In this episode, Dr. Joe Perla talks about the origins of consciousness and how it came about. Dr. Perla is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and a professor of neurology and neurobiology at the Department of Neurology and Brain Research. He s been studying consciousness for over 30 years, and has spent the last 20 years trying to figure out how we got it out of our brains. He thinks that our conscious mind is the result of a 4 billion-year-old evolutionary process, and that we have to go back even further back in time to find the genes that allowed us to learn and remember things we know about our environment. This is a fascinating subject, and I hope you enjoy listening to this episode. Joe is a great guy and I had a great time talking to him. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Joe! We have some time to talk about this fascinating topic, and it was a pleasure to have the chance to talk with him. Thank you for being here, Joe, I really appreciate it. You are a great human being and I look forward to hearing from you in the next episode. . XOXO, Timestamps: 1:00:00 - How did consciousness come about? 2:30 - What is consciousness? 3:40 - How we evolved? 4:20 - Why did we have a conscious mind? 5:10 - What are our ancestors? 6:00- How did we get conscious? 7:00 8:30- What are we evolved our conscious minds? 9:40- How do we have memories? 11: How did our brains evolve? 13:30 14:20- What is our evolutionary history? 15:10- Where did we learn about our memories and how do we learn? 16:10 17:40 What did we evolve our memory and defense? 18:20 19:10 | What is the history of our ancestors do we know? 21:00 | What are the story of our brain ? 22: How we got our brains? ? 21 - What does our brain have a single cell cell biology? 23:30 | How did it start? 26:30 Is there a common ancestor? 27:20 | What do we need to evolve our brain?
00:00:09.000I've been really looking forward to talking to you.
00:00:11.000Because the conscious mind and how we evolved our conscious mind, how we have our conscious mind, I mean, that is one of the more unique things about being a person.
00:00:30.000So shall I tell you how I got into it and how I ended up thinking about that problem?
00:00:36.000So I've been working on how the brain detects and responds to danger for most of my scientific career.
00:00:43.000A little bit before that, I'd actually studied consciousness and these people who have their brains split apart to control epilepsy called split brain patients.
00:00:50.000So I got interested in consciousness and also in how behaviors that might be produced non-consciously affect what we know about ourselves.
00:01:00.000So we see ourselves doing something and then we kind of consciously build that into our narrative of what we are.
00:01:06.000But a lot of what we do, we do non-consciously.
00:01:09.000And when we interpret it, that kind of solidifies the fact that you have a non-conscious system that's controlling your behavior when in fact you didn't do it but that system did.
00:01:20.000So you got to make sense of it and generate an explanation, a narrative.
00:01:23.000So that was where I got started and I tried to figure out, well, what would be some kinds of non-conscious systems?
00:01:30.000Maybe emotion systems are producing behaviors that we don't fully understand.
00:01:35.000I started studying that and ended up figuring out how this part of the brain called the amygdala receives information about the environment and then controls, orchestrates all the responses, fight-flight kinds of responses to help you protect yourself.
00:01:53.000After many years of doing that, I started asking, How far back does this ability to detect and respond to danger go?
00:02:00.000We know that bugs and flies can do that.
00:02:04.000And research had been done showing that bugs and flies have certain molecules in their brain.
00:02:10.000That are important in these kinds of protective defensive behaviors and including the ability to learn about them and store those as memories.
00:02:18.000So it's easier to work on those little tiny invertebrates than it is to do studies in a complex brain, even like a rat brain, which is pretty complex.
00:02:30.000So given that what these people have discovered about invertebrates, I and others who were studying mammals decided to see if the same molecules might be involved in mammalian learning, and in fact it was.
00:02:45.000So now that raises the question, you've got the same molecules doing the same thing, same molecules, same genes doing the same thing in ancient invertebrates and in animals like us.
00:02:58.000So you ask where back in time It's the ancestor that made that possible.
00:03:04.000You know, if we've got the same genes, either it kind of happens spontaneously, separately, or there's a common ancestor.
00:03:10.000And indeed, there's a common ancestor.
00:03:12.000And that goes back to the first organism, first animal, that had a bilateral body, which means it had a left, right, front and a back, and a top and a bottom.
00:03:24.000So it has kind of three-dimensional sides.
00:03:27.000Before that, there were animals like jellyfish that were radial, But no front and back.
00:03:36.000And before that, there are sponges, which have no front, back, top, bottom.
00:03:40.000They're just kind of randomly organized.
00:03:42.000So that's kind of the story of animals, sponges to jellyfish to these bilateral animals.
00:03:49.000So the ancestor, the bilateral animal that we're talking about, Gave rise to those two lines, one that became all these invertebrates like flies and bugs and snails and octopus and all those things, and another to animals like us,
00:04:04.000vertebrates, all the fish, reptiles, mammals, birds, and so forth.
00:04:58.000Well, if you go all the way back to where they came from, an even simpler kind of organism, still single cell of course, like bacterial cells.
00:05:08.000Now these guys go back to the beginning of life.
00:05:11.000The first cell that ever lived some 3.7 billion years ago that gave rise to the entire history of life was a bacterial-like cell that started dividing.
00:05:25.000Now what's interesting, that cell that started dividing is the mother of every bacterial cell that ever lived.
00:05:32.000So that cell is still alive because they reproduce by cell division.
00:05:40.000So that cell just keeps reproducing and part of that first cell ever is still with us today in all the bacterial cells that are around.
00:07:32.000Survival is the only goal of every organism.
00:07:35.000And that's what that first cell was able to do, is to generate a set of biological properties that could sustain itself long enough to reproduce.
00:07:57.000Otherwise, you have to keep your ions straight or the cell will get too big and explode or get too small and collapse.
00:08:04.000You've got to thermoregulate because all of these things depend on the right kind of internal temperature, and you have to reproduce.
00:08:11.000Those are the survival requirements of a cell, but they're also the survival requirements of a human.
00:08:17.000So the same things that a bacterial cell has to do to live through the day and create a species is exactly what we do every day to reproduce our cells.
00:08:27.000We have to eat, drink, defend against danger, incorporate nutrients and balanced fluids and ions that way, defend, you know, reproduce.
00:08:37.000And so that was the mind-blowing thing.
00:08:40.000See, I wrote the whole three-quarters of the book as a scientific journalist because I didn't know any of this stuff.
00:10:06.000And a personal present and a potential future that you can imagine different scenarios of you existing in in the future.
00:10:16.000So that's called auto-noetic consciousness, the ability to self-know about where you are in time.
00:10:25.000And this is an idea that was proposed by a guy named Endel Tolving, a very distinguished psychologist who's retired now.
00:10:33.000But his idea was that the unique aspect of the human mind is mental time travel, the ability to project ourselves in the past, present and future.
00:10:43.000Without that kind of consciousness, we're limited to kind of factual information.
00:11:20.000I see you do something that I might have done in a similar situation.
00:11:24.000I think you intentionally control that.
00:11:26.000We see a dog doing something that would be similar to what we do.
00:11:29.000We think we know why the dog is doing that because it had some intention.
00:11:33.000But the fact is, if we start taking these things apart in the brain, We see that the systems that control very simple behaviors are not the ones that are doing all this high level conscious thought.
00:11:47.000Take the example of the area I've worked on for all these years which is threat detection.
00:11:54.000Now, this part of the brain called the amygdala is key to the detection and response to threat in a kind of basic sense.
00:12:02.000You know, threat comes up, you freeze if there's a snake for example.
00:12:07.000Now, because of that, it's been assumed that the reason you freeze is because you're afraid and therefore that the amygdala is also making the fear because the amygdala experiences the fear and that's why you produce the response.
00:12:22.000But for the longest time and throughout most of my career, I've said the amygdala does not consciously experience fear.
00:12:31.000And yet my work has been used to kind of sell and defend this idea of the amygdala is the brain's fear center.
00:13:16.000The journalist kind of ignored it and it just became the amygdalas, the brain's fear center.
00:13:21.000Even the scientists ignored it because we were studying and I kind of gave up after a while and said, okay, we'll talk about it in terms of fear.
00:13:31.000Because there was a lot of money to be directed towards research if you're studying fear and how you could treat that.
00:13:39.000But I think it's been kind of a wrong path because it's led to the development of medications that don't really work.
00:13:48.000So all the big companies are getting out of the anti-anxiety business, anti-fear business, because people still feel fearful or anxious when they take them.
00:13:58.000You mean like Xanax, things along those lines?
00:14:06.000I mean they're not – either that or they're repurposing them for other purposes.
00:14:10.000But – so what happens is you – the way these things – these things – the basic drugs were discovered in the 60s almost accidentally in some cases, not rather than by some hypothesis.
00:14:24.000So the only thing that's been discovered since then is more versions of the same thing with slightly fewer side effects.
00:14:31.000But there's been no new discovery of a new kind of drug that's going to help people.
00:14:36.000Well, the way the drugs are discovered is they take a rat or a mouse, put it in a challenging situation, Give it some different medications and the ones that make the animal less timid in those situations is assumed to make the animal less fearful and that's why he's less timid.
00:14:55.000So when you give it to a person, they should be less fearful.
00:14:59.000But what you find is, say, a person with social anxiety might find it easier to go to the party.
00:15:03.000They're less timid, but still anxious while they're there.
00:15:06.000And the reason is that we now know is that damage to the amygdala in a person doesn't necessarily also eliminate the feeling of fear.
00:15:14.000It gets rid of the body responses, but not the feeling.
00:15:17.000So it was a misunderstanding of what behavior can tell us.
00:15:22.000We treat behavior as if it's an ambassador of the mind, but behavior is really a tool of survival.
00:15:28.000It goes back to those first cells that ever lived who had to defend against danger.
00:15:33.000Bacterial cells move in the water and then they come across a gradient of some chemical that's a toxin.
00:15:41.000As soon as they detect that, they bounce away and go in a different direction.
00:15:45.000If they find a gradient of something that is a nutrient, they keep going and absorb it.
00:15:51.000So they have the ability to detect what's useful and harmful in their lives.
00:18:03.000Well, alcohol also attacks those receptors, so it's like you get double the effect.
00:18:08.000Is that why they tell people don't have Xanax?
00:18:10.000Yeah, because you can, you know, if you take a lot of Xanax and drink a lot of booze, you can OD. Or you could just say crazy things and not totally be aware.
00:18:21.000Do you remember that story about a woman?
00:18:23.000She was, I believe she was a publicist, and she got on a plane, she was flying to Africa, and she said, I'm going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white, lol.
00:18:35.000She thought she was just being funny, and you laughed.
00:18:54.000She would say a bunch of snarky things like that, a bunch of funny, trying to be funny.
00:18:59.000But she was on Xanax and drinking and woke up Completely oblivious, and her life had been destroyed.
00:19:07.000She was fired, you know, she was a social pariah, and I'm pretty sure that was Xanax and alcohol that she was blaming it on.
00:19:17.000Yeah, well, you know, these are powerful drugs.
00:19:21.000So, you know, back to how they work, and they work.
00:19:25.000So, a drug like that All of the drugs that we take go to the entire body.
00:19:34.000They're not able to just find their way to one little spot in the brain and do their trick.
00:19:39.000There's this talk about magic bullet drugs that might be able to be targeted for specific circuits, but that's fantasy at this point.
00:19:49.000So if you reduce inhibition in the entire brain, Yes, you might reduce anxiety, but you're also going to change a lot of other things.
00:20:01.000So you're going to make, for example, forethought and ability to rein in things like the stuff the woman was saying more difficult because they're attacking the prefrontal cortex where you have some inhibitory control over behavior.
00:20:17.000They're going to alter your ability to retrieve and store memories and to attend to things.
00:20:27.000To the extent that these drugs have a positive effect on some people, it's been said that part of the reason is that it's kind of a general blunting of emotion.
00:20:40.000It's just kind of a dulling of everything.
00:20:42.000And you get anxiety, anti-anxiety as a part of that.
00:20:46.000But if we want to understand how to do better, we have to, you know, figure out what the brain circuit that's really making us anxious is and not just what's making us, you know,
00:21:11.000It's the same song, but it's not as annoying because you've turned the volume down.
00:21:17.000I think that's a lot of what these medications can do is turn the volume down a bit or turn it up depending on what you do.
00:21:23.000Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there some sort of a slingshot effect like after you take these things and your anxiety is ramped up afterwards?
00:21:55.000It's not that if you alleviate some anxiety, then the anxiety wants to come back even stronger?
00:22:00.000No, I mean, so, you know, I've proposed in my previous book that we each have an anxiety set point.
00:22:07.000That, you know, let's say you're worried about something and all of a sudden that gets resolved.
00:22:17.000That just makes room for the next thing to work with.
00:22:20.000So we each kind of fill that void because our brain is, you know, we've developed a brain that has a certain kind of set point for everything it's doing and that just makes room for, you know, to fill that up.
00:22:32.000If you're an anxious person, You probably will always be somewhat anxious.
00:22:36.000So there's no magic bullet that's going to take that out.
00:22:39.000What you have to do is attack the process from knowledge of how it all works.
00:22:45.000And that requires that we have a more sophisticated understanding than is possible from simply observing behavior.
00:22:54.000Behavior does not tell you necessarily what's on the mind.
00:22:59.000Behavior tells you how the brain has responded.
00:23:03.000But, you know, just to go back to the fear threat example, when Let's say I bring you into the laboratory and show you a picture of something like a blue square.
00:23:18.000My colleague Liz Phelps, who used to be at NYU, is now at Harvard, did experiments like this.
00:23:24.000And every time the blue square would come on, the person would get a mild shock to their finger.
00:23:29.000And so then she would present the blue square subliminally.
00:23:34.000That means really quickly with something that follows it, that kind of masks it.
00:23:39.000And that prevents the information from getting into the conscious mind and so the person says, I didn't see anything.
00:23:46.000But if you put the person in an imaging machine, fMRI, and image what's happening, that stimulus, that threat, the blue square gets to the amygdala, turns it on, the heart begins to race,
00:24:01.000palms are sweating, but the person has no fear.
00:24:07.000The person doesn't know it's there and doesn't experience fear.
00:24:12.000It's about detecting and responding to danger.
00:24:15.000In order to be afraid, that has to reach your conscious mind so that you can experience it as a state of this auto-noetic consciousness that we're talking about.
00:25:29.000I do think that, for example, the drugs that are available do help people because it's important to reduce the behavioral timidity and the physiological arousal that goes with that.
00:25:42.000Because if you don't treat that, then the conscious mind will be reactivated By those responses.
00:25:52.000If you only treat the conscious mind, then the physiological stuff will bring the conscious stuff back.
00:26:00.000Everything will bring back everything else unless you treat the whole system.
00:26:04.000And to do that, you have to understand the system.
00:26:07.000And we've just misunderstood it, I think, for so long.
00:26:12.000I have a friend who, he takes it every day, takes Xanax every day, and he says he needs it.
00:26:28.000No, I understand, but from your perspective, from an understanding of the human mind and all the systems that are at work, It seems like that's really not the way to do it.
00:27:01.000These systems that are in place, and all of the various things that have gotten us to 2019 as a human species, when You study anxiety and you study fear and all these different things.
00:27:18.000Are we experiencing high levels of it because there's not as much real physical danger as our ancestors experienced and it's almost like we're looking for it when it's not necessarily there, like we're programmed to be able to deal with it?
00:27:35.000I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think that's a good way to think about it.
00:27:40.000You know, the philosopher Kierkegaard said that anxiety is the price we pay for the human ability to choose.
00:27:47.000And this is where our auto-noetic consciousness comes in, our ability to think of ourselves as having a past and the future and to be able to plan and choose in the future.
00:27:58.000You know, he said it started with Adam making the first choice as a human in the Garden of Eden, and that was where it all began.
00:28:07.000You can rephrase that statement by saying our ability to choose is what allows us to be anxious because that is what anxiety is, a worry about are we going to make the right decision.
00:28:25.000How can we deal with this thing that's coming up?
00:28:43.000So like, you know, you're walking through the woods, there's a snake, you might freeze, but almost instantly that fear that is generated by you freezing and seeing the snake morphs into anxiety.
00:29:33.000Due to our prefrontal cortex, our ability to conceptualize, to, you know, imagine things that have never been imagined before, to create art, to build,
00:29:48.000to create architecture, build buildings, imagine going to the moon, designing an instrument to do that and actually pulling it off and making sure it can get back.
00:29:58.000All of that is something that our special kind of consciousness enables.
00:30:03.000But it has a dark side, which is it also allows us to be incredibly selfish and self-centered and narcissistic and to support tribes and groups.
00:30:23.000When it's either completely isolated, all the cultures are isolated, or if we could also somehow be together in a more unified way.
00:30:33.000Because the direction we're going now, where each country is isolating itself, but is still so entangled with all the others, is a recipe for disaster.
00:30:48.000Is this because we evolved essentially without long-term travel?
00:30:53.000I mean, we kind of evolved to stay in whatever area the resources we're in when we're hunters and gatherers.
00:30:59.000And then somewhere along the line, somebody figured out boats and how to get on a horse.
00:31:03.000And the next thing you know, you're visiting people.
00:31:08.000You know, we have a special kind of inquisitiveness that we can – because we can mentally model the next step and plan what are the options, try to anticipate the problems that are going to come up and take those steps.
00:32:01.000Imagining humans with no consciousness is impossible.
00:32:04.000No, there's no way to go in that direction.
00:32:07.000So is the key to this thing as the human race, is it managing our consciousness?
00:32:13.000Perhaps maybe work like yours, giving us the tools to understand what are the mechanisms involved, that maybe that can help us sort of navigate our biological Maybe.
00:32:27.000I mean, I think it's, you know, certainly we don't, I think the, I mean, I have no idea what your position on climate change is, but personally, I think that things are happening and something needs to be done.
00:33:10.000But the configuration of life on it is unlikely to continue to be the same under those conditions.
00:33:17.000The more that everything changes, the conditions of life change.
00:33:21.000And the first things to go, and this is what happened to the dinosaurs, are large energy-demanding organisms.
00:33:28.000Because as the conditions change, the climate that we've lived in We've succeeded because we were able to benefit from that kind of climate.
00:33:41.000But as the climate begins to change, our kind is not going to be able to succeed as well because those conditions are, you know, the waters are rising, the deserts are expanding, all these things are happening.
00:35:06.000Like you want to – like when you think about technological achievements and you think about the conscious mind and the ability to create and the creative process, do you – Envision the possibility of some sort of a technological solution to a lot of the problems that we're facing.
00:35:26.000I think it has to be a social solution.
00:36:06.000But if one country takes steps and imposes some sort of a technological solution that pulls carbon from the atmosphere, that does...
00:36:17.000To enhance some sort of a cooling process, to bring homeostasis, to bring some sort of a generally agreed upon state of the environment.
00:36:27.000If that's technologically possible, I mean that's going to come out of the creative mind, right?
00:36:31.000Well, I don't want to go too far off into my not area of expertise like climate and so I just think there's, I think of it from the kind of the social perspective and What our brains have contributed, but I don't think I can really address the details of all that.
00:36:47.000Right, but even socially, if we did address it socially, we're still going to have to deal with the actual physical limitations of just the environment that we live in and what we've done.
00:37:03.000But yeah, so I think creators coming along and trying to find technical solutions, that's great.
00:37:10.000When you analyze the human mind and knowing what you know about the thought processes and the way people think and work, when you see people in denial of climate change and when you see people that are so enamored...
00:38:09.000It's people cling together, and it's a kind of form of self-protection that by identifying – A set of issues that we all can agree upon because they're kind of dictated top-down in a sense that are our thing and then that thing is somebody else's thing.
00:38:33.000Yeah, that's a weird aspect of being a human being, right?
00:38:36.000These tribal identity things where if you're in this group, you must be pro-choice.
00:38:43.000If you're in this group, you must be pro-life.
00:38:53.000I mean, the belief systems, rigid belief systems, you know, part of, just part of being.
00:39:00.000And when you look at politics, and you know that these belief systems, do you find it odd that we have these, like, sort of polar opposites, or at least left-right choices, red-blue choices, that we've limited ourselves to these very distinct tribes?
00:40:33.000Now, the creativity that allows you to get food when you couldn't get food, allows you to escape from environmental conditions, allows you to escape from predators, all these things are rewarded by the continuing of your genetics.
00:40:50.000But there are other things that come into play.
00:40:53.000One of the specialties that came along, I think, is a byproduct of having language, and by language I don't mean words, but what language did, what was required for language to come out of the brain, which is the development of a cognitive sort of architecture In our brain that allowed all kinds of mental jumping around.
00:41:18.000So for example, for most animals to learn who to trust and who not to trust and in a given situation who's going to do what to whom by just looking around, they have to go through trial and error learning and see,
00:41:38.000But the human mind can simulate, create a mental model, and instantaneously make those kinds of predictions on the basis of very limited information.
00:41:49.000And this is based on something – well, the relation to language is that syntax – It gives you those kinds of options because you have past, present, future states that can be related to you and to others and so forth and personal pronouns are very important in terms of Me,
00:42:15.000The point when those come in in a child is the first point when I think self-awareness can fully be tested and shown.
00:42:27.000Some people say, well, they have it, but they just couldn't express it.
00:42:30.000Others say, no, that the arrival of the personal pronouns are very important in the child's development of a sense of self.
00:42:38.000But anyway, so language changes the brain, changes the cognitive architecture of the brain, and allows for something, just to throw out a technical term, hierarchical relational reasoning, which is the ability to think across kind of conceptual categories,
00:42:54.000laterally and horizontally, so that information, You can just jump around, and that's kind of what creativity is, the ability to just jump around in mental space and come up with something by a unique combination of those things.
00:43:12.000Do you think that there's variation in terms of the types of languages, like Chinese versus Spanish, that they allow you to interface with the world in a different way?
00:43:25.000Because the language is structured very differently.
00:43:27.000Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, but I don't know enough about other languages to say exactly how.
00:43:43.000They were discussing how Korean Airlines Because they have sort of a hierarchy of, you know, the way you're supposed to treat the upper levels of management and that they had to force these pilots to all speak English so that they didn't have this hierarchy Like this presumed hierarchy of being able to address situations.
00:44:08.000That planes had crashed because co-pilots were in their place.
00:44:13.000They were put in their place and they weren't allowed to address pilots.
00:44:16.000And that once they had switched over to English, that the language...
00:44:20.000Like there's so many different versions of dealing with your boss or someone who's an upper level person.
00:44:26.000There's so many different ways that you were supposed to address them and that they had eliminated all that by using English.
00:44:33.000And it made me think, like, just using different styles of language, the way human beings communicate here is very different than the way people communicate, say, you know, in some African countries.
00:44:44.000That we have these different styles of interpreting the world around us, and those in turn have a profound effect on the way we sort of interface with the world.
00:44:55.000Yeah, I think that's definitely right.
00:44:57.000So it's interesting to think about emotion and language.
00:45:03.000So it's often said that an emotion like fear is universal across the world.
00:45:07.000But I don't think that's actually correct.
00:45:13.000And the way fear is interpreted by different cultures is obviously different.
00:45:17.000I mean, the Asians have a different kind of perspective on fear.
00:45:23.000Every culture has their own perspective on fear.
00:45:26.000So fear is the kind of cultural assembly that you have in your brain in response to danger.
00:45:34.000So every culture has to have a language of fear, but not because fear is universal, but because danger is universal.
00:45:42.000And what they interpret as danger is different.
00:45:48.000And fear, for one person, something could Could create fear, whereas for another person, the exact same situation would not, depending upon their personal experiences and maybe even their genetic makeup?
00:46:04.000Well, I mean, genes contribute, so every part of our brain is under some kind of genetic influence, so every For example, the amygdala will be genetically kind of slightly more revved up in one person than another,
00:46:20.000so a little more sensitive to danger, and so that person might be responding more to danger in part because of genes but also maybe because of experiences that they've had.
00:46:30.000And so then the conscious mind is seeing those responses and starting to conclude, oh, I'm an anxious, fearful person.
00:46:38.000And all of that information gets collected in what's called a fear schema, which is a body of knowledge of everything you know about danger and including the way you react to danger and just who you are in terms of danger.
00:46:55.000And so whenever you encounter danger, That schema is what's called pattern completed, so presence of a threat in the world is enough to go into your brain and activate those memories about danger that give you, in a non-conscious representation,
00:47:12.000an activation of this fear schema, that is what then bubbles up into consciousness.
00:47:18.000That's your experience of fear, is what has been activated in your fear schema.
00:47:24.000Knowing what you know, and then watching whatever anxieties or fears may play out in your own mind, is that, for lack of a better term, a mindfuck for you?
00:47:49.000In 1996, I published a book called The Emotional Brain.
00:47:53.000And a few years later, I started finding out from therapists that a lot of patients were reading the book with their therapist, and they were saying that it was really helping them understand How different things were happening,
00:48:10.000that the amygdala was causing them to react in certain situations, but their fear was their conscious understanding of those reactions, and those were not the same thing.
00:48:22.000And that separation helped them navigate their own situation in a situation of danger, separating out Okay, my body is responding this way, my mind is responding this way, and these are two separate things I need to work on and control.
00:48:38.000Have you studied various ways that people mitigate anxiety and fear, like meditation and yoga and all these different things that sort of change people's states?
00:48:48.000I mean, I haven't studied it myself, but I have researched it a bit.
00:48:54.000I try to do meditation myself because I think it's the...
00:48:58.000Probably the most direct and effective way in the moment, you know, sitting in the room outside waiting for it, just had my hat and sunglasses on, just trying to chill out, meditate a little bit, get ready for you.
00:49:35.000So when you examine those kind of tools, like tools that people have sort of imagined or created to sort of in some way alleviate anxiety or enhance perspective, do you spend much time dwelling on the creation of those things and what's going on there?
00:50:12.000The nature of most approaches to fear and anxiety today.
00:50:19.000Just hold off the meditation part slightly.
00:50:22.000So we have, you know, psychopharmacology is a major line of attack, and also what's called cognitive behavioral therapy, which arose as a form first called behavioral therapy.
00:50:41.000Because it came out of the behaviorist movement which said there's no consciousness, you know, that the human is a stimulus response organism that is based on a history of reinforcement with certain kinds of situations.
00:50:56.000So, behavior therapy was about using Pavlovian or operant conditioning to change how the brain would respond to threats and how people would act in those situations.
00:51:16.000So that became cognitive behavioral therapy.
00:51:18.000But again, the cognitive change was used as a way of changing behavior.
00:51:25.000Because so much emphasis has been placed on behavior in our culture, including in the drug therapy world.
00:51:32.000It's all based on changing measurable things like behavior and physiology.
00:51:37.000And I think that that's why all of these things, in some sense, have not worked out as well as we would like.
00:51:44.000You know, the best medications and the best CBT trials will give you like 75% That's pretty great though, isn't it?
00:51:56.000Yeah, but you also have to extract out the placebo effect.
00:52:01.000And in many of these drug studies, for example, antidepressant drugs, the placebo effect is only slightly better than the placebo effect.
00:52:14.000But when you have cognitive behavioral therapy, you're actually going for the placebo effect, right?
00:52:21.000There's nothing wrong with the placebo effect.
00:52:23.000In that sense, though, you are trying to use some sort of strategy with your mind in therapy, whether it's meditation or what you're doing.
00:53:24.000I mean, I would bet a ton of money that 25% of those people don't do what they're supposed to do all the time.
00:53:33.000So, you know, you're right, but I think the issue is, from a scientific point of view, we need to know exactly what really works, what's different from placebo, so that we can see what to build upon.
00:53:49.000For medication, for cognitive therapy as well.
00:53:52.000But the therapy thing is so strange to me because, okay, maybe we're using the wrong word with placebo, because placebo is a word for a medication that has a psychosomatic effect, right?
00:54:04.000Well, it's the control group that doesn't get the treatment.
00:54:08.000It's not really doing anything physiologically, but your body is interpreting it as medicine and saying, all right, change is coming, and then the change comes.
00:54:19.000But when you're thinking about cognitive behavioral therapy, you're thinking about using techniques and strategies to change the way you think and behave So the concept of the placebo effect doesn't really apply there.
00:54:32.000Well, you have to have a control group in the study.
00:54:35.000You have to have randomized control in order to make it.
00:54:37.000So when you have cognitive behavioral therapy and you have randomized control and you have a control group, do you just give them shitty therapy?
00:54:46.000We need to get a therapist on here to give you the answer to that because I don't know the answer.
00:57:38.000But I'm not saying they aren't, but scientifically you can't measure that.
00:57:43.000Right, but if you have a dog and you come home and he's so excited to see you and he's running around in circles, that seems very emotional or akin, right?
00:57:50.000Yeah, but I don't – let's talk about the brain for a second.
00:57:55.000So the – Parts of the brain, circuits in the brain that are involved in this kind of auto-noetic emotion that I'm talking about, this self-involved emotion that's so human, such a human quality.
00:58:16.000The part of the brain that I think is important, and this is still hypothesis, it's not a fact, is something called the frontal pole.
00:58:24.000It's the very, very front part of the prefrontal cortex.
00:58:28.000That region is unique to the human brain.
00:58:34.000Now, other parts of the prefrontal cortex are present in other primates, all other primates, but not in any other mammal.
00:58:43.000So, if we can figure out in the human brain what that frontal pole does and what that other part that all primates have do, then that gives us an anchor for speculating about what other primates, what kinds of experience other primates have given what those parts of the brain enable in us.
00:59:04.000And that would allow us to then extract what other mammals Don't have that we have because they don't have those parts of the brain.
00:59:14.000So it's a kind of, you know, use of the brain to tell us some things about what might exist in other animals.
00:59:21.000But there's no way to ask a dog what's on your mind.
00:59:25.000Could we measure the brain with an fMRI or something along those lines where you get a reading of But that's not an answer.
01:00:06.000Other animals can only respond non-verbally.
01:00:09.000So they don't have that other kind of response that is only reflecting a conscious state.
01:00:15.000So I'm not saying they don't have anything, but scientifically it's very hard to know what they have.
01:00:21.000And the fact that we can study – we know, for example, fear, that the fear itself probably doesn't depend on the amygdala.
01:00:30.000But all the behavior that we see does makes us have to be cautious about observing behaviors that look like they're based on fear, love, and all these other emotions when we can't really know because we can't measure that.
01:01:06.000Like people love to say those kind of things.
01:01:10.000Is it possible to measure varying degrees of emotional response in terms of how it's affecting a person physiologically, whether or not these emotional responses are physiological, or whether you've gone down a well-grooved psychological path That you've been sort of participating in your whole life so that you have these sort of triggers.
01:01:36.000This happens and then, oh, I'm going to start crying.
01:01:39.000This happens, oh, I'm going to get angry.
01:01:41.000And people sort of fall into those paths without self-reflection, without this ability to be objective and introspective and go, why am I reacting this way?
01:01:51.000Maybe you should stop being so emotional, Joe.
01:02:03.000The varying degrees of emotional response and whether or not those are beneficial or whether or not they detract from your experience or inhibit your Your ability to be productive.
01:02:16.000So, you know, you've really nailed a lot of interesting stuff in there.
01:02:22.000You know, it's a very kind of deep analysis of what's going on.
01:02:26.000So the problem is that our language is so bad that all these terms that we have, we borrow from what's called folk wisdom or folk psychology.
01:02:40.000You know, they've come through the ages.
01:02:42.000And This is true in every aspect of science, that you have folk terms, folk physics becomes real physics and then the folk stuff goes away.
01:02:53.000Folk biology becomes real biology and then the folk stuff goes away.
01:02:57.000But in psychology, the folk stuff never goes away.
01:03:01.000Because we always experience the folk aspect of it when we have a conscious experience.
01:03:08.000That's what our conscious mind is, our folk psychology of ourselves and of others and of other animals.
01:03:14.000But underneath that is the part that we can get rid of the folk psychology of because we can understand how behavior is controlled.
01:03:29.000How these physiological responses are controlled.
01:03:32.000And it ain't because, you know, fear is causing it.
01:03:36.000But when you're afraid, you're almost always running from the bear and feeling fear.
01:03:44.000And so you assume that when you're running from the bear, fear is what causes you to run.
01:05:13.000Now you've got a specific threat, so now you're into fear, and then that's going to morph into another anxiety about what the hell is this guy going to do to me.
01:05:22.000But all of that, the dark alleyway is going to go into your brain and trigger your muscle tension, your heart to race, and so forth.
01:05:34.000And the dark alley is going to go to your cortex, and you're going to be interpreting the fact that you're in a dark alley and your heart is racing in terms of being anxious and fearful and all of that.
01:06:02.000And in between those two, you've also got to change the cognitions that underlie the conscious experience, but also the cognitions can trigger behavior.
01:06:12.000So, you know, one of the things we've proposed, I proposed this in my last book, Anxious, was a kind of test program for exploring this, where it would be kind of a three-part, three-step program.
01:06:27.000First, you would You'd have to do it with something simple like a spider phobic.
01:08:24.000Our ancestors certainly experienced venomous snakes, but there's something about some people have an almost illogical reaction to it that it's often been speculated that this is some sort of a genetic memory of someone perhaps in their ancestry line surviving a snake attack or losing someone to a snake.
01:08:46.000It turns out that it's more about the ability to rapidly learn about those kinds of dangers than to innately respond.
01:08:57.000So there seems to be – it's called prepared learning.
01:09:00.000So you have an evolutionarily-based thing that's with you that everyone has some version of, but it varies from individual to individual.
01:09:09.000And then some people are prone to rapidly learn Either because of other experiences or because of their particular genetic makeup.
01:09:21.000And so they tend to go down the road of acquiring these kinds of phobias.
01:09:27.000So the problem with treating that by just extinguishing it through exposure is that the extinction is always impermanent.
01:09:39.000Once you've been reduced, nothing is wrong.
01:09:45.000Let's say the rat has been given a tone that's been paired with a shock, and then it hears the tone 20 or 30 times, stops responding, but then if it goes back in the room or the chamber where the shock had occurred, the tone will again elicit it,
01:10:02.000and the spider phobic returns to the place where it He or she was bitten by a spider or a place where spiders are supposed to be present.
01:10:16.000And that's why – I mean they're called – these are called reinstatement and things like that because they pop back up.
01:10:26.000Maybe medications can help tamp that down a bit.
01:10:32.000Medications are useful in that sense of being able to control the behavior and the physiology, but less so in terms of changing the mental state.
01:10:41.000How could you possibly design a medication That would know how to change the content of a mental state.
01:11:01.000It's so fascinating, though, how people vary so widely.
01:11:06.000In their reaction to certain fears or to certain things that could induce fear, whether it's dogs or whatever irrational thing that people have, the source of that It's really often speculated that there's some sort of a genetic component to it.
01:11:27.000So let's say that in any kind of situation like that, there are multiple systems in the brain that are going to be involved.
01:11:36.000We're going to isolate the amygdala as a hypothetical part of that system that is detecting and responding to the stimulus.
01:11:46.000So we're going to go into the amygdala and focus on one little part of it called the lateral nucleus, that doesn't matter, but it's the part that gets the input from the outside world.
01:11:57.000So that is the gateway into the amygdala.
01:12:00.000So now let's talk about, let's say it's got, I don't know, 100,000 cells and neurons.
01:12:07.000And each of those neurons is going to have a bell curve.
01:12:15.000That's based on the genes that made that cell and whatever kinds of electrical signals it's had throughout the life of the organism.
01:12:25.000So you're going to have 100,000 bell curves of various degrees that when the stimulus comes in, those cells that are activated, their little bell curves are going to determine how much they respond to that.
01:12:40.000And that's going to propagate to other cells that have their own bell curves in areas and so on down the line that what happens at the level of behavior It's a very complicated kind of summation of all those bell curves of all those cells that happen to be activated.
01:13:00.000So it's not like, you know, one thing is programmed.
01:13:03.000It's not like a brain area is programmed.
01:13:05.000It's all about what's happened at those specific cells, both through genetics and experience.
01:13:10.000So we often kind of oversimplify things by thinking, well, there's a gene or an area that has inherited that thing.
01:13:19.000When you think of human beings and you think of what we used to be when we were some sort of a lower hominid and now what we are now, and you think of all these various components that are at play, do you ever try to imagine what a human of a thousand years or ten thousand or hundred thousand years from now will be like?
01:14:05.000So we're going to be a different thing.
01:14:08.000At some point, we may split out into a whole new kind of human.
01:14:12.000The thing about people having babies older, I mean, there's certainly physical limitations when people start having babies older.
01:14:21.000But on the plus side, you're dealing with someone that has a lot more life experience that's raising a child, you know, versus, you know, my mom had me when she was 20, 21. You know, what the fuck do you know when you're 21?
01:14:35.000You don't know much, but if you're a woman who has a child when you're 40, well, hey, that's a rich life of a lot of experiences and maybe you can impart some of that wisdom to your child and look at things in a different way and maybe that in turn will raise a child that's more balanced.
01:14:49.000You know, I'm talking out of my area here, but I think that probably, you know, the eggs sit around for a long time, and I don't know what the effect of aging on the egg is.
01:17:45.000Yeah, you could become something different.
01:17:48.000Me and my friends have this thing that we did last year called Sober October.
01:17:53.000The entire month, no alcohol, no marijuana, no drugs, and crazy exercise.
01:17:58.000Last year, we had a competition to see who could exercise the most.
01:18:01.000We wore these heart rate monitors, and we measured points.
01:18:06.000You get a certain amount of points at 80% of your max heart rate per minute.
01:18:10.000My point is, one of the things that I got out of this, and we all talked about it, because we were exercising hours and hours a day, an incredible alleviation of anxiety.
01:18:36.000I mean, I felt like so good all the time.
01:18:39.000The alleviation of angst was unlike anything.
01:18:41.000The internal chatter that sort of can fuck with your head, that just didn't exist anymore.
01:18:46.000Well, I think that's wonderful that you're saying that because you have so many followers, and I think that's such fantastic information to convey to them.
01:18:54.000It is, and it's so available to all of us.
01:18:57.000I mean, anybody that can move their body can experience this.
01:19:00.000And I don't I would recommend what we did, because we were working out five hours, six hours a day.
01:19:23.000And there's very little use of the body and the body starts to atrophy.
01:19:27.000By pumping that blood through the system and cleaning out the pipes and getting that air into the lungs and forcing yourself to move, when it's over you feel better.
01:22:05.000I think 8 million or something in New York City, but probably like 4 million.
01:22:09.000And then, of course, commuters as well.
01:22:11.000So 8 million plus all the people that come in from different places to work there and just stuffed into an incredibly small area and stacked on top of each other.
01:22:20.000That has got to be a completely new psychological state for the human animal.
01:22:25.000I remember when I first got into psychology, I was reading something about something called a behavioral sink.
01:22:34.000It was about how rats living in an impoverished environment under highly crowded conditions, their behavioral repertoire diminished a lot.
01:22:49.000I think that was used to challenge urban living and To blame a lot of urban decay in the 70s on – I don't think it was necessarily a good idea but it was kind of a way to explain some things that I think it wasn't really good at explaining.
01:23:09.000It's true that people do live under fairly crowded conditions but you can't explain everything in terms of very simple processes.
01:23:20.000Are you aware of those studies that they did where they set cameras up on streets and they set them at distance apart and they measured footsteps, how fast people walked, and then they measured the way people talk, how many syllables and how many sentences they can get in in a certain amount of time.
01:23:36.000And through measuring footsteps and how fast people walked and the way they talked, they could accurately determine how big the city was that they lived in.
01:23:48.000They could accurately figure out whether or not they lived in a high population density, whether or not they lived in a small town, by the way they talked and the way they walked.
01:24:00.000I used to have a colleague at NYU named John Bartsch, who's at Yale now, and he used to do these studies where he was a social psychologist.
01:24:09.000He would have people, students, come into the lab and Take these letters and they were like scrambled and they'd have to unscramble them into sentences.
01:24:22.000I guess it was words and you'd have to unscramble them and put them into a sentence.
01:24:26.000And if the unscramble sentence was about being older or anything about being elderly in age, it would take the students longer to walk down the hallway to get to the elevator afterwards.
01:24:40.000It's just like activating this kind of schema of aging.
01:24:45.000That top-down had some kind of effect on the way you walk.
01:24:53.000And you do see, what's really interesting to me is when you see the differences between people who are the same age, who behave and think very differently.
01:25:03.000And I always wonder how much of that is biological, how much of that is psychological, how much of that is like, well, this person just has a better genetic makeup.
01:25:12.000In their 50s, they still have tons of energy, whereas this person maybe has a shit makeup and bad lifestyle choices and they look like what we considered an old man when we were younger.
01:25:23.000Well, I mean, we're all so complicated and there's so many factors that go into shaping how we end up at any point in our life.
01:25:32.000Where do you think selfishness came from?
01:25:37.000So that's this ability to put yourself into an experience which, as I said earlier, is responsible for our greatest achievements as a species, but also is what will potentially do us in.
01:25:51.000Not only envision a world in which we can be selfless, not selfish, but help others, but also how to exclude others.
01:26:06.000I think it's a natural, basic animal instinct to Stay alive, obviously.
01:26:15.000Richard Dawkins had the theory of the selfish gene.
01:26:18.000Animals are incredibly selfish in their struggle for existence.
01:26:23.000So that kind of automatic selfishness is there.
01:26:28.000But what the auto-noetic mind allows us to do is to be intentionally, willfully selfish.
01:26:35.000To allow us to choose to do these things for our own personal good.
01:26:40.000For example, I think that the auto-noetic human mind is the only entity in the history of life that's been ever to put The organism, now we're talking about the conscious mind being a small part of what's going on in the cortex,
01:26:57.000to put all of the rest of the brain and all of the body at risk for the simple sake of a thrill.
01:27:04.000Mountain climbing, swimming in shark-infested waters or taking drugs at dangerous levels.
01:27:14.000No other organism can commit suicide in the sense of intentionally planning to put an end to an entity that it knows has the possible end.
01:27:26.000So our conscious minds are special in good ways and bad ways.
01:27:35.000What do you think is the root of that?
01:27:37.000I've always wondered why certain people are drawn to doing flips on motorcycles or certain people are drawn to climbing mountains with no ropes.
01:27:54.000I don't really know, but I think that we each have these kind of physiological states that we try to maintain.
01:28:06.000Our homeostatic levels are Are different.
01:28:10.000And some people need a little more adrenaline or a little more – I hate to use adrenaline in the kind of cheap way of just saying – it's just more of a rush or kind of body activity.
01:28:25.000Because all that also affects the brain.
01:28:28.000So consciously, you strive, you may go looking for those kinds of things to get the rush.
01:28:42.000It's sort of on the spectrum of addiction in a sense where you need that physiological change that the drug induces but we also have addictions in our lives that are habits and things that we develop and pursue that aren't necessarily good for us but that we kind of feel compelled to do.
01:29:34.000But when I talk to him, what's really interesting is he's a calm, rational, intelligent man who's very thoughtful, and he's a very kind guy.
01:29:49.000You know, when I think of someone who likes to do flips with a motorcycle or do radical, I think of some crazy, wild thrill-seeker, some dude who just needs to constantly...
01:30:01.000Or a woman who needs to be constantly...
01:30:46.000That females are attracted to men that do those crazy things and take crazy risks for some strange reason.
01:30:53.000Whether it's some sort of a remnant of our ancient past, like that thrill-seeking man is not going to be – he's not going to shy away from combat.
01:31:01.000He will protect our children or something like that.
01:31:03.000Yeah, I mean there's a lot of evolutionary psychology.
01:31:06.000A lot of that is speculative, of course.
01:31:12.000But the thrill seeker is one of the weirder things when everything's great and you have plenty of food and you live in cities and like, okay, look, I'm not getting enough juice here.
01:31:25.000I'm going to have to learn how to hand glide or something, you know?
01:31:29.000And some people may do it for attention.
01:31:56.000Yeah, so, I mean, all these things are, as a child is developing and growing up and passing through different kinds of situations in life, I think a lot of stuff happens kind of randomly,
01:32:13.000you know, so the child may do something that someone views as creative, and so, as you said, the child is rewarded for that, so then that It allows them to explore how they did that and maybe continue to do it.
01:32:27.000But other people may simply have minds that go in that direction on their own where, as we talked about earlier, their thoughts are able to jump across conceptual categories.
01:32:43.000And sort of transcend those categories into completely new ideas and so forth.
01:32:50.000And I don't think we know how the brain does that at all.
01:32:54.000That's a very good question for the future, but it's not something we have a great deal of understanding of now.
01:33:01.000I mean, there could be an area of research on it that I just don't know about.
01:33:48.000People like you who study this stuff, to me, are so important because most of us are just banging into walls, just trying to figure out why we do what we do.
01:33:57.000And to have an ability to understand the scientific explanations for the various things that are at play, it's so critical because you can kind of like, not necessarily stop the process, but at least be aware of it while it's going down.
01:34:13.000Is that part of what you wanted to do when you were writing?
01:34:18.000Well, I want to thank you for crediting me for that, but a lot of what we've been talking about, we've just been having a conversation.
01:34:30.000I don't work on creativity and all these things.
01:34:32.000But you work on the way the mind works.
01:34:34.000I think about how the mind works, but I work on how the brain detects and responds to danger.
01:34:41.000So that allows me to go back to my early work on consciousness and to bring it in And layer it on top of all that other stuff.
01:34:50.000But yeah, I get tremendous value out of sitting there writing.
01:34:57.000Because when you start a book, in my case I think this is probably true of many people, you have no idea how you're going to get to the end.
01:35:05.000You have a beginning and you just see where it goes.
01:35:09.000So this idea of writing a proposal that lays out the whole thing to me doesn't work because you just don't know where it's going.
01:35:17.000And the fun part is getting to the end.
01:36:12.000We think we know why we do the things we do and others do them, but we don't really because our conscious mind is not privy to all of the things that the body and brain are doing.
01:36:24.000Now, when you wanted to examine danger and you wanted to examine the mind and how it reacts to danger and fear and threats, what were you trying to get out of this?
01:36:34.000Well, I started out thinking this was a way to study emotion.
01:36:40.000At the time, I'd been studying these human patients with split brain surgery.
01:36:58.000So you have like young kids, teenagers that have lived most of their life paralyzed by epilepsy and not being able to lead a life There was one patient who basically his parents were constantly having to hold him down on a mattress he was seizing so often.
01:37:16.000So – and this is not – this is only done in a very extreme set of conditions and it's not done that much anymore.
01:37:26.000But when it's done, it's – the connections between the two sides of the brain are separated.
01:37:32.000So information on one side doesn't cross over to the other.
01:38:00.000And so you open it up at the top and you can look down in the center and imagine that there was like a bunch of wires crossing between the two sides of the bun.
01:38:12.000So those wires would then be surgically sectioned.
01:38:19.000Two sides of the brain, separate and independent.
01:38:23.000So typically, language is on the left side, so you can talk to that side.
01:38:27.000The right side doesn't have language, so you have to ask, well, what can it do?
01:38:32.000So if you present a stimulus that only the right hemisphere sees, And you do that by flashing, say, a picture of an apple on the left side of space because everything to the left of center goes to the right hemisphere and everything to the right of center goes to the left hemisphere.
01:38:49.000So you send a stimulus to the right hemisphere and you say, what did you see?
01:38:55.000And the left hemisphere answers because that's where the language is.
01:39:41.000The folklore of it, I don't know if this is actually true, but what is often said is that it prevents the seizures from jumping back and forth and having, you know, because the electrical activity jumping back and forth sort of gets into a kind of endless loop that can't stop.
01:39:59.000But cutting that isolates the seizures in the two hemispheres and makes each one more controllable by taking a medication.
01:40:19.000What we were interested in, in these patients that we were studying, this is my mentor, Michael Gazzaniga.
01:40:27.000And I were studying these at Dartmouth Medical School.
01:40:31.000We were at Stony Brook out on Long Island.
01:40:32.000We would drive up to Dartmouth to see these patients.
01:40:38.000How does the left hemisphere cope with the fact that the right hemispheres performed a behavior that the left hemisphere that you talked to didn't commend?
01:40:48.000So we would put information in the right hemisphere.
01:40:58.000Or, you know, if he scratched his hand, he said, I had an itch, so I needed to scratch it.
01:41:03.000And so time after time, the left hemisphere would generate a narrative that made its behavior make sense.
01:41:11.000So that's why I got interested in how non-conscious systems would be generating behaviors That we generate narratives to explain.
01:41:20.000Because at the time that we were doing this, the idea of cognitive dissonance was very popular.
01:41:27.000And what that means is that when cognitively, when you do something behaviorally that is incongruent with what you cognitively know, it's disturbing.
01:41:41.000And so you have to engage in some kind of dissonance reduction.
01:41:44.000So our hypothesis was these narratives that the left hemisphere is generating about right hemisphere behaviors was a way of left hemisphere's conscious mind kind of keeping it all together.
01:41:58.000The consciousness thinks that it's in charge.
01:42:00.000That, you know, the brain and body are its, you know, it's the control center and everything else is there to satisfy its whims.
01:42:12.000And so it generates these narratives to keep that sense of unity going, even though it's no longer unified.
01:42:17.000Trevor Burrus That is so fascinating that the brain tries to seek some sort of an explanation for the actions that you provoked externally.
01:42:25.000And that's why I got into emotion because, well, maybe emotion systems produce these.
01:43:28.000Oh my gosh, so there's like a physical struggle.
01:43:31.000Yeah, there's like this, you know, and it all kind of like over time, they don't come back together, but they negotiate something where it's not so dramatic.
01:43:40.000The woman who thinks her alien hand wants her to be a better person.
01:43:43.000Yeah, see, I'm thinking these are some sort of physiological, yeah.
01:43:48.000Well, it's, what a crazy solution to epilepsy.
01:43:52.000I know there's other solutions that...
01:44:08.000You know, the kids have lived so long in the state by the time they get their brains changed like that that I don't know really ultimately what became of all these people because I moved on to other fields.
01:44:32.000But I think in general they live a somewhat better life, but I doubt they ever live a completely full normal life.