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