back to indexLisa Feldman Barrett: Counterintuitive Ideas About How the Brain Works | Lex Fridman Podcast #129
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The following is a conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett,
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a professor of psychology at Northeastern University,
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and one of the most brilliant and bold thinkers and scientists
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I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with.
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She's the author of a book that revolutionized
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our understanding of emotion in the brain
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called How Emotions Are Made.
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And she's coming out with a new book called
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Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
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that you can and should preorder now.
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I got a chance to read it already,
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and it's one of the best short,
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whirlwind introductions to the human brain I've ever read.
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It comes out on November 17th,
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but again, if there's anybody worth supporting,
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it's Lisa, so please do preorder the book now.
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Lisa and I agreed to speak once again
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around the time of the book release,
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especially because we felt that this first conversation
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is good to release now,
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since we talk about the divisive time
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we're living through in the United States,
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leading up to the election.
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And she gives me a whole new way to think about it
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from a neuroscience perspective
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that is ultimately inspiring of empathy,
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compassion, and love.
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Quick mention of each sponsor,
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followed by some thoughts related to this episode.
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First sponsor is Athletic Greens,
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the all in one drink that I start every day with
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to cover all my nutritional bases
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that I don't otherwise get through my diet naturally.
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Second is Magic Spoon,
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low carb, keto friendly, delicious cereal
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that I reward myself with after a productive day.
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The cocoa flavor is my favorite.
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Third sponsor is Cash App,
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the app I use to send money to friends for food, drinks,
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and unfortunately, for the many bets I have lost to them.
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Please check out these sponsors in the description
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that the bold,
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first principles way that Lisa approaches
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our study of the brain is something that has inspired me
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ever since I learned about her work.
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And in fact, I invited her to speak at the AGI series
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I organized at MIT several years ago.
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But as a little twist, instead of a lecture,
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we did a conversation in front of the class.
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I think that was one of the early moments
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that led me to start this very podcast.
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It was scary and gratifying,
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which is exactly what life is all about.
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And it's kind of funny how life turns on little moments
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like these that at the time don't seem to be anything
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out of the ordinary.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
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or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett.
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Since we'll talk a lot about the brain today,
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do you think, let's ask the craziest question,
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do you think there's other intelligent life
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out there in the universe?
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Honestly, I've been asking myself lately
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if there's intelligent life on this planet.
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You know, I have to think probabilities suggest yes.
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And also, secretly, I think I just hope that's true.
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It would be really, I know scientists
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aren't supposed to have hopes and dreams,
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but I think it would be really cool.
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And I also think it would be really sad if it wasn't the case.
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If we really were alone, that would be,
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that would seem profoundly sad, I think.
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So it's exciting to you, not scary?
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Yeah, no, you know, I take a lot of comfort and curiosity.
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It's a great resource for dealing with stress.
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So I'm learning all about mushrooms and octopuses
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and, you know, all kinds of stuff.
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And so for me, this counts, I think, in the realm of awe.
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But also, I think I'm somebody who cultivates awe
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deliberately on purpose to feel like a speck, you know?
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I find it a relief occasionally.
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To feel small in a profoundly large and interesting universe.
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So, maybe to dig more technically on the question of intelligence,
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do you think it's difficult for intelligent life to arise
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like it did on Earth?
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From everything you've written and studied about the brain,
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how magical of a thing is it in terms of the odds it takes to arise?
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Yeah, so, you know, magic is just, don't get me wrong.
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I mean, I like a magic show as much as the next person.
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My husband was a magician at one time.
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But, you know, magic is just a bunch of stuff
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that we don't really understand how it works yet.
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So I would say from what I understand,
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there are some major steps in the course of evolution
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that at the beginning of life,
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the step from single cell to multicellular organisms,
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things like that, which are really not known.
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I think for me, the question is not so much what's the likelihood
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that it would happen again as much as what are the steps
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and how long would it take?
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And if it were to happen again on Earth,
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would we end up with the same menu of life forms
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that we currently have now?
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And I think the answer is probably no, right?
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There's just so much about evolution
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that is stochastic and driven by chance.
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But the question is whether that menu
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would be equally delicious,
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meaning like there'd be rich complexity of the kind of,
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like would we get dolphins and humans
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or whoever else falls in that category
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of weirdly intelligent, seemingly intelligent?
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However we define that.
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Well, I think that has to be true.
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If you just look at the range of creatures
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who've gone extinct.
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I mean, if you look at the range of creatures
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that are on the Earth now, it's incredible.
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And it's sort of tried to say that,
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but it actually is really incredible.
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Particularly, I don't know, I mean, animals,
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there are animals that seem really ordinary
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until you watch them closely
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and then they become miraculous,
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like certain types of birds,
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which do very miraculous things,
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build bowers and do dances
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and all these really funky things
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that are hard to explain
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with a standard evolutionary story,
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although people have them.
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Yeah, the birds are weird.
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They do a lot for mating purposes.
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They have a concept of beauty
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that I haven't quite, maybe you know much better,
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but it doesn't seem to fit evolutionary arguments well.
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Well, it depends, right?
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So I think you're talking about the evolution of beauty,
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the book that was written recently by,
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was it Frum, was that his name?
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Richard Frum, I think, at Yale.
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Oh, I'm sorry, no, I didn't know.
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Oh, it's a great book.
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It's very controversial, though,
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because he's making the argument
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that the question about birds and some other animals
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is why would they engage
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in such metabolically costly displays
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when it doesn't improve their fitness at all?
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And the answer that he gives is the answer that Darwin gave,
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which is sexual selection, not natural selection.
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But selection can occur for all kinds of reasons.
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There could be artificial selection,
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which is when we breed animals, right?
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Which is actually how Darwin,
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that observation helped Darwin come to the idea
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of natural selection.
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And then there's sexual selection,
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meaning, and the argument that,
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I think his name is Frum,
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makes is that it's the pleasure,
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the selection pressure is the pleasure of female birds.
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Which, as a woman, and as someone who studies affect,
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that's a great answer.
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I actually think there probably is natural,
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I think there is an aspect of natural selection to it,
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which he maybe hasn't considered.
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But you were saying the reason we brought up birds
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is the life we've got now seems to be quite incredible.
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Yeah, so he brought up birds,
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now seems to be quite incredible.
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Yeah, so you peek into the ocean,
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peek into the sky, there are miraculous creatures.
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Look at creatures who've gone extinct.
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And in science fiction stories,
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you couldn't dream up something as interesting.
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So my guess is that intelligent life evolves
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in many different ways, even on this planet.
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There isn't one form of intelligence.
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There's not one brain that gives you intelligence.
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There are lots of different brain structures
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that can give you intelligence.
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So my guess is that the menagerie
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might not look exactly the way that it looks now,
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but it would certainly be as interesting.
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But if we look at the human brain versus the brains,
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or whatever you call them,
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the mechanisms of intelligence in our ancestors,
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even early ancestors,
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that you write about, for example, in your new book,
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what's the difference between the fanciest brain we got,
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which is the human brain,
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and the ancestor brains that it came from?
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Yeah, I think it depends on how far back you want to go.
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You go all the way back, right, in your book.
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So what's the interesting comparison, would you say?
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Well, first of all, I wouldn't say that the human brain
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is the fanciest brain we've got.
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I mean, an octopus brain is pretty different
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and they can do some pretty amazing things
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that we cannot do.
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You know, we can't grow back limbs,
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we can't change color and texture,
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we can't comport ourselves and squeeze ourselves
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into a little crevice.
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I mean, these are things that we invent,
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these are like superhero abilities
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that we invent in stories, right?
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We can't do any of those things.
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And so the human brain is certainly,
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we can certainly do some things
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that other animals can't do.
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That seemed pretty impressive to us.
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But I would say that there are a number of animal brains
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which seem pretty impressive to me
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that can do interesting things
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and really impressive things that we can't do.
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I mean, with your work on how emotions are made and so on,
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you kind of repaint the view of the brain
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as less glamorous, I suppose,
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than you would otherwise think.
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Or like, I guess you draw a thread
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that connects all brains together
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in terms of homeostasis and all that kind of stuff.
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Yeah, I wouldn't say that the human brain
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is any less miraculous than anybody else would say.
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I just think that there are other brain structures
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which are also miraculous.
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And I also think that there are a number of things
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about the human brain which we share
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with other vertebrates, other animals with backbones.
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But that we share these miraculous things.
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But we can do some things in abundance.
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And we can also do some things with our brains together,
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working together that other animals can't do.
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Or at least we haven't discovered their ability to do it.
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Yeah, this social thing.
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That's one of the things you write about.
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How do you make sense of the fact,
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like the book Sapiens, and the fact that we're able
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to kind of connect, like network our brains together
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like you write about?
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I'll try to stop saying that.
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Is that like some kind of feature
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that's built into there?
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Is that unique to our human brains?
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Like how do you make sense of that?
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What I would say is that our ability
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to coordinate with each other is not unique to humans.
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There are lots of animals who can do that.
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But what we do with that coordination is unique
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because of some of the structural features in our brains.
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And it's not that other animals
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don't have those structural features.
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It's we have them in abundance.
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So the human brain is not larger
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than you would expect it to be for a primate of our size.
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If you took a chimpanzee and you grew it
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to the size of a human, that chimpanzee would have a brain
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that was the size of a human brain.
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So there's nothing special about our brain
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in terms of its size.
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There's nothing special about our brain
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in terms of the basic blueprint
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that builds our brain from an embryo
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is the basic blueprint that builds all mammalian brains
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and maybe even all vertebrate brains.
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It's just that because of its size
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and particularly because of the size
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of the cerebral cortex, which is a part
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that people mistakenly attribute to rationality.
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Is that where all the clever stuff happens?
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Well, no, it really isn't.
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And I will also say that lots of clever stuff happens
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in animals who don't have a cerebral cortex.
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But because of the size of the cerebral cortex
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and because of some of the features
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that are enhanced by that size,
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that gives us the capacity to do things
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like build civilizations and coordinate with each other,
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not just to manipulate the physical world,
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but to add to it in very profound ways.
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Like, other animals can cooperate with each other
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We draw a line in the sand and we make countries
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and then we create citizens and immigrants.
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I mean, the countries are centered around the concept
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Well, what do you think a citizen is and an immigrant?
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Those are ideas that we impose on reality
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and make them real.
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And then they have very, very serious and real effects,
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physical effects on people.
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What do you think about the idea
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that a bunch of people have written about,
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Dawkins with memes, which is like ideas are breeding.
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Like, we're just like the canvas for ideas to breed
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So this kind of network that you talk about of brains
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is just a little canvas for ideas
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to then compete against each other and so on.
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I think as a rhetorical tool, it's cool to think that way.
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So I think it was Michael Pollan.
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I don't remember if it was in the Botany of Desire,
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but it was in one of his early books on botany
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and gardening where he wrote about plants
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and he wrote about plants utilizing humans
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for their own evolutionary purposes.
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Which is kind of interesting.
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You can think about a human gut in a sense
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as a propagation device for the seeds of tomatoes
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and what have you.
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So it's kind of cool.
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So I think rhetorically it's an interesting device,
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but ideas are, as far as I know, invented by humans,
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propagated by humans.
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So I don't think they're separate from human brains
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in any way, although it is interesting
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to think about it that way.
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Well, of course, the ideas that are using your brain
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to communicate and write excellent books.
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And they basically picked you, Lisa,
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as an effective communicator and thereby are winning.
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So that's an interesting worldview
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to think that there's particular aspects of your brain
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that are conducive to certain sets of ideas
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and maybe those ideas will win out.
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Yeah, I think the way that I would say it really though
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is that there are many species of animals
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that influence each other's nervous systems,
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that regulate each other's nervous systems,
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and they mainly do it by physical means.
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They do it by chemicals, scent.
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They do it by, so termites and ants and bees,
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for example, use chemical scents.
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Mammals like rodents use scent
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and they also use hearing, audition,
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and that little bit of vision.
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Primates, nonhuman primates add vision, right?
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And I think everybody uses touch.
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Humans, as far as I know, are the only species
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that use ideas and words to regulate each other, right?
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I can text something to someone halfway around the world.
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They don't have to hear my voice.
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They don't have to see my face
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and I can have an effect on their nervous system.
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And ideas, the ideas that we communicate with words,
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I mean, words are in a sense a way
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for us to do mental telepathy with each other, right?
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I mean, I'm not the first person to say that obviously,
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but how do I control your heart rate?
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How do I control your breathing?
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How do I control your actions with words?
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It's because those words are communicating ideas.
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So you also write, I think, let's go back to the brain.
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You write that Plato gave us the idea
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that the human brain has three brains in it, three forces,
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which is kind of a compelling notion.
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First of all, what are the three parts of the brain
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and why do you disagree?
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So Plato's description of the psyche,
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which for the moment we'll just assume
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is the same as a mind.
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There are some scholars who would say a soul, a psyche,
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a mind, those aren't actually all the same thing
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in ancient Greece, but we'll just for now gloss over that.
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So Plato's idea was that,
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and it was a description of really about moral behavior
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and moral responsibility in humans.
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So the idea was that the human psyche can be described
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with a metaphor of two horses and a charioteer.
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So one horse for instincts,
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like feeding and fighting and fleeing and reproduction.
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I'm trying to control my salty language,
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which apparently they print in England.
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Like I actually tossed off a fairly.
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I was like, you printed that?
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I couldn't believe you printed that.
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Without like the stars or whatever?
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No, no, no, it was full print.
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They also printed a B word and it was really, yeah.
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Well, we should learn something from England.
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Indeed, anyways, but instincts.
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And then the other horse represents emotions.
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And then the charioteer represents rationality,
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which controls the two beasts, right?
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And fast forward a couple of centuries
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and in the middle of the 20th century,
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there was a very popular view of brain evolution,
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which suggested that you have this reptilian core,
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like an inner lizard brain for instincts.
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And then wrapped around that evolved,
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layer on top of that evolved a limbic system in mammals.
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So the novelty was in a mammalian brain,
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which bestowed mammals with, gave them emotions,
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the capacity for emotions.
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And then on top of that evolved a cerebral cortex,
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which in largely in primates, but very large in humans.
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And it's not that I personally disagree.
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It's that as far back as the 1960s,
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but really by the 1970s, it was shown pretty clearly
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with evidence from molecular genetics.
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So peering into cells in the brain
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to look at the molecular makeup of genes
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that the brain did not evolve that way.
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And the irony is that the idea of the three layered brain
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with an inner lizard that hijacks your behavior
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and causes you to do and say things
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that you would otherwise not,
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or maybe that you will regret later.
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That idea became very popular,
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was popularized by Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden,
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which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977,
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when it was already known pretty much
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in evolutionary neuroscience
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that the whole narrative was a myth.
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So what the narrative is on the way it evolved,
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but do you, I mean, again, it's that problem
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of it being a useful tool of conversation
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to say like there's a lizard brain
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and there's a, like if I get overly emotional on Twitter,
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that was the lizard brain and so on.
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No, I don't think it's useful.
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I think it's, I think that.
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Is it useful, is it accurate?
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I don't think it's accurate,
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and therefore I don't think it's useful.
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So here's what I would say.
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I think that the way I think about philosophy and science
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is that they are useful tools for living.
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And in order to be useful tools for living,
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they have to help you make good decisions.
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The triune brain, as it's called, this three layer brain,
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the idea that your brain is like an already baked cake
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and the cortex, cerebral cortex,
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just layered on top like icing.
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The idea, that idea is the foundation of the law
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in most Western countries.
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It's the foundation of economic theory
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and it's a great narrative.
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It sort of fits in with what I've been saying
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fits our intuitions about how we work.
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But it also, in addition to being wrong,
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it lets people off the hook for nasty behavior.
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And it also suggests that emotions
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can't be a source of wisdom, which they often are.
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In fact, you would not wanna be around someone
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who didn't have emotions.
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That would be, that's a psychopath.
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I mean, that's not someone you wanna really
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have that person deciding your outcome.
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So I guess my, and I could sort of go on and on and on,
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but my point is that I don't think,
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I don't think it's a useful narrative in the end.
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What's the more accurate view of the brain
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that we should use when we're thinking about it?
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I'll answer that in a second,
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but I'll say that even our notion of what an instinct is
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or what a reflex is, it's not quite right, right?
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So if you look at evidence from ecology, for example,
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and you look at animals in their ecological context,
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what you can see is that even things
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which are reflexes are very context sensitive.
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The brains of those animals are executing
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so called instinctual actions
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in a very, very context sensitive way.
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And so even when a physician takes the,
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it's like the idea of your patellar reflex
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where they hit your patellar tendon on your knee
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and you kick, the force with which you kick and so on
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is influenced by all kinds of things.
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A reflex isn't like a robotic response.
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And so I think a better way is a way that,
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to think about how brains work,
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is the way that matches our best understanding,
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our best scientific understanding,
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which I think is really cool
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because it's really counterintuitive.
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So how I came to this view,
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and I'm certainly not the only one who holds this view.
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I was reading work on neuroanatomy
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and the view that I'm about to tell you
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was strongly suggested by that.
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And then I was reading work in signal processing,
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like by electrical engineering.
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And similarly, the work suggested that,
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the research suggested that the brain worked this way.
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And I'll just say that I was reading
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across multiple literatures
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and they were who don't speak to each other
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and they were all pointing in this direction.
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And so far, although some of the details
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are still up for grabs,
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the general gist I think is I've not come across anything yet
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which really violates, and I'm looking.
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And so the idea is something like this.
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It's very counterintuitive.
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So the way to describe it is to say
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that your brain doesn't react to things in the world.
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It's not, to us it feels like our eyes
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are windows on the world.
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We see things, we hear things, we react to them.
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In psychology, we call this stimulus response.
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So your face, your voice is a stimulus to me.
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I receive input and then I react to it.
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And I might react very automatically, system one.
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But I also might execute some control
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where I maybe stop myself from saying something
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or doing something and in a more reflective way
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execute a different action, right?
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That's system two.
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The way the brain works though,
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is it's predicting all the time.
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It's constantly talking to itself,
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constantly talking to your body,
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and it's constantly predicting what's going on in the body
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and what's going on in the world and making predictions
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and the information from your body and from the world
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really confirm or correct those predictions.
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So fundamentally the thing that the brain does
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most of the time is just like talking to itself
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and predicting stuff about the world,
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not like this dumb thing that just senses and responds,
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senses and responds.
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Yeah, so the way to think about it is like this.
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You know, your brain is trapped in a dark silent box.
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Yeah, that's very romantic of you.
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Which is your skull.
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And the only information that it receives
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from your body and from the world, right,
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is through the senses, through the sense organs,
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your eyes, your ears,
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and you have sensory data that comes from your body
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that you're largely unaware of to your brain,
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which we call interoceptive,
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as opposed to exteroceptive, which is the world around you.
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But your brain is receiving sense data continuously,
link |
which are the effect of some set of causes.
link |
Your brain doesn't know the cause of these sense data.
link |
It's only receiving the effects of those causes,
link |
which are the data themselves.
link |
And so your brain has to solve what philosophers call
link |
an inverse inference problem.
link |
How do you know, when you only receive
link |
the effects of something,
link |
how do you know what caused those effects?
link |
So when there's a flash of light or a change in air pressure
link |
or a tug somewhere in your body,
link |
how does your brain know what caused those events
link |
so that it knows what to do next to keep you alive and well?
link |
And the answer is that your brain has one other source
link |
of information available to it,
link |
which is your past experience.
link |
It can reconstitute in its wiring past experiences,
link |
and it can combine those past experiences in novel ways.
link |
And so we have lots of names for this in psychology.
link |
We call it memory.
link |
We call it perceptual inference.
link |
We call it simulation.
link |
It's also, we call it concepts or conceptual knowledge.
link |
We call it prediction.
link |
Basically, if we were to stop the world right now,
link |
stop time, your brain is in a state,
link |
and it's representing what it believes
link |
is going on in your body and in the world.
link |
And it's predicting what will happen next
link |
based on past experience, right?
link |
Probabilistically, what's most likely to happen.
link |
And it begins to prepare your action,
link |
and it begins to prepare your experience based,
link |
so it's anticipating the sense data it's going to receive.
link |
And then when those data come in,
link |
they either confirm that prediction
link |
and your action executes
link |
because the plan's already been made,
link |
or there's some sense data that your brain didn't predict
link |
that's unexpected, and your brain takes it in.
link |
We say encodes it.
link |
We have a fancy name for that.
link |
We call it learning.
link |
Your brain learns,
link |
and it updates its storehouse of knowledge,
link |
which we call an internal model
link |
so that you can predict better next time.
link |
And it turns out that predicting and correcting,
link |
predicting and correcting is a much more metabolically
link |
efficient way to run a system
link |
than constantly reacting all the time.
link |
Because if you're constantly reacting,
link |
it means you can't anticipate in any way
link |
what's going to happen.
link |
And so the amount of uncertainty that you have to deal with
link |
is overwhelming to a nervous system.
link |
Metabolically costly.
link |
And so what is a reflex?
link |
A reflex is when your brain doesn't check
link |
against the sense data.
link |
That the potential cost to you is so great,
link |
maybe because your life is threatened,
link |
that your brain makes the prediction
link |
and executes the action without checking.
link |
Yeah, so but prediction is still at the core.
link |
That's a beautiful vision of the brain.
link |
I wonder, from almost an AI perspective,
link |
but just computationally,
link |
is the brain just mostly a prediction machine then?
link |
Like is the perception just the nice little feature
link |
Like the, both the integration
link |
of new perceptual information.
link |
I wonder how big of an impressive system is that
link |
relative to just the big predictor, model constructor.
link |
Well, I think that we can look to evolution for that,
link |
for one answer, which is that when you go back,
link |
you know, 550 million years, give or take,
link |
we, you know, the world was populated by creatures,
link |
really ruled by creatures without brains.
link |
And, you know, that's a biological statement,
link |
not a political statement.
link |
Really ruled with creatures with a.
link |
You calling dinosaurs dumb?
link |
You're talking about like.
link |
Oh no, I'm not talking about dinosaurs, honey.
link |
I'm talking way back, further back than that.
link |
Really these, there are these little,
link |
little creatures called amphioxus,
link |
which is the modern, it's a, or a lancet.
link |
That's the modern animal,
link |
but it's an animal that scientists believe is very similar
link |
the common ancestor that we share with invertebrates
link |
because, basically because of the tracing back,
link |
the molecular genetics and cells.
link |
And that animal had no brain.
link |
It had some cells that would later turn into a brain,
link |
but in that animal, there's no brain,
link |
but that animal also had no head,
link |
and it had no eyes, and it had no ears,
link |
and it had really, really no senses for the most part.
link |
It had very, very limited sense of touch.
link |
It had an eye spot for, not for seeing,
link |
but just for entraining to circadian rhythm,
link |
to light and dark.
link |
And it had no hearing.
link |
It had a vestibular cell
link |
so that it could keep upright in the water.
link |
So at the time, we're talking evolutionary scale here,
link |
so give or take some 100 million years or something,
link |
but at the time, what are the vertebrate,
link |
like when a backbone evolved and a brain evolved,
link |
a full brain, that was when a head evolved with sense organs
link |
and when that's when your viscera,
link |
like internal systems involved.
link |
So the answer I would say is that senses,
link |
motor neuroscientists,
link |
people who study the control of motor behavior
link |
believe that senses evolved in the service of motor action.
link |
So the idea is that,
link |
like what triggered, what was the big evolutionary change?
link |
What was the big pressure that made it useful
link |
to have eyes and ears and a visual system
link |
and an auditory system and a brain basically?
link |
And the answer that is commonly entertained right now
link |
is that it was predation,
link |
that when at some point an animal evolved
link |
that deliberately ate another animal
link |
and this launched an arms race between predators and prey
link |
and it became very useful to have senses, right?
link |
So these little amphioxies don't really have,
link |
they're not aware of their environment very much, really.
link |
And so being able to look up ahead and ask yourself,
link |
should I eat that or will it eat me is a very useful thing.
link |
So the idea is that sense data
link |
is not there for consciousness.
link |
It didn't evolve for the purposes of consciousness.
link |
It didn't evolve for the purposes of experiencing anything.
link |
It evolved to be in the service of motor control.
link |
However, maybe it's useful.
link |
This is why scientists sometimes avoid questions
link |
about why things evolved.
link |
This is what philosophers call this teleology.
link |
You might be able to say something about how things evolve,
link |
but not necessarily why.
link |
We don't really know the why.
link |
That's all speculation.
link |
But the why is kind of nice here.
link |
The interesting thing is,
link |
that was the first element of social interaction is,
link |
am I gonna eat you or are you gonna eat me?
link |
And for that, it's useful to be able to see each other,
link |
That's kind of fascinating that there was a time
link |
when life didn't eat each other.
link |
Or they did by accident.
link |
So an amphioxus, for example,
link |
it kind of like gyrates in the water,
link |
and then it plants itself in the sand
link |
like a living blade of grass,
link |
and then it just filters whatever comes into its mouth.
link |
So it is eating, but it's not actively hunting.
link |
And when the concentration of food decreases,
link |
the amphioxus can sense this.
link |
And so it basically wriggles itself randomly
link |
to some other spot,
link |
which probabilistically will have more food
link |
than wherever it is.
link |
So it's not guiding its actions on the basis of,
link |
we would say there's no real intentional action
link |
in the traditional sense.
link |
Speaking of intentional action, and if the brain is,
link |
if prediction is indeed a core component of the brain,
link |
let me ask you a question that scientists also hate
link |
is about free will.
link |
So how does, do you think about free will much?
link |
How does that fit into this, into your view of the brain?
link |
Why does it feel like we make decisions in this world?
link |
This is a hard, we scientists hate this,
link |
this is a hard question we don't have the answer to.
link |
Have you taken a side?
link |
I think I have. Do you have free will?
link |
I think I have taken a side,
link |
but I don't put a lot of stock in my own intuitions
link |
or anybody's intuitions about the cause of things.
link |
One thing we know about the brain for sure
link |
is that the brain creates experiences for us.
link |
My brain creates experiences for me,
link |
your brain creates experiences for you
link |
in a way that lures you to believe that those experiences
link |
actually reveals the way that it works,
link |
So you don't trust your own intuition about free will?
link |
Not really, not really.
link |
No, I mean, no, but I am also somewhat persuaded by,
link |
I think Dan Dennett wrote at one point,
link |
the philosopher Dan Dennett wrote at one point that it's,
link |
I can't say it as eloquently as him,
link |
but people obviously have free will,
link |
they are obviously making choices.
link |
So there is this observation that we're not robots
link |
and we can do some things
link |
like a little more sophisticated than an amphioxus.
link |
So here's what I would say.
link |
I would say that your predictions,
link |
your internal model that's running right now,
link |
your ability to understand the sounds that I'm making
link |
and attach them to ideas is based on the fact
link |
that you have years of experience
link |
knowing what these sounds mean
link |
in a particular statistical pattern, right?
link |
I mean, that's how you can understand the words
link |
that are coming out of my mouth.
link |
Right, I think we did this once before too, didn't we?
link |
I don't know, I would have to access my memory module.
link |
I think when I was in your, when I.
link |
Yeah, I think we did it just like that actually, so bravo.
link |
Wow, I have to go look back to the tape.
link |
Yeah, anyways, the idea though
link |
is that your brain is using past experience
link |
and it can use past experience in,
link |
so it's remembering, but you're not consciously remembering.
link |
It's basically re implementing prior experiences
link |
as a way of predicting what's gonna happen next.
link |
And it can do something called conceptual combination,
link |
which is it can take bits and pieces of the past
link |
and combine it in new ways.
link |
So you can experience and make sense of things
link |
that you've never encountered before
link |
because you've encountered something similar to them.
link |
And so a brain in a sense is not just,
link |
doesn't just contain information.
link |
It is information gaining,
link |
meaning it can create new information
link |
by this generative process.
link |
So in a sense, you could say, well,
link |
that maybe that's a source of free will.
link |
But I think really where free will comes from
link |
or the kind of free will that I think
link |
is worth having a conversation about
link |
involves cultivating experiences for yourself
link |
that change your internal model.
link |
When you were born and you were raised
link |
in a particular context, your brain wired itself
link |
to your surroundings, to your physical surroundings
link |
and also to your social surroundings.
link |
So you were handed an internal model basically.
link |
But when you grow up,
link |
the more control you have over where you are
link |
and what you do, you can cultivate new experiences
link |
And those new experiences can change your internal model.
link |
And you can actually practice those experiences
link |
in a way that makes them automatic,
link |
meaning it makes it easier for the brain,
link |
your brain to make them again.
link |
And I think that that is something like
link |
what you would call free will.
link |
You aren't responsible for the model that you were handed,
link |
that someone, your caregivers cultivated a model
link |
You're not responsible for that model,
link |
but you are responsible for the one you have now.
link |
You can choose, you choose what you expose yourself to.
link |
You choose how you spend your time.
link |
Not everybody has choice over everything,
link |
but everybody has a little bit of choice.
link |
And so I think that is something that I think
link |
is arguably called free will.
link |
Yeah, the ripple effects of the billions of decisions
link |
you make early on in life are so great
link |
that even if it's not,
link |
even if it's like all deterministic,
link |
just the amount of possibilities that are created
link |
and then the focusing on those possibilities
link |
into a single trajectory,
link |
that somewhere within that, that's free will.
link |
Even if it's all deterministic,
link |
that might as well be just the number of choices
link |
that are possible and the fact that you just make
link |
one trajectory to those set of choices
link |
seems to be like something like
link |
they'll be called free will.
link |
But it's still kind of sad to think like
link |
there doesn't seem to be a place
link |
where there's magic in there,
link |
where it is all just the computer.
link |
Well, there's lots of magic, I would say, so far,
link |
because we don't really understand
link |
how all of this is exactly played out at a,
link |
I mean, scientists are working hard
link |
and disagree about some of the details
link |
under the hood of what I just described,
link |
but I think there's quite a bit of magic actually.
link |
And also there's also stochastic firing of,
link |
neurons don't, they're not purely digital
link |
in the sense that there is,
link |
there's also analog communication between neurons,
link |
So it's not just with firing of axons.
link |
And some of that, there are other ways to communicate.
link |
And also there's noise in the system
link |
and the noise is there for a really good reason.
link |
And that is the more variability there is,
link |
the more potential there is for your brain
link |
to be able to be information bearing.
link |
So basically, there are some animals
link |
that have clusters of cells.
link |
The only job is to inject noise.
link |
You know, into their neural patterns.
link |
So maybe noise is the source of free will.
link |
So you can think about stochasticity or noise
link |
as a source of free will,
link |
or you can think of conceptual combination
link |
as a source of free will.
link |
You can certainly think about cultivating,
link |
you know, you can't reach back into your past
link |
and change your past.
link |
You know, people try by psychotherapy and so on,
link |
but what you can do is change your present,
link |
which becomes your past.
link |
So one way to think about it is that you're continuously,
link |
this is a colleague of mine, a friend of mine said,
link |
so what you're saying is that people
link |
are continually cultivating their past.
link |
And I was like, that's very poetic.
link |
Yes, you are continually cultivating your past
link |
as a means of controlling your future.
link |
So you think, yeah, I guess the construction
link |
of the mental model that you use for prediction
link |
ultimately contains within it your perception of the past,
link |
like the way you interpret the past,
link |
or even just the entirety of your narrative about the past.
link |
So you're constantly rewriting the story of your past.
link |
That's one poetic and also just awe inspiring.
link |
What about the other thing you talk about?
link |
You've mentioned about sensory perception
link |
as a thing that like is just,
link |
you have to infer about the sources of the thing
link |
that you have perceived through your senses.
link |
So let me ask another ridiculous question.
link |
Is anything real at all?
link |
Like, how do we know it's real?
link |
How do we make sense of the fact that just like you said,
link |
there's this brain sitting alone in the darkness
link |
trying to perceive the world.
link |
How do we know that the world is out there to be perceived?
link |
Yeah, so I don't think that you should be asking questions
link |
like that without passing a joint.
link |
Right, no, for sure.
link |
I actually did before this, so I apologize.
link |
Okay, no, well, that's okay.
link |
You apologize for not sharing.
link |
So, I mean, here's what I would say.
link |
What I would say is that the reason why
link |
we can be pretty sure that there's a there there
link |
is that the structure of the information in the world,
link |
what we call statistical regularities
link |
in sights and sounds and so on,
link |
and the structure of the information
link |
that comes from your body, it's not random stuff.
link |
There's a structure to it.
link |
There's a spatial structure and a temporal structure.
link |
And that spatial and temporal structure wires your brain.
link |
So an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain.
link |
It's a brain that is waiting for wiring instructions
link |
And it must receive those wiring instructions
link |
to develop in a typical way.
link |
So, for example, when a newborn is born,
link |
when a newborn is born, when a baby is born,
link |
the baby can't see very well
link |
because the visual system in that baby's brain
link |
The retina of your eye, which actually is part of your brain,
link |
has to be stimulated with photons of light.
link |
If it's not, the baby won't develop normally
link |
to be able to see in a neurotypical way.
link |
Same thing is true for hearing.
link |
The same thing is true really for all your senses.
link |
So the point is that the physical world
link |
the physical world, the sense data from the physical world
link |
wires your brain so that you have an internal model
link |
of that world so that your brain can predict well
link |
to keep you alive and well and allow you to thrive.
link |
That's fascinating that the brain is waiting
link |
for a very specific kind of set of instructions
link |
Like not the specific,
link |
but a very specific kind of instructions.
link |
So scientists call it expectable input.
link |
The brain needs some input in order to develop normally.
link |
And we are genetically, as I say in the book,
link |
we have the kind of nature that requires nurture.
link |
We can't develop normally without sensory input
link |
from the world and from the body.
link |
And what's really interesting about humans
link |
and some other animals too, but really seriously in humans,
link |
is the input that we need is not just physical.
link |
We, in order for an infant, a human infant
link |
to develop normally, that infant needs eye contact, touch.
link |
It needs certain types of smells.
link |
It needs to be cuddled.
link |
So without social input,
link |
that infant's brain will not wire itself
link |
in a neurotypical way.
link |
And again, I would say there are lots
link |
of cultural patterns of caring for an infant.
link |
It's not like the infant has to be cared for in one way.
link |
Whatever the social environment is for an infant,
link |
that will be reflected in that infant's internal model.
link |
So we have lots of different cultures,
link |
lots of different ways of rearing children.
link |
And that's an advantage for our species,
link |
although we don't always experience it that way.
link |
That is an advantage for our species.
link |
But if you just feed and water a baby
link |
without all the extra social doodads,
link |
what you get is a profoundly impaired human.
link |
Yeah, but nevertheless, you're kind of saying
link |
that the physical reality has a consistent thing
link |
throughout that keeps feeding these set
link |
of sensory information that our brains are constructed for.
link |
Yeah, the cool thing though,
link |
is that if you change the consistency,
link |
if you change the statistical regularities,
link |
so prediction error, your brain can learn it.
link |
It's expensive for your brain to learn it.
link |
And it takes a while for the brain
link |
to get really automated with it.
link |
But you had a wonderful conversation with David Edelman,
link |
who just published a book about this
link |
and gave lots and lots of really very, very cool examples.
link |
Some of which I actually discussed
link |
in How Emotions Were Made,
link |
but not obviously to the extent that he did in his book.
link |
It's a fascinating book,
link |
but it speaks to the point that your internal model
link |
is always under construction.
link |
And therefore, you always can modify your experience.
link |
I wonder what the limits are.
link |
Like if we put it on Mars or if we put it in virtual reality
link |
or if we sit at home during a pandemic
link |
and we spend most of our day on Twitter and TikTok,
link |
like I wonder where the breaking point,
link |
like the limitations of the brain's capacity
link |
to properly continue wiring itself.
link |
Well, I think what I would say is that
link |
there are different ways to specify your question, right?
link |
Like one way to specify it
link |
would be the way that David phrases it,
link |
which is can we create a new sense?
link |
Like can we create a new sensory modality?
link |
How hard would that be?
link |
What are the limits in doing that?
link |
But another way to say it is what happens to a brain
link |
when you remove some of those statistical regularities,
link |
Like what happens to an adult brain
link |
when you remove some of the statistical patterns
link |
that were there and they're not there anymore?
link |
Are you talking about in the environment
link |
or in the actual like you remove eyesight, for example?
link |
I mean, basically one way to limit the inputs to your brain
link |
are to stay home and protect yourself.
link |
Another way is to put someone in solitary confinement.
link |
Another way is to stick them in a nursing home.
link |
Well, not all nursing homes, but there are some, right?
link |
Which really are where people are somewhat impoverished
link |
in the interactions and the variety
link |
of sensory stimulation that they get.
link |
Another way is that you lose a sense, right?
link |
But the point is I think that the human brain
link |
really likes variety, to say it in a sort of Cartesian way.
link |
Variety is a good thing for a brain.
link |
And there are risks that you take
link |
when you restrict what you expose yourself to.
link |
Yeah, you know, there's all this talk of diversity.
link |
The brain loves it to the fullest definition
link |
and degree of diversity.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I would say the only thing,
link |
basically human brains thrive on diversity.
link |
The only place where we seem to have difficulty
link |
with diversity is with each other, right?
link |
But who wants to eat the same food every day?
link |
Who wants to wear the same clothes every day?
link |
I mean, my husband, if you ask him to close his eyes,
link |
he won't be able to tell you what he's wearing, right?
link |
He'll buy seven shirts of exactly the same style
link |
in different colors, but they are in different colors, right?
link |
It's not like he's wearing.
link |
How would you then explain my brain,
link |
which is terrified of choice
link |
and therefore wear the same thing every time?
link |
Well, you must be getting your diversity.
link |
Well, first of all, you are a fairly sharp dresser,
link |
so there is that, but you're getting some reinforcement
link |
for dressing the way you do.
link |
But no, your brain must get diversity in other places.
link |
But I think we, you know,
link |
so the two most expensive things your brain can do,
link |
metabolically speaking, is move your body and learn.
link |
And learn something new.
link |
So novelty, that is diversity, right,
link |
comes at a cost, a metabolic cost,
link |
but it's a cost, it's an investment that gives returns.
link |
And in general, people vary
link |
in how much they like novelty, unexpected things.
link |
Some people really like it.
link |
Some people really don't like it,
link |
and there's everybody in between.
link |
But in general, we don't eat the same thing every day.
link |
We don't usually do exactly the same thing
link |
in exactly the same order,
link |
in exactly the same place every day.
link |
The only place we have difficulty
link |
with diversity is in each other.
link |
And then we have considerable problems there,
link |
I would say, as a species.
link |
Let me ask, I don't know if you're familiar
link |
with Donald Hoffman's work about questions of reality.
link |
What are your thoughts of the possibility
link |
that the very thing we've been talking about,
link |
of the brain wiring itself from birth
link |
to a particular set of inputs,
link |
is just a little slice of reality,
link |
that there is something much bigger out there
link |
that we humans, with our cognition, cognitive capabilities,
link |
is just not even perceiving.
link |
The thing we're perceiving is just a crappy,
link |
like Windows 95 interface onto a much bigger,
link |
richer set of complex physics
link |
that we're not even in touch with.
link |
Well, without getting too metaphysical about it,
link |
I think we know for sure.
link |
It doesn't have to be the crappy version of anything,
link |
but we definitely have a limited,
link |
we have a set of senses that are limited
link |
in very physical ways,
link |
and we're clearly not perceiving everything
link |
there is to perceive.
link |
I mean, it's just, it's not that hard.
link |
We can't, without special,
link |
why do we invent scientific tools?
link |
It's so that we can overcome our senses
link |
and experience things that we couldn't otherwise,
link |
whether they are different parts of the visual spectrum,
link |
the light spectrum,
link |
or things that are too microscopically small for us to see
link |
or too far away for us to see.
link |
So clearly, we're only getting a slice,
link |
the interesting or potentially sad thing about humans
link |
is that we, whatever we experience,
link |
we think there's a natural reason for experiencing it,
link |
and we think it's obvious and natural
link |
and it must be this way,
link |
and that all the other stuff isn't important.
link |
And that's clearly not true.
link |
Many of the things that we think of as natural
link |
they're certainly real, but we've created them.
link |
They certainly have very real impacts,
link |
but we've created those impacts.
link |
And we also know that there are many things
link |
outside of our awareness that have tremendous influence
link |
on what we experience and what we do.
link |
So there's no question that that's true.
link |
I mean, just, it's,
link |
but the extent is how, really the question is,
link |
how fantastical is it?
link |
Yeah, like what, you know, a lot of people ask me,
link |
am I allowed to say this?
link |
I think I'm allowed to say this.
link |
I've eaten shrooms a couple of times,
link |
but I haven't gone the full,
link |
I'm talking to a few researchers in psychedelics.
link |
It's an interesting scientifically place.
link |
Like what is the portal you're entering
link |
when you take psychedelics?
link |
Or another way to ask is like dreams.
link |
So let me tell you what I think,
link |
which is based on nothing.
link |
Like this is based on my, right, so I don't.
link |
It's based on my, I'm guessing now,
link |
based on what I do know, I would say.
link |
But I think that, well, think about what happens.
link |
So you're running, your brain's running this internal model
link |
and it's all outside of your awareness.
link |
You see the, you feel the products,
link |
but you don't sense the,
link |
you have no awareness of the mechanics of it, right?
link |
It's going on all the time.
link |
And so one thing that's going on all the time
link |
that you're completely unaware of
link |
is that when your brain,
link |
your brain is basically asking itself,
link |
figuratively speaking, not literally, right?
link |
Like how is, the last time I was in this sensory array
link |
with this stuff going on in my body
link |
and this chain of events which just occurred,
link |
what did I do next?
link |
What did I feel next?
link |
What did I see next?
link |
It doesn't come up with one answer.
link |
It comes up with a distribution of it, possible answers.
link |
And then there has to be some selection process.
link |
And so you have a network in your brain,
link |
a sub network in your brain, a population of neurons
link |
that helps to choose.
link |
It's not, I'm not talking about a homunculus in your brain
link |
or anything silly like that.
link |
This is not the soul.
link |
It's not the center of yourself or anything like that.
link |
But there is a set of neurons
link |
that weighs the probabilities
link |
and helps to select or narrow the field, okay?
link |
And that network is working all the time.
link |
It's actually called the control network,
link |
the executive control network,
link |
or you can call it a frontoparietal
link |
because the regions of the brain that make it up
link |
are in the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe.
link |
There are also parts that belong
link |
to the subcortical parts of your brain.
link |
It doesn't really matter.
link |
The point is that there is this network
link |
and it is working all the time.
link |
Whether or not you feel in control,
link |
whether or not you feel like you're expending effort
link |
doesn't really matter.
link |
It's on all the time, except when you sleep.
link |
When you sleep, it's a little bit relaxed.
link |
And so think about what's happening when you sleep.
link |
When you sleep, the external world recedes,
link |
the sense data from,
link |
so basically your model becomes a little bit,
link |
the tethers from the world are loosened.
link |
And this network, which is involved in,
link |
you know, maybe weeding out unrealistic things
link |
is a little bit quiet.
link |
So use your dreams are really your internal model
link |
that's unconstrained by the immediate world.
link |
Except, so you can do things that you can't do
link |
in real life, in your dreams, right?
link |
Like I, for example, when I fly on my back in a dream,
link |
I'm much faster than when I fly on my front.
link |
Don't ask me why, I don't know.
link |
Or when you're laying on your back in your dream.
link |
No, when I'm in my dream and flying in a dream,
link |
I am much faster flyer in the air.
link |
Not often, but I, You talk about it like you,
link |
I don't think I've flown for many years.
link |
Well, you must try it.
link |
I've flown, I've fallen.
link |
Yeah, but you're talking about like airplane.
link |
Yeah, I fly in my dreams.
link |
And I'm way faster, right? On your back.
link |
On my back, way faster.
link |
Now you can say, well, you know,
link |
you never flew in your life.
link |
Right, it's conceptual combination.
link |
I mean, I've flown in an airplane
link |
and I've seen birds fly
link |
and I've watched movies of people flying
link |
and I know Superman probably flies,
link |
I don't know if he flies faster on his back, but.
link |
He's, I've never seen Superman.
link |
He's always flying on his front, right, but yeah.
link |
But anyways, my point is that, you know,
link |
all of this stuff really, all of these experiences
link |
really become part of your internal model.
link |
The thing is that when you're asleep,
link |
your internal model is still being constrained
link |
Your brain's always attached to your body.
link |
It's always receiving sense data from your body.
link |
You're mostly never aware of it
link |
unless you run up the stairs
link |
or, you know, maybe you are ill in some way.
link |
But you're mostly not aware of it,
link |
which is a really good thing.
link |
Because if you were, you know,
link |
you'd never pay attention to anything
link |
outside your own skin ever again.
link |
Like right now, you seem like
link |
you're sitting there very calmly,
link |
but you have a virtual drama, right?
link |
It's like an opera going on inside your body.
link |
And so I think that one of the things
link |
that happens when people take psilocybin
link |
or take, you know, ketamine, for example,
link |
is that the tethers are completely removed.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
And that's why it's helpful to have a guide, right?
link |
Because the guide is giving you sense data
link |
to steer that internal model
link |
so that it doesn't go completely off the rails.
link |
Again, that wiring to the other brain,
link |
that's the guide, is at least a tiny little tether.
link |
Let's talk about emotion a little bit, if we could.
link |
Emotion comes up often.
link |
And I have never spoken with anybody
link |
who has a clarity about emotion
link |
from a biological and neuroscience perspective that you do.
link |
And I'm not sure I fully know how to,
link |
as a, I mentioned this way too much,
link |
but as somebody who was born in the Soviet Union
link |
and romanticizes basically everything,
link |
talks about love nonstop,
link |
you know, emotion is a, I don't know what to make of it.
link |
I don't know what to,
link |
so maybe let's just try to talk about it.
link |
I mean, from a neuroscience perspective,
link |
we talked about it a little bit last time,
link |
your book covers it, how emotions are made,
link |
but what are some misconceptions we writers of poetry,
link |
we romanticizing humans have about emotion
link |
that we should move away from before
link |
to think about emotion from both a scientific
link |
and an engineering perspective?
link |
Yeah, so there is a common view of emotion in the West.
link |
The caricature of that view is that,
link |
you know, we have an inner beast, right?
link |
Your limbic system, your inner lizard,
link |
we have an inner beast
link |
and that comes baked in to the brain at birth.
link |
So you've got circuits for anger, sadness, fear.
link |
It's interesting that they all have English names,
link |
But, and they're there
link |
and they're triggered by things in the world.
link |
And then they cause you to do and say,
link |
and so when your fear circuit is triggered,
link |
you widen your eyes, you gasp,
link |
your heart rate goes up,
link |
you prepare to flee or to freeze.
link |
And these are modal responses.
link |
They're not the only responses that you give,
link |
but on average, they're the prototypical responses.
link |
And that's the view of emotion in the law.
link |
That's the view, you know,
link |
that emotions are these profoundly unhelpful things
link |
that are obligatory kind of like reflexes.
link |
The problem with that view
link |
is that it doesn't comport to the evidence.
link |
And it doesn't really matter.
link |
The evidence actually lines up beautifully with each other.
link |
It just doesn't line up with that view.
link |
And it doesn't matter whether you're measuring people's faces,
link |
facial movements, or you're measuring their body movements,
link |
or you're measuring their peripheral physiology,
link |
or you're measuring their brains
link |
or their voices or whatever.
link |
Pick any output that you wanna measure
link |
and any system you wanna measure,
link |
and you don't really find strong evidence for this.
link |
And I say this as somebody who not only has reviewed
link |
really thousands of articles and run big meta analyses,
link |
which are statistical summaries of published papers,
link |
but also as someone who has sent teams of researchers
link |
to small scale cultures,
link |
you know, remote cultures,
link |
which are very different from urban,
link |
large scale cultures like ours.
link |
And one culture that we visited,
link |
and I say we euphemistically because I myself didn't go
link |
because I only had two research permits,
link |
and I gave them to my students
link |
because I felt like it was better for them
link |
to have that experience
link |
and more formative for them to have that experience.
link |
But I was in contact with them every day by satellite phone.
link |
And this was to visit the Hadza hunter gatherers in Tanzania
link |
who are not an ancient people, they're a modern culture,
link |
but they live in circumstances, hunting and foraging,
link |
circumstances that are very similar,
link |
in similar conditions to our ancestors,
link |
hunting gathering ancestors,
link |
when expressions of emotion were supposed to have evolved,
link |
at least by one view of, okay.
link |
So, you know, for many years,
link |
I was sort of struggling with this set of observations,
link |
which is that I feel emotion,
link |
and I perceive emotion in other people,
link |
but scientists can't find a single marker,
link |
a single biomarker,
link |
not a single individual measure or pattern of measures
link |
that can predict what kind of emotional state they're in.
link |
How could that possibly be?
link |
How can you possibly make sense of those two things?
link |
And through a lot of reading
link |
and a lot of an immersing myself in different literatures,
link |
I came to the hypothesis that the brain
link |
is constructing these instances
link |
out of more basic ingredients.
link |
So when I tell you that the brain,
link |
when I suggest to you that what your brain is doing
link |
is making a prediction,
link |
and it's asking itself, figuratively speaking,
link |
the last time I was in this situation
link |
and this, you know, physical state,
link |
what did I do next?
link |
What did I see next?
link |
What did I hear next?
link |
It's basically asking what in my past
link |
is similar to the present?
link |
Things which are similar to one another
link |
are called a category.
link |
A group of things which are similar
link |
to one another is a category.
link |
And a mental representation of a category is a concept.
link |
So your brain is constructing categories or concepts
link |
on the fly continuously.
link |
So you really want to understand what a brain is doing.
link |
You don't, using machine learning like classification models
link |
is not going to help you
link |
because the brain doesn't classify.
link |
It's doing category construction.
link |
And the categories change,
link |
or you could say it's doing concept construction.
link |
It's using past experience to conjure a concept,
link |
which is a prediction.
link |
And if it's using past experiences of emotion,
link |
then it's constructing an emotion concept.
link |
Your concept will be,
link |
the content of it changes
link |
depending on the situation that you're in.
link |
So for example, if your brain uses past experiences of anger
link |
that you have learned,
link |
either because somebody labeled them for you,
link |
taught them to you, you observed them in movies and so on,
link |
in one situation could be very different
link |
from your concept of for anger than another situation.
link |
And this is how anger, instances of anger are,
link |
we call a population of variable instances.
link |
Sometimes when you're angry, you scowl.
link |
Sometimes when you're angry, you might smile.
link |
Sometimes when you're angry, you might cry.
link |
Sometimes your heart rate will go up, it will go down,
link |
it will stay the same.
link |
It depends on what action you're about to take
link |
because the way prediction, and I should say,
link |
the idea that physiology is yoked to action
link |
is a very old idea in the study
link |
of the peripheral nervous system
link |
that's been known for really decades.
link |
And so if you look at what the brain is doing,
link |
if you just look at the anatomy and you,
link |
here's the hypothesis that you would come up with.
link |
And I can go into the details.
link |
I've published these details in scientific papers
link |
and they also appear somewhat in
link |
How Emotions Were Made, my first book.
link |
They are not in the seven and a half lessons
link |
because that book is really not pitched
link |
at that level of explanation.
link |
It's just giving, it's really just a set of little essays.
link |
But the evidence, but what I'm about to say
link |
is actually based on scientific evidence.
link |
When your brain begins to form a prediction,
link |
the first thing it's doing is it's making a prediction
link |
of how to change the internal systems of your body,
link |
your heart, your cardiovascular system,
link |
the control of your heart, control of your lungs,
link |
a flush of cortisol, which is not a stress hormone.
link |
It's a hormone that gets glucose
link |
into your bloodstream very fast
link |
because your brain is predicting you need to do this.
link |
Predicting you need to do something
link |
metabolically expensive.
link |
And so either that means either move or learn, okay?
link |
And so your brain is preparing your body,
link |
the internal systems of your body
link |
to execute some actions, to move in some way.
link |
And then it infers based on those motor predictions
link |
and what we call viscera motor predictions,
link |
meaning the changes in the viscera
link |
that your brain is preparing to execute,
link |
your brain makes an inference about what you will sense
link |
based on those motor movements.
link |
So your experience of the world
link |
and your experience of your own body
link |
are a consequence of those predictions, those concepts.
link |
When your brain makes a concept for emotion,
link |
it's constructing an instance of that emotion.
link |
And that is how emotions are made.
link |
And those concepts load in,
link |
the predictions that are made include contents
link |
inside the body, contents outside the body.
link |
I mean, it includes other humans.
link |
So just this construction of a concept
link |
includes the variables that are much richer
link |
than just some sort of simple notion.
link |
Yeah, so our colloquial notion of a concept
link |
where I say, well, what's a concept of a bird?
link |
And then you list a set of features off to me.
link |
That's people's understanding,
link |
typically of what a concept is.
link |
But if you go into the literature in cognitive science,
link |
what you'll see is that the way
link |
that scientists have understood what a concept is
link |
has really changed over the years.
link |
So people used to think about a concept
link |
as philosophers and scientists used to think about a concept
link |
as a dictionary definition for a category.
link |
So there's a set of things which are similar
link |
And your concept for that category
link |
is a dictionary definition of the features,
link |
the necessary insufficient features of those instances.
link |
So for a bird, it would be.
link |
Wings, feathers. Right, a beak.
link |
It flies, whatever, okay.
link |
That's called the classical category.
link |
And scientists discovered, observed
link |
that actually not all instances of birds have feathers
link |
and not all instances of birds fly.
link |
And so the idea was that you don't have
link |
a single representation of necessary insufficient features
link |
stored in your brain somewhere.
link |
Instead, what you have is a prototype,
link |
a prototype meaning you still have
link |
a single representation for the category, one,
link |
but the features are like of the most typical instance
link |
of the category or maybe the most frequent instance,
link |
but not all instances of the category
link |
have all the features, right?
link |
They have some graded similarity to the prototype.
link |
And then, you know,
link |
what I'm gonna like incredibly simplify now,
link |
a lot of work to say that then a series of experiments
link |
were done to show that in fact,
link |
what your brain seems to be doing is coming up
link |
with a single exemplar or instance of the category
link |
and reading off the features
link |
when I ask you for the concept.
link |
So if we were in a pet store and I asked you
link |
what are the features of a bird,
link |
tell me the concept of bird,
link |
you would be more likely to give me features of a good pet.
link |
And if we were in a restaurant,
link |
you would be more likely, you know, like a budgie, right?
link |
If we were in a restaurant,
link |
you would be more likely to give me the features
link |
of a bird that you would eat, like a chicken.
link |
And if we were in a park,
link |
you'd be more likely to give me in this country,
link |
you know, the features of a sparrow or a robin.
link |
Whereas if we were in South America,
link |
you would probably give me the features of a peacock
link |
because that's more common
link |
or it is more common there than here
link |
that you would see a peacock in such circumstances.
link |
So the idea was that really what your brain was doing
link |
was conjuring a concept on the fly
link |
that meets the function that the category is being put to.
link |
Then people started studying ad hoc concepts,
link |
meaning concepts where the instances don't share
link |
any physical features, but the function of the instances
link |
So for example, think about all the things
link |
that can protect you from the rain.
link |
What are all the things that can protect you from the rain?
link |
Umbrella, like this apartment.
link |
Not giving a damn.
link |
Yeah, right, right.
link |
So the idea is that the function of the instances
link |
is the same in a given situation.
link |
Even if they look different, sound different,
link |
smell different, this is called an abstract concept
link |
or a conceptual concept.
link |
Now the really cool thing about conceptual categories
link |
or conceptual category is a category of things
link |
that are held together by a function,
link |
which is called an abstract concept
link |
or a conceptual category,
link |
because the things don't share physical features,
link |
they share functional features.
link |
There are two really cool things about this.
link |
One is that's what Darwin said a species was.
link |
So Darwin is known for discovering natural selection.
link |
But the other thing he really did,
link |
which was really profound, which he's less celebrated for,
link |
is understanding that all biological categories
link |
have inherent variation, inherent variation.
link |
Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species
link |
about before Darwin's book,
link |
a species was thought to be a classical category
link |
where all the instances of dogs were the same,
link |
had the exactly same features,
link |
and any variation from that perfect platonic instance
link |
was considered to be error.
link |
And Darwin said, no, it's not error, it's meaningful.
link |
So nature selects on the basis of that variation.
link |
The reason why natural selection is powerful and can exist
link |
is because there is variation in a species.
link |
And in dogs, we talk about that variation
link |
in terms of the size of the dog
link |
and the amount of fur the dog has and the color
link |
and how long is the tail and how long is the snout.
link |
In humans, we talk about that variation
link |
in all kinds of ways, right, including in cultural ways.
link |
So that's one thing that's really interesting
link |
about conceptual categories is that Darwin
link |
is basically saying a species is a conceptual category.
link |
And in fact, if you look at modern debates
link |
about what is a species, you can't find anybody
link |
agreeing on what the criteria are for a species,
link |
because they don't all share the same genome.
link |
We don't all share, we don't,
link |
there isn't a single human genome.
link |
There's a population of genomes, but they're variable.
link |
It's not unbounded variation, but they are variable, right?
link |
And the other thing that's really cool
link |
about conceptual categories is that they are the categories
link |
that we use to make civilization.
link |
So think about money, for example.
link |
What are all the physical things
link |
that make something a currency?
link |
Is there any physical feature that all the currencies
link |
in all the worlds that's ever been used by humans share?
link |
Well, certainly, right, but what is it?
link |
So it's getting to the point that you make this function.
link |
It's the function, right.
link |
It's that we trade it for material goods.
link |
And we have to agree, right?
link |
We all impose on whatever it is, salt, barley,
link |
little shells, big rocks in the ocean that can't move,
link |
Bitcoin, pieces of plastic, mortgages,
link |
which are basically a promise of something in the future,
link |
nothing more, right?
link |
All of these things, we impose value on them.
link |
And we all agree that we can exchange them
link |
for material goods.
link |
Yeah, and yes, that's brilliant.
link |
By the way, you're attributing some of that to Darwin,
link |
No, no, I'm saying that what Darwin.
link |
Because it's a brilliant view
link |
of what a species is, is the function.
link |
Yeah, what I'm saying is that what Darwin,
link |
Darwin really talked about variation in,
link |
so if you read, for example,
link |
the biologist Ernst Mayr,
link |
who was an evolutionary biologist,
link |
and then when he retired,
link |
became a historian and philosopher of biology.
link |
And his suggestion is that Darwin,
link |
Darwin did talk about variation.
link |
He vanquished what's called essentialism,
link |
the idea that there's a single set of features
link |
that define any species.
link |
And out of that grew really discussions
link |
of some of the functional features that species have,
link |
like they can reproduce, they can have offspring,
link |
the individuals of a species can have offspring.
link |
It turns out that's not a perfect criterion to use,
link |
but it's a functional criterion, right?
link |
So what I'm saying is that in cognitive science,
link |
people came up with the idea,
link |
they discovered the idea of conceptual categories
link |
or ad hoc concepts, these concepts that can change
link |
based on the function they're serving, right?
link |
And that it's there, it's in Darwin,
link |
and it's also in the philosophy of social reality.
link |
The way that philosophers talk about social reality,
link |
just look around you.
link |
I mean, we impose,
link |
we're treating a bunch of things as similar,
link |
which are physically different.
link |
And sometimes we take things that are physically the same
link |
and we treat them as separate categories.
link |
But it feels like the number of variables involved
link |
in that kind of categorization is nearly infinite.
link |
No, I don't think so,
link |
because there is a physical constraint, right?
link |
Like you and I could agree that we can fly in real life,
link |
That's a physical constraint that we can't break, right?
link |
You and I could agree that we could walk through the walls,
link |
We could agree that we could eat glass,
link |
Oh, there's a lot of constraints, but I just.
link |
Yeah, we could agree that the virus doesn't exist
link |
and we don't have to wear masks.
link |
But physical reality still holds the Trump card, right?
link |
But still there's a lot of.
link |
The Trump card, well, pun unintended.
link |
Pun completely unintended, but there you go,
link |
that's a predicting brain for you.
link |
But there is a tremendous amount of leeway.
link |
Yeah, that's the point.
link |
So what I'm saying is that emotions are like money.
link |
Basically, they're like money, they're like countries,
link |
they're like kings and queens and presidents.
link |
They're like everything that we construct
link |
that we impose meaning on.
link |
We take these physical signals and we give them meanings
link |
that they don't otherwise have by their physical nature.
link |
And because we agree, they have that function.
link |
But the beautiful thing, so maybe unlike money,
link |
I love this similarity is it's not obvious to me
link |
that this kind of emergent agreement
link |
should happen with emotion,
link |
because our experiences are so different
link |
for each of us humans, and yet we kind of converge.
link |
Well, in a culture we converge, but not across cultures.
link |
There are huge, huge differences.
link |
There are huge differences in what concepts exist,
link |
what they look like.
link |
So what I would say is that what we're doing
link |
with our young children as their brains become wired
link |
to their physical and their social environment
link |
is that we are curating for them.
link |
We are bootstrapping into their brains
link |
a set of emotion concepts.
link |
That's partly what they're learning.
link |
And we curate those for infants
link |
just the way we curate for them what is a dog,
link |
what is a cat, what is a truck.
link |
We sometimes explicitly label
link |
and we sometimes just use mental words.
link |
When your kid is throwing Cheerios on the floor
link |
instead of eating them, or your kid is crying
link |
when she won't put herself to sleep or whatever.
link |
We use mental words.
link |
And a word is this, words for infants,
link |
words are these really special things
link |
that they help infants learn abstract categories.
link |
There's a huge literature showing that children can take
link |
things that don't look infants,
link |
like infants, really young infants,
link |
preverbal infants can take, if you label,
link |
if I say to you, and you're an infant, okay?
link |
So I say, Lexi, this is a bling.
link |
And I put it down and the bling makes a squeaky noise.
link |
And then I say, Lexi, this is a bling.
link |
And I put it down and it makes a squeaky noise.
link |
And then I say, Lexi, this is a bling.
link |
You, as young as four months old,
link |
will expect this to make a noise, a squeaky noise.
link |
And if you don't, if it doesn't, you'll be surprised
link |
because it violated your expectation, right?
link |
I'm building for you an internal model of a bling.
link |
Okay, infants can do this really, really at a young age.
link |
And so there's no reason to believe
link |
that they couldn't learn emotion categories
link |
and concepts in the same way.
link |
And what happens when you go to a new culture?
link |
When you go to a new culture,
link |
you have to do what's called emotion acculturation.
link |
So my colleague Bacha Mesquita in Belgium
link |
studies emotion acculturation.
link |
She studies how, when people move
link |
from one culture to another,
link |
how do they learn the emotion concepts of that culture?
link |
How do they learn to make sense
link |
of their own internal sensations
link |
and also the movements, the raise of an eyebrow,
link |
the tilt of a head?
link |
How do they learn to make sense of cues from other people
link |
using concepts they don't have,
link |
but have to make on the fly?
link |
So that's the difference between cultures.
link |
Let me open another door.
link |
I'm not sure I wanna open,
link |
but the difference between men and women.
link |
Is there a difference between the emotional lives
link |
of those two categories of biological systems?
link |
So here's what I would say.
link |
We did a series of studies in the 1990s
link |
where we asked men and women
link |
to tell us about their emotional lives.
link |
And women described themselves
link |
as much more emotional than men.
link |
They believed that they were more emotional than men
link |
Women are much more emotional than men.
link |
And then we gave them little handheld computers.
link |
These were little Hewlett Packard computers.
link |
They fit in the palm of your hand.
link |
They weighed a couple of pounds.
link |
So this was like pre palm pilot even,
link |
like this was 1990s and like early.
link |
And we asked them,
link |
we would ping them like 10 times a day
link |
and just ask them to report how they were feeling,
link |
which is called experience sampling.
link |
So we experienced sampled.
link |
And then at the end,
link |
and then we looked at their reports
link |
and what we found is that men and women
link |
basically didn't differ.
link |
And there were some people who were really,
link |
had many more instances of emotion.
link |
So they were treading water in a tumultuous sea of emotion.
link |
And then there were other people
link |
who were like floating tranquilly in a lake.
link |
It was really not perturbed very often.
link |
And everyone in between,
link |
but there were no difference between men and women.
link |
And the really interesting thing is at the end
link |
of the sampling period, we asked people,
link |
so reflect over the past two weeks and tell it.
link |
So we've been now pinging people like again
link |
and again and again, right?
link |
So tell us how emotional do you think you are?
link |
No change from the beginning.
link |
So men and women believe that they are different.
link |
And when they are looking at other people,
link |
they make different inferences about emotion.
link |
If a man is scowling,
link |
like if you and I were together
link |
and so somebody is watching this, okay?
link |
And yeah, hey, who are you saying?
link |
By the way, people love it when you look at the camera.
link |
If you and I make exactly the same set of facial movements,
link |
when people look at you, both men and women look at you,
link |
they are more likely to think,
link |
oh, he's reacting to the situation.
link |
And when they look at me, they'll say,
link |
oh, she's having an emotion.
link |
She's, you know, yeah.
link |
And I wrote about this actually
link |
right before the 2016 election.
link |
You know what, maybe I could confess.
link |
Let me try to carefully confess.
link |
But you are really gonna.
link |
Yeah, that when I,
link |
that there is an element when I see Hillary Clinton
link |
that there was something annoying about her to me.
link |
And I, just that feeling,
link |
and then I tried to reduce that to what is that?
link |
Because I think the same attributes
link |
that are annoying about her
link |
when I see in other people wouldn't be annoying.
link |
So I was trying to understand what is it?
link |
Because it certainly does feel like that concept
link |
that I've constructed in my mind.
link |
Well, I'll tell you that I think,
link |
well, let me just say that what you would predict about,
link |
for example, the performance of the two of them
link |
in the debates, and I wrote an op ed
link |
for the New York Times actually before the second debate.
link |
And it played out really pretty much
link |
as I thought that it would based on research.
link |
It's not like I'm like a great fortune teller or anything.
link |
It's just, I was just applying the research,
link |
which was that when a woman,
link |
a woman's, people make internal attributions, it's called.
link |
They infer that the facial movements and body posture
link |
and vocalizations of a woman reflect her interstate.
link |
But for a man, they're more likely to assume
link |
that they reflect his response to the situation.
link |
It doesn't say anything about him.
link |
It says something about the situation he's in.
link |
Now, for the thing that you were describing
link |
about Hillary Clinton, I think a lot of people experienced,
link |
but it's also in line with research, which shows,
link |
and particularly research actually
link |
about teaching evaluations is one place
link |
that you really see it, where the expectation
link |
is that a woman will be nurturant
link |
and that a man, there's just no expectation
link |
for him to be nurturant.
link |
So if he is nurturant, he gets points.
link |
If he's not, he gets points.
link |
They're just different points, right?
link |
Whereas for a woman, especially a woman
link |
who's an authority figure, she's really in a catch 22.
link |
Because if she's serious, she's a bitch.
link |
And if she's empathic, then she's weak.
link |
Right, that's brilliant. I mean, one of the bigger questions
link |
to ask here, so that's one example
link |
where our construction of concepts gets in trouble.
link |
So, but remember I said science and philosophy
link |
are like tools for living.
link |
So I learned recently that if you ask me
link |
what is my intuition about what regulates my eating,
link |
I will say carbohydrates.
link |
I love carbohydrates.
link |
I love, I just love carbohydrates.
link |
But actually research shows, and it's beautiful research.
link |
I love this research because it so violates my own
link |
like deeply, deeply held beliefs about myself
link |
that most animals on this planet who have been studied
link |
and there are many actually eat
link |
to regulate their protein intake.
link |
So you will overeat carbohydrates
link |
if you, in order to get enough protein.
link |
And this research has been done with human,
link |
very beautiful research with humans, with crickets,
link |
with like, you know, bonobos.
link |
I mean, just like all these different animals, not bonobos,
link |
but I think like baboons.
link |
Now that I have no intuition about that.
link |
And I, even now as I regulate my eating,
link |
I still, I just have no intuition.
link |
It just, I can't feel it.
link |
What I feel is only about the carbohydrates.
link |
It feels like you're regulating around carbohydrates,
link |
Yeah, but in fact, actually what I am doing,
link |
if I am like most animals on the planet,
link |
I am regulating around protein.
link |
So knowing this, what do I do?
link |
I correct my behavior to eat,
link |
to actually deliberately try to focus on the protein.
link |
This is the idea behind bias training, right?
link |
I also did not experience Hillary Clinton
link |
as the warmest candidate.
link |
However, you can use consistent science,
link |
since the consistent scientific findings
link |
to organize your behavior.
link |
That doesn't mean that rationality
link |
is the absence of emotion,
link |
because sometimes emotion or any feelings in general,
link |
not the same thing as emotion, that's another topic,
link |
but are a source of information
link |
and their wisdom and helpful.
link |
So I'm not saying that,
link |
but what I am saying is that
link |
if you have a deeply held belief
link |
and the evidence shows that you're wrong, then you're wrong.
link |
It doesn't really matter how confident you feel.
link |
That confidence could be also explained by science, right?
link |
So it would be the same thing as if I,
link |
regardless of whether someone is like Charlie Baker,
link |
regardless of whether somebody is a Republican
link |
if that person has a record that you can see
link |
is consistent with what you believe,
link |
then that is information that you can act on.
link |
Yeah, and then try to,
link |
I mean, this is kind of what empathy is in open mindedness,
link |
is try to consider that the set of concepts
link |
that your brain has constructed
link |
through which you are now perceiving the world
link |
is not painting the full picture.
link |
I mean, this is now true for basically every,
link |
it doesn't have to be men and women,
link |
it could be basically the prism through which we perceive
link |
actually the political discourse, right?
link |
Absolutely, so here's what I would say.
link |
There are people who, scientists who will talk to you
link |
about cognitive empathy and emotional empathy
link |
and I prefer to think of it,
link |
I think the evidence is more consistent
link |
with what I'm about to say,
link |
which is that your brain is always making predictions
link |
using your own past experience and what you've learned
link |
from books and movies and other people telling you
link |
about their experiences and so on.
link |
And if your brain cannot make a concept
link |
to make sense of those, anticipate what those sense data are
link |
and make sense of them, you will be experientially blind.
link |
So, when I'm giving lectures to people,
link |
I'll show them like a blobby black and white image
link |
and they're experientially blind to the image,
link |
they can't see anything in it.
link |
And then I show them a photograph
link |
and then I show them the image again, the blobby image
link |
and then they see actually an object in it.
link |
But the image is the same.
link |
It's they're actually adding,
link |
their predictions now are adding, right?
link |
Or anybody who's learned a language,
link |
a second language after their first language
link |
also has this experience of things
link |
that initially sound like sounds
link |
that they can't quite make sense of,
link |
eventually come to make sense of them.
link |
And in fact, there are really cool examples
link |
of people who were like born blind
link |
because they have cataracts or they have corneal damage
link |
so that no light is reaching the brain.
link |
And then they have an operation
link |
and then light reaches the brain and they can't see.
link |
For days and weeks and sometimes years,
link |
they are experientially blind to certain things.
link |
So what happens with empathy, right?
link |
Is that your brain is making a prediction.
link |
And if it doesn't have the capacity to make,
link |
if you don't share, if you're not similar,
link |
remember categories are instances
link |
which are similar in some way.
link |
If you are not similar enough to that person,
link |
you will have a hard time making a prediction
link |
about what they feel.
link |
You will be experientially blind to what they feel.
link |
In the United States, children of color
link |
are under prescribed medicine by their physicians.
link |
This is been documented.
link |
It's not that the physicians are racist necessarily
link |
but they might be experientially blind.
link |
The same thing is true of male physicians
link |
with female patients.
link |
I could tell you some hair raising stories really
link |
that where people die as a consequence
link |
of a physician making the wrong inference,
link |
the wrong prediction because of being experientially blind.
link |
So we are, empathy is not, it's not magic.
link |
We make inferences about each other,
link |
about what each other's feeling and thinking.
link |
In this culture more than,
link |
there are some cultures where people
link |
have what's called opacity of mind
link |
where they will make a prediction
link |
about someone else's actions
link |
but they're not inferring anything
link |
about the internal state of that person.
link |
But in our culture, we're constantly making inferences.
link |
What is this person thinking?
link |
And we're not doing it necessarily consciously
link |
but we're just doing it really automatically
link |
using our predictions, what we know.
link |
And if you expose yourself to information
link |
which is very different from somebody else,
link |
I mean, really what we have is we have different cultures
link |
in this country right now that are,
link |
there are a number of reasons for this.
link |
I mean, part of it is, I don't know if you saw
link |
the Social Dilemma, the Netflix.
link |
Yeah, it's a great, it's really great documentary and...
link |
About what social networks are doing to our society?
link |
But nothing, no phenomenon has a simple single cause.
link |
There are multiple small causes
link |
which all add up to a perfect storm.
link |
That's just how most things work.
link |
And so the fact that machine learning algorithms
link |
are serving people up information on social media
link |
that is consistent with what they've already viewed
link |
and making, is part of the reason that you have these silos
link |
but it's not the only reason why you have these silos.
link |
I think there are other things afoot
link |
that enhance people's inability
link |
to even have a decent conversation.
link |
Yeah, I mean, okay, so many things you said
link |
are just brilliant, so the experiential blindness
link |
but also from my perspective, like I preach
link |
and I try to practice empathy a lot
link |
and something about the way you've explained it
link |
makes me almost see it as a kind of exercise
link |
that we should all do, like to train,
link |
like to add experiences to the brain
link |
to expand this capacity to predict more effectively.
link |
So like what I do is kind of like a method acting thing
link |
which is I imagine what the life of a person is like.
link |
Just think, I mean, this is something you see
link |
with Black Lives Matter and police officers.
link |
It feels like they're both, not both,
link |
but I have, because martial arts and so on,
link |
I have a lot of friends who are cops.
link |
They don't necessarily
link |
have empathy or visualize the experience of the other.
link |
Certainly, currently, unfortunately,
link |
people aren't doing that with police officers.
link |
They're not imagining, they're not empathizing
link |
or putting themselves in the shoes of a police officer
link |
to realize how difficult that job is,
link |
how dangerous it is, how difficult it is to maintain calm
link |
and under so much uncertainty, all those kinds of things.
link |
But there's more, there's even, that's all that's true,
link |
but I think that there's even more,
link |
there's even more to be said there.
link |
I mean, like from a predicting brain standpoint,
link |
there's even more that can be said there.
link |
So I don't know if you wanna go down that path
link |
or you wanna stick on empathy,
link |
but I will also say that one of the things
link |
that I was most gratified by, I still am receiving,
link |
it's been more than three and a half years
link |
since How Motions Are Made came out
link |
and I'm still receiving daily emails from people, right?
link |
So that's gratifying.
link |
But one of the most gratifying emails I received
link |
was from a police officer in Texas
link |
who told me that he thought that How Motions Are Made
link |
contained information that would be really helpful
link |
to resolving some of these difficulties.
link |
And he hadn't even read my op ed piece
link |
about when is a gun not a gun?
link |
And like using what we know about the science of perception
link |
from a prediction standpoint,
link |
like the brain is a predictor,
link |
to understand a little differently
link |
what might be happening in these circumstances.
link |
So there's a real, what's hard about,
link |
it's hard to talk about because everyone gets mad at you
link |
when you talk about this, like, you know.
link |
And there is a way to understand this
link |
which has profound empathy
link |
for the suffering of people of color
link |
and that definitely is in line with Black Lives Matter
link |
at the same time as understanding
link |
the really difficult situation
link |
that police officers find themselves in.
link |
And I'm not talking about this bad apple or that bad apple.
link |
I'm not talking about police officers
link |
who are necessarily shooting people in the back
link |
I'm talking about the cases of really good,
link |
well meaning cops who have the kind of predicting brain
link |
that everybody else has.
link |
They're in a really difficult situation
link |
that I think both they and the people
link |
who are harmed don't realize,
link |
like the way that these situations are constructed,
link |
I think it's just, there's a lot to be said there I guess
link |
is what I want to say.
link |
Yeah, is there something we can try to say in a sense,
link |
like what I'm, from the perspective of the predictive brain
link |
which is a fascinating perspective to take on this,
link |
you know, all the protests that are going on,
link |
there seems to be a concept of a police officer being built.
link |
No, I think that concept is there.
link |
But it's gaining strength, so it's being re, I mean.
link |
Sure, it is there.
link |
But I think, yeah, for sure, I think that that's right.
link |
I think that there's a shift in the stereotype
link |
of what I would say is a stereotype.
link |
There's a stereotype of a black man in this country
link |
that's always in movies and television,
link |
not always, but like largely, that many people watch.
link |
I mean, you think you're watching a 10 o clock drama
link |
and all you're doing is like kicking back and relaxing,
link |
but actually you're having certain predictions reinforced
link |
And what's happening now with police is the same thing,
link |
that there are certain stereotypes of a police officer
link |
that are being abandoned and other stereotypes
link |
that are being reinforced by what you see happening.
link |
All I'll say is that if you remember,
link |
I mean, there's a lot to say about this, really,
link |
that regardless of whether it makes people mad or not,
link |
I mean, I just, the science is what it is.
link |
Just remember what I said.
link |
The brain makes predictions about internal changes
link |
in the body first and then it starts to prepare motor action
link |
and then it makes a prediction about what you will see
link |
and hear and feel based on those actions, okay?
link |
So it's also the case that we didn't talk about
link |
is that sensory sampling,
link |
like your brain's ability to sample what's out there
link |
is yoked to your heart rate, it's yoked to your heartbeats.
link |
There are certain phases of the heartbeat
link |
where it's easier for you to see what's happening
link |
in the world than in others.
link |
And so if your heart rate goes through the roof,
link |
you will be less likely, you will be more likely
link |
to just go with your prediction and not correct
link |
based on what's out there
link |
because you're actually literally not seeing as well.
link |
Or you will see things that aren't there, basically.
link |
Is there something that we could say by way of advice
link |
for when this episode is released
link |
in the chaos of emotion?
link |
Sorry, I don't know about a term
link |
that's just flying around on social media.
link |
Well, I actually think it is emotion in the following sense.
link |
And it sounds a little bit like,
link |
it sounds a little bit like artificial
link |
in the way that I'm about to say it,
link |
but I really think that this is what's happening.
link |
One thing we haven't talked about is brains evolved,
link |
didn't evolve for you to see,
link |
they didn't evolve for you to hear,
link |
they didn't evolve for you to feel,
link |
they evolved to control your body.
link |
That's why you have a brain.
link |
You have a brain so that it can control your body.
link |
the scientific term for predictively controlling your body
link |
Your brain is attempting to anticipate the needs
link |
of your body and meet those needs before they arise
link |
so that you can act as you need to act.
link |
And the metaphor that I use is a body budget.
link |
You know, your brain is running a budget for your body.
link |
It's not budgeting money,
link |
it's budgeting glucose and salt and water.
link |
And instead of having, you know,
link |
one or two bank accounts, it has gazillions.
link |
There are all these systems in your body
link |
that have to be kept in balance.
link |
And it's monitoring very closely,
link |
it's making predictions about like,
link |
when is it good to spend and when is it good to save
link |
and what would be a good investment
link |
and am I gonna get a return on my investment?
link |
Whenever people talk about reward or reward prediction error
link |
or anything to do with reward or punishment,
link |
they're talking about the body budget.
link |
They're talking about your brain's predictions
link |
about whether or not there will be a deposit or withdrawal.
link |
So when your brain is running a deficit
link |
in your body budgets,
link |
you have some kind of metabolic imbalance,
link |
you experience that as discomfort.
link |
You experience that as distress.
link |
When your brain, when things are chaotic,
link |
you can't predict what's going to happen next.
link |
So I have this absolutely brilliant scientist
link |
working in my lab, his name is Jordan Theriot
link |
and he's published this really terrific paper
link |
on a sense of should, like why do we have social rules?
link |
Why do we adhere to social norms?
link |
It's because if I make myself predictable to you,
link |
then you are predictable to me.
link |
And if you're predictable to me, that's good
link |
because that is less metabolically expensive for me.
link |
Novelty or unpredictability at the extreme is expensive.
link |
And if it goes on for long enough,
link |
what happens is first of all,
link |
you will feel really jittery and antsy,
link |
which we describe as anxiety.
link |
It isn't necessarily anxiety.
link |
It could be just something is not predictable
link |
and you are experiencing arousal
link |
because the chemicals that help you learn
link |
increase your feeling of arousal basically.
link |
But if it goes on for long enough,
link |
you will become depleted
link |
and you will start to feel really, really,
link |
really distressed.
link |
So what we have is a culture full of people right now
link |
who their body budgets are just decimated
link |
and there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty.
link |
When you talk about it as depression and anxiety,
link |
it makes you think that it's not about your metabolism,
link |
that it's not about your body budgeting,
link |
that it's not about getting enough sleep
link |
or about eating well or about making sure
link |
that you have social connections.
link |
You think that it's something separate from that.
link |
But depression and anxiety are just a way
link |
of being in the world.
link |
They're a way of being in the world
link |
when things aren't quite right with your predictions.
link |
That's such a deep way of thinking.
link |
Like the brain is maintaining homeostasis.
link |
It's actually allostasis.
link |
And it's constantly making predictions
link |
and metabolically speaking,
link |
it's very costly to make novel,
link |
like constantly be learning to making adjustments.
link |
And then over time, there's a cost to be paid
link |
if you're just in a place of chaos
link |
where there's constant need for adjusting
link |
and learning and experience novel things.
link |
And so part of the problem here,
link |
there are a couple of things.
link |
Like I said, it's a perfect storm.
link |
There isn't a single cause.
link |
There are multiple cause,
link |
multiple things that combine together.
link |
It's a complex system, multiple things.
link |
Part of it is that they're metabolically encumbered
link |
and they're distressed.
link |
And in order to try to have empathy
link |
for someone who is very much unlike you,
link |
you have to forage for information.
link |
You have to explore information
link |
that is novel to you and unexpected.
link |
And that's expensive.
link |
And at a time when people feel,
link |
what do you do when you are running a deficit
link |
in your bank account?
link |
You stop spending.
link |
What does it mean for a brain to stop spending?
link |
A brain stops moving very much,
link |
stops moving the body and it stops learning.
link |
It just goes with its internal model.
link |
Brilliantly put, yeah.
link |
So empathy requires,
link |
to have empathy for someone who is unlike you
link |
requires learning and practice, foraging for information.
link |
I mean, it is something I talk about in the book
link |
in seven and a half lessons about the brain.
link |
I think it's really important.
link |
It's hard, but it's hard.
link |
I think it's hard for people to have,
link |
to be curious about views that are unlike their own
link |
when they feel so encumbered.
link |
And I'll just tell you, I had this epiphany really.
link |
I was listening to Robert Reich's The System.
link |
He was talking about oligarchy versus democracy.
link |
And so oligarchy is where very wealthy people,
link |
like extremely wealthy people,
link |
shift power so that they become even more wealthy
link |
and even more insulated
link |
and from the pressures of the common person.
link |
It's actually the kind of system
link |
that leads to the collapse of civilizations
link |
if you believe Jared Diamond.
link |
But anyways, I'm listening to this
link |
and I'm listening to him describe in fairly decent detail
link |
how the CEOs of these companies,
link |
there's been a shift in what it means to be a CEO
link |
and no longer being a steward of the community and so on,
link |
but like in the 1980s, it sort of shifted
link |
to this other model of being like an oligarch.
link |
And he's talking about how it used to be the case
link |
that CEOs made like 20 times what their employees made
link |
and now they make about 300 times on average
link |
what their employees made.
link |
So where did that money come from?
link |
It came from the pockets of the employees.
link |
And they don't know about it, right?
link |
No one knows about it.
link |
They just know they can't feed their children,
link |
they can't pay for healthcare,
link |
they can't take care of their family
link |
and they worry about what's gonna happen to their,
link |
they're living like months a month basically.
link |
Any one big bill could completely
link |
put them out on the street.
link |
So there are a huge number of people living like this.
link |
So all they, what they're experiencing,
link |
they don't know why they're experiencing it.
link |
And then someone comes along and gives them a narrative.
link |
Well, somebody else butted in line in front of you
link |
and that's why you're this way.
link |
That's why you experience what you're experiencing.
link |
And just for a minute, I was thinking,
link |
I had deep empathy for people who have beliefs
link |
that are really, really, really different from mine.
link |
But I was trying really hard to see it through their eyes.
link |
And did it cost me something metabolically?
link |
I'm sure, I'm sure.
link |
But you had something in the gas tank.
link |
Well, I. In order to allocate that.
link |
I mean, that's the question is like,
link |
where did you, what resources did your brain draw on
link |
in order to actually make that effort?
link |
Well, I'll tell you something, honestly, Lex.
link |
I don't have that much in the gas tank right now.
link |
Right, so I am surfing the stress that,
link |
stress is just, what is stress?
link |
Stress is your brain is preparing for a big metabolic outlay
link |
and it just keeps preparing and preparing
link |
and preparing and preparing.
link |
You as a professor, you as a human.
link |
For me, this is a moment of existential crisis
link |
as much as anybody else, democracy, all of these things.
link |
So in many of my roles, so I guess what I'm trying to say
link |
is that I get up every morning and I exercise.
link |
I run, I row, I lift weights, right?
link |
You exercise in the middle of the day.
link |
I saw your like, you know, daily thing.
link |
Yeah, I hate it actually.
link |
You love it, right?
link |
I hate it, but I do it religiously.
link |
Because it's a really good investment.
link |
It's an expenditure that is a really good investment.
link |
And so when I was exercising, I was listening to the book
link |
and when I realized the insights that I was sort of like
link |
playing around with, like, is this, does this make sense?
link |
Does this make sense?
link |
I didn't immediately plunge into it.
link |
I basically wrote some stuff down, I set it aside
link |
and then I did what I prepared myself to make an expenditure.
link |
I don't know what you do before you exercise.
link |
I always have a protein shake, always have a protein shake
link |
because I need to fuel up
link |
before I make this really big expenditure.
link |
And so I did the same thing.
link |
I didn't have a protein drink, but I did the same thing.
link |
And fueling up can mean lots of different things.
link |
It can mean talking to a friend about it.
link |
It can mean, you know, it can mean making sure
link |
you get a good night's sleep before you do it.
link |
It can mean lots of different things,
link |
but I guess I think we have to do these things.
link |
Yeah, that's a good question.
link |
Yeah, I'm gonna re listen to this conversation
link |
several times, this is brilliant.
link |
But I do think about, you know, I've encountered
link |
so many people that can't possibly imagine
link |
that a good human being can vote for Donald Trump.
link |
And I've also encountered people that can't imagine
link |
that an intelligent person can possibly vote for Democrat.
link |
And I look at both these people,
link |
many of whom are friends, and let's just say,
link |
after this conversation, I can see as they're predicting
link |
brains not willing to invest the resources
link |
to empathize with the other side.
link |
And I think you have to in order to be able to,
link |
like, to see the obvious common humanity in us.
link |
I don't know what the system is
link |
that's creating this division.
link |
We can put it, like you said, it's a perfect storm.
link |
It might be the social media,
link |
I don't know what the hell it is.
link |
I think it's a bunch of things.
link |
I think it's, there's an economic system,
link |
which is disadvantaging large numbers of people.
link |
There's a use of social media.
link |
Like if you, you know, if I had to orchestrate
link |
or architect a system that would screw up
link |
a human body budget, it would be the one that we live in.
link |
You know, we don't sleep enough.
link |
We eat pseudo food, basically.
link |
We are on social media too much,
link |
which is full of ambiguity,
link |
which is really hard for a human nervous system, right?
link |
Really, really hard.
link |
Like ambiguity with no context to predict in.
link |
I mean, it's like, really?
link |
And then, you know, there are the economic concerns
link |
that affect large swaths of people in this country.
link |
I mean, it's really, I'm not saying everything
link |
is reducible to metabolism.
link |
Not everything is reducible to metabolism,
link |
but there, if you combine all these things together.
link |
It's helpful to think of it that way.
link |
Then somehow it's also,
link |
somehow it reduces the entirety of the human experience,
link |
the same kind of obvious logic.
link |
Like we should exercise every day in the same kind of way.
link |
We should empathize every day.
link |
You know, there are these really wonderful,
link |
wonderful programs for teens
link |
and sometimes also for parents of people
link |
who've lost children in wars and in conflicts,
link |
in political conflicts,
link |
where they go to a bucolic setting
link |
and they talk to each other about their experiences.
link |
And miraculous things happen, you know?
link |
So, you know, it's easy to sort of shrug this stuff off
link |
It's easy to sort of shrug this stuff off
link |
as kind of Pollyanna ish.
link |
You know, like, what's this really gonna do?
link |
But you have to think about,
link |
when my daughter went to college, I gave her advice.
link |
I said, try to be around people
link |
who let you be the kind of person you wanna be.
link |
We're back to free will.
link |
You have a choice, you have a choice.
link |
It might seem like a really hard choice.
link |
It might seem like an unimaginably difficult choice.
link |
You have a choice.
link |
Do you wanna be somebody who is wrapped in fury and agony?
link |
Or do you wanna be somebody who extends a little empathy
link |
And in the process, maybe learn something.
link |
Curiosity is the thing that protects you.
link |
Curiosity is the thing, it's curative curiosity.
link |
On social media, the thing I recommend to people,
link |
at least that's the way I've been approaching social media.
link |
It doesn't seem to be the common approach,
link |
but I basically give love to people
link |
who seem to also give love to others.
link |
So it's the same similar concept of surrounding yourself
link |
by the people you wanna become.
link |
And I ignore, sometimes block, but just ignore.
link |
I don't add aggression to people
link |
who are just constantly full of aggression
link |
and negativity and toxicity.
link |
There's a certain desire when somebody says something mean
link |
to say something, to say why,
link |
or try to alleviate the meanness and so on.
link |
But what you're doing essentially
link |
is you're now surrounding yourself
link |
by that group of folks that have that negativity.
link |
So even just the conversation.
link |
So I think it's just so powerful
link |
to put yourself amongst people
link |
whose basic mode of interaction is kindness.
link |
Because I don't know what it is,
link |
but maybe it's the way I'm built,
link |
is that to me is energizing for the gas tank
link |
that then I can pull to when I start reading
link |
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
link |
and start thinking about Nazi Germany.
link |
I can empathize with everybody involved.
link |
I can start to make these difficult thinking
link |
that's required to understand our little planet Earth.
link |
Well, there is research to back up what you said.
link |
There's research that's consistent
link |
with your intuition there,
link |
that there's research that shows
link |
that being kind to other people,
link |
doing something nice for someone else
link |
is like making a deposit to some extent.
link |
Because I think making a deposit
link |
not only in their body budgets,
link |
but also in yours.
link |
Like people feel good when they do good things
link |
We are social animals.
link |
We regulate each other's nervous systems
link |
for better and for worse, right?
link |
The best thing for a human nervous system is another human.
link |
And the worst thing for a human nervous system
link |
So you decide, do you wanna be somebody
link |
who makes people feel better
link |
or do you wanna be somebody who causes people pain?
link |
And we are more responsible for one another
link |
than we might like or than we might want.
link |
But remember what we said about social reality.
link |
Social reality, there are lots of different cultural norms
link |
about independence or collective nature of people.
link |
But the fact is we have socially dependent nervous systems.
link |
We evolved that way as a species.
link |
And in this country,
link |
we prize individual rights and freedoms.
link |
And that is a dilemma that we have to grapple with.
link |
And we have to do it in a way
link |
if we're gonna be productive about it.
link |
We have to do it in a way
link |
that requires engaging with each other,
link |
and which is what I understand
link |
the founding members of this country intended.
link |
Let me ask a few final silly questions.
link |
So one, talked a bit about love,
link |
but it's fun to ask somebody like you
link |
who can effectively, from at least neuroscience perspective,
link |
disassemble some of these romantic notions.
link |
But what do you make of romantic love?
link |
Why do human beings seem to fall in love?
link |
At least a bunch of 80s hair bands have written about it.
link |
Is that a nice feature to have?
link |
Well, I'm really happy that I fell in love.
link |
I wouldn't want it any other way.
link |
Is that you the person speaking or the neuroscientist?
link |
Well, that's me the person speaking.
link |
But I would say as a neuroscientist,
link |
babies are born not able to regulate their own body budgets
link |
because their brains aren't fully wired yet.
link |
When you feed a baby, when you cuddle a baby,
link |
everything you do with a baby
link |
impacts that baby's body budget
link |
and helps to wire that baby's brain
link |
to manage eventually her own body budget to some extent.
link |
That's the basis biologically of attachment.
link |
Humans evolved as a species to be socially dependent,
link |
meaning you cannot manage your body budget
link |
on your own without a tax
link |
that eventually you pay many years later
link |
in terms of some metabolic illness.
link |
Loneliness, when you break up with someone that you love
link |
or you lose them, you feel like it's gonna kill you,
link |
But loneliness will kill you.
link |
It will kill you approximately,
link |
what is it, seven years earlier?
link |
I can't remember exactly the exact number.
link |
It's actually in the web notes to seven and a half lessons.
link |
But social isolation and loneliness will kill you earlier
link |
than you would otherwise die.
link |
And the reason why is that you didn't evolve
link |
to manage your nervous system on your own.
link |
And when you do, you pay a little tax
link |
and that tax accrues very slightly over time,
link |
over a long period of time
link |
so that by the time you're in middle age or a little older,
link |
you are more likely to die sooner
link |
from some metabolic illness,
link |
from heart disease, from diabetes, from depression.
link |
You're more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.
link |
I mean, it takes a long time for that tax to accrue,
link |
So yes, I think it's a good thing for people to fall in love.
link |
But I think the funny view of it is that it's clear
link |
that humans need the social attachment
link |
to, what is it, manage their nervous system
link |
as you're describing.
link |
And the reason you wanna stay with somebody for a long time
link |
is so you don't have, is the novelty is very costly for.
link |
Well, now you're mixing thing.
link |
Now you're, you know, you have to decide whether.
link |
But what I would say is when you lose someone you love,
link |
it feels like you've lost a part of you.
link |
And that's because you have.
link |
You've lost someone who was contributing
link |
to your body budget.
link |
We are the caretakers of one another's nervous systems,
link |
And out of that comes very deep feelings of attachment,
link |
some of which are romantic love.
link |
Are you afraid of your own mortality?
link |
We're two humans sitting here.
link |
Do you think, do you ponder your own mortality?
link |
I mean, somebody thinks about your brain a lot.
link |
It seems one of the more terrifying or, I don't know.
link |
I don't know how to feel about it,
link |
but it seems to be one of the most definitive aspects
link |
of life is that it ends.
link |
It's a complicated answer, but I think the best I can do
link |
in a short snippet would be to say,
link |
for a very long time, I did not fear my own mortality.
link |
I feared pain and suffering.
link |
So that's what I feared.
link |
I feared being harmed or dying in a way
link |
that would be painful.
link |
But I didn't fear having my life be over.
link |
Now, as a mother, I think I fear dying
link |
before my daughter is ready to be without me.
link |
That's what I fear.
link |
It's, that's really what I fear.
link |
And frankly, honestly, I fear my husband dying before me
link |
much more than I fear my own death.
link |
There's that love and social attachment again.
link |
Yeah, because I know it's just gonna,
link |
I'm gonna feel like I wish I was dead.
link |
A final question about life.
link |
What do you think is the meaning of it all?
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
Yeah, I think that there isn't one meaning of life.
link |
There's like many meanings of life.
link |
And you use different ones on different days.
link |
Depending on the day.
link |
Depending on the day.
link |
But for me, I would say sometimes the meaning of life
link |
is to understand, to make meaning actually.
link |
The meaning of life is to make meaning.
link |
Sometimes it's that.
link |
Sometimes it's to leave the world
link |
just slightly a little bit better
link |
than like the Johnny Appleseed view, you know?
link |
Sometimes the meaning of life is to clear the path
link |
for my daughter or for my students.
link |
So sometimes it's that.
link |
And sometimes it's just,
link |
even in moments where you're looking at the sky
link |
or you're by the ocean.
link |
Or sometimes for me it's even like
link |
I'll see a weed poking out of a crack
link |
in a sidewalk, you know?
link |
And you just have this overwhelming sense
link |
of the wonder of the world.
link |
Like the world is, just like the physical world
link |
is so wondrous and you just get very immersed
link |
in the moment, like the sensation of the moment.
link |
Sometimes that's the meaning of life.
link |
I don't think there's one meaning of life.
link |
I think it's a population of instances
link |
just like any other category.
link |
I don't think there's a better way to end it, Lisa.
link |
The first time we spoke is I think if not the,
link |
then one of, I think it's the first conversation I had
link |
that basically launched this podcast.
link |
Yeah, that's actually the first conversation
link |
I've had that launched this podcast.
link |
And now we get to finally do it the right way.
link |
It's a huge honor to talk to you,
link |
that you spent time with me.
link |
I can't wait for hopefully the many more books you write.
link |
Certainly can't wait to, I already read this book,
link |
but I can't wait to listen to it
link |
because as you said offline that you're reading it
link |
and I think you have a great voice.
link |
You have a great, I don't know what the nice way to put it,
link |
but maybe NPR voice in the best version of what that is.
link |
So thanks again for talking today.
link |
Oh, it's my pleasure.
link |
Thank you so much for having me back.
link |
Thank you for listening to this conversation
link |
with Lisa Feldman Barrett and thank you to our sponsors,
link |
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and Cash App, which is an app
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link |
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
link |
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon
link |
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words
link |
from Lisa Feldman Barrett.
link |
It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.
link |
Thank you for listening.
link |
I hope to see you next time.