The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience

00:00:00.000 So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed.

00:00:03.360 It's a dynamic object.

00:00:05.300 So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobulum

00:00:07.940 is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self.

00:00:11.480 The feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?

00:00:14.900 Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration

00:00:18.840 for the remapping of anomaly.

00:00:21.780 This is very weird to everyone.

00:00:23.660 So you have this REM paralysis, obviously.

00:00:25.800 You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep.

00:00:27.640 You're dreaming away.

00:00:28.380 Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

00:00:30.160 Something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak

00:00:33.220 and I knew I had to wake myself up.

00:00:35.360 Like I'd try to throw myself off the bed.

00:00:37.320 Sometimes I could yell to my wife.

00:00:39.200 She'd have to come and shake me and then I'd wake up.

00:00:41.440 So I was sleeping in my room and then I had this creepy feeling

00:00:44.520 of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me

00:00:47.380 until it was on my chest strangling me.

00:00:49.800 What did the monster look like?

00:00:51.020 Well, I'll tell you.

00:00:51.660 Okay.

00:01:00.000 Hi, everybody.

00:01:08.060 I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr. Balan Jalal.

00:01:12.940 He's a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a visiting researcher

00:01:17.640 at Cambridge University Medical School.

00:01:20.240 He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other such publications.

00:01:25.280 The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep paralysis

00:01:30.660 and the terrors and opportunities of dream, fantasy, and adaptation that accompany that condition.

00:01:38.460 What did we discuss?

00:01:40.000 Dr. Jalal's Intro to Neuroscience course at Peterson Academy.

00:01:44.220 The relationship between neuroanatomy, brain function, perception, emotion, and behavior.

00:01:50.300 The function of the dream state.

00:01:52.280 The role of culture and conception in dealing with emotion, particularly fear,

00:01:57.160 and the changing landscape of the modern university.

00:02:01.140 It's quite a trip.

00:02:02.800 Join us.

00:02:04.320 Well, thanks for coming in.

00:02:06.000 Well, thank you, Jordan, Dr. Peterson.

00:02:08.900 I'd love to be here.

00:02:10.380 Let's talk about Peterson Academy first.

00:02:12.940 You just, we just released a course of yours, Introduction to Neuroscience.

00:02:16.460 Right, right.

00:02:17.000 So I'd like to know, I think it would be useful to talk a little bit about the course,

00:02:21.980 but I'd also like to know about your experience doing the filming and your,

00:02:27.160 reflections on the process and the project itself.

00:02:30.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:31.360 Well, first of all, it was a lovely process.

00:02:34.860 Let me start there.

00:02:35.640 So I flew in to Miami.

00:02:38.680 Great reception overall.

00:02:42.660 Nice people around.

00:02:44.520 Ben, Nancy, Vincent, everybody on the team, lovely.

00:02:48.140 The shooting was great.

00:02:50.800 So yeah, top professional, really liked that.

00:02:53.460 And then the course itself, it's an eight-hour course on the brain and sort of going through,

00:03:03.200 initially starting from sort of the basics of the brain, the different structures of

00:03:07.280 the brain, then going all the way to sort of higher abstract things like human nature

00:03:11.380 and sort of the nature of how art emanates in the brain and things like that.

00:03:17.120 So it's kind of has the nitty-gritty of an introductory neuroscience course, but then also

00:03:22.540 taking in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain.

00:03:26.300 So it's kind of all that mixed.

00:03:28.220 Right, so it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up.

00:03:32.400 Right, right.

00:03:32.960 How much anatomy, functional anatomy and so forth is in the course?

00:03:37.140 I make sure that the basics are there.

00:03:39.160 So for a basics neuroscience course, as an introduction, you've got to have the basics there,

00:03:43.680 all the brain structures, the cortex, the brainstem, all the different names.

00:03:49.100 But I try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep.

00:03:51.940 Well, I used to, when I did my first biopsychology neuroscience course, that was incredibly boring.

00:03:58.280 I had all these names thrown at me.

00:04:00.220 Yeah, and you just had to force memorize them.

00:04:02.820 It made no sense, right?

00:04:04.140 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:04.240 So what's the cerebellum doing?

00:04:05.680 You know, what's this doing?

00:04:06.520 You just had all these names.

00:04:07.520 You had to memorize them.

00:04:08.580 That was it.

00:04:09.060 But I really made sure to describe the function and have an overall context for each.

00:04:15.620 Yeah, I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy, even at a detailed level,

00:04:22.660 when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function.

00:04:28.280 It's very important.

00:04:29.320 Yeah, well, and it was also extremely useful philosophically.

00:04:32.300 I mean, one of the advantages, if you're a conceptual thinker, to studying neuroanatomy and neurobiology is that it puts limits on what philosophical propositions are plausible and possible.

00:04:46.540 Right.

00:04:46.700 I really like that.

00:04:48.040 So it's like you have to play a game with two different sets of rules then, right?

00:04:55.580 It has to make sense conceptually, so that would be philosophically, but then it can't violate the principles of neuroanatomy and neuroscience that are already established.

00:05:05.720 Yeah.

00:05:05.880 It's a very good way of initial triangulation.

00:05:08.840 Yeah, the way that I like to do is that I know that in this course I'll cover this, right?

00:05:13.460 But then I kind of see and explore how I can sort of weave this into sort of a narrative and a story and then kind of put things in as we go along.

00:05:22.220 And I feel like this makes sense to put this aspect here and put that aspect here so it doesn't come in this sort of, you know, very ABC kind of dry way.

00:05:31.460 So that's my approach and see how I can let things unfold in a natural way.

00:05:36.840 And so you said that when you went to do the recording that the process worked well.

00:05:43.060 Very well.

00:05:43.420 What about it worked well?

00:05:44.560 I was very impressed.

00:05:45.380 So I was very impressed by the whole process, the way things were arranged.

00:05:50.920 Obviously, we were put in a very nice hotel and we felt pampered, honestly.

00:05:56.040 Good.

00:05:56.440 It's a very, you feel pampered.

00:05:57.860 You feel everything is just on point.

00:06:01.200 And yeah, and then the shooting itself, people around you, they take care of you, bring you food.

00:06:07.400 They, you know, it's just very, you feel pampered.

00:06:10.100 So it's great.

00:06:10.620 Yeah, well, you know, we, I think we realized the importance of that, really, when I did the first Exodus seminar for the Daily Wire.

00:06:22.020 Right.

00:06:22.220 We brought nine thinkers in and we spent a fair bit of time on the hospitality side.

00:06:31.380 Right.

00:06:31.580 And one of the things I realized, and I knew this in part from working at a university, was that a lot of the professors that we pulled in for that seminar, I wouldn't say they're exactly well treated at their institutions.

00:06:45.180 And that's foolish because I invited the people who I did invite to the Exodus seminar because I thought they were great and I wanted to hear what they had to say.

00:06:57.120 Right.

00:06:57.400 And there's every reason to make that obvious in every, in every detail of treatment.

00:07:07.300 Yeah.

00:07:07.720 And so, you know, one of the things I offer people who we offer at Peterson Academy, people who come and lecture, because people ask me, well, you know, what lecture do you need?

00:07:17.300 And that's not the right approach.

00:07:19.380 My sense is, is that we, I find people whose views I want to know and share, and then I want them to do what they think would be best because I wouldn't bloody well invite them if I didn't think they knew what they were doing.

00:07:33.860 Yeah.

00:07:34.080 And I don't want to put constraints on them.

00:07:35.960 And then if we find the right people, we can sort out the curriculum rather than sorting out the curriculum and then forcing the participants, the professors into it.

00:07:44.720 That makes no sense at all to me.

00:07:46.460 Absolutely.

00:07:46.880 And that was my approach too, right?

00:07:48.200 So I would talk about my own research, what I, some of the nicest experiments that I, that I love about my work and sort of weave into that, to that neuroscience curriculum in that way.

00:07:57.580 Right.

00:07:57.800 So we talk about, for example, OCD, and then maybe you might mention the orbitofrontal cortex, which is overactive in OCD.

00:08:05.060 What's the function of the orbitofrontal cortex, this, this, this, the structure in the brain or the striatum and the basal ganglia in the context of Parkinson's.

00:08:13.840 But again, taking in some of some work, that's very, you know, some experiments that, that, that are fascinating.

00:08:20.180 So it's, it's kind of taking that natural approach, that sort of my own research or works of colleagues and just weaving it in, in a more, more natural way, I think.

00:08:30.700 Okay. So I'm curious, everybody who studies the brain in some depth has their own approach.

00:08:39.620 It's like exploring a continent, let's say they have their own approach.

00:08:42.700 And so when you're, when you lay out the architecture of the brain, let's say the basic anatomy, tell me how you do that.

00:08:49.880 Like, I would like to hear how you conceptualize the brain.

00:08:54.060 So, so do that if you would.

00:08:57.660 Yeah, absolutely.

00:08:58.400 So for me, I think the way that I, my, my view of the brain was inspired by my mentor, V.S. Romachandran.

00:09:05.100 So I.

00:09:05.380 Yeah, right.

00:09:05.840 You worked with, yeah.

00:09:06.880 I worked with.

00:09:07.100 He's a stunningly effective public speaker.

00:09:09.760 He's extremely stunningly effective, charismatic.

00:09:13.220 And when I went to California in my early days as an undergraduate, I ended up in his course.

00:09:18.300 So I took his course.

00:09:19.580 So let me take you there.

00:09:20.300 When was that?

00:09:20.740 That was in 2010, 11, around 11, 2011.

00:09:25.240 So I started there, became a research scholar in his lab eventually.

00:09:30.680 And I think, you know, becoming very good friends with him, ending up in his laboratory, going on, you know, long, long walks on the beach all the time and just spending time with him and getting his view on the brain and sort of adapting that as my own view was, was, was something that, you know, influenced me.

00:09:49.920 And, and, and, and his approach, obviously, and the approach that I've adopted is one where you sort of look at the brain holistically.

00:09:55.800 You acknowledge that the brain is hyperplastic.

00:09:58.640 So there's all these modules that are highly dynamic and the brain is extremely malleable.

00:10:04.060 And so we look at the brain as something that extremely, as, as, as a fluid process that, that's malleable and not fixed and set in its own ways.

00:10:12.140 It has this, this fluidity to it.

00:10:15.680 So that's kind of my, my view of the brain overall, that it's, it's, it's, it's a dynamic object.

00:10:23.140 But beyond that, let me also explain some of our experiments.

00:10:26.680 So the way that we approach science and, and, and probing the human brain is, is through experiments where we look at conceptual experiments in neuroscience.

00:10:36.080 So, for example, there's the robber hand illusion, if you probably know that.

00:10:39.740 Lay it out and explain it to people.

00:10:41.280 So the robber hand illusion is this illusion where you have a chap, he puts his hand right here, and then you have his right hand underneath the table, right?

00:10:49.960 And so me, Balan, the experimenter, will stroke and tap the hand of the, the, the, the sub, the experimental subject.

00:10:57.080 I'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, stroke, stroke underneath the table.

00:11:01.060 And I'll stroke and tap the table in front of Joe, the, the subject.

00:11:05.360 I'll go tap, tap, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap.

00:11:08.440 And about, I mean, two minutes of me doing this, he will feel touch sensations arising from the table.

00:11:14.100 And I don't mean this in kind of an abstract metaphorical sense.

00:11:16.900 I mean, there's literally, he will have touch sensations, somatosensory regions of his brain becoming active from this process.

00:11:23.800 Yeah, well, that's a very strange element of human perception, right?

00:11:27.360 It, it must be strongly associated not only with our ability to map sensation onto our bodies.

00:11:34.300 Right.

00:11:34.700 But also with our ability to use tools.

00:11:37.560 So I know, for example, we're very good at it.

00:11:40.060 Like if I pick up a screwdriver, it takes me virtually no time to use the tip of the screwdriver in a manner that very much approximates the tip of my finger.

00:11:49.260 Right.

00:11:49.520 Right.

00:11:49.740 And then when we go in a car, essentially what we're doing, especially once we're expert drivers, is that we expand the dimensions of our kinesthetic perception, our bodily perception, to include the car.

00:12:02.340 Right.

00:12:02.520 So you're feeling with the tires, you're feeling with the brake.

00:12:05.400 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:05.780 Right.

00:12:06.160 And that's, well, part of my understanding of that is that that's very tightly associated with our tool using, tool using proclivity.

00:12:13.520 Because a tool is a bodily extension.

00:12:15.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:16.080 Absolutely.

00:12:16.640 It's an embodiment, right?

00:12:17.540 So in two minutes, I turn this, this, this subject into a table, right?

00:12:21.960 And then more than that, if I, me, you know, Baland, was to take a hammer and go like this on the table, he'll go, you know, he'll feel pain sensations, right?

00:12:31.860 So the pain regions of his brain will light up if I was to look in a scanner and, you know, look at the neurons there.

00:12:38.800 So it shows you that in that way you can take something, you can, first of all, you can create a sensation of this table belonging to you.

00:12:47.380 But then-

00:12:47.900 Being part of you.

00:12:48.660 Big part of you, right?

00:12:49.480 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:49.680 It becomes an embodied part of you.

00:12:51.380 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:51.880 But then beyond that, you afflict pain now to the person, to the table, in fact, and then you will feel-

00:12:57.820 Yeah, well, that would also be part of social perception, I presume.

00:13:01.700 I read a paper not long ago, if I remember the details carefully, they were looking at the difference, either, I think it was, I think the dimension was agreeableness.

00:13:14.080 Right.

00:13:14.280 But it might have been psychopathy, which would be the opposite of agreeableness, let's say, that more agreeable people,

00:13:21.880 so less psychopathic people feel, have more pain activation to the perception of other people's pain.

00:13:29.820 Right.

00:13:30.020 So you could imagine that part of the utility in being able to morph your pain sensitivity, even to represent something objective like a table.

00:13:39.700 Right.

00:13:40.060 Right.

00:13:40.100 That's also a variant of my ability to map my own body, let's say, onto your body, so that the empathy that I feel for you isn't conceptual.

00:13:48.760 Right.

00:13:48.960 And I've really been thinking about this in terms of how we understand each other, because it looks to me like what we do to understand each other is, I notice what your aim is, partly by watching your eyes.

00:14:03.540 Right.

00:14:04.520 I infer your aim.

00:14:05.900 Once I infer your aim, I can inhabit your perceptual space, because if I know your aim, I know the objects that surround you, but I also know how your emotions are configured.

00:14:15.520 Right.

00:14:15.840 Because they're configured in relationship to the aim.

00:14:18.080 Yeah.

00:14:18.400 If I can adopt that aim, then I can embody those emotions and perceptions.

00:14:22.480 Right.

00:14:22.740 I can read off that embodiment, and then I, that's, so the understanding is actually my simulating you on my own neural architecture.

00:14:30.800 Right, right.

00:14:31.160 And then drawing the appropriate inferences from that, and it looks to me like children probably develop that ability.

00:14:37.320 Some of it's nascent, I would say.

00:14:39.080 Some of it's there.

00:14:40.920 It's very interesting.

00:14:41.640 So we actually, we were the first group to show that people with OCD, who has a very fixed sense of self, right, so they wash their hands all the time, washing and scrubbing.

00:14:50.220 When they do this illusion, they have a much more sensitivity to it, to the extent that there's a control condition for this illusion, where you, so the, so the illusion, for the illusion to occur, you have to stroke and tap, tap, tap, stroke, and stroke and tap in a synchronized manner.

00:15:05.280 That's important, right?

00:15:06.180 So that's, that's, that's key.

00:15:09.040 Right.

00:15:09.480 So you're linking the visual perception to the kinesthetic perception?

00:15:12.600 Absolutely.

00:15:13.020 Yeah.

00:15:13.140 Absolutely, right.

00:15:14.200 But in people with OCD, so the control for this, by the way, is if you do it in a random sequence, like tap, tap, stroke, stroke, but everything is just random, right, and you do, again, the touching and stroking is random, then the illusion will not occur, or it will be slightly, so you'll have a slight illusion there, or most of the time, no illusion.

00:15:31.700 That's, so this is the key control for the, for the illusion.

00:15:34.200 Right, so let's just walk through this, so everybody understands.

00:15:36.960 Right.

00:15:37.400 Clearly.

00:15:38.160 So you have someone with their arm on a table, let's say, their left arm, their right arm is under the table.

00:15:43.080 Yep.

00:15:43.340 So they can no longer see it.

00:15:44.860 Yep.

00:15:45.260 Now, what you're doing then is you're, you're interacting with their hidden arm physically.

00:15:50.420 Physically, yep.

00:15:51.420 But they can't see that, they can feel it.

00:15:53.380 At the same time, you interact with the table.

00:15:55.800 Yes.

00:15:56.200 Where they can see it.

00:15:57.380 Absolutely.

00:15:57.840 So you're syncing their visual perception with their kinesthetic perception.

00:16:01.180 Absolutely.

00:16:01.480 But it's not, but their kinesthetic, or their visual perception isn't focused on their own hand.

00:16:05.860 Right.

00:16:06.040 Now they start to react to the table like it's a hand.

00:16:09.100 Correct.

00:16:09.500 Okay, now you're extending this to the OCD situation.

00:16:12.240 Yes, yes.

00:16:12.580 Okay, so elaborate on that.

00:16:14.020 Absolutely.

00:16:14.580 And I just want to, just one point here is that I mentioned a table, so the original experiment was done with a rubber hand.

00:16:20.500 Right, right, right.

00:16:21.320 But I'm using table because it's more, it illustrates the experiment better, I think, and you can have a table as well.

00:16:28.560 People would start responding to a rubber hand as if it was their own.

00:16:32.060 So instead of a table, you would just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand right in front of the person.

00:16:38.760 Right, with their other hand hidden.

00:16:40.320 Correct.

00:16:40.580 They start to respond to the rubber hand as if it's theirs.

00:16:43.400 Right, right, exactly.

00:16:44.300 And then flinch if there's a threat to it.

00:16:46.100 They flinch if there's a threat to it, right?

00:16:47.620 Yeah, okay.

00:16:48.480 And that can be extended to something as inanimate as a table.

00:16:51.740 Correct.

00:16:52.140 Right, okay, got it.

00:16:52.460 Or in fact, you can do it in air.

00:16:54.320 So you do know Rich Magnale?

00:16:56.160 Yes.

00:16:56.600 Yes, yes, yes.

00:16:57.300 A common friend, right?

00:16:58.200 Yeah, yeah.

00:16:58.580 Harvard, right?

00:16:59.280 So one day, Magnale and I did it in the air.

00:17:01.900 So I did it on Rich, call him Rich.

00:17:04.300 So it's stroke, stroke, tap, tap, in the air, and he felt the rubber, like his own hand was floating in the air.

00:17:09.000 It was kind of spooky.

00:17:09.940 Wow.

00:17:10.220 And my God, what's happening?

00:17:11.820 I feel my hand is floating in the air.

00:17:14.820 Right, you know, that must also be associated with a really profound, with our sense of what constitutes ownership.

00:17:23.200 Right.

00:17:23.980 You know, because the idea that something is yours or that something is mine, there's no reason to assume that that isn't an extension of something like embodiment.

00:17:34.320 It's certainly the case that, you know, if people's cars are attacked, let's say, or kicked, they respond to that very much as if it's a bodily assault.

00:17:43.800 Right.

00:17:44.280 Right.

00:17:44.480 And so it begs the question, how much of our embodied concept of ownership, like that concept on which we platform the philosophical and philosophy and conception of ownership is actually the underlying scaffold for that is our ability to extend our embodiment to even inanimate objects.

00:18:06.280 Right.

00:18:06.580 Right.

00:18:06.760 Because then they start to become part of us.

00:18:09.260 Right.

00:18:09.520 And part of what you're pointing to with your emphasis on brain plasticity and that is that identity itself, even in terms of perception and pain sensitivity, is fluid and dynamic to a degree that you wouldn't immediately presume.

00:18:26.060 Absolutely.

00:18:26.500 And I do want to differentiate between plasticity and then the dynamic nature of the function of the modules of the brain.

00:18:33.760 So, for example, you have, in terms of the rubber hand illusion, it shows that, for example, we have a structure called the TPJ right here, temporal parietal junction is a fancy name for that.

00:18:43.740 That structure is important for taking all the sensory modalities, touch, hearing, feeling, right?

00:18:49.260 So, smelling and sort of unifying that into a whole.

00:18:54.820 That's a cortical area?

00:18:56.060 It's a cortical area.

00:18:56.760 Where is it located?

00:18:57.280 It's called a TPJ.

00:18:58.480 So, it's temporal parietal junction.

00:19:00.280 So, it's kind of strategically located between the different sort of occipital somatosensory region and the temporal.

00:19:08.640 Right.

00:19:08.860 So, is it a region that overlaps physiologically between the different sensory integration systems?

00:19:14.540 It does.

00:19:14.560 Exactly.

00:19:14.760 It's like a crossroad, so to speak.

00:19:16.600 Right.

00:19:16.860 Is it the same area that's used for silent reading?

00:19:21.160 Silent reading, I'm not sure.

00:19:22.520 Okay.

00:19:22.700 Well, the reason I'm asking about that from what I remember is that the region that we use for silent reading is the space, is the overlap between the auditory and visual cortex.

00:19:33.520 Right.

00:19:33.660 Which makes perfect sense, right?

00:19:35.120 Because we're basically, when we read silently, we're using our eyes as ears.

00:19:39.880 Right, right.

00:19:40.320 Right, right.

00:19:40.820 So, and those overlapping areas.

00:19:43.020 Okay, so this area is a place between many of this, between a variety of the different sensory integration.

00:19:48.200 Between different sensory integration.

00:19:49.620 Yeah.

00:19:49.960 It's a hub for integration.

00:19:51.320 And interestingly, actually, it's also involved in the self-other distinction.

00:19:55.420 So, we have a distinction of the land here, Dr. Peterson over there.

00:19:59.600 And then-

00:20:00.220 That's why we can't tickle ourselves.

00:20:01.820 That's why we can't tickle ourselves, right?

00:20:03.040 But that part of the brain, if you zap that, sometimes the self-other distinction can break down.

00:20:07.640 So, you feel like you're merging into another person.

00:20:09.960 So, that's very interesting.

00:20:10.920 So, it has that function.

00:20:12.480 It also has connections to the frontal lobes, which is involved in, obviously, in empathy and seeing the perspective of somebody else.

00:20:20.000 So, like a theory of mind, what is Dr. Peterson thinking right now?

00:20:25.160 What is his agenda right now?

00:20:26.940 What is his motive?

00:20:28.040 So, that ability is also involved.

00:20:30.480 I've wondered about-

00:20:31.060 And this comes to your psychopathy point, actually.

00:20:33.380 Right, right.

00:20:33.740 Because if you have the temporal parietal junction being involved in body construction, so it's involved in self-constructing a body image, which is expanded in the Robert Hand illusion, but also involved in seeing your perspective as well.

00:20:46.780 So, it's very dynamic.

00:20:48.640 Experiencing your perspective.

00:20:49.840 Experiencing somebody else's perspective.

00:20:51.380 Well, so, so, huh.

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00:22:06.500 One of the things I thought while you were discussing that is the theory of mind, theories of autism, that autistic people lack theory of mind.

00:22:18.600 But I've never really liked that theory because autism is a really fundamental disorder.

00:22:24.340 Like autistic people generally don't like people and they don't like to be touched.

00:22:29.680 That's not conceptual.

00:22:31.600 Like mammals like to be touched.

00:22:34.540 If you don't like to be touched and something's gone wrong at a level that's like under mammal, it's really deep and profound.

00:22:40.800 It's not some, what would you say, alteration in philosophy.

00:22:44.500 But one of the things that is characteristic of autistic people often is that they don't look at people's faces.

00:22:52.220 They don't look at eyes.

00:22:53.020 Right?

00:22:53.440 So then you could imagine it's not exactly a lack of theory of mind.

00:22:58.280 It's that if I don't watch your eyes, I can't infer your aim.

00:23:03.760 If I can't infer your aim, I can't mimic you on my own platform.

00:23:08.940 So I wonder to what degree, I don't know if these experiments have ever been done.

00:23:14.740 I mean, it isn't obvious to me exactly why autistic people don't watch the face.

00:23:20.540 It's very mobile and changing.

00:23:23.960 And that is something that seems to upset autistic people.

00:23:27.940 Like furniture moved in a room that they're familiar with.

00:23:31.540 But I wonder what would happen to their ability to experience empathy if they were focally trained to attend to eyes, to learn to perceive the face properly.

00:23:43.860 They probably could be trained.

00:23:45.120 And so I know Richard Davidson, he's done some studies looking at amygdala activation in autistic children.

00:23:52.320 And they do have an amygdala that's dancing with activity whenever they look at eyes.

00:23:56.440 So they have that.

00:23:57.680 But it's not entirely known why.

00:23:59.860 It probably has to do with the fusiform face area.

00:24:02.340 So there's a region of the brain specialized for recognizing faces.

00:24:06.460 Right, right.

00:24:07.100 And so it has to do with that.

00:24:09.760 But this is...

00:24:10.400 Properly oriented faces.

00:24:11.720 Properly oriented faces, exactly.

00:24:12.900 If they're upside down, it doesn't work.

00:24:14.280 It doesn't matter.

00:24:14.820 Yeah, yeah.

00:24:15.180 And to be frank, this area of the brain is also involved in dry classification of objects.

00:24:19.520 So not only faces.

00:24:21.640 Musical instruments?

00:24:23.040 Probably.

00:24:23.740 I think so.

00:24:24.660 So it's like it goes from...

00:24:26.340 But it's not that...

00:24:27.300 It's more dry.

00:24:28.100 So it goes like a guitar from a piano or something like that.

00:24:32.640 It doesn't have that specification.

00:24:34.080 To have specificity, you have to go higher up in the system.

00:24:38.380 So it has this more banal quality to it.

00:24:42.300 And so obviously in visual processing, you have a hierarchy of where it becomes more complex

00:24:48.020 with each step of envision.

00:24:50.640 And then the highest...

00:24:51.840 So then it goes to a point where you start classifying objects in the world.

00:24:56.000 That's the fusiform face area.

00:24:58.180 And then after that, you go to vernica, which is more sort of meaning and purpose.

00:25:02.920 And then you go to things like the hippocampus, which is involved in things like memory.

00:25:08.180 So it goes from more simple stages of visual processing to dry classification, faces.

00:25:15.060 Dr. Peterson's from Alex, from Kim, knowing different people.

00:25:20.460 So that's that part.

00:25:22.020 And then going to higher centers.

00:25:24.280 So that's kind of that process.

00:25:25.720 So let's go back to Ramachandran.

00:25:27.920 I was really interested in his work for a long while, especially on hemispheric lateralization and neglect.

00:25:36.720 Fascinating.

00:25:37.180 Now, some of the experiments that you described emerged because of Ramachandran's investigations into neglect, right, originally.

00:25:47.140 So neglect, for those of you who are watching and listening, is a very strange phenomenon.

00:25:50.940 So if you have a stroke and you have, correct me if I get any of this wrong because it's been like 20 years since I thought about it, right parietal damage.

00:25:59.660 Yeah, right parietal damage, yeah.

00:26:01.480 You'll lose your perception of the left side of your body.

00:26:05.600 But more than that, this is where it gets very weird.

00:26:09.100 You lose the perception of left itself.

00:26:11.940 And I've tried to imagine it sort of like, you know how everything that's behind you when you're looking forward, it isn't like it's missing.

00:26:21.720 It's just simply not there at a level that's even more profound than missing.

00:26:26.200 And I suspect what happens to people with right parietal damage is that the absence that characterizes your lack of perception of what's behind you extends so that now it's three quarters of the world instead of half.

00:26:40.740 Anyways, weirdly enough, you lose your ability to perceive the left side of everything.

00:26:47.480 And I have no idea how to conceptualize that.

00:26:49.920 But one of the consequences of that is that people with profound neglect will wake up and they'll become aware of their left arm or their left leg after they've had a stroke.

00:27:00.920 And they'll try to throw it out of bed because they think it's someone else's.

00:27:04.860 And if you get them to draw a clock, for example, they'll draw half a clock and cram all the numbers into the right-hand side.

00:27:10.540 And if you give them a plate, they'll eat half the food.

00:27:13.500 I still can't figure this out because how do you think that works?

00:27:17.480 It's like if I pick up my phone, now I look at the phone.

00:27:22.720 So now the phone is foregrounded.

00:27:24.600 But I'm not aware of the left side.

00:27:27.400 Now, if I'm looking at the room now, do I miss the left side of the room?

00:27:33.980 And in the room, do I miss the left side of all the objects?

00:27:37.680 Like I just don't understand how the hell that works perceptually.

00:27:40.700 Right, exactly.

00:27:42.540 They somehow don't attend to it, right?

00:27:44.820 Yeah.

00:27:45.020 They can draw a flower the whole day, but they only draw half of the flower.

00:27:50.320 And you keep telling them and they say, well, I did my best.

00:27:52.720 I'm drawing it.

00:27:53.360 But they can't attend to that part of the brain.

00:27:56.240 Mind you, the parietal lobes is involved in spatial orientation, knowing not only the body

00:28:00.900 where it is in space, but also the spatial layout of the room, right?

00:28:04.900 So it has that component.

00:28:06.540 So it's a really strange disorder.

00:28:09.240 And in order to understand how they are experiencing this at a subjective level is really critical.

00:28:16.140 It's a mystery of sorts.

00:28:18.440 Rabbi Chandran also did experiments with irrigation, didn't he?

00:28:23.200 Irrigation.

00:28:23.900 But before we go there, so the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule, another fancy

00:28:29.900 name there, right?

00:28:30.520 So just above the temporal parietal junction is specifically involved in creating a body

00:28:36.320 image as well.

00:28:37.160 So the TPJ we talked about, taking information from various sensory modalities and then whispering

00:28:43.280 information to the superior parietal lobule, this area just above it, its neighbor, right?

00:28:48.740 It's involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body

00:28:53.600 and not somebody else's body, right?

00:28:55.360 So when people have a stroke to that part of the brain, as you mentioned, they will be

00:29:00.500 will sometimes throw their hands out and say, this arm doesn't belong to me, it belongs

00:29:05.040 to you, or it belongs to my dad, or it belongs to, you know, this person or that person.

00:29:10.200 So literally they will become delusional.

00:29:12.740 You can play chess with them, you can have conversation, nothing, nothing is wrong.

00:29:17.040 Otherwise, they're not delusional, they're not psychotic or anything like that.

00:29:20.780 But after they have the stroke affect this region of the brain, they will just say that

00:29:25.120 this arm doesn't belong to me.

00:29:26.720 Or sometimes they might even say, you might ask them, you say, well, they might deny the

00:29:32.580 paralysis.

00:29:33.380 So that's anosognosia, right?

00:29:35.100 So you say, Joe, your arm is paralyzed.

00:29:38.880 They will say, no, it's not paralyzed.

00:29:40.440 Well, then touch my nose, Joe.

00:29:42.040 And they will say, okay.

00:29:44.280 And they will take the lifeless arm and lift it like this and say, I'm touching it, doctor.

00:29:49.180 I'm touching it.

00:29:49.900 Literally taking it up like that.

00:29:51.300 Yeah, well, it's almost as if, I wondered too, is it a lack of capacity to update as

00:29:58.780 well?

00:29:59.040 Like, it seems to me that what must be happening is they're using a pre-stroke representation

00:30:04.840 of their body.

00:30:05.980 Right.

00:30:06.360 And the tissue that's been destroyed normally would update that.

00:30:10.540 Because I remember too, with Ramachandran's experiments, when he irrigated, this is very

00:30:15.160 weird to everyone, Ramachandran would irrigate the ears, so pour water and cold water in the

00:30:22.220 ears of left ear, if I remember correctly, left ear, of the people who had neglect, and

00:30:27.360 it would make them shudder.

00:30:28.880 Now, that disturbed their vestibular system, which is involved with bodily orientation.

00:30:33.540 And it would shock them into the realization that they had a paralyzed left side.

00:30:39.740 And they would break down emotionally, catastrophically, with the realization that they'd been so badly

00:30:46.500 damaged.

00:30:47.180 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:47.620 But then the effects of the irrigation would wear off, and they'd snap back into this.

00:30:53.520 And that's why I think it's not exactly a delusional state.

00:30:56.180 I think they're stuck with the body representation that existed before the stroke.

00:31:01.140 Right.

00:31:01.340 And what's been eradicated, the systems that could update that, the right hemisphere systems,

00:31:07.780 they don't exist.

00:31:08.740 Right.

00:31:08.920 So there's no way of fixing, there's no straightforward way of fixing it.

00:31:13.840 So one way to approach this, or sort of think about this, is that, you know, the left side

00:31:18.540 of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different functions.

00:31:21.400 I just want to make it clear to the listeners, I know you know this, right?

00:31:24.560 But, so they have different functions.

00:31:26.440 So intriguingly, it's only in the right side, if you have the stroke in the left, they will

00:31:30.680 not have this delusion.

00:31:31.700 That's the funny part, right?

00:31:32.740 So it's only in the right.

00:31:33.760 So this tells you there's something going on about self in the rights that's obviously different.

00:31:38.760 It's an alteration of self.

00:31:39.920 Alteration of self, right?

00:31:40.940 Yeah.

00:31:41.060 Interestingly, if you have a stroke to the prefrontal on the left side, you will develop

00:31:45.980 catastrophic reactions to anything.

00:31:47.680 So you might have a conversation and start crying in the middle of the conversation without

00:31:51.280 any, you know, obvious reason.

00:31:54.360 If you get a stroke in the right prefrontal, you will have become delusionally optimistic.

00:32:00.600 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:01.040 So you'll go out and buy a Rolex if you can't, you know, and get, you know, become manic

00:32:04.760 effectively.

00:32:05.440 So it shows us that the left hemisphere is involved in positive emotion and the right is

00:32:10.800 involved in negative emotion.

00:32:12.100 And in fact, today, when you use things like TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, you might

00:32:17.120 zap the left hemisphere in people with depression and make it more active and you end up with

00:32:22.520 less depression.

00:32:23.680 So the brain has these functions that are very lateralized and highly unique to each side

00:32:30.320 of the brain.

00:32:30.800 Well, so L. Conan Goldberg, I really liked his model of brain lateralization.

00:32:36.260 Yeah.

00:32:37.240 Novelty versus routinization.

00:32:39.000 And I know Ramachandran developed a theory that was either parallel or influenced by Goldberg.

00:32:44.560 I can't remember.

00:32:45.940 But what that would imply, if the right hemisphere is associated with novelty recognition, so it

00:32:53.220 recognizes anomaly.

00:32:54.780 Yeah, that's right.

00:32:55.440 It makes sense that it would signal negative emotion because the first thing that should

00:32:59.340 happen when something you don't expect occurs, because that means the routine you're running

00:33:04.580 doesn't map the territory well, right?

00:33:07.320 Because what I'm trying to do is whenever I run a perceptual routine, I have a goal in

00:33:12.580 mind, and I'm presuming that my perception is adequate to the task.

00:33:17.880 If something anomalous occurs, like if I tell you a joke and you don't find it funny, or maybe

00:33:22.600 I tell you a joke and you get offended by it, then obviously the way I've mapped you is wrong.

00:33:28.120 The way I've mapped the joke is wrong.

00:33:30.100 God only knows how much error I've made.

00:33:32.520 That's going to be signaled by the right hemisphere, anomaly, negative emotion.

00:33:37.920 Okay, then you're going to attend to that.

00:33:40.260 Now, the problem with depressed people is they attend to it catastrophically.

00:33:45.820 So like, say if I'm depressed and I make a mistake like that with you, we're sitting

00:33:51.080 here talking, I make a little joke, and you either don't find it funny or you act offended,

00:33:56.760 even if that only took a brief amount of time.

00:33:59.400 A depressed person would think, well, that didn't go over very well.

00:34:06.380 Obviously, I'm not very funny.

00:34:08.520 Obviously, I don't understand people very, I don't understand this person very well.

00:34:13.700 Oh, that's because I really don't understand anyone very well.

00:34:17.860 I didn't understand people very well in the past, and I don't understand them well, and

00:34:22.560 I'm very unlikely to learn how to do that in the future.

00:34:26.520 People who are unable to learn like that socially, they're not very useful people.

00:34:33.220 Some people are so useless that it would be better if they weren't around at all.

00:34:37.480 I'm one of them.

00:34:38.940 Right?

00:34:39.240 And so I'm wondering if the, so you can imagine the right hemisphere when it's analyzing

00:34:43.840 something novel, opens up that entire space of potential consideration.

00:34:48.520 Right.

00:34:49.540 My suspicions are that the left prefrontal cortex probably puts a box around that continually.

00:34:56.660 Yeah.

00:34:56.860 You know, because the right level of analysis, if I make a joke with you and it falls flat,

00:35:03.740 I should note that, but I shouldn't leap to catastrophic conclusions to begin with.

00:35:09.820 I should just note it, like it should now become a, what would you say, an object of potential

00:35:15.640 future significance.

00:35:16.900 Right.

00:35:17.120 And I've noticed in my clinical practice that people who are well regulated emotionally

00:35:21.940 won't undergo a detailed investigation into an anomaly until it repeats, let's say, three

00:35:28.860 times until there's a pattern.

00:35:30.400 Yeah.

00:35:30.580 Whereas depressed people, they'll leap to the worst possible conclusion almost immediately.

00:35:34.700 And that does look like something like, like that left hemisphere, left prefrontal hemispheric

00:35:39.320 dysfunction that you described.

00:35:40.940 Yeah.

00:35:41.220 Yeah.

00:35:41.500 So you can imagine that the right hemisphere notes the novelty, elicits negative emotion,

00:35:48.200 then opens up the search space, which could be indefinite.

00:35:51.320 Yeah.

00:35:51.480 Like the reason your joke didn't go over might be because you are the kind of unpopular loser

00:35:57.660 who wreaks havoc wherever they go.

00:36:00.160 But that shouldn't be your first conclusion, right?

00:36:03.480 So you lose the left hemisphere system and that whole cataclysmic reaction is dysregulated.

00:36:09.500 I like that.

00:36:10.100 I mean, it makes sense, right?

00:36:11.520 So the right hemisphere is more emotional, big picture oriented, as you say.

00:36:15.860 And it could be that it goes into this infinite loop of possibilities in this big space land

00:36:20.500 where there's no way it can really get fixed.

00:36:22.920 There's no anchoring, right?

00:36:24.240 So that's correct.

00:36:25.120 Okay, so I would say I'd like to know your thoughts about, so I'm very interested in archetypal

00:36:35.280 psychology.

00:36:36.620 Right.

00:36:36.760 And Carl Jung had a very specific hypothesis about dreams, which I really like.

00:36:42.920 And this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today because you're interested

00:36:46.160 in dreams and you've talked about them as simulations.

00:36:49.100 So his idea about dreams, which is a brilliant idea, is that it wasn't hemispherically localized

00:36:55.580 for him because he didn't have the neuroanatomical knowledge.

00:36:58.260 So imagine that you encounter an anomaly.

00:37:02.240 Okay, that's the place.

00:37:05.380 You could say that that exploration that we just described, which is, you know, is there

00:37:10.520 something wrong with me socially?

00:37:12.060 Is it generalizable?

00:37:13.280 Am I a cataclysmic person?

00:37:14.960 All of those are fantasies of a sort, right?

00:37:18.020 And you could think of the fantasies as attempts to remap the anomalous situation.

00:37:24.700 And then, like, a shallow remapping would require just a tiny alteration of fantasy,

00:37:32.280 but a large remapping would mean a whole reconfiguration of character.

00:37:36.500 Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly

00:37:43.020 and that it could be undertaken safely because you could explore different perceptual configurations

00:37:51.380 in the safety of dreams without exposing yourself to any danger.

00:37:54.700 So you could imagine that, so the right hemisphere signifies, detects anomaly and it begins this

00:38:04.760 exploration process, but it's using the landscape of fantasy, which would be simulation, to start

00:38:12.100 to explore.

00:38:15.620 And you could imagine, too, that one of the ways that that might be triangulated would be, imagine

00:38:23.620 that your right hemisphere has aggregated a couple of different anomalies.

00:38:27.800 Right.

00:38:28.760 Not enough to be cataclysmic about them, but to have them sort of there as mysteries.

00:38:34.260 Right.

00:38:34.460 Okay, now you search through the fantasy space, and one of the new fantasies explains, like,

00:38:40.280 several anomalies simultaneously.

00:38:43.240 My guess is that's something like fantasy-related insight.

00:38:47.140 Yeah.

00:38:47.500 Because you'd see that in therapy, you know, where someone will lay out a couple of different

00:38:53.100 problematic scenarios.

00:38:55.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:55.800 And then contemplate the commonalities, and sometimes they'll stumble across something

00:39:02.420 that, oh, I see, I'm looking at this whole thing wrong.

00:39:06.240 It's a restructuring of the theory, and then those three anomalies are all accounted for.

00:39:10.700 Yeah.

00:39:10.840 And that's going to give you a sense of conviction, right?

00:39:13.020 Because now you have a theory that accounts for the new information, and the dream is part

00:39:17.660 of that process.

00:39:18.300 It's the birthplace of that, the birthplace of that re-novelization of conception.

00:39:24.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:25.000 No, that's interesting.

00:39:25.820 So I think definitely, in terms of using the right hemisphere in dreams, there's got to

00:39:31.260 be something there.

00:39:32.100 So I'm not sure how much this has been explored in terms of the right hemisphere only.

00:39:35.660 Yeah.

00:39:35.940 But that's definitely because dreams is so much about emotional updating and emotional creating

00:39:42.020 a sense of, making sense of an emotional landscape, right?

00:39:47.180 So in dreams, for example, it's heavily populated by people, right?

00:39:51.060 Right, right.

00:39:51.880 REM dreams, for example.

00:39:53.100 So each night, you cycle through different stages of sleep, stage one, two, three, and

00:39:57.980 then you have deep sleep, and then you have REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, where your

00:40:02.580 eyes go from side to side.

00:40:04.380 During this stage of sleep, you're paralyzed from head to toe, so you have structures in the

00:40:08.040 brain called the pons and the medulla in the lower part of the brain that paralyzes your

00:40:12.100 entire body so you won't act out your dreams and hurt yourself, right?

00:40:14.920 So this is, so I want to lay the foundation before I get to your point, right?

00:40:18.400 Yeah, and that sets up the stage for exploration without risk.

00:40:21.040 Right, so now you can engage in this laboratory of testing, a testing space without any fatal

00:40:28.160 consequences, right?

00:40:29.180 You can do whatever you want and you don't hurt your sleeping partner or yourself.

00:40:32.420 So you have that paralysis, first of all.

00:40:34.500 You're in a physiological straitjacket, so to speak, right?

00:40:37.180 Yeah, and you can explore deeply enough so that you can actually reshape not just your

00:40:41.660 conceptions, but your perceptions, and that idea accounts for some of the bizarreness of

00:40:47.340 dreams.

00:40:47.880 Like, if you're exploring at the level of perception, it's going to seem bizarre, obviously.

00:40:54.040 So I just want to sort of go through this.

00:40:56.920 So first of all, you're paralyzed in REM sleep, right?

00:40:59.900 From head to toe, you can't move.

00:41:01.440 Your eyelids can move because of a different circuit, by the way.

00:41:03.960 I just want to add that.

00:41:04.640 So this is a different circuit for the eyelids.

00:41:06.200 It's now, interestingly, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic centers tucked behind

00:41:10.680 your ears become hyperactive.

00:41:12.440 So you have that.

00:41:13.600 Your prefrontal lobes, and the CEO of the brain, becomes less active for some reason.

00:41:19.080 So that part of the brain dials down, right?

00:41:21.880 Motor regions...

00:41:22.620 So restriction of inhibition?

00:41:25.460 Restriction of inhibition.

00:41:26.660 And so everything in the world becomes less focused, right?

00:41:31.640 So you can...

00:41:32.200 Less constrained?

00:41:33.000 Less constrained, right?

00:41:34.000 So you don't think in a logical, straightforward, ABC-like manner, right?

00:41:38.340 So if I wake somebody up from REM sleep and say, well, and tell him the word sun, he will

00:41:44.280 think of chair instead of moon, right?

00:41:47.560 So he doesn't think in a logical, serial manner.

00:41:50.500 He will think in an unrelated manner.

00:41:52.080 In fact, he will be more likely to say sun and chair versus when somebody's awake and

00:41:56.340 I ask him, well, what do you think of now when I say sun?

00:41:59.300 They might say moon.

00:42:00.060 So they are more likely to relate unrelated words.

00:42:04.560 So they think in a...

00:42:05.360 Which is what you'd expect if it was an exploratory process.

00:42:08.200 Exploratory process, right?

00:42:09.280 So the prefrontal lobes turn down, right?

00:42:12.220 The emotional part of the brain dial up, right?

00:42:14.820 So you have that.

00:42:15.840 You're paralyzed from head to toe.

00:42:17.220 Now, this is a perfect cocktail for strange things.

00:42:20.400 Not only that, but also the chemicals in your brain that have to do with logical and linear

00:42:25.920 thinking noradrenaline, you have adrenaline in your body when you're anxious or you're

00:42:30.060 excited.

00:42:31.700 You have adrenaline.

00:42:33.040 You have noradrenaline in the brain, but also in the body.

00:42:35.560 But noradrenaline is a cousin chemical of adrenaline.

00:42:39.400 Now, this chemical...

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00:43:45.940 It turns out there's a structure in the brain, in the brainstem, called the locus coeruleus.

00:43:55.300 Coeruleus.

00:43:55.780 Yes, exactly.

00:43:56.620 Your pronunciation is brilliant.

00:43:58.120 32,000 cells pitch black in the brainstem.

00:44:01.680 They will stop, you know, secreting noradrenaline during REM sleep.

00:44:07.420 So that means your way of thinking about the world is unfocused.

00:44:11.760 It's like spacey, it's creative, right?

00:44:15.480 Yeah, unconstrained.

00:44:17.100 Unconstrained by prior conviction.

00:44:19.340 Absolutely.

00:44:19.820 Or prior learning.

00:44:20.640 Right.

00:44:20.860 So this is a perfect cocktail now for craziness.

00:44:24.320 The vestibular part of your brain become hyperactive.

00:44:27.120 You know, the central motor region of the brain that has to do with automatic sort of behavior

00:44:30.960 become hyperactive.

00:44:33.240 Even though they're paralyzed.

00:44:34.440 Even though you're paralyzed.

00:44:35.580 So that's why dreams, you can sometimes feel like you're running, but you can't control your

00:44:39.440 legs.

00:44:39.720 You feel like some monster is chasing you, but you can't move or you feel like you're

00:44:45.300 controlled like a puppet on a string.

00:44:48.160 And that's because the parts of the brain that has to do with automatic movements, sporadically,

00:44:53.240 the neurons, they're fire.

00:44:54.420 So you cannot control your movement.

00:44:56.680 So you have all that.

00:44:58.080 And then you have the emotions.

00:45:00.240 And it seems like then it's just perfect for what you're saying then that the right hemisphere

00:45:05.220 type of thinking of exploration and emotion is just, it's hyperactive.

00:45:11.800 Right, so it's a safe place for simulation, for exploratory simulation that can be so extreme

00:45:18.820 that it can verge on the bizarre.

00:45:20.540 Yeah.

00:45:20.900 But why not?

00:45:21.780 Why not explore the outer limits under safe conditions?

00:45:24.780 Well, I've also, I remember that if you wake people up from REM sleep, the most common

00:45:30.320 emotion they report is anxiety.

00:45:32.260 And that makes sense too, if you think about this as part of the, what would you say, the

00:45:39.100 reconfiguration in the face of novelty process.

00:45:43.600 Yeah.

00:45:43.980 Because the most appropriate first response to something anomalous is anxiety.

00:45:51.420 Yeah.

00:45:51.580 It's to, because technically what anxiety does is stop the operation of, it stops current

00:45:58.380 operation.

00:45:59.000 Right.

00:45:59.280 So that's like a prey, it's like a prey animal response.

00:46:03.200 Yeah.

00:46:03.420 Freeze.

00:46:04.020 Yeah.

00:46:04.240 Why?

00:46:05.000 Because what you're doing has either not worked or exposed you to danger.

00:46:09.080 So now you're not where you thought you were and what you're doing isn't doing what

00:46:15.200 you thought it was.

00:46:15.960 Yeah.

00:46:16.040 Okay.

00:46:16.480 Now what?

00:46:17.360 Right.

00:46:17.980 Stop.

00:46:18.680 Yeah.

00:46:19.360 That's anxiety.

00:46:20.180 Then, then what?

00:46:22.020 Then explore.

00:46:22.920 So like if you throw a rat into a new cage, the first thing it does is freeze.

00:46:28.460 Right.

00:46:29.000 Okay.

00:46:29.360 Then what it starts to do is to look around, I guess to begin with, it doesn't even want

00:46:33.600 to move its eyes, right?

00:46:34.740 Because it doesn't want to attack, attract the attention of a predator.

00:46:38.220 So it freezes and crouches down.

00:46:40.200 Right.

00:46:40.380 And then if nothing additionally terrible happens, it starts to thaw and starts to look and starts

00:46:47.660 to sniff.

00:46:48.600 Yeah.

00:46:48.840 Right.

00:46:49.040 And then it'll start to explore and remap the territory.

00:46:52.420 Yeah.

00:46:52.840 But that seems to be what's happening at the dream level conceptually.

00:46:57.280 Yeah.

00:46:57.380 So you imagine that you're encountering a landscape of anomaly or novelty that's signified by the

00:47:02.760 right hemisphere.

00:47:03.600 Mm-hmm.

00:47:03.840 The emotion that's elicited is anxiety with a subtext of curiosity.

00:47:08.780 Right.

00:47:09.160 Right.

00:47:09.360 Because both of those two things would be at play.

00:47:11.480 Yeah.

00:47:11.640 And then the fantasy landscape can be elaborated so that even perception itself can be reconfigured

00:47:18.020 because of the error.

00:47:20.140 If you're betrayed by someone, you could say something like, I can't even look at you the

00:47:25.120 same way.

00:47:25.700 Yeah.

00:47:25.860 Right.

00:47:26.300 Right.

00:47:26.400 And that means that the betrayal has forced a reconception so profound that perception

00:47:32.840 itself has been altered.

00:47:34.100 Like, you could find someone attractive.

00:47:36.660 This happens often when people are dating.

00:47:38.840 You could find someone attractive or unattractive on first meeting.

00:47:42.580 Yeah.

00:47:42.720 And then as you get to know them, maybe you thought they were attractive to begin with

00:47:47.360 and that just goes away.

00:47:48.660 Yeah.

00:47:49.060 Or you felt that they weren't that attractive to begin with, but as you get to know their

00:47:53.340 character, let's say, then the perception itself shifts.

00:47:57.360 It's not merely the theory of mind or the conception you have of them, right?

00:48:02.480 Yeah.

00:48:02.560 You literally look at them differently.

00:48:04.460 Maybe it's because in part you actually see, I don't know, if you reconfigure the, what

00:48:11.460 would be the patterns of interaction in their face.

00:48:14.280 Right.

00:48:14.700 You know, like someone graceful, for example, you're obviously perceiving something like

00:48:18.400 a gestalt.

00:48:19.320 Yeah.

00:48:19.500 And there's something charming and beautiful about that.

00:48:21.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:21.940 My guess is if you see a person of high character across time, you can see their integration.

00:48:27.440 Yeah.

00:48:27.640 And that that would make them, that would allow you to perceive their attractiveness in a

00:48:32.040 way that you might not have been able to do superficially.

00:48:34.600 Absolutely.

00:48:35.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:35.440 That's very interesting.

00:48:36.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:36.880 Well, to go on back to the whole dream thing, right?

00:48:39.720 So one of the things is that it's populated by a lot of people and that's, again, right

00:48:44.620 hemisphere is actually involved in decoding social, like facial expressions, for example.

00:48:50.400 So that's one thing that obviously autistic people have problems with.

00:48:54.240 But for some reason, there's a lot of faith, there's a lot of people, a lot of interactions

00:48:57.800 in dreams.

00:48:58.520 So you interact a lot with a lot of people.

00:49:00.280 And usually, actually, these interactions are negative.

00:49:02.860 And this shows us that for some reason, it's advantageous to treat me of negative things

00:49:09.240 because you're more likely to train your circuits in your brain to be able to, so to put it

00:49:16.980 shortly, like if I have an encounter with a serial killer in my dream and I sort of overcome

00:49:22.780 that, I'm not killed by it, right?

00:49:24.900 By that serial killer.

00:49:25.920 Yeah.

00:49:26.080 I can navigate that situation in an appropriate manner.

00:49:29.420 I'm more likely to survive in real life.

00:49:31.560 So it shows you that dreams has a lot to do with survival and training the circuits in

00:49:36.960 the brain, making them solidify the ones that can help me survive more.

00:49:40.880 So that's a huge part of it.

00:49:42.180 Right.

00:49:42.500 Well, and it would make sense, too, that what you should...

00:49:45.920 Look, the more sophisticated you are in your social perception, the less likely even encounters

00:49:54.660 with dangerous people are to go wrong.

00:49:57.380 Yep.

00:49:59.020 I'll tell you a story about that.

00:50:00.880 Yep.

00:50:02.480 So I had this landlord when I lived in Montreal, and he was an ex-president of Hell's Angels

00:50:08.680 in Montreal.

00:50:10.120 And he'd been in prison, and he was a rough guy.

00:50:14.120 Yep.

00:50:14.260 And we couldn't communicate that easily because he spoke joual French, which is very hard

00:50:20.320 to understand, even if you're French.

00:50:22.460 And I spoke English.

00:50:23.880 And there was quite a big class difference between us.

00:50:27.400 And I was from Western Canada, and she was from Eastern Canada.

00:50:30.460 And so...

00:50:31.460 But we got along, you know.

00:50:33.060 He lived right beside me.

00:50:34.720 And to the degree we could communicate, we did.

00:50:38.060 And he did some artwork.

00:50:40.100 He worked in neon, as it turned out.

00:50:42.440 And I bought some of his pieces.

00:50:43.660 And we kind of got to know each other insofar as we could.

00:50:47.060 Now, the problem...

00:50:48.500 His name was Paulo.

00:50:50.500 The problem was that now and then he would go on a bender, and he could drink, well,

00:50:56.580 like an unlimited amount of alcohol over a three-day period, like 90 beer, you know?

00:51:01.060 Like, and he would drink himself to a point where it was not even obvious how conscious

00:51:09.080 he was, but he was still upright.

00:51:10.720 Right.

00:51:11.000 And then he'd drink up all his money.

00:51:13.680 And then he developed a habit of coming to my door at like three in the morning to sell

00:51:17.980 me like a toaster or a microwave because he needed money because he wanted to keep drinking.

00:51:23.140 And so I did that a couple of times.

00:51:25.080 He showed up at like three in the morning.

00:51:26.640 Now, he's a big guy, and he's tough.

00:51:29.840 I went out once to a bar with him.

00:51:33.160 He put me on the back of his motorcycle, which is a 750 Honda, if I remember correctly.

00:51:37.560 He put his wife's helmet on my head, which is his little tiny helmet, and away we went.

00:51:41.220 He said, if the cops come after me, I'm not stopping, just so you know.

00:51:45.260 Yeah.

00:51:45.460 It's like, well, that was the beginning of a very interesting evening.

00:51:47.980 And he got into all sorts of fights at the bars because people would come up and like

00:51:52.380 challenge him, essentially.

00:51:54.780 Stupid people.

00:51:55.780 Yeah.

00:51:55.940 And that didn't go well for them.

00:51:57.380 So he was touchy.

00:51:59.400 Let's put it that way.

00:52:01.040 Well, I talked to my wife about this because she didn't like the fact that I was giving

00:52:06.880 Paulo money for his like toasters and so forth because she knew that he was trying to quit

00:52:11.440 drinking.

00:52:12.100 Yeah.

00:52:12.400 So, and then it also scared her that he would come over like at three in the morning.

00:52:16.080 So one day he came over at three in the morning and he was standing there sort of swaying

00:52:22.460 and looking at me.

00:52:23.740 And I had to tell him that I wasn't going to give him any more money starting then.

00:52:28.620 And I had to tell him why.

00:52:30.340 And so I said, look, we know you're trying to quit drinking.

00:52:35.900 And when you come over and I buy your toaster, then you go and drink.

00:52:40.980 And I can't do that anymore because it's not good.

00:52:43.680 And he looked at me for like 10 seconds and I know why he was looking at me.

00:52:47.580 He was looking at me to see if I was playing moral superiority games.

00:52:53.620 Yeah.

00:52:54.200 Yeah.

00:52:54.480 In which case the interaction wouldn't have gone very well.

00:52:57.760 Yeah.

00:52:58.200 Right.

00:52:58.480 And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because as your social perception becomes

00:53:04.420 more sophisticated, the probability that you can navigate well in a complex and potentially

00:53:10.380 dangerous situation increases radically.

00:53:12.620 Right.

00:53:12.900 So if you can practice that in a dream.

00:53:14.900 Yes.

00:53:15.160 Now, that should mean that you should concentrate on elements of social behavior that didn't

00:53:20.920 go your way that you don't understand.

00:53:23.140 Right.

00:53:23.460 And that would take you into a landscape of, well, hard to tell, but possibly into a landscape

00:53:28.280 of malevolence.

00:53:29.060 That would explain, for example, why people go and watch horror movies and movies about

00:53:33.560 serial killers and so forth.

00:53:35.100 It's like you want to sharpen yourself up.

00:53:38.520 And that's a good point.

00:53:39.460 And so the fact is that, you know, when you dream that your brain takes you on this exploration,

00:53:44.780 right?

00:53:45.020 And it looks at various social scenarios, for example, that evoke emotions in you.

00:53:50.060 So it takes, you know, Dr. Peterson and put him in a room with Kim and Joe and see how

00:53:56.420 he reacts.

00:53:56.920 If the reaction is not an emotionally evocative one, it will literally take you and show you

00:54:03.160 another scenario until it hits on a scene that evokes your emotion that gets you riled

00:54:08.400 up and then it explores that.

00:54:10.040 So it has to be, okay.

00:54:11.100 It has, yeah, it has to have that element and then it will go down that path more and

00:54:15.700 explore it more.

00:54:16.640 It'll say, this is interesting.

00:54:18.280 Okay, I see.

00:54:18.520 So it presents scenarios.

00:54:19.940 Exactly.

00:54:20.720 Until one evokes a limbic reaction.

00:54:23.400 Absolutely.

00:54:23.980 Now, but that, but is it also searching for emotional reactions that are primarily negative

00:54:31.600 or is it, is it intensity?

00:54:33.540 Not necessarily.

00:54:34.260 So it does, there's a, there's a huge dopaminergic aspects to dreams.

00:54:38.620 So it's been shown that if you have a lesion to a part of the brain, the inferior parietal

00:54:42.500 lobule, again, it's a region just below the superior parietal lobule is involved in

00:54:46.480 creating images, but also it's, so if you have a stroke there, for example, you won't

00:54:50.420 dream or the, the, the, the mesolimbic dopamine centers is a fancy name for the part

00:54:54.940 of the brain where you have dopamine going to the prefrontal cortex.

00:54:58.180 If you have a lesion there, you won't dream as well.

00:55:00.620 So bliss and dopamine, as well as images is involved deeply in, in, in.

00:55:05.900 Okay.

00:55:06.140 So it's emotional intensity and valence.

00:55:08.080 Intensity valence.

00:55:09.000 Yeah.

00:55:09.120 Right.

00:55:09.360 But it's tilted somewhat towards the negative.

00:55:11.600 Tilted somewhat towards the negative.

00:55:12.680 We are generally as human beings tilted somewhat toward the negative.

00:55:15.260 Absolutely.

00:55:15.700 Yeah.

00:55:16.140 So, okay.

00:55:17.240 Okay.

00:55:17.580 So your brain is playing with various scenarios.

00:55:21.380 Absolutely.

00:55:21.740 And if one evokes an emotional response, so you see, the thing is, if it evokes a negative

00:55:28.840 emotional response, that would indicate that your adaptation is weak at that point, right?

00:55:33.040 Because you're much more likely to be anxious about a situation that you haven't mastered.

00:55:38.860 Right.

00:55:39.100 Okay.

00:55:39.380 So you could imagine that the evocation of negative emotion is indication of weakness

00:55:47.080 in conceptual structure.

00:55:48.660 Yeah.

00:55:48.920 Okay.

00:55:49.140 So now the dream is playing with various scenarios around that.

00:55:52.180 Yeah.

00:55:52.460 Yeah.

00:55:52.580 Yeah.

00:55:53.900 Evocation point.

00:55:54.940 Yeah.

00:55:55.420 So one, it's very interesting.

00:55:56.700 So one thing that I want to make clear as well, it's that, you know, obviously, as you

00:56:00.400 know, there's a corpus callosum that, that, that there's a bridge between the two hemispheres,

00:56:04.300 allowing the two hemisphere to, to, to communicate.

00:56:06.360 Right.

00:56:06.780 So you have the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.

00:56:09.160 So these hemisphere, if, if you literally cut it, there won't, you'll have two consciousness

00:56:13.820 in one person.

00:56:14.760 Right.

00:56:15.140 So it seems like dreams is also right hemispheric dominance for another reason, because the

00:56:21.280 things you will see in your dreams are, are like poetry, right?

00:56:25.920 It's visual metaphors that you can't explain in language.

00:56:28.900 Right.

00:56:29.280 So I can, it's like going through an art museum and looking at things, but in a very poetically,

00:56:34.460 beautifully, uh, non-language way, right?

00:56:38.440 So you can't describe it necessarily.

00:56:40.060 And obviously the left hemisphere, the regions of the Wernicke and stuff like that is involved

00:56:44.020 in language and understanding language.

00:56:46.460 But it seems like, like the poetic aspect of dreams is very much a right hemispheric,

00:56:52.240 uh, you know, thing as well.

00:56:54.440 That, that should be associated with both the novelty routinization dichotomy.

00:57:00.480 Mm-hmm.

00:57:00.980 So the question is, well, how do you approach something that's novel?

00:57:04.700 Well, if it's novel, if it produces anomaly, if you don't understand it, you haven't encapsulated

00:57:09.660 it in language.

00:57:10.460 Yeah.

00:57:10.700 It's not routinized enough so that you have a propositional description of it.

00:57:15.980 Yeah.

00:57:16.200 So you can imagine that during the day when you're conscious, you're running well routinized,

00:57:23.640 propositionalized routines.

00:57:25.420 Right.

00:57:26.600 But some of them don't work out as well as others.

00:57:30.760 Right.

00:57:31.100 Okay.

00:57:31.460 So now imagine the right hemisphere is sitting in the background, mapping the failures.

00:57:36.560 Yeah.

00:57:36.840 Okay.

00:57:37.100 So now you have like a collection of failures.

00:57:39.180 It's something like that.

00:57:40.320 Now it's nighttime.

00:57:41.620 You shut down the propositional side and you open up the metaphoric side and it's starting

00:57:46.860 to explore that land.

00:57:48.420 It's exploring.

00:57:49.440 I think it's exploring unexplored territory fundamentally.

00:57:52.660 That's the best way to conceptualize it.

00:57:54.540 But it's also like the land, it's the same as the landscape of insufficient adaptation.

00:57:59.840 Right.

00:58:00.440 And so, and that should be associated with negative emotion.

00:58:05.320 Right.

00:58:05.640 Right.

00:58:06.300 And now the question would be, what would be the utility of those metaphoric fantasies?

00:58:12.020 Well, part of that's, okay.

00:58:14.840 So imagine that around any perception, there's a cloud of connotations, right?

00:58:24.740 That are first order.

00:58:25.980 We already talked about that.

00:58:27.360 So like a first order connotation for you would, if I saw you would obviously be male.

00:58:33.260 Right.

00:58:33.700 So, and then imagine that outside of that, there's second order connotations and third

00:58:39.360 order and finally things that are so distinct that they don't seem to bear any conceptual

00:58:43.540 relationship.

00:58:44.260 Right.

00:58:44.700 Well, as you open up the metaphoric landscape, that connotation width should expand.

00:58:51.220 Right.

00:58:51.480 And then you could imagine that what you're trying to do is to explore a new network of

00:58:58.500 connotations that would map the territory more effectively, right?

00:59:04.000 Yeah.

00:59:04.340 I think, and I think what is also interesting about dreams and that whole thing is that

00:59:08.660 it seems to tap into a circuitry that's more mystical than the circuitry that we normally

00:59:14.060 tap into.

00:59:15.280 So by mystical, I mean, it seems like some of the receptors involved in mystical experiences

00:59:22.060 when you take psilocybin and things like mescaline and DMT and stuff like that, the serotonin

00:59:28.040 2A receptors.

00:59:29.420 So one theory actually talks about how, so obviously serotonin is another neurochemical in the brain

00:59:36.120 that the part of the brain that produces that, the dorsal raffin nucleus, also shuts down

00:59:40.860 its production of serotonin.

00:59:42.180 So you don't have serotonin in your dreams either in REM sleep.

00:59:45.280 Um, and, and so you end up in this space without noradrenaline and without serotonin, but it

00:59:50.540 seems like for some reason that the serotonin 2A receptors become, become dialed up.

00:59:56.320 So that part of the serotonin 2A receptors become tickled for some reasons.

01:00:00.160 And the, you know, sometimes-

01:00:01.060 And that is also happening in a psilocybin experience.

01:00:03.980 It also happened in psilocybin experience.

01:00:05.740 Right.

01:00:05.980 So that accounts in part for the overlap between the mystical experience and the dream experience.

01:00:10.160 The mystical experiences and the dream experiences.

01:00:12.140 So there's something there that is, that's hyper-cosmic in dreams that you can't, it's

01:00:17.400 ineffable.

01:00:17.980 You can't describe it in language and even, and it's highly personal and it has salience

01:00:22.700 for you.

01:00:23.340 So one thing that I noticed about dream is a lot of people come and talk to me about

01:00:26.880 their dreams all the time.

01:00:27.840 They'll go, Baland, you know, I had this dream.

01:00:29.660 I saw this and that, and they're, they're, they're very emotional about it.

01:00:32.780 And it's highly personal and cosmic.

01:00:34.360 Right.

01:00:35.280 But, you know, I kind of go, oh, that's interesting, but it's not really that interesting, but

01:00:40.040 it has that significance for you as a person.

01:00:42.400 And that's kind of about the dream thing.

01:00:43.940 It's, it's, it has personal salience, um, kind of the, the type of personal and salience

01:00:48.760 salience you can get from a psilocybin experience.

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01:02:07.240 Okay, so what do you think account?

01:02:10.460 Okay, so you said something paradoxical about that, right?

01:02:13.240 That it's a weird combination of intensely personal and cosmic, which means intensely universal.

01:02:19.480 It brings those two things together.

01:02:21.160 That's a strange conjunction because those two things are actually quite far apart.

01:02:26.040 The more personal something is, in some ways, the less cosmic, the less universal it is.

01:02:30.800 But the dream unites those two things.

01:02:32.460 It kind of unites them, yeah.

01:02:33.760 So I wonder, see, an archetype in some ways bridges the gap between the personal and the

01:02:41.040 cosmic.

01:02:43.300 So here's an example of something you can do with a dream that's very effective.

01:02:48.220 Yep.

01:02:48.720 So imagine that you have a client who's chased by something awful in a dream, and that repeats.

01:02:59.760 Yep.

01:03:00.380 And then you ask them what they do, and they say, well, I run away or I try to hide.

01:03:04.540 Yeah.

01:03:05.080 Okay.

01:03:05.680 So then you say to them, well, here's what we're going to do instead.

01:03:09.080 I want you to sit there, close your eyes, then make them relax so that they get into a state

01:03:13.320 where they can visualize, right?

01:03:14.680 Say, now, bring that dream to mind.

01:03:16.940 Yeah.

01:03:17.520 Okay, now, close your eyes, bring the dream to mind.

01:03:20.980 Now, tell me what's happening.

01:03:22.900 Yeah.

01:03:23.000 So they'll replay the dream and say, now, okay, now, at the end, instead of running,

01:03:28.040 tell me what happens if you turn around and ask the criminal or the sadist or the monster

01:03:37.960 what it's up to, or what happens if you approach it instead of running.

01:03:44.760 Right.

01:03:44.960 Well, and then the dream will continue in their imagination most of the time.

01:03:49.660 And generally, what occurs in a consequence of that is that dream goes away.

01:03:55.060 Now, I think the reason for that, and I think this is akin to this bridging of the gap between

01:03:59.320 the personal and the cosmic is because their personal response to being chased is to run

01:04:06.500 Right.

01:04:07.000 and hide.

01:04:07.840 So they're prey animals.

01:04:09.360 Yeah.

01:04:10.180 Now, if you transform that into voluntary explorers,

01:04:17.180 then what you're doing is you're inculcating an element of the hero myth into the dream

01:04:25.980 landscape.

01:04:26.440 It's like, no, the right strategy when you're threatened isn't to run.

01:04:30.840 The right strategy is to turn voluntarily and to commence the process of exploration.

01:04:35.600 That is what a hero myth is, by the way.

01:04:37.460 That's very interesting.

01:04:37.840 So let's go on that whole thing, right?

01:04:39.520 So the monster in your dream represents your hyperactive amygdala and the limbic centers

01:04:45.300 of the brain being hyperactive, up to 30% more active in the dream landscape, right?

01:04:49.480 Okay.

01:04:49.700 So that's that overplay of emotion.

01:04:51.620 That's the overplay of the emotion.

01:04:52.920 And by the way, the hippocampus also turns out the memory part of the brain is also hyperactive

01:04:57.040 in the dream REM world.

01:04:59.240 So you have the memory spilling in into this narrative about a monster chasing you, right?

01:05:04.500 So you give it identity, you give it name, you give it, you know, all these negative

01:05:09.200 features.

01:05:09.820 It's okay.

01:05:10.120 So you're, you're contextualizing the emotion.

01:05:12.440 You contextualize it based on the hyperactive hippocampus.

01:05:15.540 Yeah.

01:05:15.940 Then it's chasing you and you can't run away because we said the motor, central motor generator

01:05:20.640 of your brainstem is making it very hard for you to move.

01:05:24.040 So you don't have the, so movement normally occurs in the motor cortex of your brain that

01:05:28.280 gives you voluntary movement.

01:05:29.860 But because that part of the brain can compete with the central motor, automatic part of the

01:05:35.140 brain firing and making your behaviors all, you know, sporadic and automatic.

01:05:40.000 So you can't get away.

01:05:41.400 Now, what you said was interesting.

01:05:42.760 You said, if you turn around and approach the monster, the monster will be, it will become

01:05:48.200 diminished in strength.

01:05:49.420 And that's interesting because we know in the real world, if you walk simply by walking,

01:05:54.980 you will turn down the activity of the amygdala because you're telling your, you're telling

01:05:58.840 your brain or your, yourself that you are approaching, you're engaging in approach behavior instead

01:06:04.120 of withdrawal behavior.

01:06:05.240 Yeah, right, right.

01:06:05.440 Which, which puts you, see, that shift your identity in relationship to the thing that's

01:06:10.120 chasing you, right?

01:06:10.860 You're changing and saying, now I'm no longer the prey here.

01:06:13.960 I'm the predator.

01:06:14.760 I am the one that is being, that, that is doing the haunting, you know?

01:06:19.020 And so in that sense, it would make sense that the monster would vanish.

01:06:25.020 So that's very interesting, but I also want to touch on that whole, on monsters, since

01:06:29.000 we're on the topic of monsters.

01:06:30.620 So there's a condition called sleep paralysis, and I talk about it in my, my Peterson Academy

01:06:35.320 course.

01:06:35.880 There's a whole lecture on sleep paralysis.

01:06:37.860 So are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

01:06:40.380 I experienced sleep paralysis repeatedly.

01:06:42.960 Is that right?

01:06:43.420 For years.

01:06:44.360 Yeah.

01:06:44.540 Especially if I slept on my back.

01:06:46.520 That doesn't happen anymore, but.

01:06:48.040 Okay.

01:06:48.440 But I'm very familiar with sleep paralysis.

01:06:50.860 Do you see any monsters?

01:06:52.060 Can you explain?

01:06:52.720 I'm curious.

01:06:53.320 Most of my experience was being unable to move and no, I knew what sleep paralysis was.

01:07:04.500 So even when it happened to be in my dreams, usually my experience was that I, something

01:07:11.300 was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak.

01:07:14.120 And I knew I had to wake myself up.

01:07:16.180 Like I tried to throw myself off the bed.

01:07:18.120 Sometimes I could yell to my wife.

01:07:20.320 I mean, literally in my life, I, I would yell and she'd have to come and shake me and then

01:07:24.400 I'd wake up.

01:07:25.120 But no, I didn't have the monster element to it.

01:07:28.820 Okay.

01:07:29.060 But I had clients who did in sleep paralysis.

01:07:32.380 I think the reason that didn't happen is because I knew what was happening.

01:07:35.260 Yeah.

01:07:35.540 Right.

01:07:35.820 So the, the monster too, just out of curiosity.

01:07:39.280 So you could imagine that with this interplay between the hippocampus and the amygdala, if

01:07:44.400 the emotional systems are more active.

01:07:46.480 Okay.

01:07:46.900 So now there's lots of emotions being triggered.

01:07:48.980 Yeah.

01:07:49.140 Now the memory systems are interacting with those emotions.

01:07:52.100 They're going to flesh them out.

01:07:53.680 Yeah.

01:07:53.900 Right.

01:07:54.420 So here's the emotion.

01:07:55.900 Here's the thing that would be most likely to manifest that.

01:07:58.920 So if it's a panoply of emotions, it would be an amalgam of emotion evoking stimuli.

01:08:05.260 And there's no difference between an amalgam of emotion, eliciting stimuli and a monster.

01:08:11.200 Right.

01:08:11.420 Those are the same thing.

01:08:12.480 Same thing.

01:08:12.680 That's what a monster is.

01:08:14.060 Yeah.

01:08:14.100 Yeah.

01:08:14.260 Right.

01:08:14.760 So a monster is your worst nightmare come to life.

01:08:17.240 It's your worst nightmare, right?

01:08:18.500 It's whatever you dread, whatever is lurking in your unconscious mind, that's coming to

01:08:22.540 the, to the fore, right?

01:08:24.120 And so during sleep paralysis, interestingly, you didn't have any of the monsters, but it

01:08:29.020 turns out about 40% of people will see monsters.

01:08:32.820 Sleep paralysis is a terrifying experience.

01:08:34.800 So you have this REM paralysis, obviously you're paralyzed from head to toe during REM

01:08:38.440 sleep.

01:08:38.780 You're dreaming away.

01:08:40.240 Occasionally for some people, they might start feeling like they can, you know, they can see

01:08:45.220 their surroundings.

01:08:46.260 So they might open their eyes and then they realize, my God, I'm paralyzed.

01:08:50.000 I can't move.

01:08:50.600 I can't speak.

01:08:51.780 And it's terrifying at this point.

01:08:53.900 And then they look around and I had one of these experiences.

01:08:57.420 So let me tell you about my own experience.

01:08:59.340 So I was sleeping in my room as a teenager in Copenhagen.

01:09:02.320 And I grew up in a ghetto-like neighborhood in Copenhagen.

01:09:05.820 And I was lying there sleeping.

01:09:07.780 And then I woke up paralyzed, unable to move or speak.

01:09:11.100 And then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me.

01:09:15.820 And it came closer and closer until it was on my chest, strangling me.

01:09:20.380 And I saw my legs flying up and down.

01:09:23.700 And mind you, at this point, I was like, is this real?

01:09:27.040 It was as crisp as this conversation you and I are having right now.

01:09:29.780 What did the monster look like?

01:09:30.920 Well, I'll tell you.

01:09:31.600 Okay.

01:09:31.740 So at this point, I just saw my legs flying up and down.

01:09:35.940 And it was choking me.

01:09:37.480 And I couldn't do anything.

01:09:40.160 It was literally trying to kill me.

01:09:42.340 Now, on this occasion, I didn't see a monster.

01:09:44.500 I didn't see a monster on this occasion.

01:09:45.740 But I've had sleep paralysis since then on many occasions.

01:09:48.680 And I've had various monsters.

01:09:51.000 So I've seen, like one was Colonel Gaddafi, you know him, eccentric figure.

01:09:54.880 He was hovering over me when I was living in Egypt for a period of time in my early undergraduate years.

01:10:00.820 I was a little bit out there.

01:10:02.040 And I saw during the Libyan Revolution, of all people, Gaddafi was in my bedroom, hovering over me, you know, attacking me.

01:10:10.640 So that can happen during sleep paralysis.

01:10:12.440 And that was...

01:10:12.980 So he's the monster of the oppressive patriarchy coming to visit.

01:10:16.880 Yes, absolutely.

01:10:18.180 My wife had a dream like that about Richard Nixon dressed in a general's outfit.

01:10:23.980 So he was another figure.

01:10:26.580 Like, you could think about him as the monstrous form of the patriarchy.

01:10:29.380 Yeah, yeah.

01:10:29.900 My wife kissed him.

01:10:31.440 Okay.

01:10:32.040 Right, right.

01:10:32.780 So that was how she reconciled that conflict.

01:10:35.180 Oh, yeah.

01:10:35.500 Well, you can think about it.

01:10:36.800 It's a funny move, right?

01:10:38.380 Because the monstrous element of the patriarchy is the negative side of the social order.

01:10:44.060 Yeah.

01:10:44.340 It's something everyone has to contend with.

01:10:46.200 That's a class of monster, right?

01:10:48.900 Like giant.

01:10:49.840 It's the same thing as giant.

01:10:51.120 Yeah.

01:10:51.340 And in hero mythology, of course, one of the categories of monster that the hero fights

01:10:56.840 is giant.

01:10:57.600 Yeah.

01:10:57.820 There's dragon.

01:10:58.660 There's very...

01:10:59.520 And dragon is a different...

01:11:01.400 That's more like a representation of the terrible aspect of nature.

01:11:04.880 Yeah.

01:11:05.040 That's a good way to think about a dragon.

01:11:06.780 Okay.

01:11:07.100 So you said you were in Libya?

01:11:08.940 Well, I was in Egypt.

01:11:10.040 Egypt.

01:11:10.440 Egypt, yeah.

01:11:11.200 What was happening around you?

01:11:12.280 Around that time, there was a spring, the Arab Spring and the Libyan Revolution.

01:11:16.320 And all that was going on and going on and I was watching CNN all the time, you know?

01:11:20.260 Oh, yeah.

01:11:20.440 You should never do that.

01:11:21.520 That I should never do, right?

01:11:23.100 So I was doing that.

01:11:24.460 I was sort of watching the news and, you know, I was influenced in some way.

01:11:28.320 So that's really interesting.

01:11:30.020 So our research now in about seven countries has shown that, you know, whenever you have

01:11:35.300 a cultural narrative for it, like stories of witches, of space aliens or whatever, you

01:11:42.640 will have those lurking into your unconscious and you will see that manifest, right?

01:11:47.740 So we show...

01:11:48.680 So those are categories of the monstrous.

01:11:50.740 Those are your Carl Jung archetype, you know, figures appearing.

01:11:57.080 So, for example, in Egypt, we showed that the evil genius of Aladdin, you know, Aladdin

01:12:01.460 the cartoon, you will have that appear in front of you.

01:12:04.080 So, you know, they will have bloody fangs and everything will be creepy, very, you know,

01:12:08.280 scary monsters you will see in Egypt.

01:12:10.180 In Italy, for example, in the Pandafika region of Italy, you will see these giant cats or witches.

01:12:16.600 So that's very common.

01:12:18.140 And in the U.S., space alien abduction is...

01:12:22.060 Right.

01:12:22.600 It's very common in the U.S.

01:12:24.400 So you might see that.

01:12:25.380 Okay, so what that would imply is that you could imagine that the cultural...

01:12:29.740 Okay, so let's say the core of the revelation is diffuse emotional activation, much of it

01:12:37.540 negative emotion.

01:12:38.500 Yeah.

01:12:39.040 Okay, now the question is, what's the most basic form in which that could take perceptual

01:12:45.400 shape?

01:12:45.960 That's a good point.

01:12:46.420 Okay, so the cultural narrative would be like a first order elaboration of the core of that

01:12:53.320 fear.

01:12:54.140 So then it's not surprising at all that that's what your mind would latch on to when it was

01:12:59.440 trying to clothe that emotion in perceptual reality.

01:13:03.280 It's very interesting.

01:13:04.240 Actually, so it turns out if you go first order and the basic level, most people will just see

01:13:09.080 shapes and shadows.

01:13:10.040 So they won't even see the monster clothed and have all these details.

01:13:14.200 So it turns out...

01:13:16.080 Right, that's the truly unknowable monster.

01:13:18.540 That's the V1.

01:13:19.600 That's the...

01:13:20.320 That's the...

01:13:20.920 You know, the occipital lobes and the visual cortex responds to lines and basic shapes.

01:13:27.080 And as we move...

01:13:27.480 Oh, I see.

01:13:28.040 Oh, that's so cool.

01:13:29.200 Yeah.

01:13:29.340 So the first order...

01:13:31.180 It's the first order.

01:13:32.420 It's simply the brain says, look, I don't even care about the details.

01:13:36.060 I feel fear right now.

01:13:38.020 I just want to hallucinate the basic...

01:13:39.740 Just the sketch.

01:13:40.700 Just the sketch, right?

01:13:41.760 So you have the sketch.

01:13:43.140 Okay, so then as you explore, does it move up the visual...

01:13:45.940 Then it moves up the visual hierarchy, right?

01:13:47.800 So we know then that you have a part of the brain called the MT, the motor part of the

01:13:51.380 brain, has to do with movement.

01:13:53.980 So that's the next in the hierarchy.

01:13:55.360 Then you have a part of the brain that has to do with, as we said, putting faces and

01:14:01.000 depth and color.

01:14:02.520 And so that comes as we move along the visual hierarchy.

01:14:05.840 And then finally you reach the vernica and the meaning part of the brain, the hippocampus,

01:14:10.160 and you go, my God, this is Freddy Krueger from Elm Street.

01:14:13.380 He's attacking me right now.

01:14:14.660 And he has this agenda and intentions.

01:14:17.120 So, but most of the time, people will see these shadows and shapes and that's it.

01:14:22.060 And that's it.

01:14:22.600 Are they most terrified at that level?

01:14:24.460 It's very terrifying.

01:14:25.360 Usually, the reason, the one reason for this is that usually when you don't have an identity,

01:14:30.160 it's even more scary because you have imagination.

01:14:32.200 Yes, of course, because you don't know what to do.

01:14:33.300 Exactly.

01:14:33.840 Yeah, so, okay.

01:14:34.440 So then you imagine that, oh, that's so cool.

01:14:36.940 So then you imagine that adaptation would proceed in this manner.

01:14:41.400 So when it's only shapeless form, you have no idea what to do because there's no concrete

01:14:49.280 action you can take against a shapeless form.

01:14:52.500 Okay, so now you can imagine using this in behavior therapy to deal with fears.

01:14:58.020 It's like, okay, first of all, because you're trying to get it to take form.

01:15:01.680 Yeah.

01:15:01.780 Well, why?

01:15:02.840 Because the more form it takes, the more delineated the strategy can be for dealing

01:15:07.020 with it.

01:15:07.520 Yeah.

01:15:07.700 So you're saying, okay, so first of all, you're doing a walk through the visual hierarchy.

01:15:12.700 Yeah.

01:15:13.180 You got just the shadows and the basic, and then you get the basic motion.

01:15:17.160 And then what's the next level?

01:15:18.420 If you get depth, for example, you get color, V4 area in the brain with color, so you might

01:15:22.400 add color, so that could be another.

01:15:24.000 Okay.

01:15:24.500 And then it takes a face.

01:15:25.940 Yeah.

01:15:26.480 And then it takes...

01:15:26.780 And an identity.

01:15:27.480 It takes a face, identity, and then you hook up the emotional part of the brain so it gets

01:15:31.080 emotions.

01:15:31.560 Okay.

01:15:31.800 The next thing you'd need above that would be a behavioral strategy.

01:15:36.260 Yeah.

01:15:36.440 So if this named and faced figure now makes itself manifest, what do you need to do?

01:15:42.980 And so, see, this is partly what you do if you're trying to treat someone for post-traumatic

01:15:47.860 stress disorder is you help them specify very clearly, so give form to, the nature of the

01:15:56.180 fear, but that's not enough.

01:15:58.100 It isn't enough to know your enemy, right?

01:16:01.460 That's better than not knowing your enemy because that's even more terrifying.

01:16:04.640 But you want to lay out a behavioral strategy in relationship to that enemy that either

01:16:10.480 quells the threat, so how do you deal with a criminal, let's say, or like the optimal

01:16:17.380 strategy would be to take the enemy and to transform him into an ally, right?

01:16:22.200 That's like, that's the highest possible level of adaptation because who needs an enemy?

01:16:27.600 And partly what you're doing, like in therapy, you can go through someone's history and you

01:16:32.320 can see where they might have had a repeated traumatic experience, like in a relationship.

01:16:36.360 Then you have to find out what is it that's absent in their representation of relationship

01:16:41.600 that's exposing them time and time again to that threat because it means there's something

01:16:46.040 in their perception and their strategy.

01:16:49.480 Because imagine this, imagine that you were selectively blind for, only for white vans that

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01:18:10.960 It's not much of a deficit, but your recurring experience would be once every two years, you

01:18:20.660 get run over by a white fan, and you have no idea why.

01:18:24.180 Right.

01:18:24.380 Okay, so that's the account of the lack of your perception and the repeat experience.

01:18:29.960 Okay, so now you have someone who has a repetitive trauma.

01:18:32.260 You think, well, you've got a hole in your adaptive structure.

01:18:35.040 Okay, now you want to characterize that, so give it form, and you want to append a, it's

01:18:40.580 a perceptual and behavioral strategy to it.

01:18:42.680 And that'll, that's what'll make the nightmare go away.

01:18:46.000 And it's really remarkable.

01:18:47.420 My experience clinically was that it all, it took very few repetitions of a repeating

01:18:55.720 dream where you inverted the strategy.

01:18:59.000 The dream would, the, the dream would almost, my experience was that if you did that once,

01:19:04.620 the person wouldn't have the recurring dream anymore.

01:19:06.660 Right.

01:19:06.880 Right, right, and it's because you might say at some very deep level, they had conceptualized

01:19:12.780 themselves in that situation as nothing but a prey animal.

01:19:15.940 Yeah.

01:19:16.500 You do the same thing with exposure therapy, with agoraphobia, right, is you get people

01:19:20.560 to imagine what upsets them and then begin to confront it.

01:19:25.580 Yeah.

01:19:26.080 Right, so, and the generalization element isn't the specific strategy of confrontation, it's

01:19:32.380 the idea that they could be the one that confronts.

01:19:35.240 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:35.860 It's very interesting.

01:19:36.340 There's two points on that I want to, I want to go into that's really, very fascinating.

01:19:39.820 So, first of all, we should, we've shown that when you have a specific cultural narrative

01:19:44.840 for it and a name for it, right, the more terrifying and salient it becomes.

01:19:49.580 So, for example, if you live in Egypt and you say it's these evil genies, they come

01:19:53.100 at night, they choke you, they strangle you, they kill you, then you will, first of all,

01:19:57.340 have this experience much more frequently.

01:19:59.740 So, so up to one third of more frequency to the experience.

01:20:03.920 That's the first thing.

01:20:04.760 If there's a cultural narrative.

01:20:05.940 If there's a cultural narrative.

01:20:07.060 So, we compared Egypt to Denmark, my home country.

01:20:09.580 So, we compared these two countries and it turns out when, in Denmark, by the way, people

01:20:12.980 say most of the time, it's just the brain, it's stress.

01:20:15.640 It's nothing terrifying.

01:20:16.740 Like, there's no, there's no higher, like, explanation for it, right?

01:20:21.260 So, it's just physiology.

01:20:22.600 Right.

01:20:22.840 In Egypt, you have the opposite, right?

01:20:25.640 The complete opposite.

01:20:27.640 More frequent.

01:20:29.020 More fearful.

01:20:29.700 So, 50% of Danish people will say, I think, for Egyptians, will say, I will die from this.

01:20:35.260 This is fatal.

01:20:36.700 So, this is Egyptians.

01:20:38.700 Okay?

01:20:38.980 So, they have that.

01:20:39.900 It becomes, they say the paralysis lasts much longer.

01:20:42.800 So, they will say the paralysis is intense.

01:20:44.960 It lasts much longer.

01:20:46.640 So, it seems like through their cultural beliefs, the experience has become much more salient,

01:20:52.960 much more profound and impactful.

01:20:55.320 And we then-

01:20:55.620 It's got elements of psychogenic epidemic to it, eh?

01:20:57.800 Absolutely.

01:20:58.260 And we said, is this true?

01:20:59.480 Is this actually the case?

01:21:00.820 And we went to Italy and we looked at the Egyptians, the Italians with these terrifying

01:21:07.320 explanations of sleep paralysis.

01:21:08.900 And we saw the same pattern.

01:21:10.840 The Italians would also have these long episodes.

01:21:13.960 They would have them frequently and they would be extremely fearful.

01:21:17.500 So, it's like a contagious, maladaptive conceptualization.

01:21:21.940 Absolutely.

01:21:22.780 Right?

01:21:23.220 And so, it turns out we have a theory for why that occurs.

01:21:25.880 Okay.

01:21:26.360 So, imagine little Lisa living on this fictitious island in Simbuktu, for example.

01:21:31.360 And she has this conversation with her grandmother over, you know, dinner.

01:21:36.000 Let's say the grandmother says, at night, you will have this monster.

01:21:38.860 It comes and attacks you, chokes you.

01:21:40.740 It looks like this and that.

01:21:42.140 It has all these features.

01:21:43.960 She now goes to bed, right?

01:21:46.160 And she has never had, by the way.

01:21:47.820 She's never had sleep paralysis before, right?

01:21:50.140 For the first time, she will have sleep paralysis now.

01:21:53.360 She will wake up the next day and she will have sleep paralysis again.

01:21:57.220 A few days later, she'll have it again.

01:21:59.520 And then a month later, it's become chronic at this point.

01:22:03.600 And she'll go tell other people about it and they will have it too.

01:22:07.620 And then you might be asking, why is this the case?

01:22:09.500 What's going on?

01:22:10.480 And this is the idea.

01:22:11.480 We think that, first of all, the grandmother implanted these ideas into her brain about what sleep paralysis is.

01:22:18.260 When she's now sleeping in her bed, she will have nocturnal arousal, meaning the emotional part of the brain will be hyperactive during the REM stage.

01:22:27.460 And she will engage in this hyper-conformatory behavior where she will monitor any paralysis sensations, saying, is something holding me down?

01:22:37.200 Is something choking me?

01:22:37.960 Now she's got a scary explanation for it.

01:22:40.180 And she's looking for an explanation for this now.

01:22:42.600 And then whenever, and because of her emotional centers being hyperactive, whenever she feels something, she'll go, my God, this is it.

01:22:50.200 This is it.

01:22:50.700 And she'll open her eyes.

01:22:51.900 And then the emotional, the hippocampus and all the narrative part of the brain will spill over into the experience.

01:22:58.600 And she will literally see whatever her grandmother was telling her.

01:23:01.680 Now you might say, why then does it happen a few days later?

01:23:05.240 Well, that created profound fear.

01:23:07.860 And so a few days later, she will have anxiety and stress, which will predispose her.

01:23:12.220 We've shown that anxiety and stress predisposes you.

01:23:15.380 So she will have it again, two days later and three days later.

01:23:18.960 And at this point, she'll go, my God, I'm possessed.

01:23:22.320 It's no longer just one episode.

01:23:24.340 This monster is, you know, chronically possessing me and it's coming after me.

01:23:29.760 And a funny thing is, too, it is a kind of possession.

01:23:32.980 It is kind of a possession.

01:23:33.680 Because the grandmother transmitted the spirit to her.

01:23:36.080 Transmitted.

01:23:36.460 It's like a virus, right?

01:23:37.580 Yeah, a meme.

01:23:38.660 It's a monstrous meme.

01:23:39.920 It's a meme, right?

01:23:40.600 But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode,

01:23:45.540 they will have more anxiety and more PTSD-like symptoms from this, right?

01:23:50.220 So at this point, she might have these small teas of trauma of the monster coming and attacking you

01:23:56.460 and then creating an overall trauma.

01:23:58.580 So it becomes almost a traumatic experience.

01:24:00.520 Well, you can imagine how that would increase the probability that it would spread, too.

01:24:04.400 Because she might tell a friend, for example.

01:24:06.900 That's what I'm saying, right?

01:24:07.540 So she goes around and tells her friends about it.

01:24:09.460 And it turns out, then, that if you live in a culture like Egypt, it's twice as common versus Denmark.

01:24:17.340 So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis.

01:24:22.700 But beyond this, it's generally twice as common in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth.

01:24:31.220 So there's this element to it that's very, very interesting.

01:24:34.380 And I want to take you to an experiment that your colleague Rich did, Rich McNally, that sort of encapsulates all this.

01:24:40.600 So he showed that people who think that sleep paralysis is a space alien abduction,

01:24:45.660 so these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down in a spaceship.

01:24:50.940 It attacked me.

01:24:51.900 It choked me.

01:24:52.600 It took out my semen.

01:24:53.960 It was a lot of sexuality going on.

01:24:56.200 And obviously, we know from REM sleep, the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive.

01:25:00.940 The sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive.

01:25:03.180 So you have sexual arousal doing sleep paralysis.

01:25:06.040 Right, right, right.

01:25:06.580 So you have the monster coming down, taking their semen and all that.

01:25:10.160 Then they will have...

01:25:11.980 Like a succubus from the Middle Ages.

01:25:14.000 Like a succubus, right?

01:25:14.940 But then at this point, what's interesting is that these guys, when they listen to the audio script of their encounters of themselves narrating,

01:25:23.940 so they'll listen to themselves saying, oh, I had this experience and this happened and that happened.

01:25:29.680 Their physiological reactions to that, their DSR, their sweating and their heart rate and blood pressure will be as profound as somebody who went to war.

01:25:38.680 So somebody with actual PTSD who went to a war situation, the physiological reactions they have is comparable to somebody who was sleeping in their beds and having sleep paralysis.

01:25:51.100 So for me, this shows me this might be one of the most interesting phenomena in the time of science.

01:25:54.280 Well, you can see, well, look, you know from psychotherapy that the simulations that produce the most psychophysiological response are the most curative.

01:26:05.280 So for example, when Edna Foa was treating people with PTSD, and I think she did this as well as anybody's ever done it,

01:26:13.180 she would have people, this is counterintuitive in some ways, so imagine that the trauma was rape instituted.

01:26:21.100 She'd have them bring the rape incident to mind in as much detail as possible, voluntarily.

01:26:28.740 That's the critical element, voluntarily.

01:26:30.540 And then she did psychophysiological measurements, and the participants who showed the highest levels of psychophysiological response to the reenactment were the ones that got better faster.

01:26:43.060 Now, that was still damn hard on them while they were doing it, but it makes perfect sense that the more hyperrealist simulation,

01:26:52.100 the more learning would be associated with it, obviously.

01:26:55.900 And you could see how that could be pathologized.

01:26:58.800 So then the question would be, this would be the tricky question for a therapist, is like,

01:27:04.900 well, what do you do with a client that has a repetitive alien abduction experience?

01:27:09.360 Because now that's a person who needs a strategy.

01:27:12.060 Right.

01:27:12.480 Right.

01:27:12.760 Well, so I developed a therapy for sleep paralysis.

01:27:15.320 I don't know, maybe you're interested in that.

01:27:16.760 I can tell you about that.

01:27:17.620 All right.

01:27:17.880 So it's a four-step solution that I came up with.

01:27:20.340 So from my work around the world, I thought, I got to have some method to help these people, right?

01:27:26.480 So how could I help them?

01:27:29.140 This was my thought.

01:27:29.800 How can I help these guys, right?

01:27:31.280 And so one thing is that I noticed that, for example, prayer and meditation and prayer and thinking about positive things was helpful.

01:27:38.880 In a lot of instances, people would lay down and think about whatever God they're believing in, and that would actually help them.

01:27:44.840 So that got me thinking about the attention system and the emotional parts of the brain and how I can bring that into the experience, given that you have limited attentional capacities.

01:27:54.080 And so if you're lying there and thinking about ghosts because your emotional part of your brain, the amygdala, is hyperactive.

01:28:00.540 And you know the amygdala has a lot of projections to the visual parts of the brain, so it can tell you what to see in the world.

01:28:06.520 So we know this.

01:28:07.360 So it can spill over and penetrate the visual scene.

01:28:10.620 So we don't want that.

01:28:11.520 So I thought, how can I bring in the positive affect to the experience and make it more benign?

01:28:18.060 So it has four components.

01:28:19.760 The first component is cognitive reappraisal.

01:28:25.340 You know these terms.

01:28:26.560 Meaning simply you say, look, this is not a monster.

01:28:29.520 This is just the brain.

01:28:30.780 It's not terrifying.

01:28:32.040 Let me change my thoughts about it.

01:28:34.740 So that's the first point.

01:28:36.240 You do that when the experience strikes.

01:28:39.300 And you close your eyes to just to filter any, you know, visual inputs.

01:28:44.840 So you're doing that with people when they're bringing the experience to mind?

01:28:47.520 When they have the sleep paralysis episode.

01:28:49.160 So these are the four steps.

01:28:50.620 You apply directly during sleep paralysis.

01:28:52.320 Obviously, you learn them when you are awake.

01:28:54.400 And I train you.

01:28:55.000 And you practice.

01:28:55.720 You practice, right?

01:28:56.360 Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

01:28:57.280 So this is the, yeah, great.

01:28:58.380 You made that point.

01:28:59.260 So you have that first thing.

01:29:00.920 You do the cognitive reappraisal saying, well, this is just your mind and brain playing tricks

01:29:06.100 on you.

01:29:06.860 Next step is emotional and psychological distancing.

01:29:11.600 You go, since it's just a brain, simply, given that it's common all around the world,

01:29:17.260 there's no reason for me to be scared of this.

01:29:19.480 So you kind of distance yourself from the event.

01:29:21.980 So that's the second part, right?

01:29:24.720 Thirdly, this is where prayer and meditation and affect comes in.

01:29:28.800 And you put all your attention on a positive emotional object in your mind.

01:29:35.600 So you bring to mind, could be God, somebody who believes in God.

01:29:39.960 It could be your mother's face.

01:29:41.940 It could be anything emotionally salient.

01:29:43.720 And you focus hyperattentively on that because then-

01:29:47.180 That's why Mary is an antidote to the demonic, right?

01:29:50.700 For example.

01:29:50.920 Because you bring the notion of mother and maternal care as the antithesis.

01:29:55.620 Good point.

01:29:55.920 And so you bring in, so in that way, given the limited attentional abilities of the brain

01:30:01.440 and the frontal parietal regions and all that, so you focus intensely on this object, let's

01:30:07.120 say God.

01:30:08.300 And then fourthly, you meditate and meditate meaning you do a mindfulness kind of detachment.

01:30:16.460 You say, I feel spasmy and pain in my legs and I feel heavy, but I'm not going to do anything

01:30:22.520 about it.

01:30:22.920 I'm just going to let it fly.

01:30:24.260 I'm just going to just leave it alone.

01:30:25.900 Right, right.

01:30:26.340 And this turns out, these four steps, if you apply it during sleep paralysis, we did a pilot

01:30:31.640 study, a small study that showed it reduced sleep paralysis about 50%.

01:30:35.860 So that's a significant amount, but obviously we have to do more studies.

01:30:39.840 It's a very small study, but it's a first step.

01:30:42.180 It's the first empirical study on this as a treatment for sleep paralysis.

01:30:47.280 So I was very excited about that, but we need to do more research.

01:30:51.320 But I think, what do you think?

01:30:52.820 I walked the Via Dolorosa with Jonathan Paggio, and we were talking about its significance.

01:30:58.560 And so you could imagine that, imagine that one of the things that you have to do in life

01:31:03.920 is to, what do you say, reconcile yourself to the monstrous.

01:31:10.500 While walking the road of the crucifixion does that, because it enables you to voluntarily

01:31:15.600 simulate intense suffering in the face of malevolence.

01:31:21.400 Yeah.

01:31:21.540 Right now, you can imagine that because it's voluntary, rather than something that's imposed

01:31:26.320 on you, you're switching your framework from victim to accept, it's very strange, accepting

01:31:34.560 participant.

01:31:35.460 It's like turning around to confront the monster.

01:31:37.560 It's the same thing.

01:31:38.760 So you could imagine, we talked already about the figure of Mary, let's say, as, or briefly,

01:31:43.340 as the maternal, as the antithesis of the monstrous, that's pretty obvious.

01:31:48.760 But you could also imagine that practicing your ability to accept the reality of malevolence

01:31:55.080 and suffering.

01:31:55.980 Yeah.

01:31:56.680 That's a meta-strategy for dealing with the monstrous itself.

01:32:00.020 It's something like that.

01:32:00.980 That's a good point.

01:32:01.480 That'd be my guess.

01:32:02.420 That's a very, very interesting point.

01:32:03.980 Yeah.

01:32:04.080 But you brought something to mind right now that I wanted to ask you about.

01:32:06.860 So obviously, I've seen your latest work on we wrestle with God and all this.

01:32:10.980 So do you have any thoughts about prophetic dreams, the kind of metaphors?

01:32:15.980 Do you have any?

01:32:16.640 Have you written about this, for example?

01:32:18.300 I wrote a little bit about it in the story of Noah.

01:32:21.660 Yeah.

01:32:22.480 Right.

01:32:22.880 Well, so Noah is an archetypally good man.

01:32:28.960 Yeah.

01:32:29.140 But in the culturally and personally limited sense, in a way, Noah's as good a man as you

01:32:37.400 could expect some to be for the conditions of his time and place.

01:32:40.660 Yeah.

01:32:41.140 Okay.

01:32:41.420 We know from the anthropological literature on elders that people who are singled out as

01:32:47.780 elders in, let's say, traditional communities are people who other people are motivated to

01:32:54.480 go to for advice when things aren't going well.

01:32:56.820 Yeah.

01:32:56.960 Okay, so now you might imagine, well, what sort of person would you have to be to be the

01:33:01.580 sort of person who people would go to for advice when things aren't going well?

01:33:05.840 Well, you'd have to establish a reputation of either having had things go well for you

01:33:11.600 so you could avoid the catastrophes, or having withstood a variety of catastrophes and still

01:33:18.380 be highly functional.

01:33:20.100 Okay, so then that would make you a certain kind of person.

01:33:22.580 Well, the insistence in the story of Noah is that if your orientation is upward, your

01:33:32.040 intuition is valid.

01:33:34.320 If your intuition is valid, you're a prophet because you can see things coming when blind

01:33:38.420 people won't see them.

01:33:39.880 Yeah.

01:33:39.940 Right.

01:33:40.600 So why wouldn't, like, there's no difference between forethought and prophecy except time

01:33:48.220 span.

01:33:48.780 Yeah.

01:33:48.920 Okay, so you might say, well, a mature person is capable of forethought.

01:33:53.700 Yeah.

01:33:54.080 Okay, now if you are mature and maximally optimally configured in your moral aim, your capacity

01:34:03.140 for forethought would extend.

01:34:04.500 You'd be able to see things coming long before other people.

01:34:08.660 Right.

01:34:08.780 And maybe some of that would reveal itself in, like, visions.

01:34:11.840 Those are fantasies.

01:34:13.180 Yeah.

01:34:13.620 They could be prophetic visions.

01:34:15.040 They could come in dreams.

01:34:16.280 Yeah.

01:34:16.920 You know, imagine that your dream, imagine now you're the sort of person who's dispensed

01:34:21.040 with the first order monsters.

01:34:23.060 Well, your dreams are still going to be doing something.

01:34:25.020 Yeah.

01:34:25.260 They're going to be concentrating on more sophisticated forms of anomaly.

01:34:29.480 Yeah.

01:34:29.740 Then maybe you master those.

01:34:31.040 Well, then now you're up another level.

01:34:32.940 Yeah.

01:34:33.260 Right.

01:34:33.500 Those are the sort of people that would be prophetic because, look, one of the ways of

01:34:38.760 being a prophet is just by looking at things that other people won't look at.

01:34:42.100 Yeah.

01:34:42.760 Right?

01:34:43.060 Because even in the landscape of media, if a story comes out about what's monstrous, most

01:34:49.900 people will just, they won't look into it.

01:34:52.600 Right.

01:34:52.860 They'll deny it.

01:34:53.800 Yeah.

01:34:53.960 Well, imagine instead you delve into it, like you delve into the character of the monster

01:34:59.560 in the dream.

01:35:00.320 Right.

01:35:00.700 Well, are you less prepared or more?

01:35:02.880 Well, obviously, far more.

01:35:05.200 Yeah.

01:35:05.340 And I don't know.

01:35:06.260 I don't think there's a limit to that.

01:35:08.360 Yeah.

01:35:08.720 Yeah.

01:35:09.600 No.

01:35:09.820 Because there's also an insistence in hero mythology that you go to the heart of darkness.

01:35:16.320 Right.

01:35:16.660 Right.

01:35:17.380 No, it's very interesting.

01:35:18.540 And one reason that I bring this up is I was, I used to live in Egypt, as I told you,

01:35:23.960 and I was much inspired by the prophetic dreams of Joseph.

01:35:27.680 I thought they were very, they were very striking, the suns and sun and the moon bowing down and

01:35:32.860 all these kinds of things.

01:35:33.740 So I think there's something, something very, very interesting about the whole, that realm

01:35:38.240 of explanation and how that sort of spills and trickles into narratives in religious scripture.

01:35:46.220 So I thought that was-

01:35:47.680 Well, like one of the, you might say that one of the strong functions of the religious

01:35:54.760 is the religious is a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous.

01:35:59.020 Right.

01:35:59.120 That's not all it is.

01:36:00.100 Yeah.

01:36:00.280 But that's one of the things that it is.

01:36:02.440 Yeah.

01:36:02.740 Like how do we contend with not, you could imagine, how do I contend with my neighbor who's being

01:36:09.200 a pain?

01:36:09.920 Yeah.

01:36:10.140 Well, then how do I contend with the class of neighbors who are being troublesome?

01:36:15.100 Right.

01:36:15.440 Well, then how do I contend with the fact that people can be malevolent?

01:36:19.220 Yeah.

01:36:19.760 Then how do I contend with the existence of malevolence itself?

01:36:23.680 Yeah.

01:36:23.980 Right.

01:36:24.260 So those are, you're getting deeper into the question with each of those iterations.

01:36:28.400 Right.

01:36:28.680 By the time you get to the point where your question is, how do I deal with the existence

01:36:33.340 of malevolence itself?

01:36:34.820 You're in the religious realm.

01:36:36.300 Yeah.

01:36:36.500 I would say that by definition.

01:36:38.240 Yeah.

01:36:38.660 Yeah.

01:36:38.920 So it was weirdly the case when I, when I was working as a clinician, when I was dealing

01:36:44.940 with people who were profoundly traumatized.

01:36:47.660 Yeah.

01:36:48.160 So they had their reasons.

01:36:50.100 The language always became religious when we were talking about, you can't escape it

01:36:55.240 because if you've really been hurt by someone who really wanted to hurt you, you've been

01:37:01.300 touched by something like the spirit of malevolence.

01:37:03.700 Yeah.

01:37:04.000 And when you're having a discussion about the nature of the spirit of malevolence, the language

01:37:08.220 takes on like religious connotations and depth of its own accord.

01:37:13.840 It's quite interesting.

01:37:14.820 So there's a phenomenon I'm sure you know of, it's temporal lobe epilepsy.

01:37:18.300 So these guys will have epileptic seizures.

01:37:21.600 So they will have that in the, you know, selectively in the temporal lobes.

01:37:25.540 So they will, and this is the emotional part of the brain, become hyperactive.

01:37:29.340 And so they will see everything in the world as almost like they're living in a dream.

01:37:33.360 Everything is poetic.

01:37:34.260 Everything is highly salient.

01:37:35.820 When I look at it, this pen right here, it's highly salient.

01:37:39.040 It's emotional.

01:37:39.760 It's godly.

01:37:40.620 Yeah.

01:37:41.160 It's quite an interesting scenario.

01:37:42.560 Dostoevsky had temporal lobe epilepsy.

01:37:44.440 Yes.

01:37:44.780 Yes.

01:37:45.180 So it's just quite, and also Ramachandran and I wanted to study it more.

01:37:49.980 Yeah.

01:37:50.800 But we didn't get into it.

01:37:52.180 We focused on some of the OCD work instead.

01:37:54.620 But it's interesting.

01:37:55.740 So these guys will become hyper-religious as well.

01:37:58.060 They will have hypergraphies.

01:37:59.420 They will write all the time, you know, so they will develop this tendency to write.

01:38:03.280 And yeah, it's become hyper-poetic and quite an interesting phenomenon.

01:38:10.180 And some people have argued that in the temporal lobe, you have the god center of the brain,

01:38:15.200 so to speak.

01:38:15.660 In that region, that's where it all emanates in terms of the emotional landscape where that belief.

01:38:26.080 Well, one of the things, you know, if we have a further conversation at some point,

01:38:29.580 I'd like to talk about the, like, neurological conceptualization of the religious, by definition.

01:38:38.460 Like, because I think we're at a point in our understanding of neuroscience where we could have a conversation like that.

01:38:45.320 So, like, one of the hypotheses, for example, would be, imagine, I think that perceptions are the axioms of thought.

01:38:53.100 Yeah.

01:38:53.280 Okay, now, and so an axiom is a very deep presupposition.

01:38:58.060 Yeah.

01:38:58.140 You can imagine in any conceptual structure that there are shallow elements of the conception.

01:39:04.700 Yeah.

01:39:04.980 And then layers, kind of like the visual system.

01:39:07.420 Yeah.

01:39:07.640 Layers, and that there are axiomatic elements of the conceptual system.

01:39:12.280 Yeah.

01:39:12.560 Okay.

01:39:13.000 If an axiomatic element is accidentally shifted, you're traumatized.

01:39:17.900 If it's voluntarily shifted, you're a hero.

01:39:21.280 Right.

01:39:21.880 Right.

01:39:22.200 But as the level of depth of the inquiry maximizes, the inquiry becomes more religious in its nature.

01:39:33.920 Right.

01:39:34.160 That's a definition.

01:39:35.200 Yeah.

01:39:35.800 Yeah.

01:39:36.000 And so, then you could imagine that the salience of the investigation magnifies in proportion to its depth.

01:39:43.800 Yeah.

01:39:43.960 And so, that would account for the experiential element of awe, for example.

01:39:47.740 It does.

01:39:48.580 Yeah.

01:39:48.760 So, that's something that would be very entertaining to discuss technically.

01:39:52.920 Technically, yeah.

01:39:53.400 So, it's very interesting.

01:39:54.300 And I think with the whole temporal lobe epilepsy, right?

01:39:56.920 So, the whole landscape becomes hyper, you know.

01:39:59.700 So, the regions, we talked about the fusiform face area before.

01:40:03.440 The regions from the cluster of cells in the fusiform and the emotional part of the brain become hyperconnected and hyperactive.

01:40:10.940 So, there's kind of a kindling going on.

01:40:13.000 So, that's why when you look at a dry object like a pen, it becomes hypercosmic and emotional and spiritual, right?

01:40:21.580 But that's interesting.

01:40:22.340 There's also the opposite in a way.

01:40:24.560 So, if you have what's called Cotard syndrome, everything in the world is dead.

01:40:31.700 Everything in the world is almost like depression, in fact.

01:40:34.960 Yeah.

01:40:35.160 But everything is in the world.

01:40:36.400 And you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, my God, I am dead.

01:40:39.780 I'm a dead person.

01:40:40.720 Right, right, right.

01:40:41.120 And the doctor will say, what do you mean you are dead?

01:40:45.320 They'll say, I'm dead.

01:40:46.780 And then they'll say, what about if I take a needle and poke you and are you dead?

01:40:50.980 And they will say, well, yeah.

01:40:52.520 And then the doctor might go like this.

01:40:54.300 And they bleed.

01:40:55.220 And they say, well, how come you're dead?

01:40:57.320 You're bleeding.

01:40:58.360 Can dead people bleed?

01:41:01.100 And so, yes.

01:41:02.380 Apparently.

01:41:02.960 Apparently.

01:41:03.320 Since I'm dead.

01:41:04.280 Since I'm dead, right?

01:41:05.140 So, it shows you that, you know, something intriguing is going on in the brain.

01:41:09.680 When these centers are hyperactive, everything becomes salient.

01:41:12.860 Right.

01:41:13.000 If they're underactive, you know, you are dead.

01:41:16.720 You know, in fact, if that part of the brain, the face area in the brain and the emotional

01:41:20.760 part of the brain is hyperactive, there's another syndrome called Fregoli syndrome, where

01:41:25.600 you go around and you say, everybody in the landscape looks like my Uncle Joe, for example.

01:41:30.120 So, you go around and say, well, this looks like my Uncle Joe and this looks like my Uncle

01:41:34.720 Joe.

01:41:35.320 And the reason is that you have hyper-emotionality.

01:41:38.300 You are hyper-emotional, right?

01:41:40.080 Because of that vision, the emotion part of the brain and the face part of the brain are

01:41:43.880 hyperactive and they're hyper-connective.

01:41:46.720 The connectivity is an overdrive.

01:41:50.080 And then you feel like, I shouldn't have emotions.

01:41:52.360 That's how your brain concludes.

01:41:53.480 Right, right, right.

01:41:53.740 I shouldn't have emotions when I go around in the landscape and looking at people.

01:41:57.160 But I do.

01:41:57.840 But I do.

01:41:58.720 Therefore, your brain jumps to these absurd conclusions and go, you know, these are all

01:42:03.180 my Uncle Joe.

01:42:03.880 Yeah, well, you see the same.

01:42:05.200 We should close with this and we'll move to the Daily Wear section.

01:42:07.860 But you see the same thing with the onset of paranoid schizophrenia is that, say, someone

01:42:12.980 is watching television and part of the speech becomes hyper-emotionally significant, right?

01:42:20.760 So, now it stands out.

01:42:22.100 Yeah.

01:42:22.520 Okay.

01:42:22.800 And the more intelligent schizophrenics are more likely to become paranoid, by the way,

01:42:28.200 because they build up the conceptual structures around the perceptual anomaly.

01:42:32.480 Yeah.

01:42:32.680 But it's the perceptual emotional anomaly that's the core of the pathology.

01:42:37.500 It's like, well, why is that so significant?

01:42:40.520 Well, because you get this emotional hyper-response.

01:42:44.220 It's like, it evokes anxiety and wonder.

01:42:46.360 It's awe-inspiring.

01:42:47.560 Yeah.

01:42:47.720 It's like, well, it's like this is, it's particularly significant to me.

01:42:53.480 It's a message to me.

01:42:55.160 Yeah.

01:42:55.440 It's a message.

01:42:56.600 What?

01:42:57.200 It's a message from the television station?

01:42:59.280 Yeah.

01:42:59.500 Is it a message from the satellites?

01:43:01.660 Is it a message from the Pope?

01:43:03.120 There's no denying the reality of the experience, right?

01:43:06.460 So, then the paranoid conspiracy, let's say, is overlaid on top of that as an explanation

01:43:12.400 for something that can't be challenged because it's so visceral, right?

01:43:16.940 And it is dreamlike in the sense that you just described.

01:43:19.480 Yeah.

01:43:19.780 And one of the things you also alluded to was that we actually base our sense of reality

01:43:24.060 on that valence, right?

01:43:25.680 So, it's hyper-real if everything's over-valence and it's dead if nothing has significance.

01:43:33.300 Significance is the marker of the real.

01:43:35.240 Right.

01:43:35.620 Right.

01:43:36.060 That's very different than objective reality.

01:43:38.340 Okay.

01:43:38.580 We should stop.

01:43:39.660 Here's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side.

01:43:41.760 You're at Harvard.

01:43:42.940 Correct.

01:43:43.280 And you're working really in the same area in the Harvard Department of Psychology that

01:43:49.180 I was in the 90s.

01:43:50.340 And so, one of the things I'd like to talk to you about is your experience there and your

01:43:55.020 thoughts on the university system in general.

01:43:57.180 So, let's do that for half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

01:44:00.160 Sounds good.

01:44:00.520 So, all of you who are watching and listening, you can, well, you can continue your investigation

01:44:06.960 into exactly the topics that we described today.

01:44:10.020 Obviously, at Peterson Academy, because I'm lecturing there and my guest is lecturing there,

01:44:16.460 it's Introduction to Neuroscience.

01:44:18.360 Correct.

01:44:18.640 Yeah, yeah.

01:44:19.020 And so, that's one of the newer courses in our offerings.

01:44:21.320 And so, if you're fascinated by this sort of thing, it's so useful to know the anatomy and

01:44:27.320 the neuroscience, as I said, because it gives you much deeper insights into, well, the nature

01:44:33.600 of the problems that you might encounter and also into the nature of their, of what?

01:44:38.020 The universe of potentially viable solutions.

01:44:40.440 That's a good way of thinking about it.

01:44:42.040 And we're putting a tremendous amount together right now on the scientific and cultural front

01:44:47.380 in relationship to the overlap between brain function, neurochemistry, physiology, and behavior,

01:44:52.900 and like profound philosophical conceptions.

01:44:56.280 It's great to work at that interface.

01:44:57.960 And so, the courses that, well, this Introduction to Neuroscience course is one that focuses

01:45:03.440 exactly at that nexus.

01:45:04.820 We have several like that.

01:45:06.020 So, in any case, join us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour.

01:45:10.120 We'll talk about the state of the modern university, focusing in this case on Harvard and the

01:45:15.400 Department of Psychology there, although you've been at other universities too, and we can bring

01:45:19.340 them into the mix.

01:45:20.300 So, join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:45:22.060 Thank you very much.

01:45:22.840 Thank you very much.

01:45:23.440 Yeah, really good to talk to you.

01:45:24.520 Same here.

01:45:24.920 Thanks to the film crew here today in Scottsdale and to the Daily Wire for making this possible.

01:45:29.220 And finally, to all of you for your time and attention.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 27, 2025

533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience ｜ Dr. Baland Jalal

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