Neurologist Dr. Richard Cytowic - Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_738)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
162.32535
Summary
Dr. Richard Saitoic is a neurologist at the George Washington University, a pioneer in the field of synesthesia, and the author of the new book, "Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: How to Control Your Attention Span in the Digital Age."
Transcript
00:00:00.000
With great excitement, I introduce you to Northwood University, a truly exceptional institution in
00:00:06.400
American higher education. Since 1959, this private, accredited university has been a vibrant
00:00:13.640
bastion of free thought and enterprise, standing out among the thousands of other schools in the
00:00:20.760
U.S. Known as America's free enterprise university, Northwood is dedicated to nurturing the next
00:00:27.760
generation of leaders who drive global, social, and economic progress. At the heart of Northwood
00:00:35.300
lies the Northwood idea, a philosophy that celebrates individual freedom, responsibility,
00:00:42.040
and the importance of moral law and free enterprise. This entrepreneurial spirit is evident in that
00:00:49.020
one-third of Northwood alumni own businesses. Northwood is more than an institution. It's a
00:00:55.520
movement that empowers students to think critically and champion liberty. It is a rare gem in today's
00:01:03.040
academic world. If you're passionate about supporting a university that values intellectual
00:01:08.520
growth and free enterprise, or to learn more about its academic programs, visit northwood.edu.
00:01:15.980
Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad. For The Sad Truth, I've had many physicians lately on my show.
00:01:22.400
Add to that illustrious roster, I've got another physician, a neurologist, Dr. Richard Saitoic.
00:01:33.240
All right. Let me just mention a couple of things about you, Richard. You're a professor of neurology
00:01:39.000
at George Washington University, a pioneering researcher in synesthesia, which I'd love to
00:01:44.720
talk about that because that's one of those things that I first learned about when I read this guy's
00:01:49.840
work, Oliver Sacks. I recently bought his autobiography. I'm sure you've got great stories
00:01:54.160
about that. Your previous books include Synesthesia, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, The Neurological
00:02:02.320
Side of Neuropsychology, Wednesday is Indigo Blue, Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, co-authored
00:02:09.600
with David Eagleman. And your latest book, I think out on October 1st, right? So about three weeks ago,
00:02:15.940
your stone age brain in the screen age. A lot of people are writing about some of the difficulties
00:02:21.660
we're facing with trying to pry away our children, let alone us, from all these technologies. So maybe
00:02:28.080
we, well, welcome, Richard. Maybe we could start with your latest book. Give us a quick summary of
00:02:35.740
Well, I think what's going to surprise a lot of your listeners and viewers is that the brain
00:02:41.760
operates on a fixed bandwidth of energy and no amount of diet, exercise, supplements,
00:02:48.480
or Sudoku puzzles can increase that. So we're up against the brick wall. And yet people are forcing
00:02:55.700
themselves to multitask, to work on several screens at the same time, thinking that maybe just sheer
00:03:02.340
real power or a pot of coffee will get them through this. But I think everybody agrees that our attention
00:03:08.980
spans have gone to hell. And one of the reasons is that we're simply, our brains are simply exhausted,
00:03:15.340
we're asking it to do stuff that it cannot do. So we have to work within the limits that we have.
00:03:22.480
Now, was your idea, the impetus to write this book, was it in any way informed from your work as a
00:03:32.620
neurologist? Or it's just the fact that both of them in one form or another deal with the mind,
00:03:37.520
and therefore you went into it. What's the link between your work as a neurologist and this current
00:03:42.920
Well, you know, most people don't think about the way they think or how they think. But for me,
00:03:47.780
it's my job. So a quick story is that my spouse and I were in New York, we're looking for an address,
00:03:55.600
and we just had track phones at the time. And we couldn't, the city is shut up on a grid,
00:04:01.220
for God's sakes, but we couldn't find this address. And all the phone books and public telephones
00:04:07.020
had been ripped out at the time. And so we looked at each other and said, we have got to get an
00:04:11.140
iPhone, if only for the maps. So we each got an iPhone. And after about the second day of fiddling
00:04:18.260
with it, I said, Oh, my God, no wonder these things are so addictive. It's like having a slot machine in
00:04:24.760
your hand. And there's no end in sight. And the quarters just keep coming. So that was the that was
00:04:32.220
the big insight is that yes, these are these devices are addictive, for very simple reasons. And they
00:04:39.020
are, they are a behavioral addiction. We're used to the physical ones like alcohol, drugs, things like
00:04:47.800
that. But then there's the behavioral addiction, such as overeating, gambling, compulsive sex,
00:04:55.120
shopping. And the endless scroll of the screen is, it feeds into this kind of behavioral addiction,
00:05:05.820
because when do you stop scrolling? You don't, there's no end in sight. So you just keep going
00:05:10.320
and going and going. And like a slot machine, I mean, you get a little hit, oh, that's interesting.
00:05:15.500
And you keep scrolling, maybe I'll get something better. Oh, I get a bigger hit. Yeah, at least keep
00:05:19.680
going. And you just keep going in in hopes of getting the jackpot, which never comes. So yeah,
00:05:26.980
right. Sorry, finish your point. So that's so that's one point. Another point is that the screens
00:05:31.820
act like secondhand smoke, so that anybody who's in the line of sight of a screen is going to be
00:05:38.000
distracted by it. We've all experienced this in waiting rooms and airport lounges. If there's a screen
00:05:45.500
on, it demands to be looked at, you cannot, it takes energy not to look at it. And so even not
00:05:52.720
looking at it is draining your your your limited supply supply of energy. Do you think that the
00:05:59.760
cat is out of the bag, and there's no going back? Or is there a way for us to set up some discipline
00:06:07.600
behavioral modifications that would allow us to temper our constant hit for the digital dopamine?
00:06:14.440
I think the first step is realizing that we're asking, we're looking at this situation the wrong
00:06:18.900
way. We're looking at it as this is a technological device. And therefore, the solution is going to be
00:06:26.080
technological. But what we should be looking at it is from the brain's perspective. What does it want? How is
00:06:34.640
it being overwhelmed? And how can we work within the natural limits that we have? I mean, we got we've
00:06:40.740
gotten along pretty well for 3 million years. And the iPhones, smartphones have been around for what 30
00:06:47.080
if that. So, you know, technology advances exponentially like a rocket ship. But we still
00:06:54.320
have the same Stone Age brain as our distant ancestors evolution. I see a picture of Darwin in
00:07:00.540
the background. Evolution does not, you know, not say, Oh, it's been 10 years, let's say we'll have a new
00:07:06.940
model, we'll have a new new model of the cortex. We don't have a new version, you know, like your
00:07:13.140
washing machine, you have a new one every 1015 years, the brain doesn't work that way. Evolution
00:07:19.160
just gives us what we have. And it works pretty good. We just have to be careful that we're we're not
00:07:27.280
overloading it. I mean, I love that the fact that, you know, in your title, you you reference our
00:07:33.380
evolutionary past, because you're correct. And that there here's the here's Darwin, my my own work,
00:07:40.560
my own academic work is at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology,
00:07:45.600
and human behavior in general, but economic decision making and consumer decision making in
00:07:51.560
particular. And in my work, I argue that you can't fully understand human behavior,
00:07:55.980
behavior, and let alone consumer behavior, if you don't study the the underpinnings of our
00:08:01.320
biological heritage, what why do we consume the way that we do? And so much of it is unconscious,
00:08:06.160
you see, so much of it is unconscious, people think that they're rational beings in that that mean,
00:08:11.000
that's a joke. We're not rational at all, we're emotional through and through. And in terms of
00:08:16.200
behavioral economics, I mean, there are psychology knows pretty well why we do stupid things. And you
00:08:23.520
know, and the kind of biases that we have, and confirmation bias, expectation, etc. So we are our
00:08:32.560
thinking is inherently faulty, or at least it behaves in ways that don't make common sense. And so people
00:08:43.220
can go and push themselves off a cliff, if so to speak, unless they understand what they're up against,
00:08:51.540
unless they understand their own biases, for example, and that it's, you know, the iPhone is a fantastic
00:08:59.040
tool. I mean, it's better than Star Trek. It's certainly better than the Apollo computers. But it's
00:09:07.240
also a narcotizing agent. So you can have you can have the good, but you have to appreciate that unless
00:09:13.780
you're careful, you're going to get sucked in to the bad. Now you know that and I think the maxim is
00:09:20.600
physicians cannot heal by self or something to that effect the truism. So you know where I'm going
00:09:25.800
with this having now studied the ill effects of being addicted to technology. Does that mean that
00:09:33.480
you've been able to temper your own behavior or you're the pulmonologist who is smoking in the waiting
00:09:40.660
room? Well, yes, I have tempered my behavior. But I, you know, I realized that at any, any instant, I can be
00:09:52.700
sucked right back into the endless scroll. You know, I'm in the morning, I read the Wall Street Journal in the New
00:10:00.520
York Times, and the Washington Post on my iPad. And if, if I'm not careful, I'll just keep on going and going and
00:10:07.580
going. It's like, and so my, my Apple Watch dings is like, Oh, 6am time for breakfast, put this down.
00:10:13.300
Okay. So you have to discipline yourself and do certain things at certain times, because
00:10:20.040
there's no end to the news. You know, if something really important happens, I'll find out about it
00:10:26.380
eventually, or tomorrow when I read the paper, or when I read it in the evening at cocktail hour.
00:10:31.900
So, uh, I'm not missing anything. So I would argue, and I'm, I'm, I'm, I think that you probably
00:10:39.040
would agree with this. A lot of the behavioral modifications that we try to implement, say at
00:10:44.920
New Year's resolution, often they will fail because they don't have specificity to them. Right? So if I
00:10:51.240
say, uh, you know, I'd like to eat more health, you know, health, more healthily this year.
00:10:57.080
That means nothing. That's a vague promise. That means nothing. But if I say that when I'm going
00:11:02.940
to go to the club med in two weeks, even though it's all you can eat, I will never take more than
00:11:10.380
one plate of food. That is a specific rule by which I can abide. So maybe not maybe, but I would argue
00:11:19.600
that the exact same thing has to imply in terms of the digital appetite that we, you know, we, we
00:11:24.220
engage in, which is, you know, after six o'clock, I never checked my emails on the weekend without
00:11:29.300
that specificity, we're likely to get sucked in right into the, I know. I mean, I do. I check it.
00:11:34.500
I check my emails early in the morning and again, late in the afternoon and that's it. And if people
00:11:39.560
need to get hold of me, they will eventually, um, you know, when I was a, when I was a resident in
00:11:46.180
neurology, you know, we had beepers that we clipped to our belt and all that. And Oh, what a status
00:11:50.840
symbol that one was. Cause it's, Oh, you're important. Look how important I am. I have
00:11:56.180
to be reachable at any moment. There could be an emergency. Well, now of course, the luxury is
00:12:00.900
being unavailable. So it we've come full circle, right? You don't practice anymore, right? I don't
00:12:07.580
see patients anymore. I still, I still mentor medical students. Do you, I mean, do you miss it or
00:12:13.640
is this, Oh, thank God I got out of that job? No, because I basically, I went from, I just had
00:12:20.200
lunch with a psychiatrist friend of mine. And when I, when I stopped practice, he said,
00:12:24.020
Richard, you don't retire because you're always busy and you've just shifted your focus from
00:12:29.440
how to treat certain thing to writing about what is, what is the mind? What is the nature of
00:12:34.960
nervous tissue? Et cetera. So you're still solving problems and mentoring medical students,
00:12:41.460
we're still solving problems with them because this is all new to them. Right. So I don't miss
00:12:47.200
it. Uh, I'm still doing it. Uh, and basically as long as I'm awake, I'm working, my brain is
00:12:54.180
very active and I'm having thoughts and stuff. So that's beautiful. And I love it. I love it. I
00:12:59.960
really do. Uh, I was going to ask, I mean, I guess maybe this is the time since we're talking
00:13:04.520
about wearing different hats, uh, as I was preparing for our chats, I, you know, I, I will typically
00:13:09.760
look at a person's bio and something that struck me in your bio, Richard, is that you have an
00:13:15.500
MFA, a master's in fine arts, I think in creative writing, that really appeals to me because I'm
00:13:22.360
so, so in high school, I won the chemistry award and the history award, right? Right. And so I often
00:13:30.760
talk about interdisciplinary, I mean, my, my whole academic career.
00:13:33.760
How, how, how C.P. Snow would have admired you.
00:13:36.900
Uh, I don't know if you know the term consilience, right? Unity of knowledge.
00:13:42.160
So maybe you could talk to us about how, you know, a neurologist is also an MFA because
00:13:51.140
Well, my father was a physician and my mother was an artist. And back in the fifties and sixties,
00:13:59.320
the doctor's office and house were attached. So I would help my mother with squeeze this big two
00:14:07.660
pound tube of lead white Grumbacher on the, on the pallet and all that. And she'd mix it with
00:14:13.660
linseed oil and turpentine. And then when, when, and when she was done with the canvas, I would take
00:14:18.620
it down to the basement where they would dry, but the, the smells would then waft up into my father's
00:14:25.100
office and mix with an abyss medicinal smells that only the doctor's office had back then.
00:14:31.540
The distant, I don't know what it was. It's disinfected or something and all that.
00:14:35.720
So to me, and my, her father was a, was a horticulturist and my father's father was a technical
00:14:42.740
glass blower for RCA, but he made these beautiful Christmas ornaments and trees populated with different
00:14:51.840
colored birds. And I have get glass cufflinks that he made and all that. So to me, there's no difference
00:14:59.040
between art and science because I was, I had this mingling all my life. So it doesn't, it wasn't
00:15:06.740
strange for me to step from one to the other. And as far as writing I I've been writing since the seventh
00:15:13.900
grade. My teacher just praised out a impromptu essay that I wrote. I had forgotten the assignment
00:15:20.540
to do it in ahead of time. So I just did it right then and there. And I got an A plus and he read it.
00:15:26.000
This is great. And he told my mother at the PTA, he should go into journalism kind of thing. Anyway,
00:15:30.820
so I've written since the seventh grade for pay since my years at Duke. And then my first book was in
00:15:40.280
1989. And that was published by Springer Herlag. That was Synesthesia Union of the Senses. And Springer makes
00:15:48.540
beautiful books. They make books that aren't going to sell many copies, but they're, they're,
00:15:54.400
they're in mathematics and physics and all that, but they're, they're. This one is Springer.
00:15:59.240
Aha. The Darwin one is Springer. Yeah. Yeah. And they made beautiful, beautiful books. So that's
00:16:05.140
fine. And then after, you know, I wrote, I read, I don't know, six or seven books. And I wanted to
00:16:11.660
switch from, and I wrote a number of magazine pieces about teaching people how to die, students
00:16:18.540
how to deal with death, for example. And I thought, I really want to switch from pure science writing to
00:16:25.380
more literary kinds of nonfiction. And so I thought, oh, I'll go back to school. And American University
00:16:32.420
has a creative writing program. And I thought, well, they're never going to let me in. I'm too old and
00:16:37.540
all that. Well, I didn't realize that somebody like me was prized. And we had six of us who are
00:16:43.120
over the age of 50, they're called non-traditional students. We called ourselves old farts. And it was,
00:16:51.560
it was exciting being around all these creative people, young, young and 20 years old, and then the
00:16:57.820
faculty, well-established writers. It was very energizing. And I would do things like, I realized
00:17:08.280
how much I love to go to the library and just wander the stacks. And I hadn't done that in decades. It's
00:17:21.040
So yeah, that's amazing. So okay, let's go. I just want to, I remember there's one term from your
00:17:27.180
latest book, let me mention it again, for people to go get it, your stone age brain in the screen
00:17:32.040
age. So there's one term, digital autism, I must admit, I haven't read the book yet, I plan to,
00:17:39.360
but that caught my eye, because I'm currently writing a book titled, suicidal empathy. And of
00:17:46.980
course, empathy is something or lack thereof, sometimes that you could see in autism. So I'm
00:17:51.700
familiar with some of that literature. But what does digital autism mean in the context of your
00:17:57.500
It means that people exposed to heavy screen use, particularly young people, what they have
00:18:05.900
exposure does is it induces autistic like symptoms in otherwise normal individuals, they don't have
00:18:16.540
developmental autism, but they have autistic like symptoms. So the first thing is that reduced eye
00:18:23.080
contact, you call their name, you're lucky if you get a grunt out of them, they won't look up, reduce
00:18:29.820
socialization, reduce language, you know, and the thing is, is that if you and of course, if you try to
00:18:37.700
take the phone away from a from a kid, they, they, they have a meltdown there, you know, they, they have a
00:18:45.360
meltdown is what they have. And it's like, wow, tell me they're not addicted to this little device
00:18:52.600
here. But if you do take it away, and for only, I don't know, about two weeks or so, the symptoms go
00:18:59.160
away, which they never do in developmental autism. And this was first noticed in an orphanage in
00:19:06.560
Romania, where kids were exposed to TVs and screens all the all the all the time. And the doctors there
00:19:13.700
noticed these these autistic like symptoms, and remove the devices and noticed the dramatic
00:19:22.200
reversal of symptoms. And so there are there are deep boot camps that would go into for digital detox,
00:19:30.000
like Hillary cash's restart, for example, there's there's quite a few around the country now. And
00:19:35.640
basically, the kids get sent away to this camp, and they have no screens, no devices, no radios,
00:19:43.140
they just each other, and the counselors, and they have to talk to one another, they have to play with
00:19:49.980
each other, they have to engage over their meals. That in other words, they have to socialize, which is
00:19:58.240
something they haven't done in a long time, because they're so sucked into the screen here. And so
00:20:05.340
this, it has a caustic, it has a caustic effect.
00:20:08.640
Are you familiar with the recent book also by on the same topic by Jonathan Haidt, the anxious
00:20:16.760
generation, I think it deals with roughly the same types of issues.
00:20:20.180
I've not read it, but I, we corresponded sometime back, we're on the same wavelength, basically,
00:20:26.800
he's approaching it from a different angle than I am. Whereas I'm looking at it from the brain's point
00:20:32.620
of view, but pretty, pretty strictly. And not only just, you know, exposure to screens, but what
00:20:38.900
happens with with the lack of sleep, what happens with all this blue light that we're being exposed to,
00:20:44.020
etc. So there's quite a, and then what about the loss of cursive handwriting? How does that affect
00:20:51.220
thinking? So there's quite a lot of material in the book that I cover.
00:20:57.720
Here's a, here's a empirical question that maybe it's been addressed. And if it has, I'm sure you
00:21:02.900
probably have the answer. So I'm a voracious reader. But I found that even in for someone who,
00:21:10.020
I mean, I'm not a teenager, so my brain is not quite as malleable, I'm not quite as addicted
00:21:14.800
as some of the young folks. But I find sometimes that because I've been conditioned to also do the,
00:21:21.800
the scrolling for the next hit, that at times, I really have to work hard to not interrupt my
00:21:30.200
reading flow, because I've lost a bit of the ability to completely be immersed in the book.
00:21:36.140
So is there any research that links the amount of digital technology that I consume,
00:21:48.060
I don't know if there's any qualitative, quantitative link that's been established. But the,
00:21:55.380
there is, there's a wonderful book called The Revenge of Analog. And it talks about people who write
00:22:02.260
in Molesky notebooks or sketch on inches paper, or talk about the finishability of a novel,
00:22:10.300
of the kind of pleasure you get from linear thinking, being able to follow a linear argument,
00:22:16.940
not just one screen pull at a time, not just a paragraph at a time, if you're lucky, because we don't
00:22:22.860
hardly get that much in these little dribs and drabs that we get online.
00:22:28.360
But to be able to follow a sustained argument is really flexing, building your cerebral muscles.
00:22:38.720
Yeah, beautiful. Okay, I want to go now, as promised, in the intro to synesthesia.
00:22:44.500
Before we do that, so this is a, I think I read what I'm about to describe is called the President's
00:22:51.560
speech. It was one of the chapters in Oliver Sacks, the man who mistook his wife for a hat. And I've,
00:23:02.000
I've, are you familiar with that particular chapter? Do you know what I'm talking about?
00:23:05.860
So it, so at one point, Sacks, who was also a neurologist, was doing his rounds, and he passes
00:23:12.840
by a room, Richard, where the people who were in that room were all suffering from aphasia.
00:23:20.440
But yet, they were looking at the screen, listening to some president, I can't remember
00:23:26.320
who the president would have been at the time, maybe Reagan. And even though they couldn't
00:23:30.680
understand the words that were being enunciated, they were all cracking up. And so that took
00:23:36.980
them about, why are they laughing? And apparently, the explanation he gave is that even though they
00:23:41.780
couldn't understand the words, they understood what seemed like some of the falsity in political
00:23:48.100
speech. And they were responding to those intonations. So having said, so that was the
00:23:53.180
first time that I kind of learned of the, these magical clinical tales that of course, you've
00:23:59.360
got a whole bunch of. So what is synesthesia? Because it seems like it's a complete science
00:24:06.380
Well, synesthesia, and here's, here's the book here, right? The synesthesia, everybody knows
00:24:13.560
anesthesia, which is no sensation. So synesthesia means joined or coupled sensation. And there
00:24:20.360
are children born with two, three, or all five of their senses hooked together. So that my
00:24:25.580
voice, for example, is not only something that they hear, but they might also see it or taste
00:24:31.100
it or feel it as a physical touch. They assume everybody's like this, until they say something
00:24:36.780
innocuous. One seven year old told her best friend, Oh, my A is the most beautiful pink
00:24:42.500
I've ever seen. What does your A look like? And the girl looked at her and said, you're
00:24:46.640
weird, and never talked to her again. So they go from thinking everybody does it to I'm the
00:24:52.460
only one in the world. And, you know, at the beginning, when I did this, the first, I only
00:25:01.840
knew the word because I like words. And so I thought synesthesia, anesthesia, great, stick
00:25:06.660
it in the back of your head. And I had a new neighbor who taught lighting design at the School
00:25:12.040
of the Arts. And he invited me to dinner to meet some friends and then said, will be a few
00:25:16.240
more minutes, there aren't enough points on the chicken. Now his friends laughed and said,
00:25:21.620
Oh, Michael, what are you smoking? But he turned to me and said, Well, you're a neurologist,
00:25:25.680
maybe you'll understand. When I taste something, I feel it on my face and in my hands, a feeling
00:25:32.680
sweeps down my arm, and I feel weight, shape, texture, temperature as if I'm actually grasping
00:25:38.860
something. So I said, Oh, you have synesthesia. I was just trying to be polite. And he looked at
00:25:48.320
me and said, Do you mean there's a name for what I do? And then I thought, How could he
00:25:52.980
not know? And that's when the light bulb went off, like this could be something important.
00:25:58.420
Because here's this, this well known phenomenon that's been forgotten. And he doesn't know he
00:26:04.540
has it. So I told my my colleagues about him. And they said, Well, what is this CAT scan show?
00:26:09.760
And I said, No, no, no, you don't understand. He doesn't have a hole in his head. He has something
00:26:15.000
extra. And they looked at me like I was crazy and said, Oh, man, this is too weird,
00:26:20.800
to new age, you stay away from it, because it's going to ruin your career. So I don't know where
00:26:26.260
their careers went, but mine's doing fine. But as he says that with some gleeful,
00:26:32.740
for the first, for the first 15 years, I got these withering looks of this cannot possibly be a real
00:26:40.180
brain phenomenon. They're just making it up. They want attention. They're having residual
00:26:44.540
hallucinations from years of pot smoking and LSD, or maybe on and on and on and on everything they
00:26:50.580
came up with. And, you know, what they insisted on was were pictures of the brain, which we didn't
00:26:57.500
have at the time, really. And but eventually, because and what that's asking for, they want a third
00:27:04.600
person verification of a first person feeling. It's like, well, show me what it's like to be in
00:27:12.700
love on a brain scan. Okay, well, you sort of can, but it's like, you know, take the most
00:27:19.080
subjective thing and insist that you have an external operative definition of it. And that
00:27:24.700
just doesn't fly. But eventually, they got the pictures that they asked for, and they had to shut
00:27:30.400
up. And so now, of course, synesthesia is is very, very popular all around the world as young people
00:27:35.880
studying it, writing, doing their thesis on it, writing monographs and papers. There's conferences
00:27:43.900
all over the world. I just got invited to one in Spain, another one in Bern to give a keynote address,
00:27:50.680
et cetera. So but early on, it was like, these people are crazy. This can't be real. And of course,
00:27:57.360
what what synesthesia has done is cause a paradigm shift. Because we used to believe in modularity,
00:28:05.960
that every sense, every there was module for language for sensation for cap for calculation,
00:28:11.680
but just that the other. And by definition, there was no crossover between the two. Well,
00:28:16.940
synesthesia really sort of puts the kibosh on that idea. So it's synesthesia has caused a rethinking of
00:28:24.240
how we think the brain is organized. And we now know that there's cross it's not do do synesthetes
00:28:31.900
have crosstalk in their brain? Of course they do. But they have much more than the rest of us. And so
00:28:37.480
that's why I say that we are all synesthetic, except we're not consciously aware that we are.
00:28:42.480
Okay, a couple of questions. What percentage of the population has synesthesia?
00:28:47.340
Oh, 4% of 4% of the population, or one in 23 people inherit the gene for it. But because
00:28:54.020
it's not expressed with complete fidelity, a smaller number of one in 90 has some kind of overt
00:29:02.320
Okay, now does the so I'm assuming that the condition implies that there are at least
00:29:08.980
an overlap between two sensations. But could it could it be that all of my five sensations are invoked
00:29:18.320
as I navigate the world? Or is there an upper limit? Is it there's never been a documented case with more
00:29:25.420
Oh, yes, sure there has. Yes. The way I found out about synesthesia was by reading
00:29:30.460
A.R. Lurie's The Mind of a Mnemonist, which is about a memory expert who had a five fold synesthesia.
00:29:38.000
And the reason that he had such a limitless memory is he could add all these extra hooks that he could hang
00:29:43.120
things on. So yes, if you have one kind of synesthesia, you've got a 50% chance of having a second, third or fourth
00:29:50.580
So there are there are people who have multiple kinds of synesthesia. It's not unusual to have
00:29:57.100
four kinds or all five that they won't necessarily be the senses. For example, the personalization of
00:30:07.340
and genderization of graphemes, that is of numerous numerals and letters.
00:30:15.260
There's seeing time in three dimensions in space that encircles you. These are called number forms.
00:30:24.860
So people say, you know, where's seven? Well, seven is down here. It's brown and it's by my knee.
00:30:31.600
So and they have their then again, they have the it's like having a filofax or calendar that's
00:30:37.000
limitless. So they birthdays and certain appointments and things are colored in a certain
00:30:43.040
way in this spatial configuration that encircles the body. David Dickelman's done a lot of work
00:30:52.820
And it I mean, you mentioned just a few minutes ago about, you know, brain imaging and or you can't
00:30:58.080
quite see love and then you corrected yourself said, well, you can't. So does that mean that we can
00:31:03.120
see a signature of someone who has that condition, either through brain imaging or some other
00:31:10.300
neuroanatomical like, can I can I look at two brains and say, I can tell that this one has
00:31:17.480
synesthesia and this one doesn't or it's completely invisible to you?
00:31:21.080
Well, there's a cottage industry of functional MRI that looks at people who have, let's see,
00:31:27.460
you know, colored hearing, colored graphemes, different kinds, different kinds of musical
00:31:35.780
units, etc. And you can show that, in fact, if they say that when they listen to spoken
00:31:40.920
words, they see color. Indeed, the V4, the human color area does activate. So you can show
00:31:48.420
so but, you know, and it's interesting for a for us from a scientific perspective, but the mistake
00:31:58.740
is to point point and say there, there it is, you know, no, that's only one node in the distributed
00:32:04.820
system that that that accounts for synesthesia and synesthesia exists as the most active process in
00:32:13.940
this distributed system. So, you know, scans can only see a small part of the active brain.
00:32:21.540
Well, that's interesting that you say this, because so I've written two papers, academic
00:32:26.260
papers, Richard, where I was critiquing the neuroimaging paradigm. And in my argument, I
00:32:35.060
borrowed a term from one of my former professors in my PhD, who's a cognitive psychologist, I think he
00:32:41.200
called it the illusion of explanatory profundity. The idea is that, you know, if I see a bunch of
00:32:48.480
sciency looking brain images, it just it feels sciency. Now, in my view, and you're the neurologist,
00:32:56.100
so you'll tell me if I'm right or not. The brain imaging paradigm is great for diagnosis. You know,
00:33:04.020
here we are here, here's the tumor. It's not quite as good in inferring, you know, behavior and so
00:33:11.160
on where, you know, use the term cottage industry almost with some derision. Did I read that correctly,
00:33:17.720
that we are overselling how much explanatory profundity we're getting out of the neuroimaging
00:33:23.160
paradigm? Yes, I think so. Because I think that it's, it's, it's being misunderstood by the larger
00:33:29.840
population. I mean, that's that that's the real problem, is that they there's not an appreciation of
00:33:35.220
the limits of these techniques. When you're dealing with behavior, you've got the time factor,
00:33:44.220
and the scans, these scans take several minutes. And so, you know, they're not going to catch a
00:33:52.580
fleeting thought, because all that that you're thinking is too fast. And what are you thinking?
00:33:58.460
They used to be, well, I started, started with cerebral blood flow using radioactive xenon.
00:34:06.800
And it would be called the resting state. And we showed this hyperfrontal thing. Well,
00:34:14.140
of course, the frontal lobes are activated, because they're lying on this table with several thousand
00:34:19.420
volts going across their head in this motorcycle helmet that's modified with these scintillation
00:34:24.580
probes. And the doctors where there's telling them, relax, relax, relax. And so, of course,
00:34:31.060
so what's the resting state? Right? That's assuming that the brain is a tabula rasa? Well,
00:34:37.360
they could be thinking about their, their laundry list, their shopping, having sex, fantasizing,
00:34:45.100
you know, God knows what they're thinking about. It's not a resting state, their, their mind is very,
00:34:50.000
very active. So I think it's a misnomer to think that the thing that you're pointing to that's
00:34:56.500
activated is the only thing that's going on at the time. Right? And that's just not the case.
00:35:03.120
It may be a personal question. So my background is in psychology of decision making. That's what I did
00:35:08.800
my PhD on. I specifically, I studied how much information do we acquire before we stop acquiring
00:35:16.640
additional information and commit to a choice. So I studied those cognitive processes. So I'm very
00:35:20.980
much steeped in the behavioral decision theory and psychology of decision making literature and so on.
00:35:25.980
So as someone who studies decision making, I'm always interested when I have people on
00:35:29.980
to ask them, how did they make the choices that they made? So when you were deciding to specialize
00:35:35.200
in a particular medical, medical specialization, what do you remember, or was there a mechanism by which
00:35:42.700
you said neurology is for me, not internal medicine? Oh, neurology picked me. I hated it in
00:35:50.860
medical school. I hated neuroanatomy. We made all these drawings with colored pencils. And then the
00:35:56.360
next day, the professor came in with all the exceptions, and we had to tear that away and make
00:36:01.540
a new one and all. So just before a big exam, somebody we never saw, heard of before, came in with a 28
00:36:10.040
page handout, outlining quote, some of the highlights of the limbic system, the emotional
00:36:15.860
brain. Well, we threw a fit and marched into the dean's office saying, this is impossible. And then
00:36:23.560
trying to study that exam, I in a fit of peak, I threw my notes off the balcony of my apartment.
00:36:29.040
Well, obviously, I retrieved them. But then later on, in internal medicine, reading the section of
00:36:37.640
neurology and Harrison's internal medicine. I was late at night, 1am, I'm going to this laundry list
00:36:45.020
of unpronounceable diseases and all that. And I come across aphasia. And I think, oh, wow, this is
00:36:53.300
diabolical. You can move your mouth and tongue and make sounds, but you can't speak, or you can't
00:37:00.960
understand what's being said to you. I said, does that take away somebody's humanity? What's left?
00:37:07.000
Are they a ghost in the shell? And I laughed out loud, at which point I thought, oh, shit,
00:37:12.480
I'm supposed to hate this. So that was the moment that neurology picked me. And then when I rotated
00:37:18.160
through as a student, one of the professors, one afternoon, put his arm around me and say, you know,
00:37:24.340
Rick, you have a real knack for this. We're going to send you to a fellowship at Queen Square in London
00:37:29.720
after one of your clinical rotations. And that was that. It was decided for me. And of course,
00:37:36.340
when I got to London, which I loved already, but there you're at the center of English speaking
00:37:43.600
neurology. There's the amphitheater that the country where the CAT scan was invented, you had to wait a
00:37:51.640
week to get a CAT scan. So it was all hands on. It was very theatrical. Yeah, I remember in one
00:38:00.600
rounds, Brian McArdle of McArdle's disease was chastised. The resident said, well, let's get it.
00:38:07.920
We need to get an EMG. He said, what for? He said, well, to document the weakness. And the doctor said,
00:38:13.580
you just shown us that they're weak. You don't need to test. Only Americans do that.
00:38:20.780
Did you ever get a chance to meet or interact with Oliver Sacks?
00:38:26.300
We corresponded. We never met in person, but we corresponded.
00:38:34.120
Well, people always, you know, people often ask
00:38:37.980
whether we were alike or not. Of course, we weren't alike at all.
00:38:42.060
Other than the fact, I guess they were both gay. There must be something about being gay and being
00:38:46.900
a neurologist that goes together. But, you know, Oliver was this like Talmudic kind of
00:38:53.500
approach to it. And I just have a different kind of approach.
00:39:02.200
Ah, okay. Because I wanted, I missed the part in the Talmud where you... Okay, I see.
00:39:07.360
Okay. So what are some of the next... I mean, I know now you're promoting your latest book,
00:39:15.600
but what are some projects that keep you up, excited about what the future holds?
00:39:22.400
You know, I always wake up with a sense of purpose. It's wonderful. It's great to be alive.
00:39:27.880
My next project is a suspense thriller called What She Saw. It involves murder. It involves
00:39:38.980
It's a... This is a fiction book. And I'm doing it in... With a collaborator,
00:39:43.060
one of my old MFA students. She's a little bit older than me.
00:39:46.960
She's been a successful playwright. She's got a... Having a reading in London of her upcoming play.
00:39:54.700
So we're going to... On the 11th, I leave for the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, which is an artist colony,
00:40:02.640
three hours away in the foothills of the Appalachians. And so we're going to be working
00:40:06.740
there together for six weeks, working on this new project.
00:40:12.620
Oh, we have. No, no, no. We... One afternoon in the Southampton Writers Conference, it was raining.
00:40:21.100
So we were standing under the eaves and after lunch, waiting for the showers to stop. And I had my
00:40:26.240
little recorder with me. So in an hour, we dictated this whole plot of this thing. And... But it sat for a
00:40:34.980
while because we were both busy with other things. And then just this past year, we started resuming
00:40:40.520
work on it. We've been Zooming sessions and getting a little preliminary work done so that by the time
00:40:47.060
we get to the artist colony, we'll be able to hit the ground running.
00:40:49.980
Well, I'm glad that you said that you're working on it because if you hadn't said that, then my next
00:40:53.920
question wouldn't make sense. What is the difference in your creative process? All of your previous
00:41:00.680
book have been nonfiction, correct? Yes. So is there a... I mean, yes, there's a difference in
00:41:07.160
that one is fiction, one is nonfiction. But in the generation of output, what would be some of the
00:41:14.960
key... Because for example, I've only written nonfiction books, right? So I don't know. I've
00:41:21.180
never... Even when I wrote as a kid, I would write about actual things. What is my position on the
00:41:29.020
death penalty, right? So I never created characters. I never generated a world that
00:41:35.260
didn't exist until I came along to build the characters. So from your view, having now engaged
00:41:41.760
both processes, what are some similarities and differences for aspiring authors?
00:41:45.900
Well, they're quite different, actually. And my agent said he's had a lot of his clients who have
00:41:54.920
gone, tried to write fiction, and they give up on it. It's just too hard. Well, the focus has got to be
00:42:01.860
on character. And as Aristotle says, a person's character is his desire. So that's the driving
00:42:10.600
force of what do people want? What are the obstacles in their way? And you can't have a lot of exposition.
00:42:19.020
You have to... It has to be dramatic. And so the arc is conflict and resolution and challenge.
00:42:32.860
Do you find it more daunting to write the fiction book? Because the other one,
00:42:37.580
you're protected by your expertise, right? I mean...
00:42:41.180
And I've done it... That's what I've done for decades is the nonfiction. And I wanted to get away from that.
00:42:46.220
Right. So even in your Stone Age brain, I start with a dramatic scenario of three million years ago
00:42:53.420
in some gorge where the sun comes up and the men come out and sniff the air and the women go off
00:42:59.980
marching to the tidal pool to collect snails and food and all that. And it illustrates some of the
00:43:07.020
things about the orienting reflex and some of the aspects of the Stone Age brain, and particularly about
00:43:13.180
the need for socialization because our early communities were only a couple dozen, two,
00:43:18.380
three dozen people, individuals together. And so everybody had to cooperate.
00:43:24.860
So the other thing about fiction is dialogue. You've got to have dialogue and then you have to know how to
00:43:33.020
write brief dialogue. You can't be long-winded. Mark Twain once said, I would have written you a shorter
00:43:50.460
As you're mentioning the importance of dialogue, I'm thinking about some of my favorite movies of
00:43:54.220
all time. Well, certainly my favorite movie of all time is 12 Angry Men, the original one,
00:44:01.740
Right. And that movie can only work, right? I mean, there's no special effects and car chase
00:44:08.620
scenes, right? So the only thing that's gripping me are the words that are being exchanged within
00:44:13.660
that room. So it speaks to your point. Dialogue is everything. The other one that I was thinking
00:44:17.420
about, which I'm not sure, tell me if you've seen it, is Glengarry Glen Ross, which is...
00:44:27.020
Well, incredibly powerful dialogue between a bunch of salespeople, real estate guys,
00:44:34.940
Exactly. So, okay, last question, and then I'll let you go. This is one that has almost become
00:44:42.460
customary for me to ask at the end of the show, because in my last book on happiness,
00:44:47.100
I end the book with a section on regret. And you're going to be happy if hopefully at the end of your
00:44:54.700
life, you look back and you have few regrets. And before I cede the floor to you, let me give you
00:45:01.100
kind of the background. So one of my former professors, when I was a doctoral student,
00:45:10.060
Oh, you know his work. Okay. Specifically his regret work or his decision-making work or which work?
00:45:14.700
Oh, the earlier work. How I know what's not so, I think.
00:45:18.620
Oh, yeah, of course. Well, part of my PhD, I took a seminar with him.
00:45:24.300
Of course, with him. Any case, in his psychology of regret work, I mean, he wasn't the first to
00:45:29.020
make that distinction, but certainly to study it empirically, he was a pioneer. So we've got two
00:45:34.060
sources of regret, Richard. We've got regret due to inaction and regret due to action, right?
00:45:39.340
I regret that I cheated on my wife and now I'm divorced. That's action. I regret something that I
00:45:44.300
did. I regret regret due to inaction. You know, I decided to become a physician because my dad was a
00:45:50.700
physician, but I really wanted to be an artist. That's where, and I regret that I didn't follow
00:45:55.420
that path. Now, it may or may not surprise you, Richard, that over the long term, the biggest
00:46:02.220
regret that looms in people's psyche is the one due to inaction, the road not taken.
00:46:07.980
So having said that and set it up, you're still, hopefully, you've got many more years left in
00:46:12.700
your illustrious life. If I asked you today, what is the one or two big regrets that you'd be willing
00:46:19.340
to share? What would they be? Oh, I would have taken advantage of opportunities earlier in my life
00:46:26.620
as they came along. Professional opportunities. All sorts of opportunities for friendships, for
00:46:33.340
adventure, for travel, just to get to develop skills. On the other hand, you can't do everything.
00:46:44.620
So it's like, I, you know, you might say be wistful in a sort of way that, gee, I wish I had,
00:46:50.380
you know, been able to work with my hands more, for example. But, you know, I work with my head.
00:46:56.540
So that's what I do. So I don't have any regret about that. And yes, my father was a physician and
00:47:02.140
come hell or high water. I was going to be a physician just like him. I really wanted to
00:47:07.260
go into the theater because I liked, I was very good at it. But as an actor, yes, as an actor.
00:47:14.460
And looking, looking back at it, I don't regret that at all. Because when you're a doctor, you have,
00:47:21.980
you can, you can have all sorts of opportunities that you can take advantage of. You have all sorts
00:47:26.780
of choices before you. Whereas if I were an actor, then I'd be limited to what's available and
00:47:34.460
pounding the pavement and all that. So I've had a, I'm just blessed with having had the education
00:47:44.140
that I've had. And knowing that it's like, I have nothing to complain about, because I have lots of
00:47:51.020
resources. And if I ever feel sorry for myself, smack me. Well, gratitude is certainly part of
00:47:58.780
the recipe for happiness. Let me mention the book one more time, Where My Glasses, your latest book,
00:48:03.900
Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age just came out in early October. Check it out. Richard,
00:48:09.180
stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline. Thank you so much for coming and best of luck with