The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1344 - Joseph LeDoux

00:00:03.000 Here we go.

00:00:04.000 Joe, thank you.

00:00:05.000 Thank you for being here.

00:00:06.000 Really appreciate it, man.

00:00:06.000 It's a pleasure to be here.

00:00:08.000 This is a fascinating subject.

00:00:09.000 I've been really looking forward to talking to you.

00:00:11.000 Because 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.

00:00:21.000 It is.

00:00:22.000 How did it happen?

00:00:23.000 Well, it's only a four billion year story is the subtitle.

00:00:27.000 We have some time.

00:00:30.000 So shall I tell you how I got into it and how I ended up thinking about that problem?

00:00:36.000 So I've been working on how the brain detects and responds to danger for most of my scientific career.

00:00:43.000 A 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.

00:00:50.000 So I got interested in consciousness and also in how behaviors that might be produced non-consciously affect what we know about ourselves.

00:01:00.000 So we see ourselves doing something and then we kind of consciously build that into our narrative of what we are.

00:01:06.000 But a lot of what we do, we do non-consciously.

00:01:09.000 And 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.

00:01:20.000 So you got to make sense of it and generate an explanation, a narrative.

00:01:23.000 So that was where I got started and I tried to figure out, well, what would be some kinds of non-conscious systems?

00:01:30.000 Maybe emotion systems are producing behaviors that we don't fully understand.

00:01:35.000 I 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.

00:01:53.000 After many years of doing that, I started asking, How far back does this ability to detect and respond to danger go?

00:02:00.000 We know that bugs and flies can do that.

00:02:04.000 And research had been done showing that bugs and flies have certain molecules in their brain.

00:02:10.000 That are important in these kinds of protective defensive behaviors and including the ability to learn about them and store those as memories.

00:02:18.000 So 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.

00:02:30.000 So 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.

00:02:45.000 So 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.

00:02:58.000 So you ask where back in time It's the ancestor that made that possible.

00:03:04.000 You know, if we've got the same genes, either it kind of happens spontaneously, separately, or there's a common ancestor.

00:03:10.000 And indeed, there's a common ancestor.

00:03:12.000 And 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.

00:03:24.000 So it has kind of three-dimensional sides.

00:03:27.000 Before that, there were animals like jellyfish that were radial, But no front and back.

00:03:34.000 They just have a top and a bottom.

00:03:36.000 And before that, there are sponges, which have no front, back, top, bottom. 0.98

00:03:40.000 They're just kind of randomly organized.

00:03:42.000 So that's kind of the story of animals, sponges to jellyfish to these bilateral animals.

00:03:49.000 So 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,

00:04:04.000 vertebrates, all the fish, reptiles, mammals, birds, and so forth.

00:04:10.000 So those are two separate lines.

00:04:12.000 That inherited these genes that make the memory and defensive behavior possible.

00:04:18.000 So, you say, well, how far back does it stop there?

00:04:22.000 And no, it doesn't because you can find those genes on through jellyfish and then keep going into single cell organisms.

00:04:31.000 These are like protozoa, things that give you intestinal parasites so they can give you upset stomach.

00:04:42.000 Things like amoeba, paramecia that you might have heard of in biology class in high school or something.

00:04:49.000 These have no nervous system and yet they detect and respond to danger.

00:04:53.000 They learn about their environment.

00:04:55.000 They do all these sorts of things.

00:04:57.000 And where do they come from?

00:04:58.000 Well, 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.

00:05:08.000 Now these guys go back to the beginning of life.

00:05:11.000 The 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.

00:05:25.000 Now what's interesting, that cell that started dividing is the mother of every bacterial cell that ever lived.

00:05:32.000 So that cell is still alive because they reproduce by cell division.

00:05:40.000 So 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.

00:05:50.000 It's kind of a mind-blowing thing.

00:05:52.000 It's incredibly mind-blowing.

00:05:54.000 Do we have any idea why the first cell decided to divide?

00:05:57.000 Well, I shouldn't say it's the first cell that decided to divide.

00:06:02.000 Bacterial cell?

00:06:03.000 It's the first cell that was able to sustain life long enough to give off offspring that could sustain and sustain and sustain.

00:06:13.000 So there were probably lots of experiments before a kind of cell or a kind of group of cells had the right stuff to be able to do that.

00:06:21.000 So those others never made it because they didn't have quite enough of what it took to be a cell that could do that.

00:06:29.000 So the first cell, I mean, it's kind of a hypothetical cell.

00:06:32.000 It's called LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of life.

00:06:37.000 So that's about 3.7, 3.8 billion years ago.

00:06:42.000 But it could have been a bunch of cells, a collection of cells, cell types, one of which then populated all of life.

00:06:52.000 The weird thing about life is not just that it's different and it varies so much, but that it's ever increasing in its complexity.

00:07:03.000 If you go back to the single cell and then you come all the way to today to a person.

00:07:08.000 Right.

00:07:08.000 Like, what a weird sort of transformation.

00:07:11.000 You know, it's dangerous to talk about as if we're moving towards some kind of goal.

00:07:18.000 Right.

00:07:18.000 Is it dangerous?

00:07:19.000 That we are the goal.

00:07:20.000 We're not the goal.

00:07:21.000 I don't think we're the goal.

00:07:22.000 No, we're definitely not the goal.

00:07:23.000 I've been more and more thinking that artificial life is the goal.

00:07:27.000 Mm-hmm.

00:07:28.000 Well, I mean, there's no goal of life.

00:07:30.000 Right, of course.

00:07:32.000 Survival is the only goal of every organism.

00:07:35.000 And 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.

00:07:47.000 That's all you have to do.

00:07:48.000 You have to live long enough to reproduce.

00:07:50.000 And to do that, you have to have energy resources.

00:07:53.000 So you have to incorporate nutrients.

00:07:55.000 You've got to balance your fluids.

00:07:57.000 Otherwise, you have to keep your ions straight or the cell will get too big and explode or get too small and collapse.

00:08:04.000 You've got to thermoregulate because all of these things depend on the right kind of internal temperature, and you have to reproduce.

00:08:11.000 Those are the survival requirements of a cell, but they're also the survival requirements of a human.

00:08:17.000 So 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.

00:08:27.000 We have to eat, drink, defend against danger, incorporate nutrients and balanced fluids and ions that way, defend, you know, reproduce.

00:08:37.000 And so that was the mind-blowing thing.

00:08:40.000 See, I wrote the whole three-quarters of the book as a scientific journalist because I didn't know any of this stuff.

00:08:45.000 I had to just learn it.

00:08:47.000 And it was a lot of fun, but it took a long time.

00:08:50.000 I can't imagine.

00:08:51.000 When you think about the original Luca and then human beings, do you ever try to extrapolate?

00:08:57.000 Do you ever try to keep the process rolling in your mind and see where is this going to go?

00:09:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:09:03.000 So the end of the book, I paint a not-so-rosy picture of where it's going.

00:09:11.000 So let's talk about the end of the book.

00:09:13.000 So I say, okay, well, our We have these two kinds of significant experiences in our lives that occupy the human mind.

00:09:27.000 One is the kind that we can call an awareness of facts.

00:09:34.000 This thing is here.

00:09:37.000 And the other is what we might call a self-awareness.

00:09:44.000 It's me that is aware that that is a bottle.

00:09:47.000 So that's a higher level.

00:09:50.000 And that is what appears to be unique to the human mind, the ability to represent the self as a subject.

00:09:57.000 In other words, to have these subjective experiences that have a personal past.

00:10:02.000 It's not just the past, but your past.

00:10:05.000 You lived it.

00:10:06.000 And a personal present and a potential future that you can imagine different scenarios of you existing in in the future.

00:10:16.000 So that's called auto-noetic consciousness, the ability to self-know about where you are in time.

00:10:25.000 And this is an idea that was proposed by a guy named Endel Tolving, a very distinguished psychologist who's retired now.

00:10:33.000 But 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.

00:10:43.000 Without that kind of consciousness, we're limited to kind of factual information.

00:10:49.000 Something is there.

00:10:50.000 I might be able to say, oh, food is there.

00:10:55.000 Drink is there or a sexual partner is there, but not necessarily that I want that food.

00:11:04.000 You might have a kind of biological urge towards it.

00:11:07.000 Now from the outside, it looks like Everything we do is intentional and willful.

00:11:15.000 So I think I'm controlling my behavior.

00:11:18.000 You think you're controlling yours.

00:11:20.000 I see you do something that I might have done in a similar situation.

00:11:24.000 I think you intentionally control that.

00:11:26.000 We see a dog doing something that would be similar to what we do.

00:11:29.000 We think we know why the dog is doing that because it had some intention.

00:11:33.000 But 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.

00:11:47.000 Take the example of the area I've worked on for all these years which is threat detection.

00:11:54.000 Now, this part of the brain called the amygdala is key to the detection and response to threat in a kind of basic sense.

00:12:02.000 You know, threat comes up, you freeze if there's a snake for example.

00:12:07.000 Now, 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.

00:12:22.000 But for the longest time and throughout most of my career, I've said the amygdala does not consciously experience fear.

00:12:31.000 And yet my work has been used to kind of sell and defend this idea of the amygdala is the brain's fear center.

00:12:39.000 I think that's completely wrong.

00:12:41.000 Why do you think it's been misinterpreted?

00:12:44.000 It's a long, complicated story, but partly it's my fault because I was not as vigilant as I should have been when I was describing it.

00:12:57.000 See, what I did was I I would talk about the amygdala as a non-conscious state of fear, non-conscious implicit fear.

00:13:06.000 I would say that while the neocortex is where we consciously experience fear and those are separate.

00:13:14.000 But that was too complicated.

00:13:16.000 The journalist kind of ignored it and it just became the amygdalas, the brain's fear center.

00:13:21.000 Even 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.

00:13:31.000 Because there was a lot of money to be directed towards research if you're studying fear and how you could treat that.

00:13:39.000 But I think it's been kind of a wrong path because it's led to the development of medications that don't really work.

00:13:48.000 So 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.

00:13:58.000 You mean like Xanax, things along those lines?

00:14:00.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:01.000 Companies are getting out of the Xanax business?

00:14:04.000 Benzos, Xanax, yeah.

00:14:06.000 I mean they're not – either that or they're repurposing them for other purposes.

00:14:10.000 But – 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.

00:14:24.000 So the only thing that's been discovered since then is more versions of the same thing with slightly fewer side effects.

00:14:31.000 But there's been no new discovery of a new kind of drug that's going to help people.

00:14:35.000 And why is that?

00:14:36.000 Well, 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.

00:14:55.000 So when you give it to a person, they should be less fearful.

00:14:59.000 But what you find is, say, a person with social anxiety might find it easier to go to the party.

00:15:03.000 They're less timid, but still anxious while they're there.

00:15:06.000 And 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.

00:15:14.000 It gets rid of the body responses, but not the feeling.

00:15:17.000 So it was a misunderstanding of what behavior can tell us.

00:15:22.000 We treat behavior as if it's an ambassador of the mind, but behavior is really a tool of survival.

00:15:28.000 It goes back to those first cells that ever lived who had to defend against danger.

00:15:33.000 Bacterial cells move in the water and then they come across a gradient of some chemical that's a toxin.

00:15:41.000 As soon as they detect that, they bounce away and go in a different direction.

00:15:45.000 If they find a gradient of something that is a nutrient, they keep going and absorb it.

00:15:51.000 So they have the ability to detect what's useful and harmful in their lives.

00:15:55.000 These are not there for psychology.

00:15:58.000 They're simply there to keep the organism alive.

00:16:01.000 And many of the behaviors that persist throughout the whole history of life are like that.

00:16:07.000 They're there because each of the cells in the body has to, you know, do all these things to stay alive.

00:16:15.000 And so the organism as a whole has to do it as well.

00:16:18.000 Defend against danger, incorporate nutrients, balance fluids, thermoregulate, reproduce.

00:16:23.000 So these are survival tools, not mind tools.

00:16:27.000 Now we can use our mind in conjunction with these things.

00:16:30.000 And because we can, we conflate every time we're freezing in the front of a snake to the fact that the fear is what's causing it.

00:16:39.000 But the fear is a separate process.

00:16:41.000 It's the awareness that that stuff is happening to you.

00:16:45.000 The awareness that that stuff is happening to you?

00:16:49.000 No self, no fear.

00:16:50.000 That's my t-shirt.

00:16:52.000 That's my merch on the book.

00:16:56.000 Now, how do things like Xanax work?

00:17:00.000 What's the mechanical process?

00:17:03.000 Okay, so that's part of the class of drugs called benzodiazepine.

00:17:10.000 And they will They bind to receptors in the brain.

00:17:16.000 The brain has receptors for all kinds of chemicals, and many of these things are things that exist in nature.

00:17:24.000 And what they bind to is a receptor called the GABA receptor, which is the major inhibitory transmitter in the brain.

00:17:31.000 So when you have a benzodiazepine binding to a GABA receptor, what it's going to do is increase inhibition.

00:17:39.000 So the kind of simple reason why those things What can help is they kind of inhibit.

00:17:47.000 So they tone down the brain a bit and so things that would normally trigger a response no longer trigger it.

00:17:54.000 So it's like increasing the threshold for something to bother you in a sense.

00:17:59.000 And a lot of people enjoy that with alcohol.

00:18:02.000 You're not supposed to?

00:18:03.000 Well, alcohol also attacks those receptors, so it's like you get double the effect.

00:18:08.000 Is that why they tell people don't have Xanax?

00:18:10.000 Yeah, 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.

00:18:21.000 Do you remember that story about a woman?

00:18:23.000 She 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.

00:18:35.000 She thought she was just being funny, and you laughed.

00:18:39.000 And she landed in Africa.

00:18:41.000 That must have been a surprise.

00:18:42.000 Do you know the story?

00:18:43.000 No, but there are other stories like that.

00:18:45.000 This was one of the original stories of someone ruining their entire life with just putting one little tweet online.

00:18:52.000 She thought she was being funny.

00:18:54.000 She would say a bunch of snarky things like that, a bunch of funny, trying to be funny. 1.00

00:18:59.000 But she was on Xanax and drinking and woke up Completely oblivious, and her life had been destroyed.

00:19:07.000 She 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. 1.00

00:19:17.000 Yeah, well, you know, these are powerful drugs.

00:19:21.000 So, you know, back to how they work, and they work.

00:19:25.000 So, a drug like that All of the drugs that we take go to the entire body.

00:19:34.000 They're not able to just find their way to one little spot in the brain and do their trick.

00:19:39.000 There's this talk about magic bullet drugs that might be able to be targeted for specific circuits, but that's fantasy at this point.

00:19:49.000 So 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.

00:20:01.000 So 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.

00:20:17.000 They're going to alter your ability to retrieve and store memories and to attend to things.

00:20:27.000 To 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.

00:20:38.000 It's not an anti-anxiety drug.

00:20:40.000 It's just kind of a dulling of everything.

00:20:42.000 And you get anxiety, anti-anxiety as a part of that.

00:20:46.000 But 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,

00:21:02.000 not toning down everything.

00:21:04.000 It's kind of like, you know, you go to a restaurant, the music's too loud.

00:21:07.000 Somebody says, please turn it down.

00:21:08.000 So they turn it down a little bit.

00:21:10.000 The music stays the same.

00:21:11.000 It's the same song, but it's not as annoying because you've turned the volume down.

00:21:17.000 I 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.

00:21:23.000 Correct 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?

00:21:30.000 Well, it can be a rebound effect.

00:21:32.000 There can also be kind of a lot of people next day feel depressed because the stuff is out of your system.

00:21:42.000 It's kind of like taking sleeping pills.

00:21:44.000 Things like Ambien are of the same general category of drug, benzodiazepines.

00:21:49.000 And so you get this hangover the next day.

00:21:51.000 Okay, so it's just a physiological response to the medication?

00:21:55.000 Yeah.

00:21:55.000 It's not that if you alleviate some anxiety, then the anxiety wants to come back even stronger?

00:22:00.000 No, I mean, so, you know, I've proposed in my previous book that we each have an anxiety set point.

00:22:07.000 That, you know, let's say you're worried about something and all of a sudden that gets resolved.

00:22:17.000 That just makes room for the next thing to work with.

00:22:20.000 So 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.

00:22:32.000 If you're an anxious person, You probably will always be somewhat anxious.

00:22:36.000 So there's no magic bullet that's going to take that out.

00:22:39.000 What you have to do is attack the process from knowledge of how it all works.

00:22:45.000 And that requires that we have a more sophisticated understanding than is possible from simply observing behavior.

00:22:54.000 Behavior does not tell you necessarily what's on the mind.

00:22:59.000 Behavior tells you how the brain has responded.

00:23:03.000 But, 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.

00:23:18.000 My colleague Liz Phelps, who used to be at NYU, is now at Harvard, did experiments like this.

00:23:24.000 And every time the blue square would come on, the person would get a mild shock to their finger.

00:23:29.000 And so then she would present the blue square subliminally.

00:23:34.000 That means really quickly with something that follows it, that kind of masks it.

00:23:39.000 And that prevents the information from getting into the conscious mind and so the person says, I didn't see anything.

00:23:46.000 But 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,

00:24:01.000 palms are sweating, but the person has no fear.

00:24:07.000 The person doesn't know it's there and doesn't experience fear.

00:24:10.000 The amygdala is not about fear.

00:24:12.000 It's about detecting and responding to danger.

00:24:15.000 In 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.

00:24:27.000 A self-involved consciousness.

00:24:30.000 That's hard for people to separate.

00:24:31.000 Yeah.

00:24:32.000 The idea that there's a physical response, but that your mind's unaware of it.

00:24:36.000 Right.

00:24:36.000 But when you understand that, that's why you come to understand that's why the medications are not working.

00:24:41.000 They're targeted to work on these underlying systems in rats or mice, but that's not where we are experiencing our anxiety.

00:24:49.000 But these medications are very profitable, right?

00:24:51.000 I mean, people enjoy it.

00:24:52.000 Millions of prescriptions get written.

00:24:54.000 Are they just going to phase those out?

00:24:56.000 They'll probably, you know, they're probably all going off patent.

00:25:00.000 And because the company can't find anything new, they're not going to keep pursuing it because it's not going to be a profit anymore.

00:25:08.000 But don't people still want them?

00:25:10.000 I mean, it seems like that's a really popular medication.

00:25:13.000 Yes, they'll become generics and people will be able to get them for less money.

00:25:22.000 And they'll just do with whatever they want.

00:25:25.000 Off-label, whatever.

00:25:29.000 I 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.

00:25:42.000 Because if you don't treat that, then the conscious mind will be reactivated By those responses.

00:25:52.000 If you only treat the conscious mind, then the physiological stuff will bring the conscious stuff back.

00:26:00.000 Everything will bring back everything else unless you treat the whole system.

00:26:04.000 And to do that, you have to understand the system.

00:26:07.000 And we've just misunderstood it, I think, for so long.

00:26:12.000 I have a friend who, he takes it every day, takes Xanax every day, and he says he needs it.

00:26:18.000 He says without it, he's just a mess.

00:26:21.000 Well, you know, whatever gets you through the day, I guess.

00:26:24.000 I'm not a therapist.

00:26:25.000 I'm not advocating that.

00:26:28.000 No, 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.

00:26:36.000 Yeah.

00:26:36.000 I mean, it's – you know, I'm sure that that's – you know, in a sense, maybe that's his crutch, his way to get through the day.

00:26:45.000 And he's come to believe that he needs – Much like an alcoholic believes they need a drink.

00:26:52.000 But I'm not calling him.

00:26:54.000 Well, I'll call him.

00:26:57.000 He does like to drink, too.

00:26:58.000 But he's a great guy.

00:27:01.000 These 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.

00:27:18.000 Are 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?

00:27:33.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

00:27:35.000 I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think that's a good way to think about it.

00:27:40.000 You know, the philosopher Kierkegaard said that anxiety is the price we pay for the human ability to choose.

00:27:47.000 And 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.

00:27:58.000 You 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.

00:28:07.000 You 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.

00:28:25.000 How can we deal with this thing that's coming up?

00:28:27.000 It's a worry about the future.

00:28:30.000 Yeah, and the ability to think about the possibilities, like what could go wrong, what could go right, am I doing the right thing?

00:28:37.000 And then to contemplate all those various choices.

00:28:42.000 Anxiety.

00:28:42.000 Yeah.

00:28:43.000 So 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.

00:28:56.000 You know, will the snake bite me?

00:28:58.000 If it bites me, will I get to a doctor?

00:29:00.000 Will he have the anecdote?

00:29:01.000 If I die, what will happen to my family?

00:29:04.000 That's worry.

00:29:05.000 That's anxiety.

00:29:05.000 So these are kind of separate.

00:29:08.000 Fear is about a danger that's present.

00:29:11.000 Anxiety is about one that hasn't happened yet.

00:29:13.000 Almost always, as soon as you're afraid, that makes you anxious about what's going to happen.

00:29:18.000 And then there's general existential angst.

00:29:21.000 The life itself.

00:29:25.000 The existence is just a, what is this?

00:29:29.000 And all of that is...

00:29:33.000 Due to our prefrontal cortex, our ability to conceptualize, to, you know, imagine things that have never been imagined before, to create art, to build,

00:29:48.000 to 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.

00:29:58.000 All of that is something that our special kind of consciousness enables.

00:30:03.000 But 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.

00:30:18.000 I think that the world survives best.

00:30:23.000 When it's either completely isolated, all the cultures are isolated, or if we could also somehow be together in a more unified way.

00:30:33.000 Because 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.

00:30:48.000 Is this because we evolved essentially without long-term travel?

00:30:53.000 I mean, we kind of evolved to stay in whatever area the resources we're in when we're hunters and gatherers.

00:30:59.000 And then somewhere along the line, somebody figured out boats and how to get on a horse.

00:31:03.000 And the next thing you know, you're visiting people.

00:31:05.000 I think it's more about...

00:31:08.000 You 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.

00:31:27.000 And that's a pretty special thing.

00:31:29.000 But it also allows us to plan in a kind of devious way where, you know, me or my group is going to benefit.

00:31:39.000 And if mine benefits, I don't want the other one to benefit because we've got to keep everything separate.

00:31:46.000 So it's, you know, consciousness, our kind of consciousness is our, you know, greatest achievement, but also probably our worst aspect.

00:31:56.000 Oof.

00:31:58.000 But it's what makes us human.

00:32:01.000 It is.

00:32:01.000 Imagining humans with no consciousness is impossible.

00:32:04.000 No, there's no way to go in that direction.

00:32:07.000 So is the key to this thing as the human race, is it managing our consciousness?

00:32:13.000 Perhaps 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.

00:32:27.000 I 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.

00:32:42.000 It's clearly things are happening.

00:32:43.000 And that, you know, there was, I read a couple of editorials, probably in the New York Times or something a couple of months ago.

00:32:52.000 One was about How, yes, things are changing and we have a right to worry, but we shouldn't worry about the Earth. 0.99

00:33:04.000 The famous quote is, Gaia's a tough bitch. 1.00

00:33:07.000 So the Earth will survive. 0.97

00:33:10.000 But the configuration of life on it is unlikely to continue to be the same under those conditions.

00:33:17.000 The more that everything changes, the conditions of life change.

00:33:21.000 And the first things to go, and this is what happened to the dinosaurs, are large energy-demanding organisms.

00:33:28.000 Because 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.

00:33:41.000 But 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.

00:33:54.000 And it's just not going to be...

00:33:57.000 Yeah, species don't last that long.

00:34:00.000 A few million years and they go.

00:34:03.000 So our time may be...

00:34:05.000 We've only been around for what?

00:34:07.000 300,000, 400,000 years and something?

00:34:10.000 Well, it depends on what we are.

00:34:11.000 What we call we, right?

00:34:13.000 And the Neanderthals were around quite a bit longer than that. 0.86

00:34:16.000 They're not here anymore.

00:34:18.000 So we don't have a...

00:34:23.000 I think that we can use our minds to try and help us get through this, but that's only going to work if we can do that collectively.

00:34:35.000 That's the scary part.

00:34:36.000 We have to work together collectively as a world because these are not local issues.

00:34:41.000 These are global issues.

00:34:44.000 How is that going to happen?

00:34:47.000 Especially getting other countries like China to comply.

00:34:51.000 But you see that small successes, I mean, like auto companies deciding, well, we need to, you know, rein in the emissions.

00:35:00.000 And there's probably a profit motive underlying that at some point.

00:35:03.000 Sure.

00:35:03.000 And people are conscious.

00:35:05.000 There's green dollars.

00:35:06.000 Yeah, right.

00:35:06.000 Like 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.

00:35:26.000 I think it has to be a social solution.

00:35:28.000 Social?

00:35:29.000 How so?

00:35:31.000 We have to figure out how to balance this worldwide.

00:35:39.000 We can do whatever we want in this country.

00:35:42.000 If we could, do what we want.

00:35:46.000 Even if we were the best country in the world for the environment, that wouldn't solve the problem.

00:35:52.000 It's a worldwide problem.

00:35:54.000 Amazon forest, that's affecting a lot of people.

00:36:00.000 It's just not a simple thing that one country can solve.

00:36:05.000 Right.

00:36:06.000 But if one country takes steps and imposes some sort of a technological solution that pulls carbon from the atmosphere, that does...

00:36:17.000 To enhance some sort of a cooling process, to bring homeostasis, to bring some sort of a generally agreed upon state of the environment.

00:36:27.000 If that's technologically possible, I mean that's going to come out of the creative mind, right?

00:36:31.000 Well, 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.

00:36:47.000 Right, 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.

00:36:58.000 How to somehow or another...

00:37:00.000 Mitigate it.

00:37:01.000 Yeah.

00:37:02.000 I agree.

00:37:03.000 Yeah.

00:37:03.000 But yeah, so I think creators coming along and trying to find technical solutions, that's great.

00:37:10.000 When 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...

00:37:42.000 I don't think it's simple.

00:37:45.000 It's not simply Denial of climate change for climate reasons.

00:37:54.000 I think there's a lot of social – within certain groups, there's social stigma for being pro-environment.

00:38:04.000 And so it's – Tribal.

00:38:08.000 Tribal.

00:38:09.000 It'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.

00:38:33.000 Yeah, that's a weird aspect of being a human being, right?

00:38:36.000 These tribal identity things where if you're in this group, you must be pro-choice.

00:38:43.000 If you're in this group, you must be pro-life.

00:38:45.000 You must be anti-war.

00:38:47.000 You must be pro-Second Amendment.

00:38:49.000 There's very little deviation.

00:38:51.000 And that's left, right, that's everything.

00:38:53.000 I mean, the belief systems, rigid belief systems, you know, part of, just part of being.

00:39:00.000 And 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?

00:39:16.000 Right.

00:39:17.000 Yeah, I think that's unfortunate, but that's where we are.

00:39:21.000 Is there a way out of that?

00:39:23.000 The political scientists have to take that one.

00:39:27.000 We're going down a weird road.

00:39:28.000 What do you think is the source of creativity?

00:39:33.000 Like somewhere along the line, I mean, and we've seen it, right?

00:39:36.000 I mean, there's some speculation and scientists have sort of generally agreed that some monkeys are in the Stone Age.

00:39:43.000 That some primates are in what would be considered Stone Age.

00:39:47.000 They're starting to use tools.

00:39:48.000 They're starting to use sticks.

00:39:50.000 There's a famous photograph that I love of an orangutan.

00:39:54.000 Where are we going to get a copy of that?

00:39:55.000 We should get that orangutan with a spear.

00:39:57.000 Make a note of that.

00:39:58.000 There's a crazy orangutan image of an orangutan holding onto a branch and then spearfishing.

00:40:05.000 It's amazing.

00:40:06.000 And apparently, he had seen humans do it, so that's where he learned the behavior.

00:40:11.000 That imitation.

00:40:11.000 Yes, but still, that is a primate using a weapon to try to spearfish.

00:40:17.000 Look at this photo.

00:40:19.000 Isn't that incredible?

00:40:20.000 Nice.

00:40:21.000 I mean, that is incredible.

00:40:22.000 I mean, that's like...

00:40:23.000 Really thoughtful and skillful and the way he's hanging, I mean, my goodness, look at that.

00:40:30.000 I love that picture.

00:40:32.000 That picture is amazing.

00:40:33.000 Now, 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.

00:40:50.000 But there are other things that come into play.

00:40:53.000 One 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.

00:41:18.000 So 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,

00:41:36.000 they experience all of that a lot.

00:41:38.000 But the human mind can simulate, create a mental model, and instantaneously make those kinds of predictions on the basis of very limited information.

00:41:49.000 And 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,

00:42:13.000 I, mine, you, yours.

00:42:15.000 The point when those come in in a child is the first point when I think self-awareness can fully be tested and shown.

00:42:27.000 Some people say, well, they have it, but they just couldn't express it.

00:42:30.000 Others say, no, that the arrival of the personal pronouns are very important in the child's development of a sense of self.

00:42:38.000 But 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,

00:42:54.000 laterally 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.

00:43:12.000 Do 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?

00:43:25.000 Because the language is structured very differently.

00:43:27.000 Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, but I don't know enough about other languages to say exactly how.

00:43:31.000 I think it was Malcolm Gladwell.

00:43:33.000 I think it was the outliers who discussed this, like the limitations of certain languages in terms of pilots.

00:43:41.000 Was that Gladwell?

00:43:42.000 I think it was.

00:43:43.000 They 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.

00:44:08.000 That planes had crashed because co-pilots were in their place.

00:44:13.000 They were put in their place and they weren't allowed to address pilots.

00:44:16.000 And that once they had switched over to English, that the language...

00:44:20.000 Like there's so many different versions of dealing with your boss or someone who's an upper level person.

00:44:26.000 There's so many different ways that you were supposed to address them and that they had eliminated all that by using English.

00:44:33.000 Yeah.

00:44:33.000 And 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.

00:44:44.000 That 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.

00:44:55.000 Yeah, I think that's definitely right.

00:44:57.000 So it's interesting to think about emotion and language.

00:45:03.000 So it's often said that an emotion like fear is universal across the world.

00:45:07.000 But I don't think that's actually correct.

00:45:09.000 What's universal is danger.

00:45:13.000 And the way fear is interpreted by different cultures is obviously different.

00:45:17.000 I mean, the Asians have a different kind of perspective on fear.

00:45:23.000 Every culture has their own perspective on fear.

00:45:26.000 So fear is the kind of cultural assembly that you have in your brain in response to danger.

00:45:34.000 So every culture has to have a language of fear, but not because fear is universal, but because danger is universal.

00:45:42.000 And what they interpret as danger is different.

00:45:48.000 And 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?

00:46:04.000 Well, 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,

00:46:20.000 so 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.

00:46:30.000 And so then the conscious mind is seeing those responses and starting to conclude, oh, I'm an anxious, fearful person.

00:46:38.000 And 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.

00:46:55.000 And 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,

00:47:12.000 an activation of this fear schema, that is what then bubbles up into consciousness.

00:47:18.000 That's your experience of fear, is what has been activated in your fear schema. 0.92

00:47:24.000 Knowing 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? 0.96

00:47:34.000 You know what I mean?

00:47:36.000 Because you studied this so much, and then you're a human, so I assume you have the same anxieties.

00:47:41.000 I have a lot of anxieties.

00:47:42.000 And we all do.

00:47:43.000 Yeah.

00:47:46.000 Truthfully, it helps to some extent.

00:47:49.000 In 1996, I published a book called The Emotional Brain.

00:47:53.000 And 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,

00:48:10.000 that 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.

00:48:22.000 And 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.

00:48:38.000 Have 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?

00:48:48.000 I mean, I haven't studied it myself, but I have researched it a bit.

00:48:54.000 I try to do meditation myself because I think it's the...

00:48:58.000 Probably 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.

00:49:10.000 Do you do that on a regular basis?

00:49:13.000 It's hard to maintain it because life gets busy and it seems like the hardest time to do it is when you need it most.

00:49:19.000 Yeah.

00:49:20.000 I think it's one of those things like hygiene where you sort of have to say, well, it's hard to take a shower.

00:49:25.000 You have to take a shower.

00:49:26.000 Don't stink.

00:49:27.000 You have to brush your teeth.

00:49:28.000 You'll get cavities.

00:49:29.000 You have to meditate.

00:49:30.000 You'll go crazy.

00:49:31.000 Yeah, it's perfect.

00:49:32.000 That's the way it should be done.

00:49:34.000 I think that is what it is.

00:49:35.000 So 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?

00:49:53.000 What do you mean by the creation?

00:49:54.000 Well, like a human had to figure out how to meditate.

00:49:57.000 A person had to figure out these modalities, these different ways to sort of interface with...

00:50:03.000 So, let's take that to...

00:50:12.000 The nature of most approaches to fear and anxiety today.

00:50:19.000 Just hold off the meditation part slightly.

00:50:22.000 So 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.

00:50:41.000 Because 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.

00:50:56.000 So, 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.

00:51:10.000 It wasn't about the mind at all.

00:51:12.000 It was all about behavior.

00:51:13.000 And then cognition was added to that.

00:51:16.000 So that became cognitive behavioral therapy.

00:51:18.000 But again, the cognitive change was used as a way of changing behavior.

00:51:25.000 Because so much emphasis has been placed on behavior in our culture, including in the drug therapy world.

00:51:32.000 It's all based on changing measurable things like behavior and physiology.

00:51:37.000 And I think that that's why all of these things, in some sense, have not worked out as well as we would like.

00:51:44.000 You know, the best medications and the best CBT trials will give you like 75% That's pretty great though, isn't it?

00:51:56.000 Yeah, but you also have to extract out the placebo effect.

00:52:01.000 And in many of these drug studies, for example, antidepressant drugs, the placebo effect is only slightly better than the placebo effect.

00:52:14.000 But when you have cognitive behavioral therapy, you're actually going for the placebo effect, right?

00:52:21.000 There's nothing wrong with the placebo effect.

00:52:23.000 In 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.

00:52:33.000 You're trying to enact change.

00:52:35.000 And if that change is enacted, there's not a pill involved.

00:52:38.000 So it is kind of like the same mechanism that's involved In a placebo effect, your mind is creating this new change.

00:52:47.000 Yes.

00:52:48.000 But the question is, a person that It goes through the motions but doesn't get the therapy.

00:52:55.000 How much are they changed?

00:52:57.000 Simply by kind of going through it.

00:53:00.000 There's so many variations with humans.

00:53:02.000 I'd like to find out, like, are they lazy?

00:53:04.000 Are they self-destructive?

00:53:06.000 And why is that the case?

00:53:08.000 Maybe all of the above.

00:53:10.000 Whenever you have, I think 75% is amazing.

00:53:14.000 If you have a group of people, what are the odds?

00:53:18.000 If you have a group of 100 people, what are the odds that 25 of them are going to be lazy?

00:53:22.000 Pretty good, right?

00:53:24.000 I 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.

00:53:33.000 So, 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.

00:53:48.000 For medication.

00:53:49.000 For medication, for cognitive therapy as well.

00:53:52.000 But 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?

00:54:04.000 Well, it's the control group that doesn't get the treatment.

00:54:08.000 It'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.

00:54:17.000 And that is a real thing.

00:54:19.000 But 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.

00:54:32.000 Well, you have to have a control group in the study.

00:54:35.000 You have to have randomized control in order to make it. 0.91

00:54:37.000 So when you have cognitive behavioral therapy and you have randomized control and you have a control group, do you just give them shitty therapy?

00:54:46.000 We need to get a therapist on here to give you the answer to that because I don't know the answer.

00:54:50.000 Have you gone to therapy yourself?

00:54:51.000 I have, yeah.

00:54:52.000 Did you do that to examine this?

00:54:55.000 You know, I mainly went into it for the meditation part to try and calm some of my...

00:55:04.000 Restlessness.

00:55:04.000 Has writing and all this study that you had to do to write these books, has that enhanced you?

00:55:11.000 I mean, you have much more of an understanding about what's at play than the average person does.

00:55:18.000 Well...

00:55:21.000 You know, again, it's kind of like the patient who's reading the emotional brain with their therapist.

00:55:27.000 I think by writing those books, I learn a lot, and it helps me see things.

00:55:33.000 It doesn't necessarily help me lead my life any better, but I think I understand it better.

00:55:39.000 But no self, no fear.

00:55:40.000 Yeah.

00:55:41.000 Well, no self, no fear means that You have to have this auto-noetic consciousness ability in order to be afraid.

00:55:51.000 And that is a special human quality.

00:55:54.000 The ability to put yourself in the moment, in your past and in your future.

00:56:01.000 If it's not you that's going to be harmed by that snake, then you don't have to worry about what it's going to do to you.

00:56:08.000 So if you are part of it, then you worry and it becomes, you know, it's an emotion when you're involved.

00:56:14.000 So I think emotions, this is a crazy idea that's in the book, that emotions didn't arise through natural selection.

00:56:22.000 Really?

00:56:22.000 Well, that's the idea, that they were byproducts of other capacities that came along.

00:56:29.000 First, you had some kind of crude language.

00:56:32.000 That enabled this hierarchical and relational reasoning to jump across.

00:56:36.000 Language gave you categories to conceptualize things.

00:56:40.000 Hierarchical reasoning allowed you to jump across those categories.

00:56:45.000 And those kinds of things allow you to conceptualize Yourself as an entity with an experience.

00:56:55.000 So you had to have a self that could do that kind of reasoning across those conceptual categories.

00:57:04.000 And that is what enabled an emotion, the ability to put yourself into a significant situation.

00:57:11.000 So now that it's here, now that we have, once emotions are there, then they become selected.

00:57:18.000 But they weren't selected by, for example, the amygdala having evolved to be the fear center and inherited that from animals.

00:57:25.000 You know, animals probably have some kinds of experiences, but scientifically it's very hard to know what they have.

00:57:31.000 Well, we know like dogs have emotions, right?

00:57:34.000 Dogs get sad, dogs get happy.

00:57:36.000 Well, you see their behavior.

00:57:38.000 Right.

00:57:38.000 But I'm not saying they aren't, but scientifically you can't measure that.

00:57:43.000 Right, 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?

00:57:50.000 Yeah, but I don't – let's talk about the brain for a second.

00:57:55.000 Okay.

00:57:55.000 So 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.

00:58:16.000 The 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.

00:58:24.000 It's the very, very front part of the prefrontal cortex.

00:58:28.000 That region is unique to the human brain.

00:58:31.000 Not even another ape has that.

00:58:34.000 Now, other parts of the prefrontal cortex are present in other primates, all other primates, but not in any other mammal.

00:58:43.000 So, 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.

00:59:04.000 And 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.

00:59:14.000 So it's a kind of, you know, use of the brain to tell us some things about what might exist in other animals.

00:59:21.000 But there's no way to ask a dog what's on your mind.

00:59:25.000 Could we measure the brain with an fMRI or something along those lines where you get a reading of But that's not an answer.

00:59:32.000 I mean, it's correlate.

00:59:34.000 If you ask me, is there a pin here on the table?

00:59:44.000 I say, yes, I can respond verbally or I can point to it.

00:59:50.000 But when I'm responding verbally, I can only do that for something I'm conscious of.

00:59:57.000 I can't respond To something I'm unconscious of by naming it.

01:00:04.000 Follow that?

01:00:06.000 Other animals can only respond non-verbally.

01:00:09.000 So they don't have that other kind of response that is only reflecting a conscious state.

01:00:15.000 So I'm not saying they don't have anything, but scientifically it's very hard to know what they have.

01:00:21.000 And the fact that we can study – we know, for example, fear, that the fear itself probably doesn't depend on the amygdala.

01:00:30.000 But 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.

01:00:48.000 I mean, it's a tough problem.

01:00:49.000 Again, I'm not saying it's not there.

01:00:51.000 It's just like scientifically, you know, you have to – what's the evidence?

01:00:56.000 Yes.

01:00:56.000 Yeah, you have to – now measuring it in humans is – I mean, there's this concept of people – I'm an emotional person.

01:01:03.000 You know, I'm emotional.

01:01:04.000 I get emotional.

01:01:06.000 Like people love to say those kind of things.

01:01:10.000 Is 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.

01:01:36.000 This happens and then, oh, I'm going to start crying.

01:01:39.000 This happens, oh, I'm going to get angry.

01:01:41.000 And 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?

01:01:51.000 Maybe you should stop being so emotional, Joe.

01:01:55.000 Right?

01:01:55.000 Has anybody ever said that to you?

01:01:57.000 I guess my wife has said that.

01:02:00.000 Well, what does that mean?

01:02:02.000 You know what I mean?

01:02:03.000 The 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.

01:02:16.000 So, you know, you've really nailed a lot of interesting stuff in there.

01:02:22.000 You know, it's a very kind of deep analysis of what's going on.

01:02:26.000 So 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.

01:02:40.000 You know, they've come through the ages.

01:02:42.000 And 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.

01:02:53.000 Folk biology becomes real biology and then the folk stuff goes away.

01:02:57.000 But in psychology, the folk stuff never goes away.

01:03:01.000 Because we always experience the folk aspect of it when we have a conscious experience.

01:03:08.000 That's what our conscious mind is, our folk psychology of ourselves and of others and of other animals.

01:03:14.000 But underneath that is the part that we can get rid of the folk psychology of because we can understand how behavior is controlled.

01:03:29.000 How these physiological responses are controlled.

01:03:32.000 And it ain't because, you know, fear is causing it.

01:03:36.000 But when you're afraid, you're almost always running from the bear and feeling fear.

01:03:44.000 And so you assume that when you're running from the bear, fear is what causes you to run.

01:03:49.000 But fear is not the answer.

01:03:51.000 Fear is your awareness that all that should is happening to you.

01:03:57.000 But also the ability to contemplate the consequences, right?

01:04:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:02.000 Like, this bear is going to get me, he's going to eat me!

01:04:04.000 Yeah.

01:04:05.000 So it's all, you know, one interpretation after another running forward.

01:04:09.000 But no self, no fear, that's no possible either, right?

01:04:17.000 Well, you need the self to be afraid.

01:04:21.000 And to be consciously afraid.

01:04:24.000 But you can react to danger without the self.

01:04:26.000 And that's key.

01:04:28.000 You find yourself freezing or walking in New York City and you jump back and the bus goes flying by.

01:04:35.000 So you've reacted to danger.

01:04:36.000 But only afterwards do you feel fear when you cognitively become aware that that's happened.

01:04:41.000 Well, in that sort of a situation.

01:04:43.000 But in a situation like where you're walking down a dark alley, and then you see some guy who seems to be following you.

01:04:48.000 You're like, oh boy.

01:04:49.000 So now you're in a situation where you're in a potentially dangerous situation.

01:04:55.000 So now you're anxious about what's going to happen.

01:04:58.000 So you're not starting with fear.

01:04:59.000 You're starting with anxiety.

01:05:00.000 Worry about what's going to happen.

01:05:02.000 There's nothing there that's made you But then what if he ramps it up?

01:05:05.000 He says, hey, Joe, why don't you come over here, man?

01:05:08.000 I'd like to borrow some money from you. 1.00

01:05:09.000 And you're like, oh, shit. 1.00

01:05:12.000 Now it's fear? 1.00

01:05:12.000 Is that fear? 1.00

01:05:13.000 Yeah.

01:05:13.000 Now 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.

01:05:22.000 But 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.

01:05:34.000 And 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.

01:05:43.000 But they're happening separately.

01:05:45.000 It's not one bundle.

01:05:47.000 It's like separate things in the brain.

01:05:48.000 And once we understand that, it becomes, I think, a much easier problem how to approach problems of fear and anxiety.

01:05:56.000 You've got to separately treat the behavior and the physiology.

01:06:00.000 From the conscious thoughts.

01:06:02.000 And in between those two, you've also got to change the cognitions that underlie the conscious experience, but also the cognitions can trigger behavior.

01:06:12.000 So, 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.

01:06:27.000 First, you would You'd have to do it with something simple like a spider phobic.

01:06:33.000 A what?

01:06:34.000 Spider phobic or snake phobic.

01:06:35.000 Oh, okay.

01:06:36.000 So you would do exposure therapy subliminally.

01:06:39.000 That means you present the picture of a snake or the spider so fast that the conscious mind doesn't know it's there.

01:06:47.000 So like those old hungry-eat-popcorn things?

01:06:50.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:06:51.000 And that's a very common technique in psychology.

01:06:54.000 So they would show you a film and there would be one or two frames of a spider if you had a raccoon.

01:06:57.000 Or just a picture.

01:06:59.000 But it could be a film, yeah.

01:07:01.000 But it would have to go very fast in the film.

01:07:06.000 So with a picture, you just present it really quickly.

01:07:11.000 Normally, if you show a spider phobic, try to do exposure therapy, they don't want to do it because they don't want to deal with spiders.

01:07:18.000 But they, their conscious mind, doesn't know what's happening because it's going through subliminally.

01:07:23.000 So the amygdala is being tamed by the exposure.

01:07:29.000 And now they can look at the picture without the body reacting.

01:07:34.000 They're not jumping, their heart isn't racing because the amygdala has been turned off, so all those body responses have calmed down.

01:07:42.000 So now the person can undergo some cognitive change about looking at spiders and so forth.

01:07:49.000 And then finally, once you've done those two steps, the brain's ready for talk therapy.

01:07:54.000 And meditation and other kinds of mindfulness approaches.

01:07:58.000 Because all of the impediments to all that have been put aside by these first two steps.

01:08:05.000 So has anybody ever, like, officially cured someone of arachnophobia or fidiophobia or, you know, fear of snakes or spiders?

01:08:13.000 Like, those seem to be almost like deep-seated genetic fears.

01:08:18.000 Well, I mean, our ancestors, yes, had a snake and...

01:08:23.000 But they vary, which is what's weird.

01:08:24.000 Our 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.

01:08:46.000 It turns out that it's more about the ability to rapidly learn about those kinds of dangers than to innately respond.

01:08:57.000 So there seems to be – it's called prepared learning.

01:09:00.000 So you have an evolutionarily-based thing that's with you that everyone has some version of, but it varies from individual to individual.

01:09:09.000 And then some people are prone to rapidly learn Either because of other experiences or because of their particular genetic makeup.

01:09:21.000 And so they tend to go down the road of acquiring these kinds of phobias.

01:09:27.000 So the problem with treating that by just extinguishing it through exposure is that the extinction is always impermanent.

01:09:39.000 Once you've been reduced, nothing is wrong.

01:09:43.000 This is true in a rat or a person.

01:09:45.000 Let'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,

01:10:02.000 and 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.

01:10:10.000 It can come back.

01:10:11.000 So these are imperfect, temporary solutions.

01:10:14.000 They're not enough.

01:10:16.000 And that's why – I mean they're called – these are called reinstatement and things like that because they pop back up.

01:10:26.000 Maybe medications can help tamp that down a bit.

01:10:32.000 Medications 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.

01:10:41.000 How could you possibly design a medication That would know how to change the content of a mental state.

01:10:47.000 That seems like an impossible task.

01:10:50.000 And that's what you want to do.

01:10:51.000 You don't want to change all mental states.

01:10:53.000 You want to change one content.

01:10:55.000 I'm afraid of spiders.

01:10:58.000 Yeah.

01:11:01.000 It's so fascinating, though, how people vary so widely.

01:11:06.000 In 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.

01:11:26.000 Do you buy into that?

01:11:27.000 So let's say that in any kind of situation like that, there are multiple systems in the brain that are going to be involved.

01:11:36.000 We're going to isolate the amygdala as a hypothetical part of that system that is detecting and responding to the stimulus.

01:11:46.000 So 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.

01:11:57.000 So that is the gateway into the amygdala.

01:12:00.000 So now let's talk about, let's say it's got, I don't know, 100,000 cells and neurons.

01:12:07.000 And each of those neurons is going to have a bell curve.

01:12:15.000 That's based on the genes that made that cell and whatever kinds of electrical signals it's had throughout the life of the organism.

01:12:25.000 So 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.

01:12:40.000 And 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.

01:13:00.000 So it's not like, you know, one thing is programmed.

01:13:03.000 It's not like a brain area is programmed.

01:13:05.000 It's all about what's happened at those specific cells, both through genetics and experience.

01:13:10.000 So we often kind of oversimplify things by thinking, well, there's a gene or an area that has inherited that thing.

01:13:19.000 When 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?

01:13:38.000 Oh, they're going to be different.

01:13:42.000 Every organism is in constant change.

01:13:46.000 Racial mixing, interbreeding happens.

01:13:53.000 Random mutations.

01:13:56.000 We're living longer and so that's creating people having babies later. 0.99

01:14:03.000 Change a lot of stuff.

01:14:05.000 So we're going to be a different thing.

01:14:08.000 At some point, we may split out into a whole new kind of human.

01:14:12.000 The thing about people having babies older, I mean, there's certainly physical limitations when people start having babies older.

01:14:21.000 But 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? 0.98

01:14:35.000 You 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. 0.99

01:14:49.000 Right.

01:14:49.000 You 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.

01:15:06.000 I just don't know.

01:15:08.000 Well, there's also a big factor with the male sperm. 0.98

01:15:10.000 Male sperm, yes. 0.75

01:15:10.000 They're thinking that's one of the main contributors to autism. 0.75

01:15:13.000 And schizophrenia is supposedly… I've heard that older fathers are more likely to have male sons that are schizophrenic.

01:15:24.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

01:15:25.000 I wouldn't say that as a fact, but I've heard that.

01:15:27.000 Well, it all makes sense that there'd be some glitches in the matrix.

01:15:31.000 Yeah, we're not supposed to live that long.

01:15:34.000 Are we not?

01:15:35.000 What are your thoughts on people that are trying to live longer and trying to sort of squeeze out as much time as they can on this rock?

01:15:43.000 I don't know, it's like I see a lot of old people that just don't want to live anymore, and I understand that. 1.00

01:15:49.000 You know, your body starts falling apart, your mind is going, what's the point at that point?

01:15:54.000 Yeah, I get that, but what about the people that can keep it together?

01:15:57.000 Yeah, I guess if you keep it together, you want to, like, you know, okay, let's go as far as we can.

01:16:03.000 Let's go to the moon and go to Mars.

01:16:06.000 Well, pharmacological solutions, too.

01:16:08.000 I mean, if there was some sort of a genetic Component that they identified to aging and they gave the option to reverse the process.

01:16:17.000 Would you participate?

01:16:20.000 Or do you like it?

01:16:22.000 Do you like the finite nature of this existence?

01:16:25.000 I do.

01:16:26.000 I think so.

01:16:27.000 I knew you were going to answer that.

01:16:31.000 I take certain medications, but I'd rather just live most of my life as possible without them.

01:16:43.000 What medications do you take?

01:16:45.000 Blood pressure.

01:16:47.000 Mainly blood pressure stuff.

01:16:48.000 Do you exercise?

01:16:50.000 Not enough.

01:16:51.000 That's got a big effect on anxiety and a big effect on just a general alleviation of angst.

01:16:59.000 That's a good example of something I know I should do.

01:17:03.000 Is that a discipline issue?

01:17:06.000 I used to be kind of disciplined, but...

01:17:08.000 What happened?

01:17:09.000 I've been using it a lot to do things like I really want to do, like writing or making music.

01:17:20.000 So those are the things that kind of...

01:17:23.000 I know I should do the exercise, too, so I can do more of that longer.

01:17:27.000 Yeah, do you think you have a finite amount of discipline?

01:17:31.000 Possibly each person has that sort of anxiety quotient, that discipline quotient.

01:17:40.000 You probably can work that like a muscle.

01:17:44.000 Yeah, I would imagine you can.

01:17:45.000 Yeah, you could become something different.

01:17:48.000 Me and my friends have this thing that we did last year called Sober October.

01:17:53.000 The entire month, no alcohol, no marijuana, no drugs, and crazy exercise.

01:17:58.000 Last year, we had a competition to see who could exercise the most.

01:18:01.000 We wore these heart rate monitors, and we measured points.

01:18:06.000 You get a certain amount of points at 80% of your max heart rate per minute.

01:18:10.000 My 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.

01:18:20.000 Incredible.

01:18:21.000 I exercise regularly, but I don't exercise at that level.

01:18:26.000 That level that we were doing, because we were in this competition, was really a lot of cardio.

01:18:32.000 But my God, that runner's high is real.

01:18:34.000 I felt amazing.

01:18:36.000 I mean, I felt like so good all the time.

01:18:39.000 The alleviation of angst was unlike anything.

01:18:41.000 The internal chatter that sort of can fuck with your head, that just didn't exist anymore.

01:18:46.000 Well, 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.

01:18:54.000 It is, and it's so available to all of us.

01:18:57.000 I mean, anybody that can move their body can experience this.

01:19:00.000 And I don't I would recommend what we did, because we were working out five hours, six hours a day.

01:19:05.000 I live in New York, so I walk a lot.

01:19:08.000 That's great, right?

01:19:09.000 You have to.

01:19:11.000 Yes, but just that alone, there's many people that don't walk.

01:19:16.000 You know, you just sit here and then you move to that spot.

01:19:19.000 You sit there and you get in the car and you sit there.

01:19:21.000 You get on the train, you sit there.

01:19:23.000 And there's very little use of the body and the body starts to atrophy.

01:19:27.000 By 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.

01:19:36.000 I'm breathing better already.

01:19:37.000 I just feel it, right?

01:19:39.000 I'm imagining it.

01:19:40.000 I'm imagining this exercise.

01:19:42.000 What about nature?

01:19:44.000 Do you take any time in nature at all?

01:19:46.000 Do you go to Central Park?

01:19:47.000 Well, we have a house up in Sullivan County in the Catskills.

01:19:50.000 Oh, that's nice.

01:19:51.000 How often do you get a chance to get out there?

01:19:53.000 We spend a lot of time there in the summer.

01:19:55.000 Oh, that's great.

01:19:56.000 Do you feel better when you're up there?

01:19:58.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:19:59.000 Interesting, right?

01:20:00.000 It takes a couple of days to get into the rhythm, but then it's good. 0.78

01:20:05.000 But once you do, do you ever think, man, what the fuck am I doing living in Manhattan with all these buildings? 0.97

01:20:12.000 My wife's a New Yorker, so I'm by birth. 0.97

01:20:16.000 A week there, we need to go in.

01:20:20.000 Then we want to come back.

01:20:21.000 My friend Jeff has a place on Fire Island.

01:20:24.000 It's a beautiful place.

01:20:25.000 Beautiful.

01:20:26.000 And he lives in Manhattan as well.

01:20:28.000 But he says as he's gotten older, he really doesn't think that he could live in Manhattan anymore if it wasn't for this ability to escape.

01:20:39.000 And go somewhere and just, ah, wake up in the morning, look out, see the ocean, have a cup of coffee.

01:20:44.000 Ah.

01:20:46.000 Moving to Brooklyn was kind of like that, getting out of Manhattan.

01:20:49.000 Yeah.

01:20:49.000 I don't know.

01:20:50.000 If you don't live in New York, that may not make a lot of sense to you.

01:20:53.000 Explain to people what the difference is.

01:20:55.000 So, you know, Manhattan is just like supercharged all the time.

01:21:00.000 And it's not a tried thing.

01:21:03.000 It's a true thing that once you get out of Manhattan, everything is just a notch down.

01:21:09.000 Yeah.

01:21:10.000 A hive.

01:21:11.000 Step off the subway and you kind of feel a little bit more relaxed.

01:21:15.000 Do you think that's because Brooklyn, I mean, it's just speculative, but there's still a lot of people in Brooklyn.

01:21:20.000 Yeah.

01:21:21.000 But there's no skyscrapers.

01:21:22.000 Few.

01:21:23.000 I mean, there's starting to be lots of tall buildings and stuff.

01:21:25.000 Oh, yeah?

01:21:26.000 What's, like, a tall building in Brooklyn?

01:21:27.000 Like, 30. 30. Right.

01:21:29.000 Residences, you know.

01:21:30.000 What's Manhattan?

01:21:31.000 Like, 80s.

01:21:32.000 There's, like, 80s and 90s.

01:21:34.000 Yeah, right.

01:21:34.000 And there's some giant buildings.

01:21:35.000 I looked out the other day, I guess, from the airplane.

01:21:39.000 And there's something in North Manhattan that looks like it's way above the Empire State Building in terms of size.

01:21:48.000 I don't know what that is.

01:21:50.000 Have you thought about that existence in terms of how unnatural it is and how recent it is?

01:21:59.000 This ability to jam untold millions.

01:22:01.000 How many people are in Manhattan?

01:22:03.000 Oh, boy.

01:22:04.000 I have no idea.

01:22:05.000 I think 8 million or something in New York City, but probably like 4 million.

01:22:09.000 And then, of course, commuters as well.

01:22:11.000 So 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.

01:22:20.000 That has got to be a completely new psychological state for the human animal.

01:22:25.000 I remember when I first got into psychology, I was reading something about something called a behavioral sink.

01:22:34.000 It was about how rats living in an impoverished environment under highly crowded conditions, their behavioral repertoire diminished a lot.

01:22:49.000 I 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.

01:23:09.000 It's true that people do live under fairly crowded conditions but you can't explain everything in terms of very simple processes.

01:23:20.000 Are 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.

01:23:36.000 And 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.

01:23:46.000 Interesting.

01:23:48.000 They 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.

01:23:57.000 Interesting.

01:23:58.000 That there's a profound effect.

01:24:00.000 I 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.

01:24:09.000 He 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.

01:24:22.000 I guess it was words and you'd have to unscramble them and put them into a sentence.

01:24:26.000 And 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.

01:24:40.000 It's just like activating this kind of schema of aging.

01:24:45.000 That top-down had some kind of effect on the way you walk.

01:24:50.000 Well, that makes sense.

01:24:53.000 And 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.

01:25:03.000 And 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. 0.91

01:25:12.000 In 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. 0.51

01:25:23.000 Well, 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. 0.97

01:25:32.000 Where do you think selfishness came from?

01:25:35.000 Auto-noetic consciousness.

01:25:37.000 So 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.

01:25:51.000 Not only envision a world in which we can be selfless, not selfish, but help others, but also how to exclude others.

01:26:06.000 I think it's a natural, basic animal instinct to Stay alive, obviously.

01:26:15.000 Richard Dawkins had the theory of the selfish gene.

01:26:18.000 Animals are incredibly selfish in their struggle for existence.

01:26:23.000 So that kind of automatic selfishness is there.

01:26:28.000 But what the auto-noetic mind allows us to do is to be intentionally, willfully selfish.

01:26:35.000 To allow us to choose to do these things for our own personal good.

01:26:40.000 For 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,

01:26:57.000 to put all of the rest of the brain and all of the body at risk for the simple sake of a thrill.

01:27:04.000 Mountain climbing, swimming in shark-infested waters or taking drugs at dangerous levels.

01:27:14.000 No 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.

01:27:26.000 So our conscious minds are special in good ways and bad ways.

01:27:35.000 What do you think is the root of that?

01:27:37.000 I've always wondered why certain people are drawn to doing flips on motorcycles or certain people are drawn to climbing mountains with no ropes.

01:27:49.000 What do you think that is?

01:27:53.000 I'm just guessing.

01:27:54.000 I don't really know, but I think that we each have these kind of physiological states that we try to maintain.

01:28:06.000 Our homeostatic levels are Are different.

01:28:10.000 And 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.

01:28:25.000 Because all that also affects the brain.

01:28:28.000 So consciously, you strive, you may go looking for those kinds of things to get the rush.

01:28:42.000 It'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.

01:29:02.000 Do you know who Alex Honnold is?

01:29:04.000 Yeah, I've had him on the podcast a couple of times and every time I talk to him my hands start getting sweaty.

01:29:09.000 I get so nervous.

01:29:11.000 For folks who don't know who we're talking about, he's probably the most famous free solo climber in the world.

01:29:18.000 And he climbs these seemingly impossible mountains with no ropes.

01:29:24.000 And there's video of him doing it.

01:29:27.000 There's drone footage of him climbing these peaks.

01:29:30.000 And my hands just start pouring sweat.

01:29:33.000 I just watch it.

01:29:34.000 But 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.

01:29:47.000 He doesn't seem like some...

01:29:49.000 You 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...

01:30:01.000 Or a woman who needs to be constantly... 1.00

01:30:03.000 Freaked out.

01:30:04.000 He's not that guy.

01:30:06.000 And when he describes it, what's really interesting is, he goes, it's very mellow.

01:30:10.000 He's like, if there's really a thrill, I've done something horribly wrong.

01:30:16.000 The real thrills are so scary because that means you're about to die.

01:30:19.000 So instead of getting the thrill, he's getting that peace.

01:30:24.000 Yeah, but he's getting a peace from putting himself at extreme risk.

01:30:28.000 And there's also the thing of other people praising you for your risk-taking, which is an odd thing about humans.

01:30:37.000 And they've shown through natural – well, there's a natural selection process.

01:30:43.000 Aspect of it with females and mates.

01:30:46.000 That females are attracted to men that do those crazy things and take crazy risks for some strange reason.

01:30:53.000 Whether 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.

01:31:01.000 He will protect our children or something like that.

01:31:03.000 Yeah, I mean there's a lot of evolutionary psychology.

01:31:06.000 A lot of that is speculative, of course.

01:31:10.000 Yes, of course.

01:31:12.000 But 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.

01:31:25.000 I'm going to have to learn how to hand glide or something, you know?

01:31:29.000 And some people may do it for attention.

01:31:32.000 Yes.

01:31:34.000 Yeah, the things people do for attention.

01:31:37.000 Creativity.

01:31:38.000 Creativity.

01:31:40.000 That, to me, is one of the more interesting aspects of being human beings, our ability to create things, and our desire to create things.

01:31:47.000 And in a way, that's also along the same lines, right?

01:31:50.000 Because you're getting rewarded for it.

01:31:54.000 Well, probably...

01:31:56.000 Yeah, 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,

01:32:13.000 you 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.

01:32:27.000 But 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.

01:32:43.000 And sort of transcend those categories into completely new ideas and so forth.

01:32:50.000 And I don't think we know how the brain does that at all.

01:32:54.000 That's a very good question for the future, but it's not something we have a great deal of understanding of now.

01:33:01.000 I mean, there could be an area of research on it that I just don't know about.

01:33:04.000 It's a big field.

01:33:06.000 But I certainly don't know the answer to how creativity comes about.

01:33:10.000 Well, it's interesting, too.

01:33:11.000 Creativity has a reward system built in for the person who creates.

01:33:16.000 Even without recognition from others, there's some fundamentally satisfying feeling of creating something.

01:33:24.000 It's fun.

01:33:24.000 Yeah.

01:33:25.000 Why do you think that is?

01:33:29.000 Well, novelty is rewarding, not reinforcing.

01:33:34.000 And certainly creativity is novelty.

01:33:37.000 It's like anything that is novel that you do has a kind of charge effect to it, I would think.

01:33:45.000 Yeah, I mean...

01:33:48.000 People 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.

01:33:57.000 And 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.

01:34:13.000 Is that part of what you wanted to do when you were writing?

01:34:18.000 Well, 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.

01:34:27.000 My work is rather limited and all.

01:34:30.000 I don't work on creativity and all these things.

01:34:32.000 But you work on the way the mind works.

01:34:34.000 I think about how the mind works, but I work on how the brain detects and responds to danger.

01:34:41.000 So 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.

01:34:50.000 But yeah, I get tremendous value out of sitting there writing.

01:34:57.000 Because 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.

01:35:05.000 You have a beginning and you just see where it goes.

01:35:09.000 So 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.

01:35:17.000 And the fun part is getting to the end.

01:35:21.000 The brain reacting to danger.

01:35:23.000 Did you do any interviews with people who are soldiers or interview fighters or people that are involved in extreme activities?

01:35:33.000 I haven't done a lot of interviews.

01:35:36.000 I mean, I have talked to people like that.

01:35:42.000 Individual cases are interesting because they give you stuff, but it's not data.

01:35:47.000 So the data you have to go out and collect.

01:35:50.000 Yeah.

01:35:51.000 What do you got there for notes?

01:35:52.000 You got a pile of notes?

01:35:54.000 Oh, I don't know.

01:35:55.000 Do you want to discuss?

01:35:57.000 I just thought...

01:35:58.000 I just brought this...

01:36:02.000 I think we covered most of what I want to say.

01:36:05.000 The amygdala is not a fear center.

01:36:07.000 Behavior is not primarily a tool of the mind.

01:36:10.000 It's a tool of survival.

01:36:12.000 We 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.

01:36:24.000 Now, 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?

01:36:34.000 Well, I started out thinking this was a way to study emotion.

01:36:40.000 At the time, I'd been studying these human patients with split brain surgery.

01:36:47.000 Can you explain that?

01:36:48.000 Because you glossed over that earlier, but the split brain surgery is an alleviation of epilepsy?

01:36:52.000 It's a way to control epilepsy that can't be controlled in any other way.

01:36:56.000 Medications are not working.

01:36:58.000 So 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.

01:37:16.000 So – and this is not – this is only done in a very extreme set of conditions and it's not done that much anymore.

01:37:26.000 But when it's done, it's – the connections between the two sides of the brain are separated.

01:37:32.000 So information on one side doesn't cross over to the other.

01:37:35.000 How do they do that?

01:37:38.000 They open up the skull.

01:37:42.000 You've got two loaves of bread sitting next to each other and they're connected by threads, which are axons that go between them.

01:37:51.000 So you pull apart here and you can see where those axons are when you open up from the top.

01:37:57.000 So imagine like a hot dog bun.

01:37:59.000 Okay.

01:38:00.000 And 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.

01:38:12.000 So those wires would then be surgically sectioned.

01:38:16.000 And so now you end up with...

01:38:19.000 Two sides of the brain, separate and independent.

01:38:23.000 So typically, language is on the left side, so you can talk to that side.

01:38:27.000 The right side doesn't have language, so you have to ask, well, what can it do?

01:38:32.000 So 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.

01:38:49.000 So you send a stimulus to the right hemisphere and you say, what did you see?

01:38:55.000 And the left hemisphere answers because that's where the language is.

01:38:58.000 He says, I didn't see anything.

01:39:01.000 So, okay, you say, reach into this bag and see what's in there.

01:39:06.000 If the right hand goes in, that's connected to the left hemisphere, can't find it.

01:39:10.000 If the left hand goes in connected to the right hemisphere, which saw the apple, it pulls out the apple.

01:39:16.000 So the right hemisphere has information that the left hemisphere can't talk about.

01:39:22.000 What is life like for people once they've done that operation?

01:39:25.000 Well, slowly, the left hemisphere kind of comes to dominate again.

01:39:34.000 They come to live with it.

01:39:37.000 How does it prevent seizures?

01:39:41.000 The 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.

01:39:59.000 But cutting that isolates the seizures in the two hemispheres and makes each one more controllable by taking a medication.

01:40:08.000 Jesus.

01:40:09.000 Imagine being the first guy to try that out.

01:40:12.000 I got an idea. 0.98

01:40:14.000 Split your brain like a hot dog bun.

01:40:19.000 What we were interested in, in these patients that we were studying, this is my mentor, Michael Gazzaniga.

01:40:27.000 And I were studying these at Dartmouth Medical School.

01:40:31.000 We were at Stony Brook out on Long Island.

01:40:32.000 We would drive up to Dartmouth to see these patients.

01:40:38.000 How 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?

01:40:48.000 So we would put information in the right hemisphere.

01:40:52.000 The guy would stand up.

01:40:54.000 I said, why'd you do that?

01:40:56.000 I needed to stretch.

01:40:58.000 Or, you know, if he scratched his hand, he said, I had an itch, so I needed to scratch it.

01:41:03.000 And so time after time, the left hemisphere would generate a narrative that made its behavior make sense.

01:41:11.000 So that's why I got interested in how non-conscious systems would be generating behaviors That we generate narratives to explain.

01:41:20.000 Because at the time that we were doing this, the idea of cognitive dissonance was very popular.

01:41:27.000 And what that means is that when cognitively, when you do something behaviorally that is incongruent with what you cognitively know, it's disturbing.

01:41:40.000 It causes dissonance.

01:41:41.000 And so you have to engage in some kind of dissonance reduction.

01:41:44.000 So 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.

01:41:58.000 The consciousness thinks that it's in charge.

01:42:00.000 That, you know, the brain and body are its, you know, it's the control center and everything else is there to satisfy its whims.

01:42:12.000 And so it generates these narratives to keep that sense of unity going, even though it's no longer unified.

01:42:17.000 Trevor Burrus That is so fascinating that the brain tries to seek some sort of an explanation for the actions that you provoked externally.

01:42:25.000 And that's why I got into emotion because, well, maybe emotion systems produce these.

01:42:30.000 You got something, Jamie?

01:42:31.000 When I'm looking this up, alien hand syndrome came up.

01:42:34.000 Do you know anything about this?

01:42:36.000 I don't.

01:42:36.000 I'm sorry.

01:42:37.000 Okay.

01:42:37.000 There's a long article explaining this thing called alien hand syndrome and also known as Dr. Strangelove syndrome.

01:42:43.000 Picture of Dr. Strangelove.

01:42:44.000 The explanations are very strange about people's hands doing something that they're not explaining.

01:42:48.000 It's kind of the same.

01:42:50.000 Do they generate an explanation when they do that?

01:42:53.000 It just explains different scenarios.

01:42:55.000 People have had like a leg walk in the wrong direction or buttoning up your shirt with your left hand.

01:43:00.000 The right hand starts unbuttoning it.

01:43:01.000 That seems to be like some sort of a neurological problem. 0.96

01:43:04.000 Well, they split brain patients right after surgery when things are really fucked up. 0.97

01:43:09.000 Squirrelly. 0.98

01:43:10.000 It would be like pulling the pants down with one hand and pulling them up with the other.

01:43:15.000 Oh, wow.

01:43:15.000 There's one patient I saw in the hospital, a young kid.

01:43:19.000 The left hand reaches out to grab the nurse on the ass. 1.00

01:43:22.000 Can I say that? 1.00

01:43:23.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:43:25.000 And the right hand is pulling it back.

01:43:27.000 Oh, my God.

01:43:28.000 Oh my gosh, so there's like a physical struggle.

01:43:31.000 Yeah, 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.

01:43:40.000 The woman who thinks her alien hand wants her to be a better person. 0.94

01:43:43.000 Yeah, see, I'm thinking these are some sort of physiological, yeah.

01:43:48.000 Well, it's, what a crazy solution to epilepsy.

01:43:52.000 I know there's other solutions that...

01:43:55.000 That is a last-ditch effort.

01:43:57.000 Yeah.

01:43:58.000 So for severe, severe cases.

01:44:00.000 Do those people go on to eventually sort of achieve some sort of a normalization?

01:44:06.000 Yeah.

01:44:08.000 You 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.

01:44:32.000 But I think in general they live a somewhat better life, but I doubt they ever live a completely full normal life.

01:44:41.000 I mean, how could you after all that?

01:44:43.000 I'm really interested in the brain creating these narratives to explain Because there's so many people that do things like that.

01:44:51.000 They'll try to explain their life away and give themselves excuses and give themselves reasons for behavior.

01:44:59.000 And one of the things you see with the more rational people is it's never their fault.

01:45:03.000 It's always someone else's fault.

01:45:05.000 Well, that's the four-billion-year story that I tell, how we got to these narratives.

01:45:10.000 That's what it's all about.

01:45:11.000 Wow.

01:45:11.000 Listen, man.

01:45:12.000 This is amazing stuff.

01:45:13.000 Please tell everybody your books, where they can get them, how they can find them.

01:45:19.000 Are they available in audio as well?

01:45:20.000 Right.

01:45:21.000 Yeah.

01:45:21.000 So the new book is called The Deep History of Ourselves, The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains.

01:45:28.000 And you can get that on Amazon.

01:45:30.000 You can get the Audible on Audible.com.

01:45:35.000 I think all the major booksellers have the books.

01:45:40.000 The last book was Anxious.

01:45:42.000 It also has an Audible version.

01:45:43.000 I always wanted to get like Christopher Walken to do my – Trevor Burrus Why don't you do it?

01:45:47.000 Did you not do it?

01:45:48.000 No, I didn't do it.

01:45:49.000 They didn't ask me anything.

01:45:51.000 I would want you to do it.

01:45:52.000 It's your work.

01:45:53.000 I get bummed out when someone else reads.

01:45:56.000 One of the good things about Pinker and Gladwell, they read their own books.

01:46:01.000 They've never offered it to me.

01:46:02.000 You should demand it.

01:46:03.000 Next time.

01:46:04.000 Demand it.

01:46:05.000 Well, for my memoir, I'll definitely...

01:46:07.000 Oh, there you go.

01:46:08.000 You have to.

01:46:08.000 Well, thank you for being here.

01:46:10.000 I really, really appreciate it.

01:46:11.000 Thanks.

01:46:11.000 Thanks for all your work.

01:46:12.000 Did I just say one thing?

01:46:13.000 Yes, please.

01:46:13.000 So, sometimes I, when I release books, I also release music to go with them.

01:46:18.000 So, Anxious had a record with it, and Deep History has some songs of life that are on the deephistory.com website with me.

01:46:26.000 Oh, that's cool.

01:46:26.000 So you are a musician.

01:46:28.000 You were bringing that up.

01:46:29.000 Right, yeah.

01:46:29.000 I've got a couple of bands.

01:46:31.000 A couple bands?

01:46:32.000 Well, the main band is the Amygdaloids.

01:46:36.000 Amygdaloids.com.

01:46:37.000 Oh, that's awesome.

01:46:38.000 And, you know, it's a rock band.

01:46:40.000 We created our own genre, heavy mental.

01:46:46.000 Songs about mind and brain and mental disorders.

01:46:48.000 They're love songs, but most rock songs are love songs about mental disorders anyway.

01:46:52.000 Yes.

01:46:53.000 Yeah, you're just being more specific.

01:46:54.000 And then an acoustic duo, So We Are, which is a lot easier to get around without drums and amps and stuff.

01:46:59.000 It's two acoustic guitars.

01:47:00.000 Awesome.

01:47:00.000 And we play the acoustic versions of the Amygdaloids.

01:47:03.000 All right.

01:47:04.000 Well, thank you, Joe.

01:47:04.000 I appreciate it, man.

01:47:05.000 Thank you.

01:47:05.000 It's been fun.

01:47:06.000 Thanks.

01:47:06.000 Thank you.

01:47:08.000 That was great.

The Joe Rogan Experience - September 04, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1344 - Joseph LeDoux

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