#268 — The Limits of Self-Knowledge
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Summary
Steven fleming is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and the author of the recent book, "Know thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness and Self-awareness." In this conversation, we talk about the relevant neuroscience, the relationship between self-knowledge and intelligence, the evolution of metacognition, error monitoring theory of mind, mirror neurons, deception and self-deception, false confidence, probabilistic reasoning, cognitive decline, and other topics related to the topic of self-awareness. To access a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/Making Sense. To learn more about the Making Sense Podcast, please go to makingsense.org/podcasts/the-making-sense-podcast. This podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, and therefore it s made possible by the support and contributions of our listeners. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. We don t run ads on the podcast, but you can become a supporter by becoming one of our super-savant fellow members, and you'll get access to all sorts of awesome resources including books, courses, podcasts, and courses, including the latest ones we discuss in the making sense podcast. You'll get a chance to access full episodes of the Making sense Podcast wherever you get your chance to listen to the podcast. Thanks for listening to this podcast! - Sam Harris Make sense? This is a podcast by Sam Harris -- not an ad? -- is the podcast that makes you better than you get to know what you're listening to? -- is it possible to be better than that? -- not even you can be helped to know that you're making sense? -- you'll need to be helped by that you can do that by listening to it? -- can you become a good thing? -- it's made possible to help you? -- yes, you'll become a friend? -- and so much of that's a good idea? -- so you'll even get a sense of that too you'll have a good chance to learn about the podcast? -- let me say that you'll also get that too of that in that's not better of that, right you'll hear about it, too you're not even that's right, right of you, so you're gonna get that?
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy
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what we're doing here please consider becoming one today i'm speaking with steven fleming steven is a
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professor of cognitive neuroscience at university college london and is the author of the recent
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book know thyself the science of self-awareness and self-awareness is the topic of today's
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conversation we talk about the relevant neuroscience the relationship between self-knowledge and
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intelligence the evolution of metacognition error monitoring theory of mind mirror neurons deception
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and self-deception false confidence probabilistic reasoning where metacognition fails cognitive decline
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those places where self-knowledge might be counterproductive and other topics anyway i found it quite
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interesting and i hope you do as well and now i bring you steven fleming
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i am here with steven fleming steve thanks for joining me thanks very much sam it's an honor to
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be here so you've written a very interesting book on perhaps the most interesting topic the topic is
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self-knowledge self-awareness the book is know thyself the science of self-awareness but i'm really
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eager to talk about the whole sweep of this but um before we jump in perhaps you can summarize your
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background academically and intellectually sure yeah so i'm currently a professor of cognitive
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neuroscience at university college london and i guess i mean i've always been interested in the
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sciences um i left high school without really knowing what i wanted to do wanted to be a musician so
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i didn't apply to university like all my friends were doing and instead i took a a year off back
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then and worked in an office job and it was while i was commuting that i started reading popular science
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books on cognitive science that's partly why i was also so interested in writing one myself when i got
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the opportunity and interesting just found it absolutely fascinating i had like no idea that there
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was a science of the mind out there we didn't get exposed to that at school at high school so i then
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became fixated on doing experimental psychology i went to oxford and i was lucky there to have
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as a tutor a guy called paul as a party who works on blindsight this bizarre neurological condition of
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consciousness and it was paul who convinced me that there was a real rigorous science out there of
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consciousness and it was possible to do you know good neuroscience on this and i then went on to
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university college london to do a phd in neuroscience with and that was co-supervised with the psychologist
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chris frith and the neuroscientist ray dolan and both great people i haven't met either but i've
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obviously read their papers yeah no it was uh it was a fascinating time and in ray's lab he was focused
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on um studying decision making using reinforcement learning models and in my phd i mostly focused on using
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brain imaging to study decision making but on the side i was continuing to kind of have this
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off on love affair with consciousness which has kind of continued with me now and i i guess towards the
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end of my phd i realized we could start applying some of the tools of decision making research to also
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study how we make second order decisions so how we think about and reflect on how we're performing on
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various tasks and that's what psychologists refer to as metacognition or thinking about thinking
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and but at the time there there was a you know a long tradition in psychology of studying this
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this topic but very few people were working on the neuroscience of metacognition
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and i had the opportunity in a sense to get in on the ground floor of that and we ran a couple of
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early brain imaging studies looking at the relationship between prefrontal function and metacognition
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i then went off to new york to do a postdoc at myu to build computer learn how to build computational
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models of metacognition and then in 2015 moved back to to london and ucl where i now lead my own
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research group studying metacognition and consciousness nice nice well um we should dispense
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with one possible source of confusion at the outset because i'm not sure how familiar you are with with my
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work especially on the topic of mindfulness meditation the nature of the self and so i'm
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someone who's given to say at fairly regular intervals that the self is an illusion or at best a
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construct you know at bottom it's not what it seems but that's a very specific use of the word
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self and when we talk about self-awareness i think we're talking about something that is
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far more capacious than the the sense of subject object perception which is really the the linchpin
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of what of the self that i would argue that mindfulness ultimately reveals to be illusory
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so i mean we're talking about the whole person much more often than we're talking about the sense that
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there's a subject in the head independent of experience so when we're talking about self-awareness
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there's you know this this is not in violation of anything i have said about the status of of the
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the self as subject and in other contexts and i'm happy to talk about the self with you as well but
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i just wanted to try to clarify that for people because there's going to be something i can hear in the in
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the heads of many listeners if the self is an illusion what could we possibly mean by self-awareness well
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self-awareness extends to everything else we can reflect on and be aware of in a kind of second
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order way that relates to our experience you know our performance errors the thing that we just
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experienced a moment ago you know lapses in memory or i mean let's just let's just dive into the topic
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how do you describe metacognition at this point yeah no i think that's a really useful background to
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have in place a because i am talking about something distinct here to the philosophical notion of
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self which is a complex object and here i'm talking about something more practical something more
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functional which is this capacity to be aware of our traits our skills our personalities our behaviors
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and in some sense see ourselves like others see us and we can study this in various ways we can
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look at in very simple tasks how people realize they've made errors or how they're able to estimate
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their confidence in their skills and abilities and so on and it's something that we often i think just
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take for granted but the reason i find it so fascinating is because when you think about it for a moment it is a
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kind of bizarre and wonderful feature of the human mind that we can some in some sense think about how
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our own minds are working and this has very practical consequences so you the reason we write a shopping
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list when we go shopping is because in some sense we realize that our memory is not going to be good
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enough to hold all those items in mind and similarly when we start to realize our sight is failing for
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instance it's not because we think the outside world has become blurry it's because we realize that
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there's something in our perceptual systems that it needs fixing with new glasses and so on so
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it's this kind of practical reflective thought that's not always obvious from the outside but it's
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something that we can study with the tools of psychological science yeah yeah and one thing is increasingly
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clear is that other people and now even algorithms can know what we're like better than than we can
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certainly on specific topics as i remember a friend once told me a a story from a board meeting where he
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was uh he was engaged in a very stressful conversation with the group and someone in the meeting commented on how
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emotional he was getting and and you know just seemed like they might want to take a break and and he denied
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being overly emotional and and someone at around the table suggested that he bring his attention
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to the sensations at his upper lip and the moment he did that he burst into tears wow i mean apparently
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his lip had been quivering as though he were about to he was about to burst into tears and it was noticeable to
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to those in the room and you know you can imagine just how much can be known about any one of us
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now based on our google search history say or you know anything we do with our attention online and when
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you look at the database of knowledge that is the profile of each of us that is accruing in somewhere in the
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cloud and what might be gleaned from that when you compare it to everything else you know every other
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profile of every other person you know just the statistical knowledge there and the capacity to
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predict the next thing we'll find captivating yeah it is exactly what you said to take the view of
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oneself that another person could have opens the door to you know sometimes mortifying you know at minimum
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interesting facts that are not necessarily visible or salient when one's simply living one's life and
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having one's experience yeah absolutely it's interesting the example you mentioned of the
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person in the boardroom because i i feel like i have through studying metacognition i've become
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more attuned in my own life to how i might have this fading out of self-awareness at certain moments and
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it's something that my wife has said to me on occasion when things are stressful with grant
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applications or whatever that i just become you know a horrible person to live with on a for a few
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days at a time and i used to deny this completely i was like i don't feel like anything's changing my
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behavior and i now come to realize that how could i have possibly known at that time i mean there's a
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whole interesting story there about stress and how it is detrimental for metacognition itself so you
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have this kind of paradoxical situation where the times when you might need to be aware of how your
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behavior is becoming uh causing problems for others those are the times when metacognition and
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self-awareness might actually be most impaired um but i have definitely i think become a bit more
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willing to accept in my own life that those fade outs of self-awareness can happen and they do
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happen probably more often than i'd like to admit and i then have this stronger tendency to trust what
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say my wife is saying about my behavior and to try and correct it accordingly yeah yeah so let's um
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build up this picture of metacognition i mean the the simplest or most common definition i think one
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encounters is the phrase knowing that you know right there's the knowing of things there's the cognition
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piece and then there's the self-awareness that you have the knowledge and this extends to
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knowledge in all of its forms you know semantic knowledge if you ask me could you name more than four
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states in the united states i could say yes to that i could be sure about my knowledge there without
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actually going through the exercise of listing any states uh so i have this more abstract understanding
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that you know my knowledge bank contains at least you know four state names and so it is with so much
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of what we know and of course we can be wrong about that we can actually think we could uh produce
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specific concepts or memories and when asked actually fail but generally speaking there's um
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there's a representation of what uh is in our storehouse of knowledge that doesn't require us
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to actually go into the storehouse in order to cash it out in that moment and so it is with you know
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even procedural learning or you know motor memory so again do you know how to ride a bike you know
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could you raise your hands over your head we'd be surprised to have our confidence about that
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disconfirmed uh if we tried but it's um how would you build up the layers of what we're calling
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metacognition here what what is it beyond this representation to oneself that one knows certain
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things yeah i i think that's um a very nice way of thinking about it this this notion that there are
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representations that go beyond knowledge and one analogy that i sometimes use it's not a perfect one
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because it's not how things actually work but you can think of metacognition as in some sense being
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like the index of a book and the index usually points you to the right page in the book but if
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the index maker has got things wrong and the book's self-knowledge has in some sense failed then
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sometimes there will be an index entry that does not correspond to the the actual text in the book and
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i think we can you know start to build up a picture of how metacognition works by thinking of the brain as
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effectively a hierarchical system and that it does not only encode information in memory it does not
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only perceive and you know represent things at a first order level but it also has what we think of as
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higher order representations and we think parts of association cortex like prefrontal and parietal
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cortex are important for this that they it builds representations at a more abstract level of how the
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system is working and i think that's you know that's probably the best way of conceptualizing
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metacognition at a cognitive systems level uh that we have at the moment and then we can obviously
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take this in many different directions in terms of specific topics within that
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broader umbrella term of metacognition and how does it interact if it interacts at all with the
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variable of intelligence so there's i think the there is an initial intuition that we have that
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intelligence is in some sense allied with having good awareness of what we know and don't know but
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as ever it turns on our definition of intelligence and empirically what we've found perhaps surprisingly
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in many of our studies is that when we measure metacognition in the lab and maybe it's useful
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to say a few words about how how we actually do that so typically the way we can quantify your
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metacognition and put a number on it in a particular task is by asking you to assess your performance on a
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number of trials so of the task so we might give you a memory task and after every decision about
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whether this object was on the list that you're asked to remember or not we'd ask you how confident
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you were about that choice or we might give you a task involving perceptual judgments and then ask
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you how confident you are about each choice and the key thing we're interested in there is not only
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your performance on the memory and the perception task but also how your confidence tracks your
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performance so intuitively if i have high confidence when i'm right and lower confidence when i'm wrong
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that's what we call having good metacognitive sensitivity or metacognitive ability and what
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we found in those studies now we've done studies of thousands of people is that performance on classical
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iq tests is not a great predictor of metacognitive ability and this lines up with some other work
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in um using other measures of metacognition like whether we tend to be fooled for um by initially
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intuitive answers without reflecting on them so these are things like the cognitive reflection test
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that taps into more system two than system one thinking and again there in the literature on that kind of
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test it does seem to be independent of classical iq measures and i think one way of thinking about this
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on a very broad brush basis is that the kind of neural and cognitive resources that we bring to
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the table to solve reasoning problems which is effectively what an iq test is tapping into
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is uh that those are distinct to or somewhat distinct to the kinds of neural and cognitive resources involved
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in reflecting on our performance in those tasks including potentially even in an iq test so you in theory
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and we have done a little bit of this you can measure someone's metacognition about their
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performance on a test of intelligence so in a sense both on a theoretical basis but also also on an
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empirical basis we think metacognition and iq come apart in interesting ways yeah you can you can see
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that metacognition and performance have to break apart because you would have perfect metacognition
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if you were confident that you had utterly failed to perform if in fact you had utterly failed to
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perform you could just go through life failing again and again and and as long as you're aware
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that it's just one failure after another well then your your metacognition score is perfect
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that's that's right that's exactly right so and i say i kind of make the throwaway line in the book
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that metacognition is often most useful when we're doing stupid things because that's when
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you know we need to be aware of making errors so no that's absolutely right what picture do we have
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based on evolutionary psychology of metacognition how do we think this might have evolved and and we
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know what are the benefits of being able to represent to oneself the likelihood that one has made an error
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or i mean that's obviously only one slice of metacognition but this second order reflection
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what how does this fit in in the context of evolutionary psychology so one starting point
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for getting at that question is to look at how and whether we share metacognitive capacities
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with other species and there has been an interesting line of work for many years in
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comparative psychology looking at tests of confidence and uncertainty and error monitoring
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in animals and the general picture there is that in many species you can have pretty sophisticated
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tracking of confidence tracking of errors and so on so there's been some lovely work in dolphins and
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monkeys and rats showing that they pass confidence tasks similar to the ones that we use with humans
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but that i think is a um is a type of metacognition that occupies a different space to explicit self
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awareness in humans and the reason that we think that's the case is because when we look at child
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development in humans that kind of implicit metacognition the ability to track confidence and monitor errors
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that seems to be in place relatively early in life so there's been some beautiful and heroic studies done
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by sig kuida's lab in paris showing that babies as young as 12 months i think even younger than that in some
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of their studies show signatures of error monitoring both in eeg activity and also in their persistence for
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searching for particular objects so when you use their persistence of searching for a toy for instance as a marker of
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confidence then you get all the same metrics of metacognitive sensitivity that you can get out of the
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the the adult data now that seems to be that kind of lower level ability to self-monitor seems to be in place
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quite early in life in humans but when you actually when kids become verbal and you then ask them about their
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confidence and about whether they know something or don't know something then as i'm discovering at the moment
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with my two and a half year old their metacognition is terrible they think they know things they don't
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know they fail to you know realize they need to ask you about something and so on so it's not until the
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age of around three or four that children start to gain this explicit self-awareness of what they know
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and don't know and we think that in studies in adult humans that kind of more explicit level of
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self-awareness is related more to theory of mind or the ability to think about other people as well as
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to think about ourselves so i'm not sure if that answered your question but hopefully it got us started
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along that line yeah well that does um neatly differentiate us from other animals even other
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primates when you um imagine that the that an awareness a comprehensive awareness of our own
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mind is of a piece with with what we call theory of mind it goes by other names like mind reading and
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mind sight and but it's the ability to represent the mental states of others such that you can recognize
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that other people can have rather often different beliefs and desires and expectations than you do
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and they and they can be at odds with what is in fact true of the world as obviously the famous test of
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this is to set up a little playhouse with some dolls and and ask kids around the age of four
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one doll leaves the room and then another doll hides a cherished object somewhere in the playhouse and
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uh then you ask the kid you know where when this when this other figure comes back where is he or
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she going to look for the the object it's only once they can develop the concept of another person
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holding a false belief that they can give the correct answer which is he's going to believe it
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was where he where it last was before he left the room so yeah i mean remind me i i think we
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while there's some possible basis for a very rudimentary theory of mind in other primates i mean i think
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there's some something like deception it's not the it's still somewhat controversial to call it
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deception right i think we still don't think that other primates have a proper theory of mind is that
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correct yeah that i mean it's an evolving field and in fact only in the past two or three years
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um have there been studies suggesting that chimpanzees can represent false beliefs at least
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to the extent of being able to shift their gaze towards where the object is actually going to be
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sorry where to where the object will they think the object will appear from the perspective of the
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other person but so far at least and i was reading a review on this recently from laurie santos and
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colleagues and so far at least the picture is that even though if you use clever experimental
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techniques you could get some hint that they can track false beliefs at least but in behavior in the
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in in terms of being able to act upon those and use those to guide behavior it seems like there is a
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gulf there from the best experiments on chimps to humans there's quite a gulf and this is not human
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adults this is as you say kids age around four and what's really interesting there is that if you go
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back that field of research that field on animal theory of mind was kicked off by this famous paper
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back in the 70s which just had the title of does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind and going back
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to that paper you what what the authors of that paper meant by theory of mind was the ability to think
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about other people's mental states but also the ability to think about your own mental state
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that term theory of mind has kind of got used most often in the literature to be about other people
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yeah what's interesting now i think with this rise of work on metacognition is that we're starting to
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think okay maybe this is just a more general computational capacity that subserves not only
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thinking about other people but also thinking about ourselves yeah this is this is really interesting
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and this is this is a place where it does at least make a point of contact with the self that i
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often denigrate as illusory and there's this sense that our sense of our our representation of
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ourselves in social space and in the world is of a piece with our concrete representation of others
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as others right that this really indelible sense of self and other emerges together kind of a single
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cognitive brushstroke and when you as many people can attest in you know experiences in meditation and
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you know with psychedelics when that boundary between self and other erodes it you know it erodes
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again it's kind of a single boundary where you're if you're not really reifying self you're not
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quite reifying other in quite the same way in the normal course of events where we we feel like
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ourselves and surrounded by other minds it does seem intuitive to me that we're doing something quite
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similar when we're representing other minds and and reflecting on our own i mean it's just what we're
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thinking about the same kinds of things and it's the angle of our gaze that is different but it's
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it's in this goes to many other results in neuroscience when you think of you know the mirror neuron
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research and just how is it that we interpret the behaviors of others when you you see someone
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reaching for an object you have you understand their intention in a way that maps on to you know
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what it's like to be you doing more or less the same thing reaching for objects of of that kind
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there's a kind of mirroring component here in the way we um we understand other people's behaviors and
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it is the research thus far you know i think it's appropriate to be somewhat skeptical of just how much
00:27:38.100
has been made of the mirror neuron research but it certainly seems that there is a kind of self
00:27:43.560
mapping uh that is the basis for our understanding the behavior of others yeah i i think there's
00:27:49.160
there seems to be a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding that linkage it's really hard to
00:27:56.160
pin it down um and what i find fascinating and somewhat frustrating is you know can we cash that
00:28:03.780
out in a more computational terms like what is that system really actually doing assuming it is a
00:28:09.600
system that is as you say building a model of someone else and also building a model of ourselves
00:28:14.800
but it does seem like that similar brain networks are involved and we recently did a meta-analysis of
00:28:21.880
all the studies of brain imaging studies of metacognition and compared that to classical theory of mind
00:28:29.300
networks and there there was interesting overlap in regions of the medial prefrontal cortex
00:28:34.960
and we know for instance in neurodegenerative diseases like dementia decline in self-awareness is
00:28:42.420
often accompanied by a decline in social cognition as well and developmentally they seem to go hand
00:28:48.360
in hand in children so there's a lot of kind of there does seem to be a symmetry there and i'm
00:28:54.000
attracted to that symmetry i just think it's hard to find a good way and we are thinking of trying to
00:28:59.640
do this but it's hard to find a good way of directly comparing the kind of computations that might
00:29:05.180
underpin self and other evaluations yes we've just discussed that theory of mind is the the necessary
00:29:12.720
precursor for deception because it's not until you understand that other people have beliefs and
00:29:20.020
representations uh that you can then manipulate those beliefs and representations strategically
00:29:26.180
with an awareness of uh that this is a likely way to produce a desired effect in their behavior
00:29:32.900
but then there's this question of self-deception which um again is a somewhat controversial topic
00:29:40.020
scientifically it's there are paradoxes that await us when we try to think of self-deception as
00:29:46.340
being truly analogous to the deception of others because then you're left with this quasi freudian
00:29:52.460
picture of part of you consciously deceiving some other part of you so that the part of you that is
00:29:57.740
in the deception business must know the truth in order to strategically hide it or or or distort it
00:30:03.980
uh for the rest of you how do you think of self-deception or the the phenomenology of being
00:30:11.580
you know flagrantly wrong about one's inner life or outer behavior in ways that um invite this this analogy
00:30:20.620
to deception you know we do often summarize it as self-deception or you know willful ignorance i mean the
00:30:27.280
willful part of it is perverse uh and you know inscrutable from a cognitive point of view
00:30:34.200
um where does that fit into the discussion of metacognition yeah it's it's interesting in terms
00:30:41.040
of how that might connect to this notion of belief decoupling from accuracy or confidence decoupling from
00:30:50.260
performance because i think that is something we do see routinely in many studies people's metacognition
00:30:56.220
isn't very good they are sometimes confident that they've got the right answer even though it's
00:31:01.600
clearly wrong and we know that there are all these biases in belief and confidence that people like
00:31:08.400
daniel kahneman have famously documented i think that one place it connects there to the discussion we
00:31:17.960
were just having on theory of mind is that we model or we create narratives to explain the behavior of
00:31:26.080
others that's part of the the the depth of mental state inference that we can do that we can say well
00:31:33.260
they must have ignored me in the street because of you know what i did yesterday or something like
00:31:39.520
that there's a kind of like a narrative that we create about the thought processes going on in
00:31:44.100
other people's heads and we seem to create a similar self-narrative and that can cohere more or less
00:31:53.840
with reality and when it decouples completely then we're in the realm of psychosis or confabulation
00:31:59.340
so i think that there are you know we can start building up a story about why beliefs or narratives
00:32:06.420
might decouple from what is the ground truth of our behavior or how we appear to others what i think
00:32:13.320
is really interesting about your your question is that i hadn't really thought about before is that
00:32:17.740
does that then in some sense require a system to also know the truth internally and it's not clear to
00:32:26.620
me that that is the case although i think there could it could be possible that that is the case in some
00:32:31.640
circumstances so we've done a bit of work this was work led by a former postdoc of mine dan bang
00:32:38.020
who has been really interested in this problem he calls private public mapping which is effectively
00:32:45.280
how do we take our private beliefs and convert them into what we say to others and so his example
00:32:52.200
of this is you know what do you say to a kindly aunt who's given you a terrible christmas present and
00:32:57.620
you know you don't want to hurt their feelings so you say an untruth but you you do this strategically
00:33:03.140
and we studied that in the context of metacognition by being able to track using brain imaging the
00:33:09.860
confidence that was being formed at any given moment because we have a fairly good understanding now of
00:33:15.140
the neural correlates of confidence in individual decisions but then we required subjects to
00:33:21.640
strategically adjust the confidence they communicated to their partners in a collaborative
00:33:27.480
game and what we found was that there was a distinct there were distinct networks involved in this
00:33:33.760
private sense of confidence how do i feel about my performance now and another part of the prefrontal
00:33:39.520
cortex was engaged when they had to strategically adjust that to communicate to the other person so
00:33:45.660
that would be it's not quite deception but it's some kind of strategic mapping between um you know this
00:33:53.060
kind of private feeling of of what's going on and what we're trying to communicate to others for the
00:33:59.140
purposes of strategic manipulation um so it'd be super interesting to know whether we're at some level
00:34:05.460
doing that to ourselves that at some sense that same general circuit for strategic manipulation of
00:34:11.660
others is also working under the hood for ourselves and i don't know of any work on that yeah well
00:34:17.440
when you look at the structure of much of our thought it is conversational i mean we are talking to
00:34:23.180
ourselves much of the time as though there's someone in us who is listening right who needs to be told
00:34:30.940
certain things otherwise you know much of our discursive thought is totally superfluous right you know
00:34:36.460
i mean why do you why does part of you say anything to the rest of you as though the rest of you isn't
00:34:43.420
aware of the thing that's being said you know if you like if i'm looking for an object and on my desk
00:34:48.740
and i said you know i when i spot it i might say oh there it is right to myself you know silently with
00:34:55.840
the voice of the mind but if i'm the one to see it right why who am i telling oh there it is right i mean
00:35:02.820
who who needs that further linguistic information when i i the one who is in possession of the eyes that have
00:35:10.700
seen it are you know is looking at it in that moment and so so much of our thought is dialogical
00:35:16.780
uh that one could imagine a similar process is happening we know we're the thoughts are tumbling
00:35:22.660
out our mouths when we're speaking to others and then when we shut our mouths we keep talking to
00:35:28.440
ourselves about more or less everything yeah and i'm i'm very attracted to the position that
00:35:35.940
chris frith holds on this that in a sense and this comes back to the conversation about an
00:35:41.480
evolutionary story of metacognition that why did we start building this this self-narrative
00:35:48.900
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