The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms.

00:01:12.880 I'm continuing my investigation today into the domain of cognitive neuroscience with a bit of a side foray into psychotherapeutics

00:01:20.460 and the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy, with some attention paid to associated implications for analysis of brain function.

00:01:30.760 I'm pleased today to be talking with an outstanding researcher in those joint fields.

00:01:38.860 Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris is the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor in Neurology and Psychiatry

00:01:44.980 and Director of Neuroscape's Psychedelics Division at the University of California, San Francisco.

00:01:52.340 He moved to Imperial College London in 2008 after obtaining a PhD in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol.

00:01:59.460 In 2009, under the mentorship of Professor David Nutt, he relocated to the Imperial College

00:02:05.700 to continue fMRI research with the psychedelic drug psilocybin,

00:02:10.360 derived from what have been known culturally as magic mushrooms.

00:02:14.980 In conjunction with Dr. Nutt, he built up a process of psychedelic research

00:02:20.640 that includes functional magnetic resonance imaging and MEG imaging with psilocybin,

00:02:26.580 fMRI imaging with MDMA, and plans for a MRC-sponsored clinical trial of psilocybin

00:02:32.740 as a treatment for major depression.

00:02:35.120 He was awarded an MA in psychoanalysis at Brunel University London

00:02:39.820 and a PhD in psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol.

00:02:43.440 He has designed human brain imaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT

00:02:51.080 and several clinical trials of psilocybin therapy.

00:02:54.000 He founded the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London in April 2019,

00:03:01.240 was ranked among the top 31 medical scientists in 2020,

00:03:05.600 and in 21 was named in Time magazine's 100 Next,

00:03:09.920 a list of 100 rising stars shaping the research future.

00:03:14.500 I wanted to start this conversation by asking Robin about his thoughts about the relationship

00:03:21.240 between categorization and implicit learning and Hebbian learning,

00:03:29.740 all of those things together.

00:03:31.080 So the way I've been thinking about it, tell me what you think about this,

00:03:35.780 is that we have to impose a structure of perception on the world in order to even perceive it.

00:03:43.940 So our perceptions themselves are categories, and they're implicit.

00:03:48.180 And those categories can be functional and provide us with what we need,

00:03:53.580 or they can be dysfunctional and cause us all sorts of misery and distress.

00:03:56.780 But that this also pertains to the question of what constitutes the unconscious.

00:04:01.960 A lot of what the unconscious seems to be is the implicit category structure

00:04:05.840 that we use to perceive the world through.

00:04:08.960 So that's a proposition.

00:04:10.520 Maybe I could get you to comment on that as a proposition.

00:04:14.860 Yeah, I think that's a reasonable proposition.

00:04:20.180 So much of what we learn is learnt implicitly,

00:04:24.980 really the majority, and the assumptions that we come to,

00:04:32.440 the recognition of differences between things,

00:04:35.900 which is the essence of categorization,

00:04:39.880 occurs implicitly and then is encoded with varying degrees

00:04:49.220 of what you might call confidence or precision.

00:04:53.400 precision, and that precision develops.

00:04:57.620 It can strengthen with repetition.

00:05:01.920 And then the encoding is stronger and the assumptions are more influential.

00:05:12.360 And those processes are very much processes that play out unconsciously,

00:05:17.400 unconsciously, and yet they dominate our thinking,

00:05:23.780 the content of our thought, and our behavior.

00:05:28.920 Right.

00:05:29.460 So imagine, for example, for those of you watching and listening,

00:05:33.960 that you imagine a pianist who's playing a complex piece,

00:05:38.560 and they play it repeatedly.

00:05:40.840 And when they first start to learn it,

00:05:43.120 they have to pay a tremendous amount of conscious attention

00:05:45.560 to everything they're doing, to every finger movement.

00:05:48.260 But as they play it repeatedly,

00:05:50.380 they build specialized neural machinery

00:05:52.880 to govern the motor output

00:05:55.460 that constitutes the ability to play the piece.

00:05:58.080 And so they're automating what is initially voluntary.

00:06:02.560 Then imagine that they automate a mistake,

00:06:06.100 like you can play a missed note,

00:06:07.640 or you can automate a phrase that's mistimed.

00:06:11.320 And then you'll have learned something that is now automatic,

00:06:16.180 but is also in error.

00:06:17.400 And part of your theory of psychopathology

00:06:20.440 is analogous to that in some sense,

00:06:22.460 is that we'll practice modes of apprehending the world,

00:06:27.520 modes of categorizing the world,

00:06:28.840 and make them automatic,

00:06:30.660 but they're also dysfunctional enough to cause us misery.

00:06:35.900 And I guess your theory with regards to psychedelic usage

00:06:39.620 is something, as far as I can tell,

00:06:42.240 is that psychedelic usage enables the re,

00:06:48.040 what would you say,

00:06:50.200 it re-novelizes the environment,

00:06:52.980 or re-novelizes experience,

00:06:54.540 so that the effect of that over-learning

00:06:56.420 is ameliorated, at least temporarily.

00:07:00.220 And that gives the cognitive system,

00:07:02.920 that gives the person having the experience

00:07:04.640 the opportunity to lay down new conceptions

00:07:07.140 that are less constrained by that previous learning.

00:07:10.320 And then the question is,

00:07:11.900 well, when would previous learning be pathological?

00:07:14.440 Because that's a hard thing to figure out.

00:07:17.200 So...

00:07:17.720 It is.

00:07:18.740 It is.

00:07:19.720 And, you know, analogies will help us here.

00:07:22.700 And one that is perhaps relevant is rebirth.

00:07:28.160 You know, we come into this world,

00:07:30.320 sure, with some inherited models.

00:07:33.940 And certainly they can, you know,

00:07:37.920 come into play as we live a life

00:07:40.500 and they're activated and engaged

00:07:43.720 as we encounter aspects of human experience.

00:07:48.000 But, you know, as we develop and we learn

00:07:51.340 and we create associations,

00:07:55.480 these implicit associations

00:07:57.600 that become ingrained and entrenched in our psyche,

00:08:02.520 then, yes, it can happen

00:08:05.860 that sometimes we learn things too strongly

00:08:08.880 and they dominate our way of thinking,

00:08:13.740 our way of seeing the world

00:08:15.400 and our way of behaving.

00:08:19.240 And so the analogy I want to come to

00:08:20.960 is one of rebirth,

00:08:22.600 is, you know, in a sense,

00:08:25.220 resetting the system,

00:08:26.480 recalibrating the system.

00:08:27.740 And, yes, then we will be experiencing the world

00:08:31.020 with a refreshed level of novelty.

00:08:34.560 Okay, so imagine this.

00:08:36.420 I'll go in two directions from that.

00:08:38.100 So the first is that,

00:08:40.240 imagine that you grow up in a family

00:08:42.180 where the interactions between the father

00:08:45.460 and the mother and the children are pathological.

00:08:48.560 So maybe the father is narcissistic and psychopathic,

00:08:51.600 at least to some degree.

00:08:52.580 And so the children grow up in that environment

00:08:56.040 and they learn to respond to anything masculine

00:08:59.800 as if it has these psychopathic

00:09:02.600 and narcissistic characteristics.

00:09:04.420 And so their perceptions are tuned

00:09:06.200 in that regard.

00:09:11.180 And then they move out into the world

00:09:13.340 and there are all sorts of potential

00:09:16.160 male-female interactions

00:09:17.580 that obtain in the actual world.

00:09:19.420 And their perceptions aren't calibrated properly

00:09:23.520 for the more generic environment

00:09:25.200 because their specific environment

00:09:27.060 was tilted in a pathological way.

00:09:30.020 But now their very perceptions have been tuned.

00:09:33.200 And that's where the unconscious is, right?

00:09:35.140 It's in the structures

00:09:36.320 that actually govern perceptual categories.

00:09:39.740 And so what will happen for, say,

00:09:41.700 a girl in that situation is

00:09:43.260 she won't be able to see anything positive

00:09:46.860 that a man might do

00:09:48.320 because that's so anomalous

00:09:49.920 and outside her domain of perceptual familiarity.

00:09:54.380 And anything that's vaguely reminiscent

00:09:56.080 of the pattern that she's already learned

00:09:58.020 will elicit the whole pattern.

00:10:00.340 So part of what happens

00:10:01.540 in the psychopathological environment

00:10:03.180 is that you specialize your perceptions

00:10:05.480 for a microenvironment

00:10:07.540 that's not generalizable

00:10:09.680 to the broader macroenvironment.

00:10:12.000 And that's a good way

00:10:13.020 of sort of zeroing in

00:10:15.720 on what actually might constitute

00:10:17.280 a form of psychopathological learning, right?

00:10:20.460 So you might come from

00:10:21.680 a dependency-inducing familial background, too,

00:10:24.680 where you're really, really taken care of

00:10:27.360 to an extreme.

00:10:28.600 And then you're going to learn

00:10:29.620 how to adapt to that

00:10:30.600 and to see the world

00:10:31.440 as if that's how it's structured.

00:10:33.240 Then when you're thrown out

00:10:34.280 into the broader world

00:10:35.300 and that level of intensive care

00:10:37.980 isn't forthcoming,

00:10:39.380 your perceptions aren't adapted

00:10:41.720 to that macroenvironment,

00:10:43.740 to that broader macroenvironment.

00:10:45.640 Now, so that's one thing.

00:10:46.920 Now, you talked about rebirth.

00:10:48.620 So I spent a lot of time

00:10:50.240 studying Mircea Eliade,

00:10:51.700 in particular,

00:10:52.620 historian of religious ideas.

00:10:54.460 He was very interested

00:10:55.480 in the symbolic structure

00:10:57.920 of the idea of rebirth.

00:11:00.100 And so the way that this is laid out

00:11:02.800 in the broad mythological literature

00:11:05.160 is that the rebirth,

00:11:07.740 and that would be a baptism, too,

00:11:09.080 is a return to the beginning of time

00:11:12.300 where chaos and possibility rule unstructured.

00:11:18.580 And so, and that return

00:11:20.060 to the beginning of time

00:11:21.200 to see that unstructured chaotic possibility

00:11:24.120 is a time for rejuvenation

00:11:26.900 and renovation.

00:11:28.540 And the idea of baptism

00:11:30.060 is actually a ritualistic attempt

00:11:34.480 to produce the kind of rebirth

00:11:36.940 that is, in principle, redemptive.

00:11:39.700 Now, you have a theory

00:11:41.760 about how psychedelics works

00:11:43.220 that makes pharmacological sense

00:11:45.960 of this notion of the reconstitution

00:11:49.320 of a generative chaos,

00:11:51.120 if I've got the theory correct, right,

00:11:53.660 is that the psychedelics blow off

00:11:55.880 the overlearning that constrains perception,

00:11:59.100 or maybe even the learning.

00:12:00.800 And the danger of that is everything,

00:12:02.760 there's too much possibility

00:12:03.940 and too much chaos,

00:12:04.800 but the upside is a whole new set

00:12:07.720 of propositions that are more germane

00:12:11.380 to current life, let's say,

00:12:12.820 aren't outdated,

00:12:13.600 could conceivably be generated.

00:12:15.620 Does that seem approximately appropriate?

00:12:18.880 Yes, it does.

00:12:20.660 And, you know, the analogy or the theme,

00:12:25.200 the archetype, perhaps,

00:12:26.440 of baptism is useful.

00:12:29.540 Baptism often involves a shock,

00:12:32.240 whether it's, you know,

00:12:33.520 being thrown in water

00:12:35.240 or water thrown on you

00:12:36.380 or a baptism of fire, you know.

00:12:39.340 So there's an appeal

00:12:40.460 to a period,

00:12:45.940 a state of chaos.

00:12:49.700 And, yeah,

00:12:51.480 and this opportunity

00:12:52.520 for a second go, in a sense.

00:12:58.500 And, you know,

00:12:59.860 for the child,

00:13:01.120 the scenario that you were describing,

00:13:03.580 suffering, you know,

00:13:06.660 complex interrelationships,

00:13:10.940 familial interrelationships,

00:13:13.400 the product of that

00:13:14.660 is that the child knows no different.

00:13:17.840 Right.

00:13:18.100 They've just learned really adaptively,

00:13:21.280 in a sense,

00:13:22.260 even though the product is maladaptive,

00:13:25.540 it couldn't have been any other way.

00:13:28.080 They, the product,

00:13:30.240 in a sense,

00:13:31.080 they can't have helped,

00:13:32.920 which is probably why we don't,

00:13:35.140 you know,

00:13:35.860 necessarily incarcerate children,

00:13:37.820 you know.

00:13:38.340 There's an innocence there,

00:13:40.060 they're subjected to things,

00:13:41.540 and they develop in a particular way,

00:13:43.600 and they can be victims.

00:13:45.660 But there is that curious transition

00:13:47.560 into adulthood,

00:13:48.780 where, of course,

00:13:50.020 you know,

00:13:52.620 there are moral judgments

00:13:54.880 on behavior and so on.

00:13:57.120 And then there is an assumption

00:14:00.200 that you could know,

00:14:01.840 you could have known differently,

00:14:03.640 you could have been another way.

00:14:06.180 You know,

00:14:06.900 after a certain level of development,

00:14:08.980 there's sufficient metacognition

00:14:10.620 or consciousness or self-awareness

00:14:13.100 to not be,

00:14:14.800 in a sense,

00:14:15.440 a victim to your experiences.

00:14:18.020 Yeah.

00:14:21.620 And, you know,

00:14:23.340 these rebirths,

00:14:27.020 if you look at mythology,

00:14:30.300 they may happen,

00:14:31.860 you know,

00:14:32.520 as a kind of rite of passage

00:14:35.000 around a certain age,

00:14:37.100 coming of age.

00:14:37.940 And perhaps there's a clue there,

00:14:41.180 again,

00:14:41.540 to some of the historical use

00:14:44.120 of psychedelic plant medicines

00:14:45.280 for that purpose.

00:14:46.240 Right.

00:14:46.680 Well,

00:14:46.940 I don't remember

00:14:47.720 if it was in one of your papers

00:14:49.120 or one of the associated papers

00:14:50.660 that I've been reading lately,

00:14:52.280 but the proposition, too,

00:14:54.580 was that,

00:14:55.580 you talked about baptism by fire,

00:14:57.540 is that if an organism

00:14:59.420 is sufficiently stressed,

00:15:01.880 that can re,

00:15:04.300 that can produce a state

00:15:06.300 where rapid new learning

00:15:08.220 is possible.

00:15:09.080 Now,

00:15:09.240 that's what should happen,

00:15:10.240 right?

00:15:10.400 Because if you're stressed,

00:15:11.800 hyper-stressed,

00:15:12.540 that means something

00:15:13.380 has gone radically wrong.

00:15:15.160 And when something's

00:15:16.140 gone radically wrong,

00:15:17.580 that's a good time

00:15:18.520 to learn something new.

00:15:20.300 But the proposition, too,

00:15:21.680 was that what the psychedelics

00:15:23.160 were doing,

00:15:24.180 in some real sense,

00:15:25.740 was pharmacologically mimicking

00:15:28.180 the neuropharmacological conditions

00:15:30.940 that might obtain

00:15:32.280 after severe stress.

00:15:35.200 That's right.

00:15:35.220 But inducing that

00:15:36.560 pharmacologically.

00:15:37.840 That's right.

00:15:38.940 So this is a model

00:15:40.820 I introduced

00:15:41.720 maybe a couple of years ago now

00:15:44.660 called Pivotal Mental States.

00:15:47.220 And really,

00:15:48.180 it's a way

00:15:48.960 to conceptualize

00:15:51.560 and contextualize

00:15:52.820 what psychedelics are

00:15:54.160 and what they do.

00:15:55.160 And I propose

00:15:56.160 that they are drugs

00:15:57.340 that hijack

00:15:58.900 a stress response system.

00:16:01.080 But that stress response system

00:16:03.100 has evolved

00:16:04.220 and exists anyway,

00:16:06.260 of course.

00:16:07.440 It has to.

00:16:08.660 The drug

00:16:09.100 has to come in

00:16:10.480 and, in a sense,

00:16:11.420 hijack and work on something

00:16:12.820 that already exists

00:16:14.060 for a function

00:16:15.340 outside of the context

00:16:16.640 of a, you know,

00:16:18.240 somewhat alien chemical

00:16:19.440 coming in

00:16:20.100 that you put into your body.

00:16:21.980 So it was,

00:16:24.320 in a sense,

00:16:25.140 a way of sort of

00:16:26.400 having a more

00:16:27.480 foundational understanding

00:16:29.600 of the psychedelic experience.

00:16:31.320 You know,

00:16:32.160 what is it

00:16:32.820 outside of the context

00:16:34.060 of psychedelic drugs?

00:16:35.960 And so there,

00:16:36.940 I looked at things

00:16:38.400 like aesthetic practice,

00:16:40.920 extreme experiences

00:16:42.360 that can drive

00:16:43.700 intense states of stress

00:16:47.300 where one comes

00:16:49.740 to a crisis point,

00:16:51.000 a pivotal mental state.

00:16:52.920 And then in that

00:16:54.160 pivotal mental state,

00:16:56.100 this moment

00:16:57.820 right now

00:16:59.360 really matters

00:17:00.540 as to where,

00:17:01.820 you know,

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00:18:42.940 Yeah, well that strikes me

00:18:44.620 as analogous

00:18:45.360 to the phenomenon

00:18:46.300 that's often noted

00:18:47.420 among people

00:18:48.220 who recover from alcoholism.

00:18:50.180 So it's very common

00:18:51.580 and I knew this,

00:18:53.320 I learned this

00:18:54.040 almost 30 years ago

00:18:55.400 when I was studying

00:18:56.240 alcoholism

00:18:57.020 and its treatments.

00:18:58.480 Even then it was known

00:18:59.700 that one of the most

00:19:00.740 reliable treatments

00:19:01.900 and this has stayed constant

00:19:03.440 in the research literature

00:19:04.460 was religious transformation.

00:19:06.800 And so you think,

00:19:07.600 well,

00:19:08.260 and these are hardcore

00:19:09.520 non-religious scientists

00:19:11.240 who are putting this forward

00:19:12.200 as a proposition,

00:19:13.120 it's just a fact

00:19:14.660 drawn from decades

00:19:16.420 of observation

00:19:17.180 about what works

00:19:18.020 and what doesn't work

00:19:18.860 in the treatment of alcoholism.

00:19:20.400 Most things don't work

00:19:22.020 including treatment centers

00:19:23.260 but one of the phenomenon

00:19:26.020 that's constantly reported

00:19:29.680 by people

00:19:30.400 who have recovered

00:19:32.140 from alcoholism

00:19:33.160 is that at some point

00:19:34.500 they hit rock bottom,

00:19:37.080 right,

00:19:37.360 and they have a devastatingly

00:19:39.480 stressful experience

00:19:40.740 as a consequence

00:19:41.520 of the fact

00:19:42.320 that their addiction

00:19:42.980 has gone out of control

00:19:44.240 and that hits them

00:19:45.900 with devastating force.

00:19:47.880 You can imagine

00:19:48.480 if that's a hyper-stress response

00:19:51.020 and it opens up

00:19:52.400 the doorway

00:19:53.880 to new learning

00:19:55.420 because it's so stressful

00:19:56.820 that everything

00:19:58.760 in the environment

00:19:59.500 gets re-novelized

00:20:00.780 in some sense,

00:20:01.720 that's associated

00:20:02.620 with an experience

00:20:03.660 of awe

00:20:04.240 and there's a religious

00:20:05.700 element to that

00:20:06.600 because the transformation

00:20:07.540 is taking place

00:20:08.700 at a very deep level

00:20:10.340 and so they hit something

00:20:13.740 that's hyper-stressful

00:20:14.760 and then they're prepared

00:20:16.020 for radically new learning,

00:20:18.560 for personality retooling

00:20:20.000 in some sense.

00:20:22.520 So, and then,

00:20:23.240 so, okay,

00:20:23.760 so then I was thinking too,

00:20:25.680 so, you know,

00:20:26.560 in psychotherapy

00:20:27.560 there's a rule of thumb

00:20:29.060 and it's a good one

00:20:30.320 that if you can help people

00:20:33.980 confront what they're afraid of

00:20:35.940 and avoiding

00:20:36.720 in manageable,

00:20:39.180 bite-sized pieces,

00:20:40.680 then they get stronger

00:20:43.080 and braver.

00:20:44.400 So, so imagine this,

00:20:45.620 imagine there's a hierarchy

00:20:46.780 of implicit presumptions.

00:20:49.220 Some are key and core

00:20:51.240 and those would be

00:20:52.640 the assumptions

00:20:53.640 that if disrupted

00:20:54.740 cause traumatic stress.

00:20:56.400 and then there are less

00:20:58.500 crucial assumptions

00:20:59.660 which are more like

00:21:00.580 peripheral perceptions

00:21:02.080 and they're ones

00:21:03.440 that still have a lot of play,

00:21:05.060 they're not hyper-learned yet

00:21:06.280 and they're not

00:21:07.380 a lot of,

00:21:08.480 not a lot of other conceptions

00:21:10.460 are dependent on them.

00:21:12.280 So they're more peripheral.

00:21:13.960 So then when you do

00:21:14.880 exposure therapy

00:21:15.940 with people,

00:21:17.180 you have them confront

00:21:18.660 the micro

00:21:20.060 categories

00:21:21.120 categories

00:21:22.280 that they're using

00:21:23.140 to constrain

00:21:25.980 and formulate

00:21:27.440 their behavior

00:21:28.240 and they can modulate those

00:21:30.240 and so

00:21:30.600 they stress themselves

00:21:31.980 a little bit

00:21:32.820 and that's enough

00:21:34.540 to produce

00:21:34.980 a little bit of learning.

00:21:36.720 But if you do that

00:21:37.640 continually,

00:21:38.680 the system can incrementally

00:21:40.720 grow and change

00:21:41.860 without having to undergo

00:21:43.320 dramatic stress-induced

00:21:45.460 revolutions.

00:21:46.200 Yeah,

00:21:48.880 what I would

00:21:50.040 want to add in there

00:21:51.640 is that perhaps

00:21:52.360 it's,

00:21:54.260 perhaps unlearning

00:21:55.380 is even more important

00:21:57.020 than learning

00:21:58.380 in that process.

00:22:00.000 So,

00:22:00.680 you know,

00:22:01.080 the patient is being

00:22:02.240 brought back

00:22:03.860 to

00:22:04.520 traumatic memories,

00:22:07.360 traumatic

00:22:07.680 themes

00:22:08.700 and

00:22:09.060 feelings

00:22:10.160 but

00:22:11.780 the pathology

00:22:13.400 that they present

00:22:14.260 with is one

00:22:15.140 of arguably

00:22:16.660 excessive learning,

00:22:19.540 you know,

00:22:20.020 a defensive learning

00:22:21.320 that needs

00:22:22.860 to be

00:22:23.560 unlearned

00:22:24.800 and so

00:22:25.400 in order

00:22:25.980 to bring

00:22:27.380 someone back

00:22:28.260 to some semblance

00:22:29.340 of health,

00:22:31.200 there is

00:22:31.700 arguably

00:22:32.580 a need

00:22:33.220 for a

00:22:34.520 confrontation

00:22:35.120 to go back there.

00:22:36.480 I mean,

00:22:36.820 this is the principle

00:22:37.660 of exposure therapy,

00:22:39.160 to go back there

00:22:40.940 and actually

00:22:41.500 weaken

00:22:42.120 associations

00:22:43.380 that have formed

00:22:44.340 too strongly

00:22:45.120 to produce

00:22:46.060 the psychopathology.

00:22:47.320 So,

00:22:47.680 one of the things

00:22:48.540 you wrote about

00:22:49.200 in your new paper

00:22:50.100 is the

00:22:50.900 emergent literature

00:22:52.320 pointing to something

00:22:53.440 like a general

00:22:54.420 factor of

00:22:55.400 psychopathology,

00:22:57.240 right?

00:22:57.500 And then

00:22:57.920 when I read that

00:22:59.100 I always think,

00:22:59.800 well,

00:22:59.900 that's neuroticism,

00:23:01.020 it's the same

00:23:01.680 factor analysis,

00:23:02.640 it's pointing to

00:23:03.580 a susceptibility

00:23:04.520 to negative emotion

00:23:05.480 and when I,

00:23:06.740 after I talked

00:23:07.260 to Carl Friston,

00:23:08.180 I was trying to

00:23:08.880 sort out in my head

00:23:09.880 the difference

00:23:10.500 between

00:23:11.160 neuroticism

00:23:12.560 and openness,

00:23:13.740 the difference

00:23:14.120 between neuroticism

00:23:15.200 and creativity.

00:23:16.680 Now,

00:23:16.940 creativity allows

00:23:17.880 you to shift

00:23:18.700 categories.

00:23:20.740 Neuroticism

00:23:21.260 seems to be

00:23:22.160 the susceptibility

00:23:23.920 of categories

00:23:24.760 to stress-induced

00:23:25.820 disruption.

00:23:27.800 And so,

00:23:28.080 then the question

00:23:28.780 is like,

00:23:29.800 so you get stress

00:23:30.840 and you talk

00:23:31.700 in your paper,

00:23:32.340 the one you sent

00:23:32.960 me about the fact

00:23:33.720 that stress

00:23:34.760 also produces

00:23:35.600 neural death,

00:23:36.620 especially in

00:23:37.840 hippocampal systems,

00:23:39.500 for example,

00:23:40.040 that are key

00:23:40.560 to the movement

00:23:41.160 of information

00:23:41.860 from short-term

00:23:42.760 attention

00:23:43.560 to long-term

00:23:44.180 storage.

00:23:44.740 So,

00:23:44.940 imagine that

00:23:45.440 when you encounter

00:23:46.380 something stressful,

00:23:48.220 the first thing

00:23:49.200 that happens

00:23:49.740 is that

00:23:50.420 there is

00:23:51.320 category death

00:23:52.580 and perhaps

00:23:53.440 neural death

00:23:54.140 that's proportionate

00:23:55.420 to the degree

00:23:55.980 of stress.

00:23:57.380 And that might

00:23:58.020 be a necessary

00:23:58.780 precondition

00:23:59.620 for learning,

00:24:00.280 but it's not

00:24:00.860 learning, right?

00:24:01.700 It's just

00:24:02.260 the falling apart

00:24:03.380 of old

00:24:04.540 pathological

00:24:05.280 systems.

00:24:06.620 And that's

00:24:07.340 a problem

00:24:07.780 because,

00:24:08.480 well,

00:24:08.600 now you don't

00:24:09.100 have the old

00:24:09.680 pathological system,

00:24:10.800 but you also

00:24:11.580 don't have

00:24:12.040 anywhere to

00:24:12.580 go, right?

00:24:14.620 So,

00:24:15.020 it's only the

00:24:15.880 death without

00:24:16.440 the rebirth

00:24:17.040 and then people

00:24:18.080 experience that

00:24:18.880 with extreme

00:24:19.500 pain too

00:24:20.120 because,

00:24:21.060 and I wonder

00:24:21.780 sometimes too

00:24:22.460 if that psychogenic

00:24:23.340 pain like

00:24:24.000 depression,

00:24:24.880 for example,

00:24:25.780 isn't actually

00:24:26.620 the psychological

00:24:27.940 consequences of

00:24:29.020 the neural

00:24:29.620 degeneration

00:24:30.240 and the category

00:24:31.140 death that,

00:24:32.060 well,

00:24:32.360 that we're

00:24:32.680 referring to

00:24:33.360 as a consequence

00:24:34.300 of stress.

00:24:36.480 Possibly,

00:24:37.200 yes.

00:24:37.500 I mean,

00:24:38.300 a theme

00:24:38.600 I'd want

00:24:38.940 to bring

00:24:39.300 in would

00:24:40.760 be disconnect

00:24:41.440 and I

00:24:43.600 suspect if

00:24:45.300 we take

00:24:45.700 a classic

00:24:46.480 aspect of

00:24:47.880 neuroticism

00:24:48.640 like depression,

00:24:50.460 then there

00:24:54.940 is,

00:24:55.460 I think

00:24:55.920 depression

00:24:56.380 and of

00:24:57.020 course this

00:24:57.380 has been

00:24:57.800 written about

00:24:58.820 extensively

00:25:00.000 and famously

00:25:00.840 by the likes

00:25:01.780 of Freud,

00:25:03.360 there is

00:25:04.700 a sort of

00:25:07.820 forced

00:25:08.260 retreat

00:25:09.120 from objects

00:25:10.860 that one

00:25:12.580 would invest

00:25:13.600 in,

00:25:14.100 often implicitly

00:25:15.200 love objects,

00:25:16.400 you know,

00:25:16.760 but that's

00:25:18.260 meant very

00:25:19.020 broadly

00:25:20.360 and generally

00:25:20.980 so that

00:25:21.540 might be

00:25:22.120 one's

00:25:22.460 vocation,

00:25:23.420 you know,

00:25:23.800 that is

00:25:24.200 an object

00:25:25.500 of intense

00:25:26.840 investment

00:25:27.540 or in

00:25:28.160 Freudian

00:25:28.860 language

00:25:29.380 cathexis,

00:25:31.880 the investment

00:25:32.860 of libidinal

00:25:34.040 energy

00:25:35.360 and Freud's

00:25:36.520 model of

00:25:36.860 depression

00:25:37.260 was that

00:25:38.060 investment

00:25:39.020 that we do

00:25:39.800 when we,

00:25:40.380 you know,

00:25:40.840 have get up

00:25:41.420 and go

00:25:41.880 and we write

00:25:42.420 papers

00:25:42.920 and fall

00:25:43.860 in love

00:25:44.420 and,

00:25:45.080 you know,

00:25:45.360 love our

00:25:45.800 family and

00:25:46.340 children

00:25:46.620 and so on,

00:25:47.700 if that's

00:25:48.280 cut off,

00:25:49.400 if there's

00:25:49.780 a forced

00:25:50.420 retreat,

00:25:52.120 then where

00:25:52.900 does that

00:25:53.380 energy go?

00:25:54.660 And it,

00:25:55.300 you know,

00:25:55.780 and that was,

00:25:56.700 you know,

00:25:56.960 Freud's model

00:25:57.680 of depression

00:25:58.260 that it's

00:25:58.840 sort of

00:25:59.100 dammed up

00:25:59.880 and it gets

00:26:00.500 deflected back

00:26:01.600 onto the

00:26:02.480 self

00:26:02.820 in this

00:26:04.120 very self-critical

00:26:05.600 way.

00:26:07.040 So I think

00:26:07.780 it's a bit

00:26:09.000 tangential there

00:26:09.780 but I wanted

00:26:10.780 to bring in

00:26:11.200 the theme

00:26:11.600 of disconnect

00:26:12.460 because I

00:26:14.320 imagine that

00:26:15.060 there's something

00:26:15.580 important

00:26:16.200 in neuroticism

00:26:19.300 when it

00:26:19.740 develops

00:26:20.180 into a

00:26:20.720 depression

00:26:21.260 that involves,

00:26:24.520 yes,

00:26:25.320 some kind

00:26:25.780 of inability

00:26:26.300 to invest

00:26:27.200 in.

00:26:27.840 So I've

00:26:28.560 been trying

00:26:28.940 to conceptualize

00:26:29.900 that neurologically.

00:26:31.140 So imagine

00:26:31.660 that there's

00:26:34.220 a hierarchy

00:26:34.800 of conception,

00:26:36.300 right?

00:26:36.520 And so we

00:26:37.000 have some

00:26:37.340 fundamental

00:26:37.840 conceptions

00:26:38.700 upon which

00:26:39.520 many other

00:26:40.100 conceptions

00:26:40.660 are predicated

00:26:41.320 and some

00:26:41.820 that are

00:26:42.100 less

00:26:42.340 fundamental.

00:26:43.120 Now,

00:26:44.440 before you

00:26:46.340 question a

00:26:47.060 category,

00:26:48.180 the category

00:26:48.780 should fail.

00:26:50.940 Now then

00:26:51.640 that raises

00:26:52.200 two questions

00:26:52.940 is how

00:26:53.460 severe is

00:26:54.180 the failure?

00:26:54.860 So let me

00:26:55.420 give you an

00:26:55.780 example.

00:26:56.200 If you have

00:26:56.620 an argument

00:26:57.000 with your

00:26:57.520 wife about

00:26:58.120 the dishes,

00:26:59.180 that could

00:26:59.920 mean that

00:27:00.400 you should

00:27:00.820 negotiate

00:27:01.460 who's going

00:27:02.220 to do

00:27:02.520 the dishes

00:27:02.980 or it

00:27:03.780 should mean

00:27:04.200 that you

00:27:04.520 should get

00:27:05.620 divorced.

00:27:07.060 Now,

00:27:07.620 the thing

00:27:07.920 about someone

00:27:08.480 who's depressed

00:27:09.440 is that

00:27:10.820 they'll take

00:27:11.380 a micro fight

00:27:12.760 and it'll

00:27:14.040 cascade all

00:27:15.040 the way up

00:27:15.480 the conceptual

00:27:16.100 system to

00:27:17.200 the most

00:27:17.620 fundamental

00:27:18.160 level.

00:27:18.880 They might

00:27:19.160 go even

00:27:19.580 beyond,

00:27:20.220 well,

00:27:20.360 not only

00:27:20.720 should I

00:27:21.220 get a

00:27:21.640 divorce

00:27:22.000 because my

00:27:22.740 marriage is

00:27:23.240 hopeless,

00:27:23.660 because then

00:27:24.380 they'll go,

00:27:25.140 who could

00:27:25.440 stand to be

00:27:26.120 married to

00:27:27.060 anyone as

00:27:27.580 hopeless as

00:27:28.180 me?

00:27:29.000 I've always

00:27:29.800 been hopeless,

00:27:30.580 my whole past

00:27:31.220 is hopeless,

00:27:31.780 there's nothing

00:27:32.300 good about

00:27:32.940 the present,

00:27:33.760 and everything's

00:27:34.600 just going to

00:27:35.040 get worse in

00:27:35.600 the future.

00:27:36.200 I might as

00:27:37.100 well be

00:27:37.480 dead.

00:27:38.420 And so

00:27:38.640 imagine this,

00:27:40.080 imagine that

00:27:40.680 there's a

00:27:41.180 hierarchy of

00:27:41.880 conceptions,

00:27:43.040 and there's a

00:27:43.960 barrier for

00:27:44.760 error propagation.

00:27:46.940 And the

00:27:47.400 barrier is

00:27:48.060 something like

00:27:48.600 the number

00:27:49.080 of errors

00:27:49.760 you have to

00:27:50.840 experience at

00:27:51.700 each level

00:27:52.380 before you'll

00:27:53.540 move up a

00:27:54.680 level to

00:27:55.960 question that

00:27:56.940 presumption.

00:27:58.660 And so then

00:27:59.120 imagine the

00:27:59.700 more neurotic

00:28:00.380 you are,

00:28:01.400 the fewer

00:28:02.200 failures it

00:28:03.180 takes at

00:28:03.700 any level

00:28:04.520 to move

00:28:06.020 up another

00:28:06.580 level to

00:28:07.140 move up

00:28:07.660 a level

00:28:08.060 higher in

00:28:08.600 the hierarchy

00:28:09.080 and question

00:28:09.540 something more

00:28:10.160 fundamental.

00:28:11.480 And maybe

00:28:11.960 that's serotonin

00:28:12.900 mediated.

00:28:13.600 So as you

00:28:14.160 become more

00:28:15.300 socially confident

00:28:17.420 and your

00:28:17.980 environment is

00:28:18.620 actually more

00:28:19.620 benevolent,

00:28:20.300 because you're

00:28:20.640 more well-placed,

00:28:21.920 your resistance

00:28:22.800 to error cascade

00:28:24.360 increases.

00:28:26.060 And when you're

00:28:26.660 depressed, there's

00:28:27.340 no resistance.

00:28:28.760 It's every error

00:28:29.560 propagates all the

00:28:30.520 way up to the

00:28:31.260 most fundamental

00:28:31.920 level.

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00:29:42.780 Yes, if it's

00:29:45.260 that, because

00:29:46.180 another possibility

00:29:47.160 is that the data,

00:29:49.680 you know, in

00:29:50.480 predictive coding,

00:29:51.420 we often talk about

00:29:52.220 error coming up the

00:29:53.120 hierarchy and sort

00:29:55.120 of prediction or

00:29:55.900 model coming down

00:29:56.800 the hierarchy.

00:29:57.440 hierarchy, but

00:29:57.820 what one might

00:29:58.980 think of

00:29:59.580 depression and

00:30:00.460 a lot of

00:30:00.920 psychopathology as

00:30:01.980 too much top

00:30:02.680 down.

00:30:03.860 You know, in a

00:30:04.340 sense, reality,

00:30:05.900 and you can see

00:30:06.620 this in depression,

00:30:07.620 you know, the

00:30:07.980 notion of

00:30:08.540 depressive realism

00:30:09.460 is only partly

00:30:11.240 true, typically a

00:30:12.780 proper depression,

00:30:14.880 you know, the

00:30:16.580 real deal is in a

00:30:18.600 sense delusional.

00:30:19.320 Right, right.

00:30:20.340 And you can

00:30:21.200 measure this and

00:30:22.020 yeah, you can see

00:30:23.660 that people's, you

00:30:24.860 know, forecasting of

00:30:26.300 future life events is

00:30:27.480 way off.

00:30:28.620 They think that only

00:30:29.640 bad things are going

00:30:30.580 to happen, nothing

00:30:31.400 good, and then you

00:30:32.680 can actually track

00:30:33.420 that and see what

00:30:34.200 happens and you see

00:30:35.100 that, you know,

00:30:35.740 people were

00:30:36.400 catastrophizing and the

00:30:38.400 reality wasn't that

00:30:39.620 bad, you know, so

00:30:40.500 that's depression.

00:30:41.280 So I would argue

00:30:42.260 that that's too much

00:30:44.120 model.

00:30:45.160 And the model is

00:30:46.380 skewed and we sort

00:30:48.520 of touched on this

00:30:49.280 earlier, you know,

00:30:50.360 tilted in a

00:30:51.600 particular way, biased

00:30:52.960 in a particular way.

00:30:54.620 So there is this

00:30:55.400 fascinating question

00:30:56.420 of why are you

00:30:57.820 biased?

00:30:58.740 Where did that

00:31:00.360 skew come from?

00:31:02.020 Why are you having

00:31:03.000 to see the world

00:31:04.380 through this bias,

00:31:06.320 through this skew?

00:31:07.680 What does it do

00:31:08.660 for you?

00:31:08.780 Well, one of the

00:31:09.320 mysteries there too,

00:31:10.320 this is why, okay,

00:31:11.620 so now we have a

00:31:12.760 conflict in view of

00:31:14.400 depression in some

00:31:15.320 sense because the

00:31:16.580 way I put it

00:31:17.280 forward was that it

00:31:18.780 was an excess of

00:31:19.900 of error-induced

00:31:21.600 chaos and the way

00:31:22.600 you just put it

00:31:23.320 forward was that it

00:31:24.100 was a pathology of

00:31:26.600 constrained forecasting.

00:31:30.280 But there's a

00:31:30.900 point of agreement,

00:31:32.600 right?

00:31:32.760 We're both agreed

00:31:33.480 that something

00:31:34.020 fundamental has

00:31:35.040 gone wrong.

00:31:36.100 And we know this,

00:31:36.840 right?

00:31:37.060 Because, yeah, the

00:31:37.760 depressive realism

00:31:38.580 stuff, mostly

00:31:40.200 cognitive behavioral

00:31:41.340 or social

00:31:42.640 psychologists using

00:31:43.860 cognitive behavioral

00:31:45.280 derived scales

00:31:46.460 used people who

00:31:48.200 were just barely

00:31:49.180 threshold for

00:31:49.980 depression to

00:31:50.740 formulate the

00:31:51.420 depressive realism

00:31:52.280 idea.

00:31:52.780 If you have people

00:31:53.560 who are really

00:31:54.120 depressed, it's like

00:31:55.100 everything is

00:31:56.940 terrible, it's

00:31:57.940 always been

00:31:58.500 terrible, and it's

00:31:59.200 going to be

00:31:59.500 terrible into the

00:32:00.140 future.

00:32:00.920 Something, and so

00:32:01.800 what's really

00:32:02.220 interesting about

00:32:03.040 that, and this is

00:32:03.820 why something, some

00:32:05.220 fundamental set of

00:32:06.400 propositions must have

00:32:07.560 gone astray, because

00:32:08.720 and you're thinking

00:32:09.920 about it as something

00:32:10.680 that's canalized into a

00:32:12.020 very narrow channel, and

00:32:13.180 I'm thinking about it

00:32:14.400 more as the

00:32:14.960 disintegration of

00:32:16.000 anything positive.

00:32:16.880 But, you know, there

00:32:18.180 may be a way to

00:32:18.860 reconcile that.

00:32:20.020 It's that it has to

00:32:24.040 be fundamental.

00:32:25.580 It has to be a

00:32:26.540 primal set of

00:32:28.480 conceptions, because

00:32:29.260 it colors absolutely

00:32:30.800 everything, right?

00:32:32.180 Nothing escapes from

00:32:33.540 the depressive abyss, and

00:32:35.560 so it has to be

00:32:36.960 disruption in a

00:32:38.180 system that's so

00:32:38.940 fundamental that all

00:32:40.020 other cognitions and

00:32:41.100 perceptions depend on

00:32:42.220 it.

00:32:42.740 So this is part of the

00:32:44.060 reason I was trying to

00:32:44.800 make sense of it in

00:32:45.840 relationship to social

00:32:46.880 status, right?

00:32:48.020 Because we know that

00:32:49.060 if someone's social

00:32:50.340 status falls, their

00:32:52.060 tonic levels of

00:32:53.260 serotonin constraint

00:32:55.100 decrease.

00:32:56.840 And the logic in that

00:32:59.040 from an evolutionary

00:32:59.820 perspective would be

00:33:01.020 that the more you're

00:33:03.180 situated properly,

00:33:04.920 optimally, within a

00:33:06.220 social hierarchy, the

00:33:07.880 more benevolent the

00:33:08.880 environment actually is.

00:33:10.320 Because you have

00:33:11.020 friends and you have

00:33:11.880 people you can rely on

00:33:13.100 and you're getting a

00:33:13.980 lot of attention from

00:33:14.860 other people, and so

00:33:15.660 it makes sense that

00:33:16.600 you don't have to be

00:33:18.120 hypersensitive to

00:33:19.640 error because you're

00:33:20.960 buffered.

00:33:22.140 So imagine you get

00:33:23.560 depressed and the

00:33:25.320 mechanism that is

00:33:26.900 adjudicating your

00:33:28.060 social status is

00:33:29.780 pathologized, and it

00:33:31.180 rates you as a 1 out

00:33:32.440 of 10 instead of a

00:33:33.400 10 out of 10.

00:33:34.680 And then the

00:33:35.200 consequence of that is

00:33:36.180 your whole nervous

00:33:36.800 system now is tuned

00:33:38.260 to react as if the

00:33:39.840 environment, the whole

00:33:41.100 thing, has now turned

00:33:42.700 on you and is

00:33:43.460 dangerous, which it

00:33:44.740 is if you're

00:33:45.320 socially isolated and

00:33:47.100 extremely unpopular.

00:33:49.200 You are in that sort

00:33:50.340 of danger.

00:33:51.620 Yes, but there is

00:33:53.960 this interesting other

00:33:55.200 possibility.

00:33:56.700 I mean, it is a very

00:33:58.060 delicate question of

00:34:01.140 whether a pathology is

00:34:04.140 adaptive or maladaptive or

00:34:06.980 functional or

00:34:08.140 dysfunctional.

00:34:08.960 And it has been

00:34:11.000 argued, you know, that

00:34:12.280 a depressive episode is

00:34:13.940 functional, you know, in

00:34:17.140 a situation of extreme

00:34:19.700 social dilemma.

00:34:22.720 Maybe it makes sense, in

00:34:25.540 a sense, to retreat, to

00:34:29.220 withdraw from the world,

00:34:30.900 in a sense, to hibernate

00:34:33.000 for a while, to stay out of

00:34:34.860 trouble for a while.

00:34:35.860 Another possibility, and

00:34:37.580 this, again, you know, I

00:34:39.700 do have a fair bit of

00:34:41.040 time for certain

00:34:42.160 Freudian ideas, and

00:34:43.220 another one in relation

00:34:45.040 to depression was that

00:34:46.260 it's often repressed

00:34:48.680 anger.

00:34:49.940 So, rather than, you

00:34:52.180 know, some social dilemma

00:34:53.320 plays out and you get

00:34:54.920 aggressive and you do

00:34:56.940 something dramatic, you

00:34:58.460 know, you kill someone,

00:34:59.880 then this could be a, this

00:35:02.940 could be fatal for you

00:35:04.180 very easily in, you

00:35:06.240 know, a social network

00:35:07.580 way back when or now.

00:35:12.720 And so, you know, this is

00:35:14.980 the argument for

00:35:16.480 civilization and its

00:35:17.760 discontents that

00:35:18.880 actually, you know, to

00:35:20.520 retreat, to withdraw, to

00:35:23.060 go into oneself, to hate

00:35:24.660 oneself, instead of, for

00:35:26.800 example, your boss that

00:35:28.720 sacked you or your partner

00:35:30.200 who was adulterous or

00:35:32.280 what have you, you

00:35:33.860 know, is, could, could

00:35:35.920 be functional.

00:35:37.040 I know that makes

00:35:38.120 depression.

00:35:39.100 Well, no, no, I

00:35:39.920 think, I mean, I think

00:35:40.760 that it points to an

00:35:42.420 underlying permanent

00:35:43.820 existential dilemma, which

00:35:45.940 is, well, if you try and

00:35:48.420 you fail, that could be in

00:35:50.240 a micro-endeavor or a

00:35:51.440 macro-endeavor, if you

00:35:52.460 try and you fail, well, you

00:35:54.500 have two options, well, you

00:35:55.660 have three.

00:35:56.140 One is you can just

00:35:56.980 ignore it.

00:35:57.940 And sometimes that's the

00:35:59.060 right thing to do, because

00:35:59.980 if you tried again, it

00:36:01.020 would work.

00:36:02.080 And so that's the

00:36:02.760 utility of persistence.

00:36:04.840 And you never know, in

00:36:06.580 some fundamental sense,

00:36:07.680 whether you're being

00:36:08.300 persistent or blind.

00:36:10.380 That's a tough thing to

00:36:11.400 figure out.

00:36:12.600 Most entrepreneurs who

00:36:13.700 become successful have

00:36:14.900 failed in a dozen

00:36:15.820 enterprises before.

00:36:17.700 And so are they

00:36:18.720 persistent or have they

00:36:20.680 failed to learn from

00:36:21.580 experience?

00:36:22.420 It's like, well, there's

00:36:23.820 a toss-up.

00:36:25.040 Then, imagine you don't

00:36:27.600 ignore it.

00:36:28.340 Okay, now you're going

00:36:29.160 to fix the problem.

00:36:31.280 Well, then you have two

00:36:32.180 choices.

00:36:32.780 You could fix the world

00:36:34.080 or you could fix

00:36:36.100 yourself.

00:36:37.660 And let's say, well,

00:36:38.800 fixing yourself is often,

00:36:40.540 at least in principle,

00:36:41.580 easier than fixing the

00:36:42.560 world, although sometimes

00:36:43.720 the world is wrong and

00:36:44.960 you're right.

00:36:45.720 Not very often, but

00:36:46.980 sometimes, you know.

00:36:48.480 So if you're going to

00:36:49.320 fix yourself, you've

00:36:50.940 failed multiple times.

00:36:52.540 The first thing that has

00:36:53.720 to happen is that the

00:36:55.020 part of you that's

00:36:56.020 error-ridden has to

00:36:57.880 die.

00:36:59.260 And so there is that

00:37:00.780 element.

00:37:01.380 That's exactly, I would

00:37:02.260 say, in some sense, the

00:37:03.240 payoff of neuroticism is,

00:37:04.720 well, why have negative

00:37:05.700 emotion?

00:37:06.400 It's, well, you get

00:37:07.960 anxious so that you

00:37:09.500 stop doing things that

00:37:10.700 might cause your own

00:37:11.880 destruction.

00:37:13.300 There's value in the

00:37:14.720 signal, but because it's

00:37:16.360 so difficult to

00:37:17.300 determine, like, if

00:37:18.000 you're arguing with

00:37:18.640 your wife, this is a

00:37:19.600 constant issue in

00:37:20.600 marriages, it's like,

00:37:21.840 well, should she change

00:37:22.920 your you?

00:37:24.320 And the answer

00:37:24.960 sometimes is she

00:37:25.900 should, and sometimes

00:37:26.760 the answer is you

00:37:27.680 should, and sometimes

00:37:28.480 the answer is you

00:37:29.400 both should, but it's

00:37:30.680 not like that's easy to

00:37:31.760 figure out a priori.

00:37:34.340 Now, you know, I think

00:37:35.680 your argument you're

00:37:37.580 making in favor of

00:37:38.660 depression in some

00:37:39.540 sense is that, well,

00:37:42.140 now and then you should

00:37:43.560 retreat and learn from

00:37:45.160 your failures.

00:37:46.520 And, of course, that's

00:37:47.680 the case.

00:37:48.180 Now, the problem with

00:37:49.140 depression is that you

00:37:50.540 get these macro

00:37:51.680 retreats where

00:37:52.600 everything falls apart

00:37:54.080 and you might hope

00:37:57.080 that you're not in a

00:37:58.740 situation where the

00:37:59.720 right reaction is for

00:38:01.080 everything to fall

00:38:02.020 apart very often.

00:38:03.280 And it does look like

00:38:04.260 people who are prone

00:38:05.120 to depression are

00:38:06.300 prone to having

00:38:09.200 everything fall apart

00:38:10.180 when it would be much

00:38:11.100 more meet and right,

00:38:12.520 and even in terms of

00:38:13.400 learning, for something

00:38:14.360 smaller to be

00:38:15.960 modified.

00:38:17.140 One of the things I

00:38:17.880 tried to do with my

00:38:18.620 clients all the time

00:38:19.620 was to, I wouldn't

00:38:20.640 say minimize a

00:38:21.840 problem, but it

00:38:23.680 would be to

00:38:24.140 parameterize it.

00:38:26.260 You know, like,

00:38:27.180 maybe I'd have a

00:38:27.980 client who was so

00:38:29.180 afraid of their

00:38:30.040 economic uncertainty

00:38:30.840 that they wouldn't

00:38:31.440 even tell me how

00:38:32.120 much rent they were

00:38:32.960 paying, because I

00:38:33.760 had clients like

00:38:34.440 that.

00:38:35.140 And so I would

00:38:35.740 continue to inquire

00:38:37.900 until I got them to

00:38:38.820 admit the terrible

00:38:39.700 truth about their

00:38:40.680 rent, and then we

00:38:42.020 could narrow the

00:38:43.380 problem.

00:38:43.920 We could keep

00:38:44.440 narrowing the scope

00:38:45.440 of the problem so

00:38:46.700 they didn't feel like

00:38:47.720 the problem meant

00:38:48.600 their entire financial

00:38:49.700 future was going to

00:38:50.660 fall apart.

00:38:52.000 And it's that, and

00:38:54.280 there's a

00:38:54.580 canalization in that,

00:38:55.820 right, that narrowing

00:38:56.680 where that's actually

00:38:57.520 beneficial.

00:38:59.140 And so the model you

00:39:00.720 sent me, the paper you

00:39:02.580 sent me, I think, if

00:39:04.340 I've got it right,

00:39:05.240 concentrated mostly on

00:39:06.540 this over-learning as

00:39:07.680 the fundamental source

00:39:09.600 of psychopathology.

00:39:11.960 Yes.

00:39:12.160 And that was very

00:39:17.420 intentional.

00:39:19.240 I mean, I do believe

00:39:20.500 it.

00:39:21.400 But I would like to

00:39:23.540 think that one useful

00:39:25.620 aspect of the model is

00:39:27.820 that it invites people

00:39:29.740 to understand pathology,

00:39:31.820 to understand how it

00:39:34.240 can be acquired through

00:39:36.460 experience.

00:39:37.860 People can be

00:39:38.600 differentially vulnerable

00:39:40.040 or sensitive, but

00:39:42.400 the pathology does

00:39:44.300 have a history.

00:39:45.300 There was a process

00:39:46.160 there.

00:39:47.720 And I think that

00:39:49.180 can help caregivers

00:39:50.740 and patients because

00:39:52.280 it says, you know,

00:39:53.900 you can, there is

00:39:55.600 some understanding

00:39:56.520 to be done here.

00:39:57.980 I mean, if that

00:39:58.540 wasn't true,

00:39:59.460 psychotherapy wouldn't

00:40:00.380 exist and people

00:40:01.820 wouldn't share their

00:40:02.600 problems and try and

00:40:03.560 understand it.

00:40:04.560 And often, you know,

00:40:06.660 the process was

00:40:07.580 very complex

00:40:09.720 and, you know,

00:40:12.280 not all the

00:40:13.000 information is

00:40:13.920 necessarily

00:40:14.680 so easy to

00:40:17.340 decipher and

00:40:18.560 clear,

00:40:19.900 but that doesn't

00:40:21.180 mean that it

00:40:22.160 hasn't developed

00:40:22.960 and hasn't been

00:40:23.740 acquired and

00:40:24.500 actually there is

00:40:25.580 some logic

00:40:27.100 to the

00:40:28.000 presentation

00:40:28.660 that comes

00:40:29.740 about.

00:40:30.460 Now, that doesn't

00:40:31.360 mean that you

00:40:32.040 then accept the

00:40:33.120 pathology.

00:40:33.680 So I just wanted

00:40:34.480 to emphasize that.

00:40:35.740 Right.

00:40:36.000 It just says that

00:40:37.000 we could understand

00:40:38.220 this, but it

00:40:39.420 doesn't say,

00:40:40.560 ah, it's functional

00:40:41.320 that you're depressed

00:40:42.180 so we just,

00:40:43.340 we'll leave it

00:40:44.220 alone.

00:40:44.680 Better you're

00:40:45.120 depressed than be,

00:40:46.360 you know, a

00:40:47.000 murderer or what

00:40:47.980 have you.

00:40:48.580 Right.

00:40:49.560 So then there's

00:40:50.540 this question of,

00:40:51.660 well, if you

00:40:52.040 understand the

00:40:52.920 presentation,

00:40:54.660 you could also

00:40:55.720 understand,

00:40:58.240 in a sense,

00:40:59.620 by understanding

00:41:00.180 how it serves

00:41:00.960 you.

00:41:01.160 Take an addiction,

00:41:02.000 for example.

00:41:02.640 You know,

00:41:02.820 someone with an

00:41:03.500 awful history

00:41:04.400 of complex

00:41:05.080 trauma,

00:41:05.780 repeated abuse,

00:41:07.740 develops a

00:41:08.640 hard drug

00:41:10.000 addiction,

00:41:11.460 and do you

00:41:12.480 rip that away

00:41:13.140 from them

00:41:13.600 and say,

00:41:15.420 be well now,

00:41:16.240 have a huge,

00:41:17.260 you know,

00:41:17.600 psychedelic experience

00:41:18.580 and go fresh,

00:41:19.620 go happy now,

00:41:20.940 you know,

00:41:21.320 or is there

00:41:22.380 something a

00:41:23.560 little bit more

00:41:24.500 gentle and

00:41:25.740 sophisticated to

00:41:27.260 how you would

00:41:27.800 treat a

00:41:28.360 presentation like

00:41:29.620 that,

00:41:29.840 even if you

00:41:30.440 are to

00:41:30.780 treat it

00:41:31.220 with,

00:41:31.580 say,

00:41:32.420 psychedelic

00:41:33.000 therapy?

00:41:33.400 Well,

00:41:33.800 on the

00:41:34.440 addiction

00:41:34.780 front,

00:41:35.860 I mean,

00:41:36.400 generally,

00:41:37.580 let's say

00:41:37.980 with alcohol

00:41:38.520 addiction,

00:41:39.120 which is a

00:41:39.860 particularly

00:41:40.300 pernicious form

00:41:41.240 of addiction

00:41:41.680 and one

00:41:42.060 that's often

00:41:42.980 deadly in the

00:41:44.260 immediate recovery

00:41:45.140 because if

00:41:46.220 you're suddenly

00:41:48.160 deprived of

00:41:48.860 alcohol and

00:41:49.540 you're an

00:41:49.820 alcoholic,

00:41:50.220 you can die

00:41:51.580 of a seizure,

00:41:52.640 that's very

00:41:53.220 common in

00:41:53.820 fact,

00:41:54.640 and so you

00:41:55.060 have to take

00:41:55.440 people off

00:41:55.980 alcohol somewhat

00:41:57.180 slowly so that

00:41:58.000 doesn't happen,

00:41:59.040 but if you put

00:41:59.860 people in a

00:42:00.440 treatment center,

00:42:02.240 you can get

00:42:03.780 them over the

00:42:04.860 physiological

00:42:05.480 dependence in a

00:42:06.640 matter of weeks,

00:42:07.560 but generally,

00:42:08.300 the literature

00:42:08.720 indicates that as

00:42:09.640 soon as you put

00:42:10.220 the person back

00:42:11.060 in their

00:42:11.360 environment,

00:42:12.500 the probability

00:42:13.080 that they'll

00:42:13.700 relapse is almost

00:42:15.120 as high as it

00:42:15.820 would have been

00:42:16.180 if they never

00:42:16.680 went to the

00:42:17.100 treatment center

00:42:17.680 at all,

00:42:18.200 and this speaks

00:42:18.920 to what you

00:42:19.380 just said,

00:42:20.000 is that the

00:42:20.760 thing is,

00:42:21.620 and this is part

00:42:22.440 of the adaptive

00:42:23.200 structure of the

00:42:24.040 pathology,

00:42:24.640 so you might

00:42:25.560 think,

00:42:25.880 well,

00:42:25.960 the reason

00:42:26.320 you're an

00:42:26.600 alcoholic is

00:42:27.360 because you

00:42:28.400 drink too

00:42:28.820 much alcohol.

00:42:30.120 It's like,

00:42:30.540 well,

00:42:31.300 that's one

00:42:32.120 reason you're

00:42:32.820 alcoholic,

00:42:33.480 and it's a

00:42:34.140 cardinal reason,

00:42:35.040 but here's

00:42:36.240 some other

00:42:36.600 reasons.

00:42:37.940 All the

00:42:38.680 things you do

00:42:39.320 socially are

00:42:40.480 focused on

00:42:41.000 alcohol.

00:42:42.540 All of your

00:42:43.540 use of leisure

00:42:44.320 time is alcohol

00:42:45.540 use learned.

00:42:48.040 All of your

00:42:48.800 friends are likely

00:42:49.740 to be alcoholic,

00:42:51.500 right?

00:42:51.880 And so,

00:42:52.560 when you throw

00:42:53.340 the person who's

00:42:54.160 now no longer

00:42:54.940 alcoholic back

00:42:55.860 into their

00:42:56.320 original environment

00:42:57.320 without preparation,

00:42:59.820 as soon as they

00:43:00.460 go see their

00:43:01.040 old friends,

00:43:02.280 the probability

00:43:02.840 that they'll

00:43:03.400 start drinking

00:43:03.960 again is

00:43:04.480 extremely high.

00:43:05.740 And it's

00:43:06.020 because not

00:43:07.200 only do you

00:43:07.660 have to remove

00:43:08.960 the pathology

00:43:10.980 of the

00:43:11.520 dependence,

00:43:12.500 but you have

00:43:13.180 to substitute

00:43:14.040 a whole new

00:43:15.000 set of skills

00:43:15.980 that provides

00:43:17.460 all the

00:43:18.020 positive

00:43:18.420 interactions

00:43:19.960 and ways

00:43:20.660 forward

00:43:21.080 that the

00:43:22.460 entire

00:43:22.780 addictive

00:43:23.140 lifestyle

00:43:23.740 provided

00:43:24.200 before.

00:43:25.160 This is

00:43:25.560 partly why

00:43:26.180 when an

00:43:26.740 Alcoholics

00:43:27.320 Anonymous

00:43:27.680 works,

00:43:28.240 it works,

00:43:28.760 it's because

00:43:29.200 it provides

00:43:30.180 people with

00:43:31.360 a new

00:43:31.700 peer group.

00:43:33.420 And so,

00:43:34.000 there is this

00:43:35.040 problem.

00:43:35.720 You could have

00:43:36.180 the death

00:43:36.820 of a

00:43:37.160 pathological

00:43:37.820 system,

00:43:39.020 but then,

00:43:41.060 okay,

00:43:42.220 the thing that

00:43:43.080 was destroying

00:43:44.420 your life,

00:43:45.120 the presuppositions

00:43:46.500 that were

00:43:46.960 destroying your

00:43:47.640 life are

00:43:48.100 now defunct,

00:43:49.820 but that

00:43:50.160 doesn't mean

00:43:50.660 that you

00:43:51.100 now have

00:43:52.320 a life.

00:43:54.080 And so,

00:43:55.120 this points

00:43:56.040 back to

00:43:56.580 this conundrum

00:43:58.820 that we've

00:43:59.260 encountered in

00:43:59.860 our discussion

00:44:00.400 so far.

00:44:01.000 You talk in

00:44:01.520 this paper

00:44:01.960 that you sent

00:44:02.480 me about

00:44:02.780 this general

00:44:03.500 factor of

00:44:04.660 psychopathology.

00:44:06.260 And as I

00:44:06.700 said,

00:44:07.460 when I see

00:44:08.000 that,

00:44:08.360 it reminds

00:44:08.900 me of

00:44:09.200 factor

00:44:09.520 analytic

00:44:09.880 studies of

00:44:10.440 emotion

00:44:10.880 showing the

00:44:12.300 powerful factor

00:44:13.300 of negative

00:44:13.660 emotion,

00:44:14.180 neuroticism.

00:44:14.920 And so,

00:44:15.400 it's definitely

00:44:15.880 the case that

00:44:16.540 this general

00:44:17.400 predisposition

00:44:18.740 to intense

00:44:19.940 suffering is

00:44:21.040 part of that

00:44:21.860 single factor

00:44:22.820 of psychopathology.

00:44:25.240 And that's

00:44:25.740 more like a

00:44:26.500 propensity to

00:44:27.560 experience stress

00:44:28.840 in response to

00:44:30.300 chaos and error.

00:44:31.400 But that's

00:44:32.000 different than

00:44:32.880 the claim that

00:44:33.700 it's pathologically

00:44:35.300 canalized learning

00:44:36.780 processes that

00:44:37.920 are core to

00:44:39.040 the essence

00:44:40.340 of psychopathology,

00:44:41.700 right?

00:44:41.920 Because you're

00:44:42.440 really talking

00:44:43.400 about a

00:44:43.720 pathological

00:44:44.320 excess of

00:44:44.920 order in some

00:44:45.700 sense,

00:44:46.120 whereas

00:44:46.320 neuroticism

00:44:47.320 is a

00:44:47.940 pathological

00:44:48.540 susceptibility

00:44:49.380 to chaos.

00:44:50.660 So I'm

00:44:50.860 still trying

00:44:51.320 to work

00:44:51.740 out the

00:44:52.800 do you

00:44:53.840 think

00:44:54.400 that there's

00:44:55.780 evidence that

00:44:56.520 the

00:44:56.880 overlearning

00:44:58.100 hypothesis

00:44:58.780 that you're

00:44:59.520 developing

00:44:59.980 is the

00:45:01.540 same

00:45:01.840 hypothesis

00:45:02.580 as that

00:45:03.320 which emerges

00:45:04.000 out of the

00:45:04.440 factor studies

00:45:05.240 of general

00:45:06.420 psychopathology?

00:45:07.420 I think

00:45:09.580 there's

00:45:10.340 work to

00:45:11.800 be done

00:45:12.440 to measure

00:45:13.480 what I

00:45:15.720 mean by

00:45:16.440 canalization,

00:45:17.780 pathological

00:45:19.060 overlearning,

00:45:21.600 and then

00:45:22.500 to see

00:45:23.420 whether it

00:45:24.360 is true

00:45:25.780 that across

00:45:26.580 the board

00:45:27.140 transdiagnostically,

00:45:29.300 so in

00:45:30.120 whatever

00:45:30.600 category

00:45:32.800 of psychiatric

00:45:34.420 disorder,

00:45:35.360 you'll find

00:45:36.820 this phenomenon

00:45:37.600 and it will

00:45:38.660 be there

00:45:39.160 and it will

00:45:39.860 be strong.

00:45:40.760 That's the

00:45:41.300 hypothesis,

00:45:42.020 that's the

00:45:42.360 model that

00:45:42.840 I've presented,

00:45:44.040 I call it

00:45:44.460 the canalization

00:45:45.680 model of

00:45:46.300 psychopathology.

00:45:47.200 And, you

00:45:50.660 know, as I

00:45:51.640 say in this

00:45:52.000 paper,

00:45:53.140 simple models

00:45:53.920 are too

00:45:55.960 simple,

00:45:56.660 they don't

00:45:57.380 claim to

00:45:59.000 explain

00:45:59.640 everything,

00:46:00.800 but they

00:46:01.320 do propose

00:46:03.560 to be able

00:46:04.460 to explain

00:46:05.320 something

00:46:05.840 important.

00:46:07.460 And so,

00:46:08.200 you know,

00:46:08.720 the idea

00:46:09.660 with this

00:46:10.420 new model

00:46:11.280 is that

00:46:12.100 there is

00:46:13.340 a principal

00:46:13.820 component,

00:46:14.940 you know,

00:46:15.120 a dominating

00:46:15.960 factor

00:46:16.840 to

00:46:17.240 psychopathology.

00:46:19.260 And I'm

00:46:20.300 putting forward

00:46:21.040 this idea

00:46:21.780 that it's

00:46:22.280 excessive

00:46:23.280 associative

00:46:25.280 learning

00:46:26.080 done for

00:46:27.160 psychologically

00:46:28.680 defensive

00:46:29.400 reasons.

00:46:30.420 Right.

00:46:30.880 Well, okay,

00:46:31.540 so in the

00:46:32.180 same paper,

00:46:33.100 when you're

00:46:33.820 talking about

00:46:34.420 the use of

00:46:34.960 psychedelic

00:46:35.540 therapy,

00:46:36.340 you put

00:46:37.060 forward some

00:46:37.680 cautions.

00:46:39.060 And so,

00:46:39.660 some of the

00:46:40.140 cautions are,

00:46:40.920 well,

00:46:41.700 maybe psychedelic

00:46:43.080 therapy would

00:46:43.860 be less

00:46:44.880 warranted in

00:46:45.820 situations where

00:46:46.740 you already

00:46:47.300 see an

00:46:48.480 excess

00:46:49.340 proclivity

00:46:50.320 towards

00:46:51.160 associative

00:46:52.440 thinking,

00:46:53.100 like pre-psychotic

00:46:54.200 states.

00:46:55.440 And so,

00:46:56.500 imagine that

00:46:57.240 we could

00:46:57.980 hypothesize,

00:46:59.760 perhaps,

00:47:00.580 to begin with,

00:47:01.280 that there are

00:47:01.640 pathologies of

00:47:02.560 order,

00:47:03.480 and there are

00:47:05.140 pathologies of

00:47:05.960 chaos.

00:47:06.520 Those might be

00:47:07.100 more associated

00:47:07.840 with neuroticism.

00:47:09.240 There might be

00:47:09.780 pathologies of

00:47:10.760 creativity that

00:47:12.260 would manifest

00:47:12.920 themselves,

00:47:13.540 let's say,

00:47:14.020 in something like

00:47:14.700 manic depressive

00:47:15.460 disorder on the

00:47:16.380 manic end.

00:47:17.520 So,

00:47:17.860 I'm wondering

00:47:18.220 if that

00:47:18.680 single factor

00:47:19.600 of obsessive

00:47:21.340 overlearning that

00:47:22.460 you're describing

00:47:23.260 would characterize

00:47:24.640 a subset of

00:47:25.940 pathologies that

00:47:27.360 are specifically

00:47:28.160 characterized by

00:47:29.120 overlearning.

00:47:30.120 So,

00:47:30.280 that would be,

00:47:31.200 do you know,

00:47:32.020 has anybody tried

00:47:33.000 treating obsessive

00:47:33.920 compulsive disorder

00:47:34.960 with psychedelics,

00:47:35.860 for example?

00:47:36.420 Because that's

00:47:36.960 certainly,

00:47:37.680 yeah,

00:47:38.000 so what

00:47:38.680 happened?

00:47:39.020 Yes,

00:47:39.280 they have.

00:47:40.020 Okay.

00:47:40.600 Well,

00:47:41.820 yeah,

00:47:42.140 pretty promising

00:47:42.840 findings,

00:47:43.580 and it's being

00:47:44.180 repeated now.

00:47:47.100 I think Yale,

00:47:48.800 Imperial College

00:47:49.460 London are doing

00:47:50.820 trials,

00:47:51.700 and a trial has

00:47:52.680 been done,

00:47:53.240 I think,

00:47:53.640 in San Diego.

00:47:55.700 So,

00:47:56.520 you know,

00:47:56.900 it's an indication

00:47:57.580 that makes sense.

00:47:58.760 Again,

00:47:59.040 I do think it

00:48:00.000 fits the model

00:48:01.280 of,

00:48:01.760 you know,

00:48:03.820 over-potentiated

00:48:05.000 ways of thinking

00:48:05.980 and or behaving,

00:48:07.200 the compulsive

00:48:07.940 action,

00:48:08.540 the need to

00:48:09.520 wash one's hands

00:48:10.480 or,

00:48:10.700 you know,

00:48:11.560 have these

00:48:12.320 intrusive thoughts

00:48:13.340 that repeat.

00:48:16.160 And this very

00:48:16.900 narrow categorical

00:48:18.900 viewpoint,

00:48:19.640 right?

00:48:19.860 So much of the

00:48:20.420 world becomes

00:48:20.980 disgusting.

00:48:22.060 And we know

00:48:22.780 that the psychedelics

00:48:23.700 are good at

00:48:24.240 treating addictions

00:48:25.340 like cigarette

00:48:26.160 smoking,

00:48:27.140 and that's also,

00:48:28.180 that's a good

00:48:29.180 model for

00:48:29.720 canalization,

00:48:30.560 because the

00:48:31.140 nicotine produces

00:48:32.040 that hyper-learning.

00:48:34.440 So,

00:48:34.800 I would say

00:48:35.940 to your question,

00:48:37.080 is this,

00:48:37.700 in a sense,

00:48:38.120 I don't know

00:48:38.560 if you used

00:48:39.000 the word

00:48:39.680 just,

00:48:40.200 just a subset,

00:48:41.220 I would say

00:48:42.100 it's the majority

00:48:43.500 subset.

00:48:44.360 That's the idea.

00:48:45.360 It's the principal

00:48:46.460 component.

00:48:47.480 And that's not to

00:48:48.240 say there aren't

00:48:48.960 other components,

00:48:50.640 say,

00:48:51.120 a component

00:48:51.800 of

00:48:52.720 hyper-associative

00:48:56.240 thinking and

00:48:57.080 behavior,

00:48:57.820 erratic,

00:48:58.620 like a delirium.

00:49:00.520 And one can argue

00:49:01.980 whether

00:49:02.400 a manic psychosis

00:49:04.060 is like that.

00:49:04.940 it may be

00:49:05.860 in a sense,

00:49:06.780 but sometimes

00:49:07.440 it's quite quick

00:49:08.680 for that state

00:49:09.380 to become

00:49:09.900 canalized as well.

00:49:11.040 Right, right, right.

00:49:13.480 And also

00:49:14.680 to say

00:49:15.420 that that

00:49:15.980 component,

00:49:16.980 that component

00:49:18.040 of hyper-associative

00:49:19.340 thinking

00:49:20.280 isn't,

00:49:22.000 arguably,

00:49:22.760 isn't fundamentally

00:49:23.700 pathological

00:49:24.520 as well,

00:49:25.560 because that's

00:49:26.420 an infant,

00:49:27.260 you know,

00:49:28.120 that's an infant

00:49:28.840 that is someone

00:49:29.820 in a,

00:49:30.740 you know,

00:49:32.080 state of,

00:49:34.100 gosh,

00:49:36.060 like a creative,

00:49:37.080 like fugue state,

00:49:38.340 you know.

00:49:39.880 Yeah.

00:49:41.000 So,

00:49:41.740 it's harder

00:49:42.340 to see that,

00:49:43.260 actually,

00:49:43.800 in my mind,

00:49:44.880 as obviously

00:49:45.840 pathological.

00:49:46.780 Yes,

00:49:46.960 it can be highly

00:49:47.640 unusual

00:49:48.120 to see that

00:49:49.320 in a grown

00:49:50.540 person,

00:49:51.880 an adult,

00:49:53.200 but it happens.

00:49:55.460 And actually,

00:49:56.080 you know,

00:49:56.320 going back to

00:49:56.880 those pivotal

00:49:57.400 mental states,

00:49:58.380 those conversion

00:49:59.760 type experiences,

00:50:01.400 they often

00:50:02.080 feature that.

00:50:04.020 And they can

00:50:05.240 be life-saving,

00:50:07.080 those experiences,

00:50:08.300 you know.

00:50:08.800 Right.

00:50:08.960 And actually,

00:50:09.580 this,

00:50:10.340 now we're coming

00:50:11.460 to the,

00:50:12.060 really,

00:50:12.460 the flavor

00:50:12.940 of the psychedelic

00:50:14.540 experience as well.

00:50:16.720 Right.

00:50:17.440 Okay,

00:50:17.800 so let's talk

00:50:18.900 about the psychedelic

00:50:19.960 experience

00:50:20.680 for a minute.

00:50:22.280 So,

00:50:23.080 when Huxley

00:50:23.800 wrote about

00:50:24.500 the psychedelic

00:50:25.560 experience

00:50:26.260 in The Doors

00:50:27.500 of Perception,

00:50:28.380 he referred

00:50:29.500 to Bergson,

00:50:31.420 who made

00:50:32.640 the claim

00:50:33.100 that in some

00:50:34.080 real sense,

00:50:34.780 consciousness was

00:50:35.580 like a reducing

00:50:36.360 valve,

00:50:36.960 is that part

00:50:38.380 of what our

00:50:38.880 brains are doing,

00:50:39.760 and they are

00:50:40.500 primarily inhibitory

00:50:41.980 at a neurological

00:50:42.680 level,

00:50:43.300 is taking an

00:50:44.540 unbelievably

00:50:45.140 differentiated,

00:50:47.360 or unbelievably

00:50:48.260 undifferentiated

00:50:49.560 mass of

00:50:50.560 experience that's

00:50:51.640 far too much

00:50:52.480 for us to

00:50:52.960 process at any

00:50:54.000 one time,

00:50:54.860 and narrowing

00:50:55.860 it incredibly

00:50:57.040 to the few

00:50:58.140 elements that

00:50:59.340 constitute the

00:51:00.920 focus of our

00:51:02.200 attention at any

00:51:03.020 one moment,

00:51:03.720 maybe as little

00:51:04.480 as three or four

00:51:05.260 bits of information

00:51:06.400 from a stream

00:51:07.200 of information

00:51:08.460 that would be

00:51:09.560 incalculably

00:51:10.520 dense in terms

00:51:11.780 of available

00:51:12.700 bits.

00:51:13.900 And so,

00:51:14.280 some of this

00:51:15.020 canalized learning

00:51:16.720 that you describe

00:51:18.300 is actually

00:51:19.160 the use of

00:51:20.660 perceptual

00:51:21.360 categories

00:51:22.020 to reduce

00:51:24.120 that information

00:51:24.960 flow.

00:51:26.040 And so,

00:51:26.380 what seems to

00:51:26.920 happen in the

00:51:27.480 psychedelic experience

00:51:28.500 is that that

00:51:29.580 a priori

00:51:31.820 restriction

00:51:32.460 on perception

00:51:34.380 and its

00:51:35.060 associated

00:51:35.680 emotions is

00:51:36.480 lifted

00:51:37.020 temporarily.

00:51:38.940 Right?

00:51:39.140 And so,

00:51:39.660 the Bergsonian

00:51:40.820 or Huxleyan

00:51:41.940 model of

00:51:42.460 psychedelic

00:51:43.020 experience,

00:51:43.720 that it

00:51:44.040 increases the

00:51:45.880 breadth of that

00:51:46.980 information funnel,

00:51:48.360 that seems to be

00:51:49.340 correct.

00:51:49.700 And that's also

00:51:50.260 being associated,

00:51:51.040 if I remember

00:51:51.700 correctly,

00:51:52.200 with increased

00:51:52.980 thalamic throughput.

00:51:54.820 So,

00:51:55.040 there's actually

00:51:55.460 more information

00:51:56.320 coming up from

00:51:57.020 the sensory

00:51:57.620 and the

00:51:58.700 motivational and

00:51:59.500 emotional areas

00:52:00.260 of the brain

00:52:00.840 during a

00:52:01.740 psychedelic experience

00:52:02.820 than under

00:52:03.300 normal conditions.

00:52:04.160 I think that's

00:52:04.700 Volunweider's work.

00:52:05.860 I think he's

00:52:06.360 concentrated on that.

00:52:08.560 That's right.

00:52:09.460 And Mark

00:52:10.140 Geyer,

00:52:10.480 yeah.

00:52:11.140 It's true.

00:52:11.820 I would say that

00:52:12.320 the thalamus

00:52:12.920 is one of

00:52:14.620 other,

00:52:15.900 in a sense,

00:52:17.400 hierarchically

00:52:18.080 subordinate

00:52:19.200 structures

00:52:20.980 and systems

00:52:21.780 where the

00:52:23.020 information can

00:52:23.820 flow up

00:52:24.540 to high-level

00:52:25.600 cortex more

00:52:26.720 freely

00:52:27.240 under a

00:52:28.520 psychedelic.

00:52:29.440 The reducing

00:52:30.040 valve analogy,

00:52:31.600 and that it

00:52:31.900 goes back to

00:52:32.540 Bergson,

00:52:33.200 is curious

00:52:33.740 because

00:52:34.280 canalization

00:52:36.420 as a theme

00:52:37.340 was sort of

00:52:39.240 brought to

00:52:39.700 prominence

00:52:40.240 by

00:52:40.800 Conrad

00:52:42.140 Waddington,

00:52:43.640 evolutionary

00:52:44.320 biologist,

00:52:45.280 who used it

00:52:46.060 to try and

00:52:46.600 explain

00:52:47.060 phenotypes

00:52:48.060 that get

00:52:48.500 stamped in,

00:52:49.420 that get

00:52:49.760 entrenched,

00:52:50.540 encoded

00:52:51.500 into the

00:52:52.000 genome.

00:52:53.080 But he

00:52:54.020 took it

00:52:54.440 from Norman

00:52:55.460 Whitehead,

00:52:56.080 who took

00:52:56.440 it from

00:52:57.180 Henri

00:52:57.520 Bergson.

00:52:58.280 And Henri

00:52:59.280 Bergson,

00:53:00.080 yeah,

00:53:00.500 he offered

00:53:01.120 the analogy,

00:53:02.600 the image

00:53:03.200 of a canal.

00:53:05.820 And so

00:53:06.680 that was

00:53:07.080 the original

00:53:07.520 inspiration.

00:53:08.380 So it's

00:53:08.620 curious that

00:53:09.860 Bergson

00:53:10.720 inspired

00:53:11.440 Huxley

00:53:12.460 with the

00:53:12.820 reducing

00:53:13.180 valve.

00:53:13.900 Right,

00:53:14.200 right.

00:53:14.440 That's an

00:53:14.780 interesting,

00:53:15.360 so here's

00:53:15.820 something cool

00:53:16.460 too,

00:53:16.760 this is a

00:53:17.180 bit of a

00:53:17.560 segue,

00:53:17.980 but you'll

00:53:18.380 catch the

00:53:18.980 significance

00:53:19.400 of this.

00:53:20.280 There was a

00:53:20.700 paper published

00:53:21.420 in Nature

00:53:22.000 just two

00:53:22.640 months ago

00:53:23.280 looking at

00:53:24.840 genetic

00:53:25.660 mutation.

00:53:27.640 Okay,

00:53:27.840 so the

00:53:28.180 idea is

00:53:28.820 that genetic

00:53:29.780 mutation is

00:53:30.580 essentially a

00:53:31.320 random process.

00:53:33.020 And the

00:53:33.240 reason for

00:53:33.680 that is,

00:53:34.400 well,

00:53:34.680 let's talk

00:53:35.540 about genetic

00:53:36.140 mutations that

00:53:36.940 are brought

00:53:37.220 about by

00:53:37.840 radiation,

00:53:39.100 solar radiation,

00:53:39.920 and so

00:53:40.240 forth.

00:53:40.700 And so

00:53:41.000 they're

00:53:41.460 randomly

00:53:41.840 knocking atoms

00:53:43.380 out of the

00:53:44.460 genetic structure

00:53:45.300 and producing

00:53:46.040 random mutation.

00:53:47.200 But it

00:53:47.480 turns out

00:53:48.040 that the

00:53:48.480 error correction

00:53:49.920 post-DNA

00:53:52.380 damage is

00:53:53.060 not random.

00:53:55.180 So the

00:53:55.680 older the

00:53:56.700 genetic

00:53:57.580 structure that's

00:53:58.640 being damaged

00:53:59.500 by the

00:54:00.300 cosmic radiation,

00:54:02.100 the higher

00:54:02.800 the probability

00:54:03.760 that it will

00:54:04.720 be repaired

00:54:05.500 by intrinsic

00:54:06.480 DNA repair

00:54:07.880 mechanisms.

00:54:09.020 So there's

00:54:09.620 a hierarchy

00:54:10.460 of genetic

00:54:12.620 presumption

00:54:13.580 built into

00:54:14.580 the code.

00:54:15.040 and so

00:54:15.380 the cells

00:54:16.000 will allow

00:54:16.840 variation

00:54:17.600 on the

00:54:18.740 fringes

00:54:19.360 to take

00:54:19.900 place

00:54:20.300 without

00:54:20.820 correction.

00:54:22.000 But if

00:54:22.300 the mutation

00:54:23.360 affects something

00:54:24.160 that would

00:54:24.540 be fatal

00:54:25.220 because it's

00:54:27.000 so core

00:54:27.640 to the

00:54:28.040 actual

00:54:28.360 biological

00:54:29.000 continuation

00:54:30.440 of the

00:54:30.980 organism,

00:54:31.560 then the

00:54:32.100 probability

00:54:32.580 that it

00:54:32.960 will be

00:54:33.180 error

00:54:33.440 corrected

00:54:33.820 reaches

00:54:34.240 100%.

00:54:35.240 And so

00:54:36.020 you can

00:54:36.860 think about

00:54:37.280 that as

00:54:37.660 analogous to

00:54:39.380 the conceptual

00:54:40.040 structure.

00:54:40.820 Imagine there's

00:54:41.540 a hierarchy

00:54:42.100 of conception,

00:54:43.820 the deeper

00:54:45.000 the conception,

00:54:45.880 the more

00:54:46.140 fundamental it

00:54:46.940 is to the

00:54:47.360 whole cognitive

00:54:47.940 process,

00:54:49.300 the more

00:54:51.440 caution there

00:54:52.300 should be in

00:54:52.940 undertaking any

00:54:53.760 sort of radical

00:54:54.640 revolution because

00:54:57.800 it's too

00:54:58.300 destabilizing and

00:54:59.380 the less likely

00:55:00.040 that will occur.

00:55:01.700 So that's an

00:55:03.700 amazing finding as

00:55:04.660 far as I'm

00:55:05.120 concerned.

00:55:05.400 That's neat.

00:55:07.420 And that's

00:55:07.760 canalization.

00:55:08.840 These are

00:55:11.720 phenotypes that

00:55:13.140 matter, that

00:55:15.200 are essential,

00:55:16.380 and you

00:55:18.460 can't rip

00:55:19.020 them up.

00:55:20.140 You could

00:55:20.660 have some

00:55:21.060 variation at

00:55:22.160 a superficial

00:55:22.660 level, some

00:55:24.000 creativity there,

00:55:25.220 but maybe

00:55:26.380 don't mess

00:55:27.020 with certain

00:55:27.880 fundamentals.

00:55:29.620 Well, that's

00:55:30.120 what happens

00:55:31.500 in post-traumatic

00:55:32.320 stress disorder

00:55:33.140 too, it looks

00:55:33.860 like, at least

00:55:34.460 to some degree,

00:55:35.140 is that

00:55:35.620 fundamental

00:55:36.840 conceptual

00:55:37.620 structures, like

00:55:39.060 the trustworthiness

00:55:40.200 of other people

00:55:41.040 or the

00:55:41.380 trustworthiness of

00:55:42.260 human beings

00:55:42.800 per se, is

00:55:43.960 brought into

00:55:44.480 question, and

00:55:45.040 that demolishes

00:55:45.940 whole swaths of

00:55:47.260 the systems that

00:55:49.140 interpersonal

00:55:49.700 communication and

00:55:51.100 interaction depend

00:55:51.980 upon.

00:55:53.320 Yeah, but

00:55:54.020 you'll see,

00:55:55.380 Jordan, that's

00:55:56.060 true of borderline

00:55:57.160 personality disorder

00:55:58.200 as well.

00:55:58.840 Others can't be

00:55:59.820 trusted, the

00:56:01.360 catastrophizing, the

00:56:02.660 splitting, and

00:56:04.680 it's true in

00:56:05.160 depression, you

00:56:06.320 know, wherever

00:56:10.000 there are these

00:56:11.000 biases, in

00:56:12.460 depression, you

00:56:13.220 know, I'm

00:56:13.500 worthless, life is

00:56:14.580 pointless, I'm

00:56:15.540 better off dead, and

00:56:16.400 so on.

00:56:16.840 they are, they're

00:56:20.440 exaggerated, in a

00:56:22.100 sense, they're

00:56:22.620 exaggerated responses,

00:56:24.660 and yeah, and then

00:56:26.940 they're skewed, and

00:56:28.000 they're skewed beyond

00:56:29.660 the data, they're a

00:56:31.380 sort of exaggerated

00:56:32.460 response to the

00:56:34.240 data.

00:56:34.600 So, so let's think

00:56:35.960 about that data, so

00:56:37.460 I've been thinking

00:56:38.140 about how

00:56:40.760 psychopathology might

00:56:42.560 be defined

00:56:43.140 formally, and so

00:56:44.340 we talked earlier

00:56:46.220 about the idea

00:56:47.060 that a child might

00:56:47.900 have grown up in a

00:56:48.680 micro-environment

00:56:49.660 where they learn

00:56:50.980 patterns of

00:56:51.640 communication that

00:56:53.000 are not applicable

00:56:53.960 to the broader

00:56:54.800 macro-environment.

00:56:56.680 So imagine in the

00:56:58.680 macro-environment,

00:57:00.020 imagine you have a

00:57:00.800 hundred interactions

00:57:01.820 in a day with

00:57:02.900 different people.

00:57:04.680 Imagine there's a

00:57:05.620 pattern that you

00:57:06.400 have to manifest

00:57:07.380 for those interactions

00:57:09.200 to go well, and

00:57:10.740 that it's stable

00:57:11.580 across all one

00:57:12.740 hundred interactions.

00:57:14.320 So, like, one

00:57:15.080 rule would be, don't

00:57:16.260 swear at someone the

00:57:17.500 second you meet

00:57:18.340 them.

00:57:19.220 That's not going to

00:57:20.080 iterate well across

00:57:21.280 multiple interactions.

00:57:23.880 So people, of

00:57:24.580 course, people don't

00:57:25.240 do that, but my

00:57:26.300 point is that there

00:57:27.320 are ways of

00:57:27.900 conducting yourself

00:57:28.820 that are going to

00:57:29.700 get yourself in

00:57:30.360 trouble, regardless

00:57:31.800 of situation, right?

00:57:33.540 So you imagine, I

00:57:35.100 had a friend, I

00:57:35.740 used to go shopping

00:57:36.520 with him, he was

00:57:37.180 extremely socially

00:57:38.420 fluent, like a

00:57:39.820 real expert.

00:57:41.160 And when we would

00:57:41.840 walk into shops, and

00:57:43.420 the shopkeeper, the

00:57:44.920 clerk would approach

00:57:45.760 him, he always took

00:57:47.040 about ten seconds to

00:57:48.760 make personal contact

00:57:49.840 with the person.

00:57:51.100 Instead of

00:57:51.580 immediately asking

00:57:52.640 them whatever

00:57:53.620 instrumental question

00:57:54.860 leaped to mind,

00:57:56.700 he would ask them

00:57:58.060 how they were doing,

00:57:59.460 and he actually meant

00:58:00.340 it, and then he

00:58:00.820 would listen, and

00:58:01.400 he'd ask them where

00:58:02.740 they worked in the

00:58:03.460 store, and he'd

00:58:04.320 try to find out

00:58:05.040 something that they

00:58:05.740 were proud of about

00:58:07.180 working there, and

00:58:08.320 he was really good

00:58:09.000 at this.

00:58:09.320 He'd make a solid

00:58:10.060 connection with people

00:58:11.060 right away, and

00:58:12.200 going to different

00:58:13.640 stores with him was

00:58:14.640 extremely enjoyable

00:58:15.600 because he would

00:58:17.280 open people up, and

00:58:18.240 then they would also

00:58:18.860 be extremely helpful.

00:58:21.140 And so he had

00:58:22.140 mastered this style of

00:58:23.300 interpersonal

00:58:23.760 communication that

00:58:24.760 worked across

00:58:25.720 multiple instantiations.

00:58:28.140 So you could

00:58:28.600 imagine that the

00:58:29.400 definition of a

00:58:30.560 pathologically

00:58:32.100 canalized

00:58:33.080 interpersonal style

00:58:34.640 is one that

00:58:35.280 worked in a given

00:58:36.200 microenvironment that

00:58:37.520 was extreme, but

00:58:38.840 doesn't generalize

00:58:40.020 well across multiple

00:58:41.500 social situations.

00:58:43.680 It's something, so

00:58:44.400 there's a, so

00:58:45.760 Yach Panksepp, for

00:58:46.960 example, he paired

00:58:49.340 animals together, rats

00:58:50.760 together, to let them

00:58:51.800 play repeatedly

00:58:52.800 instead of just once.

00:58:54.660 Now, if you just let

00:58:55.860 them play once, the

00:58:56.760 big animal can dominate

00:58:57.900 the little animal.

00:58:59.460 But if you have them

00:59:00.520 play repeatedly, which

00:59:01.600 is what they do in a

00:59:02.500 naturalistic rat

00:59:03.360 environment, the

00:59:04.620 little rat, who could

00:59:06.040 be defeated, the big

00:59:07.280 rat has to let him

00:59:08.760 win 30% of the time,

00:59:10.960 or the little rat will

00:59:12.040 stop playing.

00:59:13.740 So what Panksepp

00:59:14.780 showed was that across

00:59:15.920 iterated social

00:59:17.020 interactions, there was

00:59:18.740 a pattern of social

00:59:20.080 ethic that had to be

00:59:24.180 instantiated if the

00:59:26.140 social interaction was

00:59:27.300 going to maintain

00:59:27.940 itself.

00:59:28.660 And so, and

00:59:29.540 obviously what you're

00:59:30.460 doing when you're

00:59:31.080 dealing with someone

00:59:31.820 clinically is you're

00:59:32.760 trying to snap them

00:59:33.900 out of the narrowness

00:59:35.220 of their pathologically

00:59:37.160 sheltered environment

00:59:38.280 and enable them to

00:59:39.800 adopt a pattern that

00:59:40.820 generalizes across

00:59:42.140 multiple social

00:59:43.460 situations.

00:59:45.160 And so, whatever

00:59:46.820 healthy would be,

00:59:47.920 would be that pattern

00:59:48.940 that iterates well.

00:59:51.140 Now, that doesn't

00:59:51.780 mean we can specify

00:59:52.720 it precisely, but it

00:59:53.660 gives it a kind of

00:59:54.440 conceptual framework.

00:59:57.740 Yes.

00:59:58.580 Yes, it does.

01:00:00.040 And, you know, it

01:00:01.320 makes me think of,

01:00:04.060 you know, it makes me

01:00:07.480 think of, of, of

01:00:11.880 archetypes and of

01:00:14.100 perennialism, you know,

01:00:16.840 and the psychedelic

01:00:18.580 experience when people

01:00:19.520 have a realization

01:00:20.380 that every type of

01:00:22.360 being is in me,

01:00:25.640 you know.

01:00:28.760 And I can know

01:00:31.220 love and compassion

01:00:33.260 even if I haven't

01:00:35.120 experienced it, you

01:00:36.240 know, and then

01:00:36.820 developed pathology

01:00:38.420 because of the

01:00:40.240 harsh, maybe unusual,

01:00:44.000 or at least skewed

01:00:45.140 upbringing that I

01:00:48.200 had.

01:00:49.360 But then...

01:00:51.160 So why do you think

01:00:52.840 it reminded you of

01:00:54.180 the idea that there's

01:00:55.880 a multitude within?

01:00:57.080 Do you think that's a

01:00:57.780 reflection of the

01:00:59.220 possibility of these

01:01:00.400 diverse encounters?

01:01:02.160 Is it something like

01:01:02.940 that?

01:01:05.360 Well, I mean, it's

01:01:06.500 curious that it's not

01:01:07.740 play unless one side

01:01:10.360 can win a little bit

01:01:11.520 because then it's

01:01:12.740 just, you know,

01:01:13.960 dominating and it's

01:01:15.760 not a game.

01:01:17.100 Right.

01:01:17.660 There's no play.

01:01:19.980 So you have to have

01:01:20.860 that natural

01:01:21.460 variability.

01:01:22.400 Maybe it was that

01:01:23.120 thought of sort of

01:01:24.820 natural variability.

01:01:26.620 It can't all be

01:01:28.340 hard and a lack of

01:01:31.200 love and, you know,

01:01:32.880 there's going to be

01:01:33.800 some range, some

01:01:37.300 diversity in that.

01:01:38.920 Well, that's another

01:01:39.560 definition of play,

01:01:40.820 isn't it?

01:01:41.400 For a system to have

01:01:42.560 play means that it

01:01:44.620 has this ability to

01:01:46.680 vary without being

01:01:47.660 too rigid.

01:01:48.440 It's the opposite of

01:01:49.400 catalyzation in some

01:01:50.540 real sense.

01:01:51.900 You know, and I think

01:01:52.540 that there is something

01:01:54.540 fundamental to the

01:01:56.100 idea of play in

01:01:58.260 terms of defining what

01:01:59.960 a psychopathological

01:02:01.260 system isn't.

01:02:03.380 So because one of

01:02:04.300 the things Piaget

01:02:05.120 pointed out, for

01:02:06.000 example, was that in

01:02:08.080 order for play to

01:02:08.940 take place, both

01:02:10.700 partners in play

01:02:12.200 have to agree

01:02:13.480 voluntarily, right?

01:02:16.000 So it sets up a

01:02:17.580 joint perceptual

01:02:18.660 framework and a

01:02:19.620 conceptual framework

01:02:20.560 that people buy into

01:02:22.240 voluntarily.

01:02:23.140 And so one of the

01:02:24.140 things we could say

01:02:25.060 about optimized

01:02:26.380 social interactions

01:02:27.680 is that if they're

01:02:28.900 optimized, then both

01:02:31.000 people are engaging

01:02:32.080 voluntarily and both

01:02:33.900 people want the

01:02:34.940 interaction to

01:02:35.680 continue.

01:02:36.120 And that's a, that

01:02:38.160 actually only happens

01:02:39.340 under a relatively

01:02:40.820 narrow set of

01:02:42.580 preconditions, like

01:02:44.040 the preconditions for

01:02:45.400 a good conversation,

01:02:46.520 right?

01:02:46.760 I mean, you think

01:02:48.040 that the conversation

01:02:49.180 we're having, to the

01:02:51.240 degree that we've put

01:02:52.800 each other on the

01:02:53.640 edge of transformation

01:02:54.800 and that we're

01:02:56.340 allowing play to take

01:02:57.620 place within us,

01:02:58.760 within both of us,

01:02:59.600 and then hypothetically

01:03:00.460 within those who are

01:03:01.340 listening, that's, we're

01:03:03.640 doing it because we

01:03:04.620 want to do it, but

01:03:05.460 we're also doing it

01:03:06.320 because we're allowing

01:03:07.880 optimized change to

01:03:09.160 take place.

01:03:09.840 And I think the fact

01:03:11.600 that we're interested

01:03:12.840 in the conversation is

01:03:14.640 actually a marker for

01:03:16.040 that transformation.

01:03:18.540 Yes.

01:03:19.180 Yes.

01:03:20.000 I mean, it's, it

01:03:21.580 invites some

01:03:22.360 realizations about

01:03:23.520 play and, you know,

01:03:24.700 what children might

01:03:26.420 say, you know, if

01:03:27.700 they were meant to

01:03:29.100 be playing, you

01:03:30.160 know, that's what

01:03:30.660 they signed up to.

01:03:31.940 Yeah.

01:03:32.180 And then the game

01:03:32.900 changes somehow and

01:03:34.420 one of the partners

01:03:35.360 says, I thought we

01:03:36.800 were playing, but I

01:03:37.740 thought we were

01:03:38.280 playing, you know.

01:03:39.260 Right.

01:03:39.720 Or imagine if, if

01:03:40.700 we're having this

01:03:41.320 conversation now and

01:03:42.400 instead of it being

01:03:43.820 playful, um, uh, one

01:03:47.040 of, one of us was

01:03:48.700 sort of preaching a

01:03:49.860 particular view or, you

01:03:51.800 know, dominating too

01:03:52.920 much or trying to

01:03:54.240 convince the other of

01:03:55.740 the way the world is,

01:03:57.280 then it would stop

01:03:58.340 being fun.

01:03:59.020 and it would be like,

01:04:01.600 you know, I'd be

01:04:02.280 like, I thought we

01:04:02.920 were playing, I

01:04:03.560 thought we were

01:04:03.860 having fun.

01:04:04.480 Well, that would

01:04:05.060 also be an indication

01:04:06.320 of too rapid

01:04:08.420 canalization, right?

01:04:10.020 So, or, or the

01:04:11.280 imposition of something

01:04:12.480 already canalized.

01:04:13.660 So if I was insisting

01:04:15.520 that my viewpoint was

01:04:16.620 right, then I would

01:04:18.120 be discounting

01:04:19.140 whatever you had to

01:04:20.060 say and insisting

01:04:21.240 that my canalized

01:04:22.180 viewpoint already

01:04:23.000 dominate.

01:04:24.120 And so I might do

01:04:25.280 that because I don't

01:04:26.760 want to let any of my

01:04:27.680 ideas go, that might

01:04:29.140 be one possibility,

01:04:30.100 or I might do it in

01:04:31.820 a cheap ploy to

01:04:34.600 obtain dominance as

01:04:36.240 a marker of status,

01:04:37.620 right?

01:04:38.460 The alternative would

01:04:39.400 be that we could both

01:04:40.260 play, right?

01:04:42.500 And then whatever

01:04:43.960 status accomplishment

01:04:45.180 would go along with

01:04:46.260 that.

01:04:46.880 So in this case, it

01:04:47.740 would be, are people

01:04:48.480 going to listen to the

01:04:49.500 podcast?

01:04:50.560 That would be a

01:04:52.160 consequence not of

01:04:54.000 being dominant, but

01:04:56.140 of being able to

01:04:57.060 play.

01:04:57.680 So, so, so there's

01:05:01.480 something about, there's

01:05:02.640 something about play, I

01:05:03.780 think, that's key to

01:05:05.120 this issue of, of

01:05:07.000 psychopathology.

01:05:08.100 It's sort of like the

01:05:08.840 spirit of play is

01:05:09.700 antithetical to the, to

01:05:12.140 the psychopathological

01:05:13.340 enterprise.

01:05:15.060 Yes, I like that.

01:05:16.200 And, and, and then, you

01:05:17.500 know, how play and

01:05:18.560 creativity and art can

01:05:22.040 go, can go together.

01:05:24.260 And, you know, art and

01:05:25.600 expression can work as a

01:05:27.460 kind of antithesis to

01:05:30.060 canalization and

01:05:31.680 pathology, you know, when

01:05:33.640 in a thorough, yeah, it's,

01:05:35.920 I mean, that's a curious

01:05:38.180 one is, you know, when do

01:05:39.480 you see the, the best art in

01:05:41.560 relation to psychopathology?

01:05:43.560 And I'm trying to remember

01:05:45.860 now, I think, I mean, the

01:05:51.140 classic one is, is a manic

01:05:52.660 episode, is mania and, and

01:05:54.680 great art, you know.

01:05:55.800 But I, I think depression

01:05:59.780 and art, it's a little bit

01:06:02.000 more precarious, that one.

01:06:04.980 Yeah, well, it could, well,

01:06:06.280 it could easily be to that, to

01:06:08.460 the degree that depression is

01:06:09.880 linked to artistic production,

01:06:11.940 it's that the artistic

01:06:13.720 production is actually part of

01:06:15.040 the process that's lifting the

01:06:16.620 person out of the depression

01:06:18.040 rather than, right?

01:06:20.340 Yes.

01:06:20.840 And, and, and in bipolar

01:06:22.580 disorder, you know, the quality

01:06:23.860 check, you know, because it

01:06:25.940 goes, my, all my ideas, they're

01:06:28.180 incredible, they're ingenious,

01:06:30.220 to, they're all worthless,

01:06:32.780 rubbish, rubbish, rubbish,

01:06:34.120 rubbish, oh, oh, this one,

01:06:35.920 this one's not bad, you know.

01:06:37.860 Yeah.

01:06:38.620 I, I saw a movie, which you

01:06:40.720 can find on YouTube, of, of

01:06:42.600 Picasso, about 1955, if I

01:06:45.200 remember correctly, it was

01:06:46.040 black and white, and they had

01:06:47.700 him paint a, I think it was a

01:06:49.480 rooster, but I'm not exactly

01:06:50.720 sure, on a glass sheet.

01:06:52.800 And so he spent a number of

01:06:55.120 hours painting, and it was

01:06:56.860 so interesting to see him

01:06:59.460 play, because he wasn't

01:07:00.980 trying to produce a painting

01:07:02.920 as the end product.

01:07:05.240 He was playing with visual

01:07:06.520 representation, and he

01:07:07.620 probably erased and repainted

01:07:09.460 a hundred times while he was

01:07:11.260 working on the painting.

01:07:12.540 He'd paint and erase and

01:07:13.960 paint and erase and paint and

01:07:15.060 erase, just constant play as

01:07:17.760 he was experimenting with

01:07:19.400 hitting the mark.

01:07:20.180 You know, and so he wasn't, he

01:07:22.440 wasn't an artist who was

01:07:23.400 producing paintings, he was

01:07:24.780 exploring visual representation.

01:07:28.200 So, yeah, so I, I think that

01:07:31.340 we could start thinking about a

01:07:33.860 healthy interpersonal dynamic as

01:07:36.440 characterized by something like

01:07:38.120 the presence of the spirit of

01:07:39.700 play.

01:07:40.460 But also, we could think about

01:07:42.100 play as a, like a microcosm of

01:07:46.500 a pattern of social interaction that

01:07:48.360 actually works across multiple

01:07:50.160 potential domains of social

01:07:52.280 interaction.

01:07:53.420 You know, it's, it's why you want

01:07:54.540 your child to be a good sport,

01:07:56.600 because you might say, well, it

01:07:57.580 doesn't matter whether you win or

01:07:58.640 lose, it matters how you play the

01:07:59.920 game.

01:08:00.440 The kid doesn't understand that,

01:08:01.840 because they want to win.

01:08:03.160 But your point as a parent is, yeah,

01:08:05.860 you want to win, but you want to

01:08:07.940 win in a manner that makes other

01:08:10.000 people want to keep playing games

01:08:11.880 with you, right?

01:08:13.340 And there's something that's really

01:08:14.460 core to what constitutes health

01:08:16.300 about that.

01:08:17.700 And I like that conjunction of the

01:08:19.720 developmental literature on play,

01:08:21.960 and the philosophical literature on

01:08:23.880 play, and its association with

01:08:25.400 creativity.

01:08:26.260 And the idea of that is something

01:08:27.740 that's antithetical to

01:08:29.020 psychopathology.

01:08:30.300 The psychopathological condition

01:08:31.780 occurs when all the play has been

01:08:33.600 taken out of the system.

01:08:35.020 Yes.

01:08:35.540 Yeah.

01:08:36.220 Yes.

01:08:37.080 And, yeah, no, I like that too.

01:08:39.820 You can think of people who practice

01:08:43.300 being well, you know, like experienced

01:08:47.660 meditators.

01:08:50.280 You can sometimes encounter these

01:08:52.400 beings, and they're light.

01:08:55.700 They're like a child.

01:08:56.840 They're an adult.

01:08:57.940 Right.

01:08:58.260 A bit like the Dalai Lama, you know.

01:08:59.780 He's a bit like a big kid.

01:09:02.200 Maybe I don't know him very well.

01:09:04.580 Well, you know that, what's his name?

01:09:07.020 I don't remember the reason.

01:09:08.200 Richardson.

01:09:10.760 Richie Davidson.

01:09:11.840 Right.

01:09:12.060 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:13.160 He did EEG analysis of the Dalai Lama

01:09:16.900 and other, like, practice meditators,

01:09:20.800 and he showed that they showed a

01:09:22.640 preferential pattern of left

01:09:24.520 prefrontal activation that was

01:09:26.720 associated with a dominant state of

01:09:28.720 extroverted positive emotion.

01:09:31.120 And that would go along with that.

01:09:33.120 It also goes along with that gospel

01:09:34.900 injunction, you know, except as you

01:09:36.860 become like a little child, you'll in

01:09:38.580 no wise enter the kingdom of heaven.

01:09:40.220 It's the same idea, is that to re,

01:09:43.440 and it's also associated with the idea

01:09:45.620 of neoteny in evolutionary biology, right,

01:09:48.660 that we tend to evolve towards our

01:09:50.340 childhood forms.

01:09:51.500 That's so, you know, a human skull looks

01:09:53.620 exactly like an infant chimpanzee skull.

01:09:57.000 So that's, yeah, it's very interesting.

01:09:59.140 Stephen Jay Gould pointed this out.

01:10:00.680 He showed that animated creatures like

01:10:03.560 Mickey Mouse and so forth, he showed a

01:10:05.700 whole variety of these, become increasingly

01:10:08.640 neotenous as the animation propagates

01:10:12.000 across time.

01:10:13.100 They become more and more childlike in

01:10:14.740 their features.

01:10:16.180 It's a kind of a universal proclivity.

01:10:18.280 And so the idea with regard to mental

01:10:20.460 health would be something like the

01:10:22.760 ability to reattain that capacity for

01:10:25.780 play actually characterizes mental

01:10:28.820 health in a positive manner in adulthood.

01:10:31.260 And then one question neuropharmacologically

01:10:34.640 would be, do the psychedelics put more

01:10:38.080 play in the system?

01:10:40.080 And the fact that they allow category

01:10:41.960 shift to occur much more prolifically,

01:10:45.300 let's say, seems to indicate that the

01:10:47.020 answer to that might be yes.

01:10:49.080 Yes, I'm leaning towards a yes.

01:10:51.700 I mean, at low doses, people are often,

01:10:56.500 you know, quite silly when they can talk.

01:10:59.640 And what plays out in their mind's eye is

01:11:03.760 playful, cartoon-like, and sort of silly

01:11:11.320 and grotesque.

01:11:12.800 And yeah, of course, it can go deeper and

01:11:18.700 become, in a sense, can feel more serious

01:11:23.160 and frightening.

01:11:25.000 Well, I think play does, that occurs in play,

01:11:29.260 though, like if you, imagine that what you're

01:11:31.420 doing when you read a serious novel is

01:11:34.280 something akin to play.

01:11:36.220 But if you read a Dostoevsky novel, you're

01:11:38.500 playing at a very deep level.

01:11:40.400 And so what that would mean is that instead

01:11:41.900 of playing with superficial categories, which

01:11:44.500 you might be doing if you just read a cheap

01:11:46.200 romance, and I'm not putting that down, I'm

01:11:48.760 just saying it's a more superficial form of

01:11:51.340 play.

01:11:52.060 But you can play deeply.

01:11:53.820 And you know, when children are playing

01:11:55.300 deeply, they're really involved in it.

01:11:57.180 Like, they can play pretend games with children,

01:11:59.420 can become incredibly serious.

01:12:00.820 They can act out very complicated and even

01:12:04.380 frightening scenarios in their play.

01:12:06.680 They will do that.

01:12:08.040 So, and I would say the seriousness of play is

01:12:11.440 not a consequence of the admixture of negative

01:12:14.120 emotion, per se.

01:12:15.420 It's an indication of the depth at which the

01:12:18.260 cognitive categories are being transformed.

01:12:20.900 So the deeper they fall into the play, the more

01:12:23.120 radical the transformation is that's occurring.

01:12:25.420 Yes, yes.

01:12:26.600 In fact, the notion of a play, like a drama, you

01:12:30.340 know, if it's a good play, like, you know, a good

01:12:34.480 theater production, then it has depth and it can be

01:12:38.620 serious and it can be moving and so quite.

01:12:42.360 I guess the antithesis would be a play that gets

01:12:48.380 stuck and gets boring, that repeats, that loops.

01:12:51.640 And, you know, the analogy that...

01:12:52.660 Yeah, or where it's too predictable, right?

01:12:55.300 Yeah.

01:12:55.460 That would be canalized in some sense.

01:12:57.520 Yes.

01:12:57.580 Because all it's doing then is it's running over a

01:13:00.660 plot and characterizations that you already 100% know.

01:13:04.940 Yeah.

01:13:06.240 Right?

01:13:06.620 So there's, and that would be propagandistic.

01:13:09.500 I think that art degenerates into propaganda when it

01:13:12.580 becomes canalized.

01:13:13.680 Right.

01:13:14.180 So you have to say this.

01:13:15.700 It's like, well, we already know that.

01:13:17.300 Yeah.

01:13:17.520 We already know that.

01:13:18.300 That's already been insisted upon.

01:13:19.840 Yeah.

01:13:21.060 Yeah.

01:13:21.240 We need some surprise.

01:13:24.400 So could you talk to me a little bit about this idea of

01:13:27.900 local minima?

01:13:29.220 You talk about canalization in the paper that you sent me and

01:13:32.640 your proposition is something like when you overlearn

01:13:36.260 something, you end up in a valley, in a fitness valley.

01:13:40.640 You can't get out of it in some sense.

01:13:42.380 But I don't exactly understand that metaphor.

01:13:45.440 So how would you technically characterize a local minima?

01:13:50.960 Yeah.

01:13:51.380 It's an analogy for depicting states where the minima are

01:13:56.380 substates.

01:13:57.620 And a local minima would be the closest substate to visit where

01:14:05.820 it has some gravitational pull.

01:14:09.260 By being a minima, it has a gradient where you would get pulled

01:14:16.700 to a point.

01:14:19.660 So is it something like that if you've practiced, it's sort of

01:14:24.620 the idea that if you're an expert with a hammer, everything looks

01:14:27.740 like a nail.

01:14:28.960 It's that you have an a priori category system.

01:14:31.640 And so anything that even vaguely approximates that is likely to get

01:14:35.520 processed by that system, is that is that and is that a is that a

01:14:41.080 consequence maybe of the brain's desire to use maximally efficient

01:14:44.720 neurological processing?

01:14:46.340 Because if you have the hardware for a perception, you might as well

01:14:48.920 utilize that rather than going through all the difficulty of having

01:14:52.760 to generate a whole new perception.

01:14:55.460 Right.

01:14:55.800 That's a that's very complicated.

01:14:58.420 I think that works.

01:14:59.060 I mean, again, if we go to pathology and depression, such a prevalent

01:15:06.540 disorder, so it's maybe a useful one to go to again.

01:15:10.200 But, you know, if one one's mind naturally moves in an itinerant way

01:15:17.700 here and there and in health, it moves very freely.

01:15:22.540 But in a depression, it's very easy to fall into that minima that is related

01:15:30.260 to the depression that has a negative bias.

01:15:36.420 So that would be an example of falling into a local minima.

01:15:40.740 Right.

01:15:41.560 So it's something like a hyper availability of already laid down pathways.

01:15:47.180 Yes.

01:15:47.540 Uh-huh.

01:15:49.300 Uh-huh.

01:15:49.580 And there are pathological conditions where that's much more likely.

01:15:54.600 Yeah.

01:15:54.720 Well, that that happens when that that happens when you have to make an

01:15:57.760 immediate response, which, of course, makes sense.

01:16:00.100 Right.

01:16:00.400 Because you're going to use automatized perceptual structures in an emergency

01:16:04.960 because you don't have time to do anything else.

01:16:08.140 So if it's familiar, it's easy to go there, you know.

01:16:12.440 And so in a depressive presentation, it's easy to fall back there.

01:16:19.100 Yeah.

01:16:19.540 Now, do you practice clinically?

01:16:22.040 No, I don't.

01:16:22.800 No, no.

01:16:24.220 Just research.

01:16:25.140 But you were trained psychoanalytically as well as neuroscientifically?

01:16:30.880 Uh, as an academic, I studied and got a master's qualification in psychoanalysis.

01:16:38.500 I also had my own analysis, but I've never actually trained clinically as an analyst myself.

01:16:45.080 I see.

01:16:45.680 I see.

01:16:46.160 Okay.

01:16:46.700 Let's contrast psychedelics and antidepressants for a moment.

01:16:52.040 And so let me tell you what I understood from your papers.

01:16:56.220 And you tell me if I've got it right, perhaps.

01:16:58.180 So both of those chemicals seem to affect the serotonergic system preferentially.

01:17:04.960 And my understanding of the serotonin system is that one of the things it does is modulates

01:17:10.960 cognitive flexibility.

01:17:13.260 And so if you have high levels of serotonergic function, which would be associated with social

01:17:18.620 status, let's say, you're more resistant to error propagation.

01:17:22.420 Now, but the psychedelics also affect the serotonin system, but they seem to decrease cognitive

01:17:31.920 specialization and canalization, right?

01:17:35.020 And so they make the system more open not to catastrophic failure, but to play.

01:17:40.840 And so do you know how detailed is their knowledge about how that's actually occurring at a cellular

01:17:48.780 level?

01:17:49.920 What is the chemical itself doing at a cellular or even a higher order biological level?

01:17:56.920 So if we begin with the classic psychedelics compounds like LSD or psilocybin or DMT, then the chemicals

01:18:07.840 are binding to serotonin 2A receptors.

01:18:12.660 So a certain serotonin receptor, one of the at least 14 serotonin receptors.

01:18:18.280 These receptors are heavily expressed in the cortex and especially so in high-level cortex.

01:18:25.620 And they're expressed post-synaptically, so on the receiving neuron of communication.

01:18:33.640 And they modulate the excitability of the host cell that the receptors are.

01:18:40.360 So when they stimulate...

01:18:41.340 Do they make it more excitable?

01:18:42.620 More excitable.

01:18:43.760 It's more excitable.

01:18:44.840 All right.

01:18:45.180 And so actually, it all begins there, because if you think of excitability like temperature,

01:18:51.180 you're kind of dialing up.

01:18:52.960 You're dialing up temperature.

01:18:54.440 You're dialing up the excitability of the cell.

01:18:57.120 But the catch, it seems, is what that translates to in terms of population-level activity.

01:19:04.760 Because all the computation and the map to, I guess, information processing and experience,

01:19:11.840 it doesn't seem to happen at the single-cell level.

01:19:17.040 It's how the cells interact and interrelate.

01:19:20.520 And really, it's once we get to the population level, so populations of neurons oscillating together.

01:19:29.160 So is that within cortical columns or between them?

01:19:32.720 Or do we know?

01:19:34.800 Or is that dose-dependent?

01:19:36.440 It would be a great thing to know, and I imagine that there's increased communication between cortical columns,

01:19:43.960 where cortical columns are like basic computational information processing,

01:19:49.660 computational units in the brain, the cortical column,

01:19:54.600 like a column for a particular orientation in space, recognizing that.

01:20:00.640 Right.

01:20:00.960 And they're specialized for certain kinds of perception.

01:20:02.340 Yes, they're specialized for...

01:20:03.440 And they have sparse communication between them.

01:20:06.060 That's right, yeah.

01:20:07.320 But high communication within them, you know.

01:20:11.060 Right, right, right.

01:20:12.040 Yes, so they're specific for specific categories.

01:20:14.820 So the very rudimentary level of visual processing,

01:20:19.020 like things oriented in this vertical domain or horizontal.

01:20:26.320 So, yeah, I suspect that there's communication,

01:20:29.900 increased communication across cortical columns.

01:20:32.100 And if we look at things like systems or networks in the brain,

01:20:37.780 which we can map quite well with functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example,

01:20:43.300 then we can see that there's increased communication across networks under psychedelics.

01:20:49.120 That's actually a very well-replicated finding.

01:20:52.640 Okay, so let me throw something at you here and tell me what you think about it.

01:20:56.240 So I've been conceptualizing neuroticism as the proclivity of a conceptual system to collapse in response to error.

01:21:06.240 So the higher your levels of baseline negative emotion,

01:21:09.460 the less error it takes per unit of collapse, something like that.

01:21:14.000 So then you can make an analogy, you can make an analogous case for creativity.

01:21:20.480 So we know that creative people, if I ask creative people,

01:21:26.280 if I give them a word and then I say, tell me all the words you can that this word reminds you of in a minute,

01:21:32.640 you can map out their associations and the creative people will produce a higher volume of associations.

01:21:39.040 So they're more verbally fluent, but their associations will be more distant in conceptual space.

01:21:46.540 So the less creative you are, the more synonymous the co-activated words will be.

01:21:54.500 So then you can imagine that if your creativity is in part a consequence of how much co-activation of idea is likely to take place,

01:22:03.980 but then it's also a function of how distant the co-activation.

01:22:07.180 And so if the psychedelics are increasing excitability,

01:22:15.300 I wonder if they're doing something analogous to the co-activation of more disparate columns as well.

01:22:24.420 That's strange because they also seem to inhibit semantic processing to some degree.

01:22:31.400 People become less able to talk, able to verbalize what's happening to them.

01:22:36.000 So it doesn't exactly look like it's semantic excitation that's occurring.

01:22:40.240 It's more like, it seems to be occurring more at the level of image in some sense than semantically.

01:22:46.420 But there does seem to be this broadening of creativity that,

01:22:50.720 and the analog might be there, that excitability,

01:22:53.780 is that any given idea is more likely to activate a set of associated ideas.

01:22:58.120 Yeah, there is some evidence in this direction of things like category mixing,

01:23:04.460 binocular rivalry paradigms.

01:23:07.280 You have mixed percepts occur more often under psychedelics.

01:23:14.120 Also, when looking at spreading semantic activation,

01:23:19.040 there's evidence that the semantic network is broader under the psychedelic.

01:23:31.040 So while people might not be able to articulate themselves very well,

01:23:38.400 the semantics in terms of meaning is certainly very rich.

01:23:44.960 Well, you get this permanent effect, too, that Roland Griffiths detected, right?

01:23:51.640 So in his psilocybin-experiencing participants,

01:23:55.820 the ones that reported a mystical experience showed a one-standard deviation increase in trait openness,

01:24:03.340 which is the creativity trait, one year later.

01:24:06.460 That's a walloping effect for a single dose.

01:24:09.600 You know, it also makes, you know, I read that, and I thought, wow, that's amazing.

01:24:12.780 But it also made me sort of leery because it does indicate a permanent transformation.

01:24:18.400 It looks like a permanent transformation in personality and in neurological function.

01:24:23.180 Now, you might think, well, it wouldn't hurt everybody to be moved one standard deviation up on the creativity scale.

01:24:30.440 But you'd only say that if you assumed that creativity was a benefit without a cost.

01:24:36.180 And I've never seen a benefit without a cost.

01:24:38.900 So, you know, one of the things, I'm wondering, for example, if you're higher in neuroticism to begin with,

01:24:45.600 is an increment in openness a plus or a negative?

01:24:49.560 Because I've known really open, highly neurotic people.

01:24:54.060 And one of the problems with that personality constellation is that they often saw the branches off that they're sitting on, right?

01:25:03.060 Because their ideas are so, they can't get a grip on anything stable because they're so mutable in their cognition.

01:25:10.280 And that seems to drive a certain degree of negative emotion, right?

01:25:13.840 Because they're always, they can't settle on any identity, for example.

01:25:17.980 And so they destabilize themselves.

01:25:20.480 And like, I don't know if, we've, you know, we've looked for pathologies associated with creativity for a long time.

01:25:26.200 And manic depressive disorder seems, at least in principle, to be associated.

01:25:30.540 There's not a lot of evidence for the pathology of creativity.

01:25:34.280 But like I said, you don't often get a benefit without a cost.

01:25:38.700 Yes.

01:25:39.300 Yes.

01:25:39.940 I imagine openness sort of tops out into, on other personality scales, like, I think it's the Isaac one.

01:25:50.660 It would probably be called psychoticism and, you know, and also trait schizotypy is maybe crossing over with extreme, extreme openness.

01:26:04.580 Yeah.

01:26:04.760 Well, you get a false positive problem, right?

01:26:06.900 Because the thing about creative people is they're pretty good at identifying patterns in sparse data.

01:26:12.660 But the problem with identifying patterns in sparse data is sometimes you see things that aren't there.

01:26:19.140 Apophenia.

01:26:19.860 Yeah.

01:26:20.700 Yes.

01:26:21.160 And I think that's one of the limitations, one of the things to watch out for, one of the pitfalls of psychedelic use.

01:26:29.680 And maybe psychedelic therapy is seeing things that aren't there or, in a sense, being too zealous in one's learning from the data that's allowed to come up.

01:26:42.720 Yeah.

01:26:42.880 Well, I talked to Dennis McKenna.

01:26:45.280 McKenna, yeah.

01:26:46.780 Yeah, yeah.

01:26:47.440 And so they were the brothers who established the protocols for domestication of psilocybin mushrooms, right?

01:26:54.620 And Dennis and his brother, Terrence, who's the more famous McKenna, they went to Mexico.

01:26:59.780 I did a podcast with him just a couple of weeks ago.

01:27:02.160 They went to, I think it was Mexico, decades ago, and ate a lot of psilocybin mushrooms in a couple of months.

01:27:08.980 And it, the experience gripped Terrence in a way that never really let him go from what Dennis relates.

01:27:18.240 And Terrence developed these, some of his ideas are very interesting, but some of them were quite Baroque and strange.

01:27:24.780 And Dennis told me that, you know, those ideas, some of them had to do with alien possession, for example, because it's not that uncommon for people having a psychedelic experience to have experiences that are akin to alien abduction experiences, the kind of thing John Mack reported.

01:27:42.140 And it wasn't obvious, it seemed that Dennis had concluded that some of these ideas had gripped Terrence for decades in a way that produced a different kind of canalization, right?

01:27:54.440 They knocked him out of his normal perception, but they knocked him into a new state where he saw patterns that he then pursued literally for decades that turned out likely to be both false and counterproductive.

01:28:07.140 Yes, well, whereas the practitioners of health would say things like hold it all lightly, in a sense, don't believe anything, you know, like the Buddha said, question everything and test it all yourself, don't take anything on faith, in a sense.

01:28:28.120 There is this other thing that can happen where you take something like an intense DMT experience, where it feels like you've encountered another dimension altogether that's populated by seemingly sentient beings, and you come back from that compelling experience, deeply immersive experience, and you come back from it and think,

01:28:52.760 I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know that that other world actually exists, and I've experienced it now, kind of solipsistic reasoning, and it is a bit like, you know, a kind of apophenia trap, you're like, ah, well, I've experienced it, I've seen it, now I know, it's real.

01:29:12.280 Right, well, and I've seen it with emotional punch, right?

01:29:15.620 It's not merely the perception, it's the perception.

01:29:18.940 See, this also happens to people.

01:29:21.560 I've tried to understand the phenomenology of paranoid schizophrenia.

01:29:26.400 So here's what happens to someone who's paranoid.

01:29:29.660 So imagine they're watching the TV.

01:29:32.300 Maybe the Pope's on.

01:29:33.840 And all of a sudden, what the Pope is saying is hyper-meaningful.

01:29:37.240 So it seems like one of those experiences, maybe it's because the person is stressed,

01:29:40.760 that their a priori perceptions are no longer filtering their current perception.

01:29:47.060 And so now all of a sudden, the Pope's message is hyper-meaningful.

01:29:50.800 And it manifests itself emotionally.

01:29:52.720 They can't look away.

01:29:54.160 And they feel, it's as if he's talking directly to me.

01:29:58.460 It's the only way they can explain it.

01:30:00.080 Now, more intelligent people are more likely to become paranoid if they become schizophrenic.

01:30:06.100 So the first thing that happens is they have an aberrant experience.

01:30:09.360 And the experience might be, well, it was like the Pope was talking to me.

01:30:13.940 And maybe that's not even enough to get them going.

01:30:16.040 Maybe that has to happen three or four times with different news media.

01:30:20.460 And maybe it's only when a certain topic is being discussed, right?

01:30:25.600 And so then they conclude the only way to account for this intensification of emotional experience

01:30:31.560 is that I am being specifically targeted, that I have some cosmic destiny, let's say,

01:30:37.420 something like that, it's the only thing that makes sense out of the emotional experience.

01:30:41.680 And then having established that as an axiom, they build a whole paranoid belief system on top of it.

01:30:48.520 And the thing about talking to someone who's paranoid schizophrenic is that within the delusional axiomatic system,

01:30:56.420 they're pretty rigorous.

01:30:57.340 But the axioms are something like, oh, I'm absolutely sure the Pope spoke to me when he was on TV.

01:31:04.200 And you can't shake that, right?

01:31:05.860 That becomes the axis around the which the whole world turns.

01:31:10.420 And it seems to be instantiated in them because of the intensity of the emotional experience when that message was received.

01:31:18.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Shatish Kapoor is called the aberrant salience, like the salience which he and others would relate to dopaminergic functioning.

01:31:34.140 You know, there's a hypersensitivity of the mesolimbic dopamine system,

01:31:38.580 and that's encoding the excessive salience with which you're imbuing certain experiences.

01:31:44.940 And so, in a sense, it's feeding a Hebbian learning, actually, you know, an associative learning.

01:31:55.200 And no, the Pope is speaking to me.

01:31:57.100 Well, if it is dopaminergic, too, I mean, the dopamine system produces that sense of reward.

01:32:03.900 So that would be real, like, engrossed engagement.

01:32:07.940 But the dopamine system also produces reinforcement.

01:32:11.820 And so it sort of backtracks the neural patterns of activation that occur just before the reward, and it strengthens them.

01:32:20.140 So not only would you get that sense of grip because the message, say, is being delivered to you,

01:32:27.160 but along with that dopaminergic hyperproduction would become an increased probability that those neural systems are, in fact, reinforced in their development by the very experience.

01:32:37.820 Yes, well, it's confidence, you know, when you're, ah, I get it now, I get it now.

01:32:44.100 Yeah, right.

01:32:45.340 It comes with a feeling of this, you know, slanted in a positively valence way.

01:32:52.120 It feels good to know.

01:32:53.820 It feels good to be confident.

01:32:55.940 And typically, it's difficult to be the opposite of confident, to be swimming in uncertainty.

01:33:03.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, right, right, exactly.

01:33:07.860 Well, that also accounts for the attraction of certainty, right?

01:33:11.260 It's that when you're certain of something, well, and this is relevant to your model,

01:33:16.400 if you're certain of something, you dispense with what would be excess entropy.

01:33:21.520 Like, the entropy is all the doubts.

01:33:23.060 What could be this?

01:33:23.680 Could be this.

01:33:24.200 Could be this.

01:33:24.700 Could be this.

01:33:25.320 Could be this.

01:33:25.880 I mean, that's, there's play there, but it's, well, I think part of the distinction there, too,

01:33:30.340 is that's involuntary play, right?

01:33:32.260 When you're plagued by doubts, you're not playing.

01:33:36.120 It's your subject to them.

01:33:38.300 It's different than sitting there contemplating different possibilities, sort of at your own

01:33:42.600 rate.

01:33:42.940 It's a very different thing to be visited by an intense barrage of doubt.

01:33:48.940 And that's, no one enjoys that.

01:33:51.320 And that might, again, be the difference between neuroticism and creativity, right?

01:33:55.180 Because a neurotic person who's, like, obsessing about doubt is contemplating a whole set of

01:34:02.480 ideas, right?

01:34:04.100 But, so you think, well, what's the difference between that and creative play?

01:34:08.200 And a huge part of it does seem to be the distinction between voluntary and involuntary.

01:34:13.680 You know, one of the things you do for people who are obsessive is you say, well, you know,

01:34:18.520 you're disgusted by this thing you're looking at, and then that thought comes and visits

01:34:23.620 you involuntarily.

01:34:25.720 Before you go to sleep at night, bring that thought to mind voluntarily and play with it.

01:34:32.040 And if they do that religiously, let's say, that'll often decrease the intensity of the

01:34:37.560 thoughts.

01:34:38.420 So whether you have the thoughts in the spirit of challenge or whether they're being forced

01:34:43.940 upon you also seems to be an indication of whether you're playing creatively or if you're

01:34:50.320 subject to something like neurotic overload and stress.

01:34:55.200 Yeah, and when we think of, you know, certain so-called third-wave psychotherapies like

01:35:04.080 mindfulness-based cognitive therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, I guess there is a

01:35:11.400 promotion of a ability to sit with difficult feelings, to almost play with them.

01:35:19.640 You know, some of the acceptance and commitment therapy techniques involve play.

01:35:24.660 Like, you know, you have a arachnophobia and you'll wear a toy spider around your neck.

01:35:30.980 I guess that's exposure therapy.

01:35:32.560 But, you know, or you have a negative cognitive bias in depression thinking you're worthless and

01:35:38.340 you'll wear a sign that says, I'm worthless.

01:35:40.120 And the fact that it's there all the time becomes, like, comedic and it loses its punch because

01:35:45.900 it's out there and it's silly rather than it's in here and getting chewed over.

01:35:50.780 Well, you're also reversing the predator-prey relationship in some sense, right?

01:35:56.920 If you're afraid of spiders but you're wearing one, you're now bigger than your fear.

01:36:02.700 You know, and if, and so, and so you've, you've, you've, you've, even though you still might

01:36:07.920 be afraid, you're, you're also allowing that part of you that can transcend the fear to

01:36:13.780 become the part that you're identifying with.

01:36:16.520 And, and you do that constantly in psychotherapy is to, and you know, one of the, one of the

01:36:22.080 constant findings with regard to exposure therapy is it's not so much that people get less

01:36:28.320 afraid, it's that they get braver.

01:36:31.100 And the distinction there is really important because it turns out that if you expose a person

01:36:35.960 voluntarily to one thing they're afraid of, they become less afraid of classes of things.

01:36:42.220 You know, the psych, the psychoanalysts, when they went after the behaviorists for exposure

01:36:47.360 therapy, they said, you'll get symptom substitution.

01:36:50.720 You know, you train someone who's agoraphobic to get in an elevator, they'll still be afraid

01:36:56.780 of death.

01:36:58.100 But it turns out that if you train them to expose themselves to the elevator, they are simultaneously

01:37:04.760 exposing themselves to the fear of death.

01:37:07.660 And they actually become braver across contexts as a consequence of the single exposures.

01:37:13.060 And there is something in that that's, that's play.

01:37:16.120 You know, with my clients, I always, I always used to play with them.

01:37:19.240 It's like, okay, there's the elevator.

01:37:22.020 You don't want to look at it.

01:37:23.560 Can you look at it from 30 feet away?

01:37:26.220 No.

01:37:26.840 Well, how about 40 feet?

01:37:28.200 How about 200 feet?

01:37:29.860 Like you'd find a place where they could play.

01:37:32.780 It was right on the edge of their fear, right?

01:37:35.900 And then, and so there was play right on the edge of fear.

01:37:39.500 And then maybe you could get the person 40 feet away and say, well, will you look at the

01:37:43.220 elevator for like, just glance at it?

01:37:45.720 Will you look at it for 10 seconds?

01:37:47.320 No.

01:37:47.560 Will you glance at it?

01:37:49.440 Yes.

01:37:50.140 Can you glance at it for two seconds?

01:37:52.100 Yes.

01:37:52.740 You just push that horizon of play and you do that sequentially across sessions.

01:37:59.100 And that seems to work.

01:38:00.180 Well, it's sort of like how people learn everything, right?

01:38:02.460 Because you learn on the edge and the edge is where the play, edge is where the serious

01:38:06.940 play takes place.

01:38:09.120 So what are you working on now?

01:38:11.880 You've got this paper you sent me that's coming out, I presume at some point in the future.

01:38:16.200 It was a preprint.

01:38:17.240 Yeah.

01:38:18.420 What's out the horizon of your investigations at the moment?

01:38:21.460 What are you contemplating?

01:38:23.920 Well, I do quite a lot of brain imaging work, trying to better understand what is the psychedelic

01:38:31.500 experience in the brain?

01:38:33.160 How is it encoded in brain activity?

01:38:36.280 And bodily activity.

01:38:38.540 It's easy to be too brain centric, but it does seem to be a very important organ for

01:38:44.260 experience.

01:38:46.700 So there's that.

01:38:47.880 So I'm planning an extensive brain imaging study of the psilocybin experience.

01:38:57.980 People will have repeat sessions with the psychedelic, four separate dosing sessions with psilocybin,

01:39:07.780 including quite high dose sessions.

01:39:10.380 And the majority of the session will actually be spent in a MRI scanner.

01:39:16.500 And so this hasn't been done before.

01:39:18.260 We've done, you know, 10 minutes at the most, really, of what we call a resting state run.

01:39:25.480 You close your eyes, the scanner runs, and we collect some data and then make some mappings

01:39:29.800 to subjective ratings.

01:39:31.640 But what I'm trying to do now is to be a bit more involved with the experience sampling.

01:39:38.800 So the sampling of your experience with more regular subjective ratings.

01:39:45.500 But in order to do that and not contaminate the data with asking people to do ratings, you

01:39:52.920 need a lot of repeats.

01:39:54.220 You need a lot of data.

01:39:55.880 So this is why we have to dose people.

01:39:57.880 It's actually four times and have them go into the scanner for three more or less hour

01:40:04.700 long sessions under drug.

01:40:07.740 Wow.

01:40:08.380 How do you keep the experience positive for them when you're doing that?

01:40:12.360 Because it's a pretty clinical environment generally to have people in an MRI.

01:40:16.540 And of course, set and setting is so important to the facilitation of a psychotherapeutic psychedelic

01:40:23.600 experience.

01:40:24.180 How do you manage that with the MRI?

01:40:26.000 Yeah, well, it's surprisingly well tolerated because it's actually quite unsurprising as

01:40:33.720 an environment.

01:40:35.800 And we will have a pre-dose scan where people will acclimatize.

01:40:42.740 And so that initial habituation to being in an unusual environment is very loud.

01:40:48.460 And when the first, you know, tone of the scanner begins, it can be quite jarring, but that's

01:40:55.440 being repeated all the time for a long period of time.

01:40:58.580 So you very quickly habituate to that initial shock.

01:41:02.480 And then it becomes actually very reliable.

01:41:05.680 There's nothing, you know, new entering your visual field apart from what's playing out in

01:41:11.000 your mind's eye with eyes closed.

01:41:12.880 So it's quite a stable environment.

01:41:15.620 And, you know, you can go very deep.

01:41:19.080 And this isn't a clinical trial.

01:41:21.400 We won't be recruiting people with, say, depression for this study.

01:41:25.380 These will be people who, you know, meet criteria for being healthy.

01:41:31.480 Right.

01:41:32.080 And we'll also have had previous experience with psychedelics, and that's a safety consideration

01:41:38.500 here.

01:41:39.300 So we are trying to go deep.

01:41:41.560 It is a sort of psychonauts, you know, dream in a sense, a study like this, yeah.

01:41:50.280 So what are you hypothesizing?

01:41:54.240 What's known already about brain activation during psychedelic experiences?

01:41:58.240 And how will you extend that?

01:41:59.780 What are you expecting to learn?

01:42:02.660 Yeah.

01:42:03.280 Well, this entropic brain principle is something I introduced close to 10 years ago now, which

01:42:08.900 is a very simple principle that says that the entropy or the unpredictability of spontaneous

01:42:15.840 brain activity increases during the psychedelic experience.

01:42:21.360 And the magnitude of that increase in brain entropy correlates with the increase in the richness

01:42:29.240 of conscious experience, the richness of phenomenal consciousness.

01:42:36.020 Okay.

01:42:36.320 So let me ask you about that.

01:42:39.240 So there's this emerging idea.

01:42:41.360 I suppose it's a couple of decades old, but it's been elaborated more recently that consciousness

01:42:46.660 exists on the border between order and chaos.

01:42:50.040 And your proposition there is that if you add a richer activity set entropically, that the

01:43:01.640 field of consciousness or the breadth or the depth of consciousness actually increases.

01:43:06.020 So what do you make of ideas that consciousness, whatever it exists, exists on the border between

01:43:13.640 order and chaos?

01:43:14.640 And what do you think it means ontologically for consciousness itself to expand as brain entropy

01:43:24.640 increases?

01:43:26.860 Yeah.

01:43:27.160 Well, it's the psychedelic experience in terms of what it's like to be in that state.

01:43:32.500 That model is there in the entropic brain model as well that says that consciousness exists

01:43:40.240 at so-called criticality, you know, that critical point between, you know, the extreme poles of

01:43:49.320 an extreme order like a frozen system or an extremely, you know, random system like a gas, you know,

01:43:57.180 there's some kind of critical point at which you get certain properties of organization,

01:44:05.060 things like hierarchical organization, long range correlations or freer information flow

01:44:14.520 throughout the system and information transfer across scales as well to like fractal organization.

01:44:23.600 So why does that, why does the hierarchical organization and the fractal organization emerge

01:44:28.980 at criticality?

01:44:31.520 How are those related?

01:44:33.600 Yeah.

01:44:35.520 Do we know?

01:44:36.820 I imagine some people know and it's probably to do with efficiency.

01:44:40.300 I imagine it's to do with efficient information transfer.

01:44:49.560 It doesn't happen so well in a frozen system because things don't go very far.

01:44:54.200 There aren't sufficient dynamics.

01:44:56.400 And then maybe in a gas, things are just too loose.

01:44:59.560 There's no integration.

01:45:01.240 So there's a sweet spot.

01:45:02.720 So you get, so that's it.

01:45:04.100 So it's, so the claim is something like that at that border between chaos and order, hierarchical

01:45:11.260 organization, well-structured hierarchical organization is likely to emerge.

01:45:16.900 Yeah.

01:45:17.200 And I guess it does say that hierarchy and nature serves some kind of, you know, efficient function,

01:45:25.320 some adaptive function.

01:45:26.600 It's useful.

01:45:27.260 Well, so, you know, in the, in the Genesis chapter, that's essentially, that's essentially

01:45:33.900 the model that's being pointed at.

01:45:35.860 So what you have is the, the proposition that the divine word is the creative agent is something

01:45:42.760 like the idea that the order that is good emerges out of the dynamic interplay between

01:45:49.720 order and chaos.

01:45:51.380 So the process of dynamically intermediating between order and chaos is something like

01:45:57.340 the word.

01:45:58.600 And the word in the Genesis chapter is specified as that which generates the habitable order

01:46:05.240 that is good.

01:46:06.640 That's the proposition.

01:46:07.980 Then there's a meta proposition that emerges out of that, which is that the spirit of man

01:46:13.740 and woman is made in that image.

01:46:15.620 That's the fundamental axiomatic proposition that the narrative is putting forward.

01:46:22.840 It's very interesting to me that that's true at the mythological and narrative level and

01:46:28.320 that it's increasingly mapped out at the neurological level using language that's actually quite

01:46:33.660 similar, right?

01:46:34.820 The chaos.

01:46:36.180 So the tohu vabohu is what the spirit of God contends with at the beginning of time.

01:46:41.700 And tohu vabohu, I'm probably not saying it right, but it's also taom, which is a derivation

01:46:49.180 of the word taimat, which is Mesopotamian.

01:46:51.900 And it's just the dragon that Marduk carves up at the beginning of time to make the world.

01:46:57.040 And so it's like this place where what's predatory is encountered and mastered.

01:47:02.680 That's all hidden in the symbolic complexity of that initial story.

01:47:06.580 But the fundamental idea is that there's an eternal process that operates at the border

01:47:11.360 between chaos and order.

01:47:12.960 And if it's operating optimally, it generates the order that's good.

01:47:17.060 That's the days of creation.

01:47:19.880 So it's very much analogous to this idea that the hierarchical structure emerges out of this

01:47:24.980 interplay between chaos and order.

01:47:26.900 There is this other curious angle here.

01:47:29.640 You know, if psychedelics can increase properties of criticality, signatures of criticality like

01:47:38.500 fractal organization, long-range correlations, there's things like critical slowing, which

01:47:46.680 means that the system doesn't recover very quickly.

01:47:49.840 It recovers slowly from a perturbation.

01:47:53.020 That perturbation sort of reverberates through the system more easily.

01:47:56.960 It's a more sensitive system when the system's at criticality.

01:48:00.740 Anyway, all of those properties, if psychedelics increase the strength of those signatures of

01:48:08.520 criticality, then that implies that normal waking consciousness is poised at what I understand,

01:48:15.920 I hope I get this right, would be a subcritical regime towards order, towards that frozen system.

01:48:22.580 You know, it's close to criticality, but it's not quite there, and you can dial it up further

01:48:28.100 and see stronger signatures of criticality.

01:48:31.900 I wonder why it would, I wonder if it would be biased somewhat towards order for purposes

01:48:38.480 of efficiency, do you suppose?

01:48:41.820 Maybe for mastery.

01:48:43.740 Maybe for mastery.

01:48:45.420 You know, I wonder.

01:48:46.480 Right, for ease of mastery, right?

01:48:48.760 Because, well, if you can implement automatized routines, it's less energy demanding, right?

01:48:55.520 But the price you'd pay for that is that you wouldn't be learning as quickly, but the advantage

01:48:59.700 would be that you're doing what you already know how to do in a manner that doesn't require

01:49:03.640 a lot of energy output.

01:49:05.140 Yeah.

01:49:05.960 I think of it, again, a little bit like civilization and its discontents.

01:49:10.260 You know, like we started to control the critical world, you know, that was organized, is organized

01:49:20.760 in its, you know, beautiful, rich and diverse and fractal way.

01:49:25.280 But we started to, you know, manage our food source and structure our world in a particular

01:49:31.900 way.

01:49:32.260 And now it's, you know, it's got ridiculous how we've done that.

01:49:35.760 And I imagine, and actually there's a bit of curious neuroimaging data that suggests

01:49:43.440 that certain properties of brain activity that are suggestive of subcriticality or too

01:49:51.860 much order, like the alpha rhythm.

01:49:54.020 It's a very dominant rhythm in the human brain, in the adult human brain.

01:49:59.340 It's lower in infants.

01:50:01.280 It increases as you go up to adulthood.

01:50:03.520 And actually, it's also maximal in humans relative to other species.

01:50:07.800 So it's like an adult human rhythm.

01:50:10.960 And if you look at the sort of prominence of different rhythms in brain activity, it's

01:50:15.460 the main one, you know, it's a big peak in the alpha range.

01:50:20.520 But this curious study was done in India, looking at different people either sort of living more,

01:50:27.800 you know, at one with nature or people living in dense urban environments.

01:50:33.580 And those who lived in the dense urban environments had stronger alpha rhythms.

01:50:38.760 And for me, that was suggested of people who are kind of, have become kind of divorced from

01:50:43.660 the criticality of nature.

01:50:45.580 Right, they're more canalized.

01:50:45.940 Yeah, they're more canalized.

01:50:46.960 Right, right, right.

01:50:47.800 They're too ordered, yeah.

01:50:48.740 Yeah, well, the urban environment actually lends itself to that because a lot of the things

01:50:52.880 that we build are structured so that we only have to glance at them to know what they are.

01:50:59.840 Right?

01:51:00.120 So they're, like, a lot of our design technologies are aids to canalization.

01:51:04.160 Think about the shiny outside surface of a car.

01:51:06.820 I mean, some of that's for aerodynamic efficiency.

01:51:09.080 But a lot of it is so you can just categorize it at a glance.

01:51:12.280 It's easy.

01:51:12.620 All the complexity is hidden.

01:51:13.940 Yeah.

01:51:14.100 Yes, exactly.

01:51:14.980 And so the whole urban, this is especially true in modernist urban environments.

01:51:19.160 Everything is smooth and one pixel.

01:51:22.580 Right?

01:51:22.840 And the advantage to that is, well, you don't have to pay any attention to it.

01:51:26.420 But the disadvantage of it is, it's pretty, it's desert-like in terms of its richness.

01:51:32.760 Right?

01:51:32.980 Much different than the surface of a tree or a plant, say.

01:51:36.080 Quite.

01:51:36.580 Yeah, it's mind-numbing.

01:51:38.240 Yeah.

01:51:38.460 And so that may be one of the reasons why urban environments are associated with worse mental health.

01:51:47.700 Right, right, right.

01:51:49.020 Yeah, well, there is some indication of that.

01:51:50.900 And that actually it's the deprivation of the fractal structure of the surfaces that's associated with that.

01:51:57.520 Yes, we need to, you know, we need to come home to nature and see that practicality, to see that richness, to be reminded of our origin, in a sense.

01:52:11.080 Yeah, right.

01:52:11.860 Yeah, well, that ties us back to the beginning of the conversation.

01:52:15.460 All right, well, we should stop this part of the conversation.

01:52:18.340 And we'll proceed, for those of you watching and listening, I always talk to my guests for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:52:26.400 That's an addition, not a subtraction, by the way, because I wasn't doing that before.

01:52:31.260 And so, those of you who are interested, I'm going to talk to Dr. Carhart Harris, to Robin, about the development of his interest in the psychological, the phenomenological, and the psychedelic.

01:52:43.600 I'm very interested in how people's interests make themselves manifest and what beckons to them, let's say.

01:52:50.860 Hello, everyone.

01:52:52.020 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

314. Consciousness, Chaos and Order ｜ Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris

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