She interviews six experts to answer questions about brain processing of prejudice. Neurocientist Álvaro Machado Dias explains the theory of mind and how empathy involves mental projection and bodily responses, noting that prejudiced individuals may only mentalize without bodily projection. Everton Castro, from Black in Neuro, describes an fMRI study showing the amygdala activates more to Black faces than white faces, indicating implicit bias before conscious thought. He links this to learned threat responses, comparing it to animal fear conditioning. Thiago Arzua, another Black in Neuro founder, discusses epigenetic inheritance of trauma in mice, suggesting environmental effects can be passed to offspring. Patrícia Abado critiques the WEIRD bias in neuroscience, where studies often use Western, educated samples as universal, and introduces neurociência populacional, which studies diverse populations. She emphasizes the need to contextualize neural data with environmental factors. Alexia Ferreira explains how chronic racism stress affects cortisol levels, the immune system, gut microbiota, and can reduce hippocampus size, altering brain structure. She notes social exclusion activates brain regions similar to physical pain. Verônica Albuquerque introduces neurociência cultural, which examines how culture shapes brain function, citing experiments showing cultural differences in perception. The episode concludes with experts debating whether neuroscience can combat racism, highlighting that while neural plasticity allows change, systemic social and educational interventions are crucial. The host reflects on the complexity of the topic and the episode's role as a starting point for broader discussion.

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