Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
jones kaplan welcome to the show thank
you happy to be here i am very happy to
have you as i was saying before we
started rolling anything about the brain
beliefs like all that stuff is is my
absolute sweet spot my total obsession
right and as somebody who studies this
for a living i want to start with the
idea of beliefs i think
beliefs
govern your behaviors behaviors govern
your life
therefore the quality of your life is
basically the quality of your beliefs
but most people i have found mistake
their chosen beliefs
for
objective truth and they don't realize
that their they have chosen throughout
life to believe things whether their
parents told them to or whatever but
they have decided
that certain things are true
talk to me how do beliefs get formed
yeah that's right so they can form very
early in life almost through osmosis the
brain starts to build models of the
world i mean if you think about what the
brain is there for that's the way i like
to start the brain what is the brain
therefore
really the brain is there to keep our
bodies alive right the brain is a
complicated solution to the problem of
homeostasis the problem of maintaining a
complicated organism like the human body
do you have a thesis on why we developed
really
big brains
well our brains could have been bigger i
mean it's interesting thing about the
size of a brain isn't necessarily the
important thing a high-powered intellect
we want smart brains right not
necessarily big brains
and uh actually what happened is the
brain got wrinklier and wrinklier to fit
more and more surface area and the same
head because you know if we just keep
getting bigger and bigger heads yeah
that becomes an issue yeah it's a pelvis
becomes an issue in walking and all that
kind of stuff so but do you have a
thesis on that was it for locomotion was
it for something else is it for social
cooperation i think all of those things
i mean basically problem solving as life
gets more and more complicated there are
more and more problems to solve some of
those problems are motor problems you
know how do i get inside this bottle to
get a grape that's stuck at the bottom
some of them are social how do i deal
with
living within a community of individuals
where everybody's got different
intentions and different
beliefs and i have to navigate that
whole situation so it's not one thing
the brain is a in many ways a general
purpose problem solver but all those
problems do have to do with maintaining
life and keeping us alive
and as part of doing that the brain
builds a model of the world that it has
to navigate right it builds a simulated
picture of what the world is like that's
where beliefs come from that's the basis
of belief some of them are built into us
from the course of evolution itself we
have beliefs about
gravity and about shadows that are built
into the very perceptual system that we
have right no matter what you're going
to have those you're born with them and
they are going to influence how you
understand the world how you see and how
you hear and how you touch things and
how you respond to them and then can
there be some optical illusions or
illusions of some kind that reveal those
things there's so many optical illusions
for example when you have
a uh you know there are you can show
that two different patches of light on a
page that look very different to us one
looks dark gray one looks light gray
actually result from the same amount of
light hitting our retina and just
because one of them falls within
the cast shadow of an object the brain
reasons that it must be actually lighter
and be you know it's darker because of
the shadow when you see that test for
the first time it seems impossible i
remember thinking nope this they're
playing a trick and the they're leading
me to try to make like my cognitive
dissonance go away or something because
there's no way these are actually the
same color it's and then you fold the
paper and you're like what the [ __ ] like
it is the most bizarre experience we
believe
our perceptions we believe our eyes and
it's very convincing to see something it
seems like when you see it it's out
there in the world as it is right but
perception is a constructive process the
brain is making hypotheses about what's
out there and it's confirming and
disconfirming those hypotheses you
remember the whole blue dress yellow
dress
up yeah
i still can't fathom that other people
see it differently right which which way
i don't remember now but i remember when
i saw it i was like what do you mean uh
either i saw it as blue or gold i don't
remember which but i was looking at it
going well this is obviously blue let's
say and i was like i don't understand
how it is even remotely conceivable that
people see it as
gold like i still to this day like no
it's really hard to believe it just
seems like they must be completely wrong
but they're bringing people messing with
me again i was like it's not possible
like the because there are some optical
illusions and and the reason that i want
to go in on this for anybody listening
is there there are some things that are
hardwired to your point about evolution
has given you these things so the idea
of gravity hardwire the idea of shadows
means something hardwired uh things
going more blue at distance hardwired
like they're just all these things that
our brain uses as
born in context to make sense of the
world the point is to get people to
understand that these things that you
perceive are constructed realities they
are not objective truth and that will
have deep implications i'm sure as we
continue this conversation it certainly
has deep implications in people's lives
but uh
how convincing these perceptions can be
is really jarring
so going to the the
blue gold thing what's going on there so
the shadow i get so your brain goes oh
something in shadow means that some of
the luminosity is being blocked it's not
actually changing the color yeah but the
blue gold one the brain is making two
different assumptions in two different
people about the context of the color
right so you could have a color that
looks blue in a bright light or yellow
and a dark light produces the same
actual wavelength of light that's the
object so depending on what you assume
the ambient light is your brain is going
to make a different conclusion about
what color the thing is and what you
perceive as your actual conscious
reality is that conclusion itself right
it's not the actual your people think of
perception as a passive read-off that
there's light hitting your retina and
there are certain things that happen in
the specialized neurons that are in the
retina and that's true but what we
perceive is not
the activity in the retina right that
activity guides the
uh hypotheses and the conclusions that
the brain the inferences of the brain
makes about what's out there and what we
actually perceive is the result of those
inferences
yeah so this is where things get really
weird for me so i've made my whole life
essentially is about figuring out
the ways in which my brain is not
working for me
and that became a real big breakthrough
for me in my early 20s where i was
really sliding towards a dark place i
was not enjoying my life i felt very
trapped by my lack of intellect and so i
found that really emotionally
distressing
and it was only once i realized brain
plasticity was real i could change
things that that sort of lightened up a
little bit for me that i thought oh okay
i can get better but then as you start
going down the process of getting better
and you start learning about the brain
you realize wait a second all these
things that i assumed were just
objectively true
even a lot of those things well in fact
all of those things literally all for
everybody listening everything that you
think is real
is
your brain's
best interpretation
to an end and i've heard you talk a lot
about motivated thinking motivated
thinking and science is incredibly
dangerous you want something to be true
and therefore you find yourself like
being nudged even subconsciously towards
that
going back to beliefs that's what i
think happens with beliefs you have
like you said through osmosis gained a
belief so you didn't do anything
necessarily intentionally but you have
this belief now your brain trying to be
consistent is interpreting everything
that you see through that belief
and it can lead people to very
sub-optimal outcomes in their life
yes
there's a couple things in there that
are important one is the brain's drive
towards consistency and that is really
interesting the brain wants to have a
coherent view of the world taking it
back to perception we see this
in very simple perceptual ways with you
know for example the blind spot is
another perceptual example of this we
have this part of our retina that
doesn't receive any information from the
visual world so we're literally blind in
one part of our visual field because
it's where the optic that's where the
optic nerve leaves right normally you
know you have two eyes so one eye covers
for the other but if you close one eye
you still don't see a gap in the world
there's not a perception of nothingness
the brain papers over that gap it tries
to make a consistent picture of the
world it fills it in like photoshop
right we see that's so freaky yeah
and you know that that principle extends
beyond perception that the brain wants
to create a consistent view of the world
and that provides a motivation
to find information that's consistent
with what we think
the photoshop effect of your brain
filling that in i know there's a
rare condition where people that go
blind actually begin to hallucinate a
full visual field which just seems crazy
but that tells me that we're storing an
insane amount of information now the
people that have that um problem are
they saying i am experiencing the world
exactly as i was experiencing it before
i went blind or is there a more
dreamlike sense to it yeah that's
complicated first of all this is an
extremely rare condition this is not
something that happens a lot this is
called anton syndrome it happens with
damage to the visual cortex so the brain
can no longer see
you can't interpret signals from the
outside world but
the brain is very good at imagining at
creating
false perceptual experiences for us
using recall using memory things from
memory can regenerate very vivid
perceptual experiences now imagination
is never exactly the same as reality and
most of us can tell the difference most
of the time so i think for a lot of
these patients there's a combination of
some kind of confabulatory perceptual
machinery going on where the brain is
making all these um hallucinations these
imaginations combined with
some kind of denial that the brain
doesn't want to admit that it's losing
information a part of this papering over
process of giving us a consistent view
of the world can sometimes involve
denying certain realities like i'm blind
can you give an example of
the way that
people with selective damage to their
brain
will make up a story for instance the
one that i know is uh if you can no
longer form long-term memories
but if you do something that triggers
the pain response they'll respond
they will have learned the pain response
so they'll know to avoid that
and then when you ask them why they're
avoiding that thing which
you know outwardly would not lead to
pain but they've been through the trick
as it were by the doctors right and
they'll make something up oh yeah i
don't trust people in white lab coats
and they'll make it sound
completely logical yeah
we call that confabulations brain just
filling in gaps and you know one of the
interesting forms of that i've
encountered in my career is with a
condition called the split brain this is
what i studied when i first started in
graduate school and this is a condition
where the two hemispheres of the brain
have been surgically separated so
surgeon went in there as a treatment for
epilepsy it's kind of a drastic thing to
do this is a surgery surgery was done
back in the 50s
before we had really good epilepsy drugs
people were having seizures all day long
and there really weren't a lot of good
options sometimes you would go in there
and just you know cut things and there
was reason to believe that the
fibers that connect the two hemispheres
of the brain it's a big bundle of fibers
called the corpus callosum and if you
cut the corpus callosum the seizures
would stop spreading from one side of
the brain the others this was an
effective treatment but it left the
person with two completely separated
cervical hemispheres it's like having
two brains in one head
and what we could do in the lab is we
could demonstrate that when you show a
picture to one side of say the visual
field it's processed by the opposite
hemisphere and in a healthy brain that
information would just transfer over the
corpus callosum and both hemispheres
would know what it was that was out
there but in a split brain person that
can't happen so when you feed
information on one side of the visual
field you're feeding it to one
hemisphere you can then ask them what
they saw now one of the big difference
between the left and right hemispheres
has to do with speech left hemisphere is
really good at talking where atmosphere
basically can't control the mechanisms
of speech
so if you show a picture to the left
side of the screen of one of these split
to one of these split brain patients and
ask them what it is that they saw they
would say
i didn't see anything you know because
it's their left hemisphere that's
talking
but then so bananas they do know the
right hemisphere doesn't know what it
saw is the right hemisphere screaming
out like this is [ __ ] like i know
like is their other hand like writing
furiously you know that that side of my
brain is lying i know exactly what this
is yeah that's right so if you ask them
with the left hand to draw then then
they'll draw it do they do they have
awareness like so the the part that is
speaking and split brain patients are
like th this is
this must be the most interesting thing
in neuroscience to me
so just to really push on this point
yeah the part of them that can speak
will say that they don't know what it is
but does the part of them that can speak
have an awareness of the other side
right so this is where the confabulation
comes in
yes they do i mean not only do they have
an awareness of the other side they they
know they had this surgery right one of
our patients was probably we joked that
he was like the world expert in split
brand research because he read
absolutely every paper that was written
about him and also the brain is
disconnected at the level of the
cerebral cortex which is the highest
level of the brain but it's still
unified at the level of the brain stem
which contains some of the
more basic functions that have to do
with regulating the internals of the
body so they would have feelings about
what their atmosphere saw the left
hemisphere would get a sense or an
intuitive notion of what it was and then
it would make up a story to explain it
say oh it was something funny it must
have been a you know woman slipping on a
banana pill
and would it be a woman slipping on a
banana usually they weren't that
accurate the other thing they would but
it would be funny it would be fun so
they're reading the emotion right they
get some some feeling about this some
sense of the emotional tone of it whoa
the other thing this patient i want to
sorry i want to keep pushing on one idea
i'm so curious
is there a sense like
it i know nothing about what it would be
like to have my corpus callosum split
however
my like if you've ever in a dream where
you can't speak there's there is an
intense frustration
does their is it the right hemisphere
right here okay so is the right
hemisphere is there any sense of
agitation that it's being asked a
question because i'm assuming because of
the ears both sides are hearing
so it knows it's being asked a question
to which it has some information
an image because i know one of the
people would he had a trick where he
would draw it on the back of the other
hand which is [ __ ] insane but that
tells me that the that part of the brain
like really wants to be understood or to
to articulate like
is there that sense of frustration i
don't think so it never really um was
expressed if it was there the right
hemisphere is kind of happy-go-lucky it
doesn't seem to care
one way or the other it was pretty chill
pretty relaxed right hemisphere i mean
they would answer if you asked them to
but i never got the sense that it was
like locked in syndrome or was like
trying to communicate you couldn't well
again the left hand was like the way the
right hemisphere could express would you
need to only speak into the right ear
does the right ear go to the right side
that seems like it must the separation
of the auditory track is not as clear as
the visual track so each ear goes to
both sides more heavily to one side than
the other but you can't you can't do it
that way but you would just talk to them
and both hemispheres would hear it but
the right hemisphere could respond and
it's different of the personalities
that's uh a really tricky thing to get
at and we did a lot of different things
to um try to get at that asking them
questions you know what's your favorite
music do they have different like
preferences about things sometimes for
some patients they would exp the right
hemisphere and the left hemisphere would
express different preferences but it's
not you know uh it's hard to say it's a
very again very small number of people
so
when you're talking to a split brain
patient
how much um like how different would
they say they are like uh anybody that's
a long time listener of this show has
heard me talk about phineas gage before
uh massive brain trauma ends up
completely changing his personality even
though he never loses consciousness uh
utterly fascinating
is a split brain patient the same where
it's like if you were in a relationship
with that person you'd be like they're
just not the same or would it be mostly
the same it's mostly the same you know
these things that we do to demonstrate
the disconnection syndrome they involve
laboratory tricks i mean most of the
time the eyes are moving around the
visual field if one hemisphere wants to
see something it can just move you know
you can get information because it just
needs that eye yeah it just needs it's
not just the eye but it's each one half
of each eye goes to each hemisphere so
the left the left side of what you're
looking at like if you focus on one
thing the left side of the world which
falls on both eyes
will be rooted to the opposite
hemisphere wow so you can't just like
it's not just a closing eye
that is exactly what i was picturing the
story is that they're pretty much
indistinguishable from anyone else that
the reality is that they had this
surgery because they lived with
uh terrible epilepsy for many many years
and so there are impairments that result
from that life that they lived where you
know you would notice some things okay
very interesting interesting about
seizures just that you can have an
electrical storm that actually passes
and shows that
every synapse is basically responding to
the one that came before
and so if it's dysfunctioning then it's
gonna send that dysfunction around and
around and around yes a chain reaction
very interesting okay so split brain
patients um i have heard and i don't
know if this is accurate but that they
there is a
a potential for a difference of beliefs
so bringing this all back around the one
that i heard in your face tells me that
this is probably not accurate or that
it's uh exaggerated but what i heard is
that one side was
religious like devoutly religious and
the other side was strictly atheist
interesting i would be skeptical about
that i'm not
i'm not familiar with that particular
story i mean one of the things with the
split brain situation is that it really
caught fire and
the public mind i mean it's such a
fascinating amazing thing that shows us
something about the unity of our own
consciousness right if we could
potentially have these two minds in one
head what does it say about our actual
minds that are sort of you know loosely
connected
and so it was really interesting to
people the differences between the left
hemisphere and the right hemisphere and
all those things have become
cartoonishly
exaggerated over time the fact is that
left hemisphere and the atmosphere are
pretty similar to each other there are
differences but the differences tend to
be relative the left hemisphere will be
slightly more skilled a little bit
quicker a little bit faster certain
things rhymes might be a little bit
better at certain other things visual
spatial things but the kind of um
situation you're talking about with two
totally different belief systems i'd be
pretty skeptical
have you ever thought i'm sure you
haven't studied it but have you ever
thought about what the difference is
between a split brain patient and
twins that are connected at the head
yeah i mean that that's a really
interesting case i guess it would depend
on the particular
details of their connection do they
share a brain
i don't i haven't i've never looked into
this but when i was researching for this
episode and you i've never heard anybody
go into as much detail about split brain
patients as you have so it's always been
at the periphery of my fascination um
and then i just started thinking
why do i find this so interesting and
the reason i find it interesting is i
often my life is about getting very good
at managing competing impulses inside my
brain
and so when you started describing what
happens when you sever the ability for
the two to because a lot of what happens
in the brain is inhibitory impulses yeah
which i find utterly fascinating and we
will certainly talk about transcranial
magnetic stimulation and how you can
like get really interesting effects by
disrupting areas of the brain
but the idea that the thing that
me as a person is good at is
going oh
reacting in a high anxious way to this
that doesn't make sense and so i'm going
to regulate that impulse wanting to eat
this thing nope that doesn't serve my
goals i'm going to but the impulse is
there and it's really intense right and
so or a negative voice you know where
i'm telling myself that i'm a loser but
then another part of me is like that
doesn't make sense and so stop repeating
that right and so it's like when when
you then hear about oh those two things
and i get this is the cartoonish way to
think about it but those two things are
essentially they they each have their
side and once they can't communicate and
now they're sort of left
unbalanced unchecked
they would spin up into their sort of
own personality that feels so right to
what life feels like to me right that i
glommed on to the cartoony version of
that no i mean i think the essence of
what you're saying is getting at some
truth about the brain which is that it's
a collection of disparate processes that
are in many ways stitched together to
form the illusion of a coherent self
right the self is an illusion and we can
get deeper into that but there's a
there's a symptom that often comes along
with the split brain that i think speaks
to what you're talking about it's called
often called the alien hand syndrome
which involves
uh an action that the person doesn't
feel like they're doing themselves so it
could be like you know one hand is
buttoning the shirt and the other hand
is unbuttoning
sometimes having seen dr strangelove
yeah exactly that's so hilarious um that
actually happens not only with the split
brain but also with damage to a part of
the brain called the supplementary motor
area which is involved in the selection
and inhibition of actions where you can
get you know the hand just like doing
things on its own it's very freaky
because they can be very goal-directed
organized actions that don't accord with
what the person feels like is their own
will and this is an experience that we
all have to some degree like what you're
describing you know we have competing
impulses that we have to select among as
part of
the challenge that the brain has in in
organizing our behavior
so now the question is how do we
organize that behavior like at a
functional level i've always referred to
this as my overwatch mechanism so i feel
like there's the lesser me and the that
wants to eat the cake the ice cream
whatever and then there is my overwatch
mechanism which says these are my goals
this is my value system so i either do
or do not do that thing based on that
um
and this is why i've never done anything
dumb while intoxicated or anything like
that my my and maybe this is just luck
of the draw but that overwatch mechanism
never leaves
uh admittedly i don't like go hard on
substances of any kind so maybe that's
just part of it that i'm always sort of
sub threshold but that overwatch
mechanism feels like a very important
part of my life and so i'm curious
what is that yeah i mean i think in
cognitive neuroscience we would call
that executive control these systems in
the brain that do watch over the others
that are there to choose what it is that
we do to keep our actions in accord with
long-term goals instead of with
short-term goals to inhibit certain
motivations and to emphasize others to
control everything from you know
attentional control is part of this
where do you actually put your focus in
any given moment like right now there's
a lot of things around us that we could
be paying attention to but it involves
some kind of effort to keep focused on
my voice as i'm speaking that's the same
executive control network in the brain
that's doing that kind of direction of
our action all the time
and are we going to round that off to
the prefrontal cortex like what are we
where is that coming from yeah in the
brain i guess i would say before i
answer that question we always have to
have the caveat of you know assigning
mental functions to specific brain
regions is problematic you know when we
look at the brain it's so complicated
everything's so interconnected that each
region of the brain is not
corresponding to one particular mental
function for for the most part but there
certainly are brain networks that we
know are more important for executive
function the prefrontal cortex in
cooperation with the parietal lobe forms
what we call an executive control
network that involves a lot of these
these functions
i think this might be the the big
takeaway that i have from researching
you is how many different areas are
contributing some small thing to your
perception to your sense of self to your
beliefs to your actions whatever that
it's actually
a
ton of little areas that all contribute
like one little thing like if you've
ever
uh anybody that's ever been on a
treadmill is probably a great example
and then you step off and you still feel
like like the world is moving forward
because
you've been moving even though you
haven't been going anywhere and then as
soon as you step off and stop there are
regions of your brain that still read
they are so expecting that movement
that
it it takes a minute for that to stop
yeah
expectation and prediction is a huge
part of what the brain does i mean there
are many people now that actually
believe that prediction is sort of the
basic
organizing principle that explains all
of what the brain does
at all times because it's constantly
creating some expectation of what's
going to happen and then reading off
what happens making a comparison and
adjusting its expectations based on
what it reads in
all right now coming back to beliefs
this idea of beliefs and predictions
um
[Music]
i often say to myself and anybody who
will listen that you see what you look
for
and another way to think about that at
the brain level is you're going to see
what you believe you're going to see
what you predict right so if your brain
is predicting you know like you were
saying in these lighting conditions that
must be blue
then you're going to see blue and if
your brain says no and these lighting
conditions that must be yellow then you
see yellow and you and the person next
to you
one sees blue and one sees yellow seems
impossible but it actually is true
how does that like how do we begin to
tease that apart like d i mean you must
think about this in your own life in
terms of okay i have these beliefs which
ones need to be checked the idea of
being able to change beliefs yeah what
what is the the science of how the
beliefs get rooted and then how we can
actually change them
it's so difficult because the
motivations we have are so subtle and
they often work behind the scenes we're
not totally aware of them but they can
completely influence every aspect of our
behavior and a motivation is like a
poison when it comes to
finding out what the truth is if what
you really want to do is align your
beliefs with the truth and we can talk
about whether people actually want to do
that
that's not a game i will answer that i
don't think they do well yeah there's
some research now actually you ask
people do you think your beliefs should
change with evidence
oh god what do they say
it depends on the person but there's a
huge portion of american population that
doesn't agree that their beliefs should
change when asked point blank when asked
point blank so
it's a strange situation but
um what reason do they give well you
know there are a lot of different
reasons people often feel like their
beliefs and values are things that
define them and are to be protected and
celebrated
so and that's that's part of it there
are also
religious modes of thought that come
into this where faith is a different way
of
finding what the truth is where evidence
is explicitly denied it doesn't matter
what the evidence is this even evidence
conferring evidence can be
a test to see how strongly i believe and
i just need to rise to the challenge and
show how strong my belief but the people
that say that are they all is it a
religious thing in nature or this goes
across it doesn't religiously it doesn't
only apply to religious beliefs so you
can ask people about a whole range of
topics and there's still a portion that
say that yeah evidence isn't really
isn't really the deal but let's say it
is let's say you're
a scientist like me and you want to have
uh your
description of reality match reality as
best as you can
motivation is something you need to
remove from the equation as much as
possible and that's what the scientific
method is all about right we set up all
of these procedures to try to
make our process of finding the truth of
testing reality as free as possible of
all the motivations we know about
ourselves you know we know when testing
a drug we want it to work and so if we
know who got the drug and who didn't get
the drug we're going to see those
results in a slightly different light so
we blind ourselves we you know put it
literally put a blindfold on and make
sure that we don't know who's who when
doing that that's the process of trying
to remove motivation from the equation
because we know how dangerous it is to
the process but in everyday life we're
not running a clinical trial motivation
is just free to run wild and it
influences
every aspect of our behavior if you
think about
your the beliefs that you care about the
most most of us organize our lives in
such a way that we never even really
have to encounter evidence that
challenges our beliefs because we tend
to have friends that believe the same
things that we do right we associate our
we create our social circles
such that we have people that think
similarly to us that's what's enjoyable
to do right online with social media of
course people uh form bubbles and
associate with people that are going to
uh cheer them on for having the beliefs
that they have not challenge them for
you know for various reasons so these
motivations are able to put us in a
situation where we almost never even
have to encounter any
any evidence that goes against our
beliefs in the first place that's how
smart the brain is at protecting us from
this information that we don't want to
see so what is the process though of
changing i know you guys have studied in
the lab like what
opens people up to being changed you've
got the potential of the backfire effect
which i know is a bit unsettled right
now in the science but it's it hints at
something that i think intuitively makes
sense to people
um
what what is that tangled web
yeah i mean first of all there's no good
answer i wish there was this is
something we need to spend more effort
trying to understand about ourselves
because now that we live in this
deluge of information you know we just
need
to be better at understanding how we
respond to it and what the best ways of
dealing with there are so i like to
think of this in terms of how can we
ourselves make ourselves more
open-minded and keep us open-minded
and one of the things there is putting
yourself in situations where you're
going to encounter information that
challenges you and that's the first step
you can never change your mind if
you don't get out of your bubble at all
it's just not going to happen so
encountering information is is the first
step then there's the issue of what
happens when we encounter some challenge
to something that we believe in
and one of the things that happens there
is that emotion plays a big role you
know it just doesn't feel good to have
your beliefs challenged
let's let's put a pin in that why why
like what is it about identity and
beliefs and values that become so
sacred
might be the right word that it doesn't
feel good to have them challenged
because when you think about it so i'll
put it in a business context you
obviously see it from a scientific point
of view
but for me it's like
i'm trying to win in business and the
market
is the market and so i either make moves
that the market rewards or i make moves
that the market doesn't i'm gonna go out
of business and not be able to pay my
employees or myself if i don't figure
this out so the truth is all that
matters of what is working and what is
not working
so to get good at business i had to get
very hungry for the truth
so
what
is going on that makes
people so but and and i guess here's the
thing with the truth in business it
still hurts
when i encounter something where i'm
like you were wrong that sucks even now
so what is happening in my brain and
everybody else's brain that makes that
disruptive information feel
so shitty
i think you hit on the key word there
which is identity you know when a belief
becomes associated with who we are
then from the brain's perspective it's
part of
us and the brain's primary charge is to
protect us and to keep us alive which it
is we talked about the evolutionary
history of where the brain came from and
what it what its goal is
it's there to protect
ourselves and ourselves is not just our
physical body
the brain extends the self to the psyche
to the psychological cells that we have
to our identity and that includes that
umbrella can include
beliefs
values ideas about what's important to
us ideas about the world ideas that you
know we have about ourselves that we
think are worth protecting so something
comes and challenges that
it's like an actual threat to your
personhood from the perspective of the
brain right so weird and that's what
feelings are feelings are the brain
signals that there's some kind of a
challenge going on to the body right if
you uh feel your heart racing
and you're uh
you have the the impulse to to move
because there's some kind of danger out
there in the world that's a feeling that
the brain has evolved in order to get
you to act in a way that's going to
protect yourself
and it really is the self more than the
body right so it's whoever you think you
are your sense of identity
okay so if we're
one more thing i think we should cover
there is this idea that the brain is
using mechanisms that evolve probably
for other things and so encountering an
idea that challenges your beliefs will
often trigger the disgust
mechanism which is really interesting
yeah it's true when we've looked into
the brain to see what happens when
people are are challenged we find that
again i always have to throw the caveat
out if it's hard to assign
a particular function a particular brain
region but we do know that the insular
cortex receives information from the
viscera of the body and is very
important for feelings of of disgust you
know when you encounter spoiled food or
something just totally nasty that you
feel like you want to get away from
right it's the the brain's way of just
rejecting some kind of
thing that's bad for you
and here it's being used not just to
protect us from spoiled food or a rotten
carcass or something that that is going
to pro you know produce a pathogen that
will make us sick but also for
information information that the brain
thinks is going to
hurt us in some way us being the the
whole identity
so
what does that that seems to play out
really strangely in real life where
people go through so let's in fact let's
start putting a couple pieces together
so you've got confabulation the brain
wants consistency so desperately it will
make [ __ ] up
to get that
uh and and i'm talking make [ __ ] up i
don't know if we actually closed that
loop earlier but um in the study that i
was talking about the doctor so patient
can't form new memories doctor comes in
has a pin in his hand shakes the hand
person jerks back what the hell why'd
you do that
they leave they come back after it was
like three minutes and the person can't
retain the information that long so it
does not remember meeting the doctor
doctor sticks out their hand again they
won't shake it they make up some story
you know i never shake hands with people
in lab coats it's a tuesday i don't
shake hands on tuesday whatever
never getting to the truth which is oh i
remember that you have a pin in your
hand and it hurt but there's some deeper
region of the brain going to your point
that you're getting all this different
pieces of information that get cobbled
together into this
sense of how to move through the world
when one part is broken the explicit
memory
the other part isn't that there is an
association with this person in pain but
i don't know how to explain it because
that's a different region of the brain
therefore it makes up a story so desire
for consistency confabulation i'm going
to make [ __ ] up if i don't understand it
my beliefs become who i am i have a
disgust mechanism that is used to keep
me alive and my brain taps into that to
when i feel that discomfort which i'm
oddly enough experiencing at a bodily
level when somebody challenges an idea
which shouldn't have anything to do with
who i am but suddenly does it triggers
all this mechanism and now boom i reject
it as as a matter of life and death
because it's the ego death of you're
challenging who i view myself to be
and now throw in social media for good
measure and you get this i saw this
chart really interesting of um
it shows that the person the the
political group that gets elected is the
political group closest to the middle
and so at least in the u.s and so
whoever's close to the middle but now
they're showing like even though that
remains true like the
the weight of each party is pushing more
and more to either direction and now so
as we push ourselves into these extremes
and
follow that chain reaction that i just
walked through
it gets pretty ugly pretty fast
yeah so when you lay it all out like
that it seems like
why is it even organized this way what a
shitty system the brain has for figuring
things out
but i think you have to keep in mind
that certainly the brain didn't evolve
in a situation where we had facebook and
twitter and all this stuff and there is
probably some value
in maintaining our beliefs in protecting
them to some degree and also in
sharing them with other people and
building the connections that we have
with other people based on shared models
of reality right this is one of the
things that binds us together with other
people is we both see the world in the
same way it makes you feel very close to
someone it feels good to have that it
makes a social bond and there's probably
some evolutionary advantage to that
right in the in the history of humankind
to have a community where everybody sees
things the same way
can actually help you work together and
to cooperate probably
okay so knowing all of that
knowing that because i'm not sure that i
will say that the way the brain works is
bad i would just say that in modern
context you have to
really take control
i have a thesis on what people need to
do about this
very curious to see if you have
scientific evidence because i hunger for
the truth because i've learned that it
is very useful
um
that
there is
identity matters and it matters a lot
and rather than fight against all of the
evolutionary things that i have going on
inside my brain and my body i'm going to
leverage them so i need to build a very
strong identity that identity is going
to be built around values and beliefs
whether i want it to or not it's just
the way that the brain works so i need
to be very thoughtful about what my
beliefs are
and what my identity is and so
once you pick an anti-fragile identity
then you can move forward meaning
anti-fragile naseem teles phrase that
the more it's attacked the stronger it
gets the human immune system is the
example that he used if i remember right
uh certainly a great example you
actually need to encounter pathogens in
order to get your immune system strong
so it needs to come under assault in
order to get stronger and if it doesn't
then it weakens same with trees if you
grow a tree inside of a dome the tree
will fall over when it reaches a certain
size because there was never any wind to
force it to grow stronger root system
therefore it becomes super fragile
there is an identity that is
anti-fragile which is the identity of
the learner and so
my sense of self my self-worth my
self-esteem my pride all of it i have
this is what i've done to myself i've
literally wrapped it up in
my willingness to learn so i don't worry
about being right
i worry only about identifying the right
answer faster than anybody else and so
my self-esteem is tied to a willingness
to admit when i'm wrong a willingness to
face that oh god i'm wrong and at
discomfort and it makes me angry at you
for pointing it out and i just want to
get away from this situation and i've
trained myself to
be massively egotistical about my
willingness to sit in that discomfort
and go huh this sucks this hurts i don't
like being wrong
but is there some truth here yeah and
then teasing that apart now
if people do that i have in my n of one
study
found that it is
extraordinarily useful meaning that it
will help you get to your goal now what
you choose to aim yourself at can be its
own
nightmare scenario but if you're
thoughtful about what you aim yourself
at
and your identity is about being willing
to admit when you're wrong
then you can actually
you know iteratively become right over
time that's that's amazing that is great
i totally agree with you i would take it
one step further i think you know in
addition to being comfortable with being
wrong we can actually learn to retrain
ourselves to value being wrong i mean
there's
how do we do that i mean just being
wrong is is actually an opportunity for
learning right being wrong is when you
find out that you can actually improve
something about your model for the world
so how do we actually retrain ourselves
that's a really interesting question i'm
curious as to how you went about it i
mean i think that one of the things that
helps in a general sense and one of the
things we're looking into now with our
research is
mindfulness training you know the idea
that if you can just train yourself to
have a more
objective relationship with your own
thoughts to be more aware of the chain
of events that happens in your mind and
your body when you encounter something
like a piece of evidence that you don't
like and you feel negative you can start
to break the habitual chains of thought
and behavior there because you
have a place to intervene you recognize
i'm feeling bad now this is probably
because i'm protecting this belief i
don't like it now i'm in a position
where i can choose how to respond to
that as opposed to things just happening
automatically without your awareness
where you don't even have the choice
of how to react that's really
interesting as you were explaining that
i was like whoa meditation or
mindfulness maybe is a better word in
this connotation
is
is to the sense of self and your ability
to navigate well your own emotions as
cutting the corpus callosum is to a
seizure where what happens is you have
that visceral response this doesn't feel
good i'm being challenged you're so used
to just enacting what that emotion tells
you to do distance yourself argue push
the person away shut them down whatever
your sort of learned behavior is you
just go right into it like you never
like the number of times where my wife
and i will get in an argument and it'll
be like 10 minutes into the argument
where i'm like wait i didn't need to get
mad about that and if i actually back up
to the getting mad part and i address it
there and go oh whoa i had no idea that
that made you feel that way you know
tell me more but what's happening is i
don't like the way that makes me feel
i feel bad that i've upset her so my
impulse stupidly but my impulse is to
convince her that she shouldn't have
felt that way in the first place because
then i don't have to feel bad anymore
but really this is about me just not
wanting to feel bad and if i could have
sat there with that for a minute and
just listened then we wouldn't have been
into this 10 minute like arguing back
and forth yeah and
if we can find ways
through mindfulness in this example to
sort of pattern interrupt not let that
storm just take over and then you just
launch forward so now my question is do
you use mindfulness and meditation
interchangeably and if not what is
mindfulness
that's a good question let me just add
one other thing is that i think there's
a there's another effect of mindfulness
slash meditation that that helps here
which is the
de-emphasization of your own identity
right you don't need to
maintain a sense of who you are and it's
not necessarily not necessary to decide
for each belief whether this is
something that defines you or not right
you can keep some sort of distance
between
you and what your mind does in terms of
deciding what's true about the world i
think that's one of the things that you
learn in mindfulness meditation is to
have some kind of
separation between the machinations of
your mind and
the actual conscious experience of of
being you and i think that de-emphasis
of identity is something that can also
help with these kinds of you're gonna
have to give me more on that i have an
intuitive understanding of what you mean
we may have to talk about psychedelics
now okay i've never had the disillusion
of self i don't read it i i've heard
about it not at all not completely
because it's a range
i'm gonna say
close to not at all okay i've had a
sense of like oh my god i feel connected
with my wife i've felt a sense of like
oh my god we are a unit
so maybe that but like it still feels
like an experience i'm having right
so there's um this sort of gets into
what is the self that is there to be
dissolved
and one of the ways to answer that
question is to
break it down into different pieces one
one of the ways we can do that is to
distinguish between the self that is the
experience of us
in the here and now so we have you know
we're sitting here we can feel the
chairs in our butts we can you know i
feel like the vibration of my muscles as
i'm talking there's an experience of
actually being me
right now
in this moment and that's like some kind
of momentary consciousness of of myself
these things are happening to me
and then on the other hand there's this
self that we have that extends through
time where we project ourselves into the
future and to the past and we have a
kind of a story that we weave
of who we are you know i'm scientist guy
i grew up on the east coast i came out
here whatever it is the story that makes
up jonas
that's a narrative self that exists
through time and i really think that the
issue when it comes to belief fixation
has to do with this narrative self this
story that we weave of of who we are and
this story is a story it's an
interpretation of all our experiences
and memories that the brain weaves into
this nice little package
you know i think story is one of the
main
mechanisms the brain uses to it's one of
the main formats it uses to compress
information about the world and to
understand to make meaning out of what's
happening why is that important
why is why why is compressing and making
meaning important it it feels so
foundational to being human there must
be something very important about it i
mean we just can't
understand all of the information that
we take in without compressing it
somehow it's just a constant stream of
multiple senses all the time and we have
to
in in order to be able to navigate the
whole complexities of of space-time we
have to somehow make sense of it
and one of the ways the brain is good at
doing that you know we live in a social
world this the social work world is is
paramount to understanding what's going
on around us to surviving nowadays we
can't survive on our own we have to do
it in relationship with other people and
so the brain is really good at
interpreting things in terms of
the motivations and characters and
people in the story that are doing
things
the philosopher daniel dennett has
called this the intentional stance or
sometimes in psychology we call it
theory of mind we have these really
complicated models of other people and
what they're up to and what they're
doing and these form the this is an
important part of the story you don't
have a story without characters and so
the brain interprets everything in terms
of some kind of a story and in terms of
our self we are the main character in
this story
but in many ways it's a fiction i mean
it's not totally fictional but it's like
historical fiction right it's like takes
some actual information that we
experienced and makes puts some kind of
a spin on it it's a motivated spin
and
if you spend a lot of time thinking
about the actual story of your life it
can start to
you can you can see tears around the
edges there are threads to pull and you
can reveal that to be
the illusion
that it is and i think understanding
that your narrative self is some fiction
that the brain has come up with it's
really extent to what extent is the
depiction so i'm asked about my life so
often that i've mythologized it to make
it easy to tell right because i to
really tell you my life i'd have to get
into all the messy like complexity
so it's like you just find sort of key
milestones you're like this is my life
but when i tell it i'm like yeah man
this is really condensing this is like a
3 000 page novel condensed down into
cliff notes yes and so it's it's in some
ways
misleading if somebody were to try to
walk in my steps of like uh god it
wasn't that easy i actually got this
piece here and it took me two years to
get that piece and cobble it together
but that still feels like yeah i mean
i've got the gist of like what it means
to be me but
to what depth are we saying that
identity is an illusion like
legitimately
me and a rock are connected not the rock
a rock are connected or
no i think i think you're right that
there's a gist of it that probably has
some truth that's um that's important to
us um but the details are
so unreliable right our memories are so
in our lives my memory of the past is a
active
process of interpretation and inference
and what happens when you decide on what
the story of your past is and you tell
it over and over and over again is that
you begin to accept it as
a some kind of vertical record of what
happened then it isn't it's an
interpretation it's a reconstruction and
it's error-prone it's prone to
distortion by motivations it's not to
say that it's all wrong or that it has
no value at all but i just think we have
to treat it with a with a bit of
skepticism
okay so i'm treating it with a bit of
skepticism
but how do i dissolve it and what is the
result of dissolving it i'd say 150
micrograms of lsd it's a good way to get
there that's straight to the point i
like it but you know that's that's
hitting it with a sledgehammer there are
other ways of doing it meditation is one
probably various forms of contemplation
and tell me what i'd find that way so i
i um i know you have connection to sam
harris you guys have done a lot of stuff
together his description of five grams
of mushrooms yeah was [ __ ] awesome
that was impressive what what a cool
description
uh so i in some very distant
intellectual way feel like i kind of get
what that would be but like i meditate a
lot and i've never had anything that i
would say is a dissolution of my sense
of self what when one does it through
a contemplative practice
what's happening that they just become
aware of all the different bits and
pieces that cough this up is this
i mean you know part of it is so let's
try this back to the brain again maybe
this will help
we know that um when
people are just lying around thinking
there are certain brain networks that
are that come to life that are active
there's actually kind of a surprise
discovery in neuroscience because we had
all these experiments where we'd have
people lying inside the mri machine and
we do these brief periods of like you
know do a math test for 30 seconds and
then rest for 30 seconds and then do a
math task again for 30 seconds we were
always interested in what's happening
when people are doing the math task
and somebody at some point people
started to look at those little in
between periods when we weren't asking
people to do anything and it turned out
there was instead of the brain doing
nothing during this time there was all
this incredible activity there was a
tremendous amount of energy being spent
in very specific brain networks
there's a brain network that has been
called the default mode network but it's
kind of probably a
misnomer because it isn't really a
default it's a very active state
and it seems to be involved in many of
these processes of self-creation
identity
narrative we ask people to listen to
stories for example we see activity in
this network it's very active process of
of meaning making and that active
process because the self is one of these
pieces one of these artifacts of the
meaning making process
if you can just take a break from this
constant
narration of your thought
there's an experience that happens in
between there that is in many ways
non-narrative and this this is part of
the dissolution of the self it's just
stopping maintaining
this picture of yourself momentarily
this this story and you're just don't
have to engage with
all the interpretive processes all the
time it's something your brain
it's it's a habit for most of us it's
very difficult to sit there and not
engage with narrative thought it seems
to happen spontaneously
um but through practice people can get
into these states and have experiences
where there is a cessation or at least a
temporary pause in this constant
narration and i think that that's one of
the ways there through meditation
that's really profound the default mode
network is something i've thought a lot
about but i it's very clear to me that i
don't understand it nearly well enough
the fact that we slide into that
the sort of automatic pruning of our
sense of self
um
what's really interesting i have a
hypothesis that's coming to me in real
time so i'd be very curious to see what
you think
that um the psychological immune system
is incredibly powerful
and incredibly necessary
that the um
the most
self-delusional are the happiest among
us which is very interesting when i was
young i didn't have any anxiety
whatsoever but i was also woefully
unself-aware
as i developed and quite frankly
cultivated self-awareness that was
there's a lot of biology behind anxiety
but the reason that for me it got
started in the first place was as i
developed keen self-awareness which was
incredibly useful in my life
i ended up just stuck in that like
obsessive thinking about like how i was
being perceived like from every
conceivable angle and it becomes a
little sort of crazy inducing um
and
to some extent i've i've had to learn to
get out of that to stop that but when i
catch myself and that's where meditation
has been really useful but i'll catch
myself sort of pruning my sense of self
if you will and so it's like oh man i'll
have failed on something or somebody
will say something that rings a little
too true to me on social media and it's
upsetting and then like
i'm brushing my teeth and i just find
myself pruning that sense of self right
like reconstructing like smoothing out
like no you're still like you know going
to be able to do this or whatever that
area is that i need to attend to
and i never put that together that that
may be a huge part of the reason the
quote-unquote default mode network
exists
is that you're
you are maintaining a sense of self that
for reasons i don't yet understand
become incredibly important especially
when i think about the role of
self-confidence and how
the difference
in how somebody acts with no change in
skill set just from one minute they feel
confident to the next minute they don't
or vice versa like you see this play out
in sports
that that becomes really important yes
the hyper activity of the default mode
network is associated with depression so
there are these states we can get into
where you're just over ruminating if
you're always thinking about you're
always pruning the self and that's all
you're concerned with and that is a
state of anxiety and it doesn't matter
in what way you're pruning yourself it
might matter in what way you're pruning
yourself but i still think if you're
just obsessed with it
you know like did i say the right thing
just back then maybe i didn't say the
right thing what is he thinking of me
now there's there's some of that we all
do it obviously there's some of that
that might be healthy in terms of
understanding what just what just
happened but there's definitely a level
it can get to where it isn't healthy
anymore and so i think with meditation
part of what we're learning is how to
control those dials you know it's yes
actively engaging in some kind of
self-creation and making a good
narrative of our lives like you've done
can be psychologically healthy and can
be part of our well-being as
humans in the time that we live in on
the other hand it can also create
problems so having the ability to turn
that dial down and to engage with the
present moment instead of
the you know projecting ourselves into
the past and remembering the future
predicting ourselves into the future and
remembering the past also has a value
okay there's two things i really want to
get into one i i want to come back to
storytelling and meaning making why we
do all that but i want to keep going on
this disillusion of self okay so if
disillusion of self is that i stop the
sort of just never ending obsessive
and preening maybe is a better word to
use of my sense of self
when i am getting into the disillusion
of that is it just to stop the obsessive
rumination on myself and to be able to
enjoy the present moment i'm not sure
what the right word there is
or is there something else
that the in fact now let's talk about
the lsd so when that sledgehammer comes
it at least from what i've heard is
often sort of scary it isn't like oh my
god this is wonderful it's like a hard
thing that you do and when you come out
the other side there's like that
pleasure pain balance uh is now tilted
because the pain has stopped it i'm sure
feels like whoa that was amazing but
amazing in the way that a hard workout
is amazing
uh
so what is happening there that's useful
good
positive yeah so i'd say in in addition
to the aspects that you just mentioned
there of you know stopping the obsessive
self-pruning and maybe that takes some
attention away from whatever is in the
present moment
there is also this aspect of
self-disillusion particularly at the
levels that can happen with with
psychedelics where
when the boundary between self and other
dissolves
there's
a profound empathy and compassion with
others that's gained i mean
part of what makes me me is that i care
more about this particular body than
about that one sitting across me right
but in a lot of ways the
separation between us is artificial and
my brain emphasizes it more than it
should um you know we've studied a lot
of ways that people are connected with
each other in very profound ways that
they don't even understand for example
um the case of the mirror neurons you
know when we when i see you moving it
actually activates my own motor cortex
we're connected in these very very deep
ways and when we spend a lot of time
thinking about ourselves and about the
boundaries between ourself and the rest
of the world when they're very prominent
that separates us from other people and
from the world and there's definitely a
value to
really feeling on a visceral level that
sameness that
deep connection that we have with other
people and with nature
just random side note about deep
connection one of the things i find most
interesting about the way that humans
are connected in ways they do not
understand
is that women that live together will
synchronize their menstrual cycles and
they'll all synchronize to the dominant
female how [ __ ] crazy is that like
that's really bananas to me yeah and
part of that comes from you know the
fact that we identify with our minds a
lot more than we tend to identify with
our with our bodies there's so much
happening in our in the subconscious of
our minds and in our bodies that's part
of the way we interact with each other
that we just have no idea about yeah
it's crazy okay so i take the
sledgehammer to my sense of self i feel
more connected more compassionate
um why then
when people do lsd what or any
psychedelic why is there such a
possibility that you have a quote
unquote bad trip why is it scary
what's scary to lose something that
you're attached to i mean i think ego
dissolution is one of the most
frightening things that you can face is
it scary the second time though like
once you know like oh i'm gonna feel
empathy and connection
i mean it's death in a lot of ways right
you're facing the the end of yourself
and yourself does not want to face its
own end so yeah it can be very scary it
can be also just challenging in ways
that are that don't have to do with the
complete dissolution of self i mean when
you have the world around you is not
stable anymore perceptually it's almost
like the feeling you have when an
earthquake happens and we get these in
california quite a bit and there's this
just like the ground itself i can no
longer trust it anymore because it's not
what i thought it was i thought the
ground was like this thing that just
persisted that we all live on and now
it's moving it just makes me feel
completely lost so if your whole
perceptual world is doing that it's not
behaving in the way that your brain
wants it to the way it expects it to if
you're very attached to
you know the
the things that you see in that kind of
a ground it can be very disconcerting
yeah that's interesting and that
goes back to this idea of we're meaning
making machines right what does it mean
now that things are not stable what does
it mean to have myself dissolve
do you have a guess so i definitely look
at things from an evolutionary lens i
know that you
rightly look at things that are sort of
evolutionarily conjecture it's like
maybe maybe not but like do you have a
theory as to why
we need
meaning does it come back to that idea
of condensing things down or is there
something else at play yeah i think not
just anything down but also just making
uh good predictions about what's going
to happen right that's you know in a lot
of ways what what makes a good mind is a
mind that can make predictions about the
world and to make a good prediction
about the world you have to have a good
model of the world and a model is always
a condensed compressed version of
reality it's not going to be
as big or as complicated as the real
thing you have to find the important
parts to keep in your model is that
why this reads as a narrative is that
narrative is sort of by its nature
distilled to the important bits yeah i
think that is um
that is part of it a narrative is a way
that gets it what's important about what
happened
and do you think that there's so i've
given my entire professional life to the
belief that narrative is the way to
really influence behavior
and that also you need to focus
primarily on kids my area of interest is
11 to 15 age of imprinting actually we
should talk about cause i bet you have
some insights um
but
the
the way that narrative functions
one theory of mind so there's
to incentivize us to do the hard work of
trying to figure people out there has to
be some impetus to do it we have to have
sort of an evolutionary push so there is
something deeply pleasurable about
getting it like
understanding what somebody's going
through without them just coming out and
telling you in fact storytelling 101 man
you want the audience to get it you
don't want to tell them you want them to
get it you want them to understand that
the person is unhappy based on their
behaviors you don't want that person to
just be like i'm so unhappy because you
you deny them the chance to get it for
themselves
so there seems to be like up narrative
plays with theory of mind narrative
plays with the distillation of what's
important uh definitely triggers high
emotion
yeah somehow there's something
satisfying about the meaning-making
process itself the brain likes to figure
things out and get that that pleasure
that comes from uh understanding and
that's why i think it is important for
for storytellers to leave space for that
in their stories you know i have this
collaboration now with a filmmaker mary
sweeney who's a professor at usc and
she's a film editor and we have this
podcast where we've been trying to
uncover the the parallels between
neuroscience and and filmmaking and
other creative arts because there are so
many um ways where it comes together but
one of the things that's come up over
and over again as we talk to
various filmmakers and storytellers is
that they really try to leave some kind
of space
for the audience to do their own active
interpretation if you give people
all the answers and just lay everything
out there that it's just much less
interesting and much less engaging i
used to teach filmmaking and i was
teaching an editing class
trying to explain like why does this
work and
i remember thinking that
you know part of why editing works is
your brain is making predictions to your
point about this may be the whole reason
that the brain is so complex
and
what you
take advantage of and and sort of use
against the audience to create a cool
effect but is that the prediction of how
somebody's moving so
you'll see this now as soon as i say it
people can start seeing it everywhere
it's called cutting on action
so if i want to cut into a close-up of
me right now in fact this this will be
fun dear editor start wide and now i'm
going to reach for my cup and if they're
smart they'll cut on that action so that
your brain is now predicting that i'm
going to pick this up move it to my
mouth right and if you cut on that
action your brain is predicting oh that
i know exactly how a hand moves when it
does something like that and so while
we're filming this live multiple cameras
at the same time so it becomes very easy
when you're using a single camera
your your the motions don't actually
happen at the same time so the close-up
is filmed at a different time than the
wide shot and so you need something to
pull the audience across the cut
and that thing is their brain predicting
oh i know where this is going to go and
so as long as the motion feels
consistent then the brain just feels
like it's happening at the same time
even though it's not actually right and
you don't have to show everything
because the brain is so good at filling
in those gaps it's kind of amazing um
that
we talked to the film editor walter
merch who edited like apocalypse now oh
my god one of the greatest editors of
all time absolutely extraordinary yes
and he wrote this book called in the
blink of an eye which is basically all
about this and one of the things he said
that i thought was really interesting
was that when filmmakers first started
out they they thought that they'd have
to just do everything with one
continuous cut because the idea that you
could just cut the film and then start
somewhere else it was assumed that this
would just be like totally jarring to
people that how would they like make the
connection but we just do it totally
effortlessly when we watch films and
television we don't even notice the cuts
because our brain is so good at just
connecting all the little pieces and
what we care about is the actual through
line of the story not the through line
of the the visual actions
yeah it is man when you think about all
the different things that go into
the way you can make a film feel
seamless you really start to in fact i'd
forgotten about this so i've read that
book absolutely extraordinary and
this i think was teaching film going to
film school because i'm always like i
cannot remember what first got me
started thinking about the brain was the
answer to my problem it may have been
studying film that first put the brain
on my radar is like huh this is
interesting and the more that you learn
how the brain is predicting or ways that
you can trick the brain like for
instance if you want something to seem
loud you first have to go quiet because
there's actually a muscle in the ear
that the louder you make something it
starts to tighten up to which is why you
can when your favorite song comes on
you've already cranked it up and then
your next favorite song comes out you
have to crank it up again right
because that muscle is tightening and so
in film school they literally trained us
like hey here's what's going on at a
biological level that you need to be
aware of the sound is going to go dimmer
and so uh or it will seem like it's
getting more quiet and so they would
show great examples like they do this in
um
god is it 2001. i can't remember they do
this in sci-fi a lot well they'll cut to
the outside of space absolute silence
and then boom they cut inside when they
want something to really pop and be loud
because the ear the muscle starts to
relax and so bam you can hit people with
something that sounds loud again there's
it's amazing how much
knowledge of the perceptual systems
there are in the craft of filmmaking
just you mentioned something about uh
hearing about seeing but then there's
also all this knowledge about just human
nature that goes into it right i mean
what do you have to do to understand how
i can show that this person is angry or
that this person is sad you have to
analyze exactly how people how the
perceptual system works in terms of how
people understand other people this is
partly what we study as neuroscientists
how do how does the brain read off
another human being and understand what
it is that they're up to yeah that
that's what's crazy and then
you've got there are multiple ways to do
it right so i can
uh they did this really famous one where
they cut to a person a blank expression
and then you show one audience then they
cut to them looking at the baby and they
say oh the person wasn't actually
looking at the baby for the record
person was cut totally different the
person being filmed didn't even know
that they would eventually be cut with
looking at a baby just a blank
expression then the baby oh tell us how
he felt oh the joy you know of having an
infant then they would take the same
person same face same shot nothing new
and then they would cut to a coffin oh
what's the person feeling oh sad you
know lost it's like nope neither of
those are true but when you see those
two things juxtaposed your brain to your
point about like uh the the squares on a
piece of paper when your brain thinks
that one is in shadow it just tells you
that it's a different color or a
different shade even though it's not
actually
but then there's also just theory of
mind reading someone's facial expression
and saying oh my god that's sadness or
anger or whatever
and that you can get the same feeling
then you can start adding music right
and ominous music makes you take one
blank expression and read it one way i
mean just absolutely insane all the cues
that we pick and even sound like this
this is fascinating i don't know if this
is true but i heard an apocryphal story
about how hitler would play brown noise
like it's this
rumbles your
your guts basically and is very
uncomfortable but you don't hear it so
it's subsonic so it just makes you feel
something but you don't hear anything
just like oh god i'm uncomfortable and
then when he would walk on stage he
would turn it off so his presence made
you feel better i don't know if it's
true but jesus that is
i mean you want to talk about sinister
[ __ ] that you can really do to
manipulate people
absolutely incredible now of course the
the tool is agnostic what you use it for
becomes the thing but in filmmaking like
how you distill all of that
understanding of the human animal but
then again i get back into
how much of
my life is being unintentionally
manipulated
by
things like that whatever that may be
like i remember the first time i
realized that when i'm cold i feel
anxious and i was like why would that be
true
and then i realized
that that slightly shivery feeling of
being cold is exactly the same
of a bodily sensation when i'm getting
anxious yeah and so i was like whoa so
my brain has connected
this this like slightly shivery
uncomfortable feeling
with anxiety so whether i'm feeling it
because something is making me anxious
or because i'm cold my brain is reading
it as anxiety that's right there's so
many similar physiological states that
the brain can interpret in different
ways and then we end up really
experiencing it as that you know there's
this famous experiment with the
the bridge so people had to walk across
this um
really high up
uh suspension bridge it's kind of scary
and
when they got to the other side there
was a
confederate someone working with the
experimenter who would come and ask them
to participate in the survey this was
done back in the 70s the participants in
the study were a young man and it was an
attractive woman at the other side of
the of the um
at the other side of the bridge and she
gave them her number to
presumably follow up on the experiment
um the the men who had walked across the
shaky scary version of the bridge were
much more likely to call this girl
than the guys who went across the safe
bridge the idea is that they're
experiencing this physiological arousal
and then they're confronted with this
attractive woman so the the
interpretation of the brain putting
a and b together thinks i must be i'm
feeling this because i'm feeling
something related to this one i'm
attracted to her
confabulation yeah dude this is so you
asked earlier how i um had sort of
reinforced in myself
the anti-fragile identity of being the
learner
and
one of the ways that i
reinforce things in my mind is i embody
the emotion i want to feel
because of that what you just described
where your brain is going to tell a
story oh whoa we're really hyped up
about this thing it must really matter
and you can use that in the beginning it
feels a bit theatrical like you're sort
of making it up like when i first
launched impact theory
i knew what i wanted to feel i knew what
i wanted the company to do which is
basically my whole thing is i am not
prepared to live in a world where your
zip code is the number one predictor of
your future success which it currently
is in most of the developed world so i'm
just like yeah i'm not i'm not okay with
that so
now i need to get emotionally tied to
that because the day before literally
monday was my last day at quest and i
was all about ending metabolic disease
and tuesday was my first day at impact
theory and so i had to switch so it was
okay i'm i'm closing the door on what i
was doing there and my mission i need a
new mission it's going to be different
but i want to feel that same sense of
like just this really matters this is a
big deal this is very important to me
and so in the beginning i just started
saying this is really important to me
but i didn't say it this is very
important to me i was like you don't
understand like this is important and
i'm gonna do whatever i need to do to
make sure that i stick through this now
in just in saying it that way and
embodying it moving more elevating my
voice my brain was like whoa like this
must be a thing now of course in the
beginning it just felt theatrical but
six months in it was so ingrained in me
that this was important and every time i
talked about it i would get super
animated and it it became this like
self-reinforcing loop
and so all of these things that we learn
that the brain is doing that it's
confabulating that it's got all these
perceptual cues um
you can use them to your own advantage
and they work even when you know what
you're doing
that's a great example of how this kind
of self analysis can be useful right i
mean a lot of times
one of the things i struggle with in
neuroscience is we learn all this basic
information about how the brain works
and then what do you actually do with it
or is there anything you can do with it
that's a perfect example of a sort of
self-hack that you can come up with to
improve yourself just from understanding
how your brain works no doubt and when i
read lisa feldman barrett's book how
emotions are made that was one that it
went against everything that i
thought i knew
but then as i read it and understood it
more i was like oh my god like i can use
this to my advantage one it explained
the cold thing and so i was like oh wow
like this is exactly what's going on my
brain is trying to make sense of what i
feel
and
now
i can begin to i mean this have you seen
a clockwork orange yeah oh god so
fascinating how they make him vomit or
give him something that makes him vomit
and then watch like violent things to
make him less violent
and utterly fascinating idea and you can
actually do that you can associate
negative things that don't feel good
with the things you don't want to do or
think about anymore and you can
associate positive things with what you
do want to feel and
reading that book and understanding whoa
like this is really this two-way
communication between my brain and my
body
that got me really hardcore about my
diet and so that's when i began to
realize i think there's a connection
between what i'm eating and my anxiety
and that ended up being transformational
because my gut was sending signals
that i felt anxious but it was actually
from things i think mostly what i was
drinking i was
monster i miss you dearly but i was
drinking zero calorie monster and a lot
of diet coke and uh as soon as i cut
that out my anxiety cut
70 i mean it was it was unbelievable i
wouldn't have believed it if somebody
else had told me
um but when i cut that out i was no
longer getting that signal which is i
mean the connection between the gut and
the brain is just so much stronger than
we ever thought
the way the nervous system innervates
the gut it's one of the oldest parts of
the nervous system really and the
connections between what happens in our
gut and our brain we're still just
discovering every day you know more
connections yeah it is crazy what is the
like if for me the corpus callosum the
split brain patient is like the most
[ __ ] fascinating thing ever in
neuroscience what is that thing that
like just trips you out wow
um there's so
many i mean the super pain was
definitely one of the first for me but
you know the field of neuropsychology
which is the study of how different
kinds of brain damage affect the mind
it was just so important for me in
understanding how
little
little changes first of all how changes
to the the flesh of your actual body can
change your mind just
totally cuts through any kind of
philosophical argument give me an
example the relationship between the
mind and the brain so just the fact that
you can have complete amnesia from
losing your hippocampus your temporal
lobe
you've taken out a piece of the brain
and now you've just lost a cognitive
function completely
but there are so many
really subtle interesting neurological
cases
like we mentioned anton syndrome but
another form of that is
what's called anastagnosia so this is
the the unawareness
of some kind of deficit that you have it
generally happens for paralysis so for
hemiparesis you have damage to say the
right parietal lobe and your left arm
isn't working anymore you're basically
paralyzed
but the people seem completely unaware
about the status of their own arm if you
ask them like hey how's your arm doing
they're like oh it's fine no problem
and then you say okay here's like a tray
full of full of glasses can you just
pick it up
and you know if you know that your arm
isn't working you reach out for that
tray to grab it in the center so that
nothing falls but they'll just like
reach out with one hand as if the other
one is there
they're expecting it to be there and
everything just falls over what do they
say then when they say oh i i don't know
what happened i'm such a klutz or
something like that you know you can
even show them in the mirror you can say
look at your arm now try and move your
arm and they're like okay i did
yeah did you see your arm move yeah yeah
just i just lifted it
whoa it's one of these cases where the
feeling
of moving
is
is not being properly processed by the
brain they're sending these motor
signals out and much of our experience
of moving comes from the outgoing motor
signals not from the feelings coming
back from our from our limbs
so you feel that movement happening and
the feeling is so compelling that again
the brain is willing to stitch together
any story to not give up on that the
truth of that feeling wow yeah that like
that kind of stuff is what makes me go
oh i can't just trust
my emotions
because man the brain is doing its best
and god bless it it really does a good
job on balance but wowza there are some
things that it just really
gets quote unquote wrong and i will say
that wrong does have a definition if you
have a goal and something moves you away
from that goal i'm gonna call that wrong
sure uh and since my my joy is a
joyful fulfilled life there are many
things that my brain does that does not
lead me down that path right
absolutely
crazy
um
i had heard about that before but i
never had pushed to find out like what
that next stage was of like
how they think about it um
it makes me think of the humunculus
explain to people what that is and then
i have a very specific question about it
okay so homunculus means little man
and it just comes from the fact that
there is this map
in the human brain the brain has a lot
of different maps of the outside world
and some of the earliest maps that were
discovered are maps of the sensory body
and maps of the the um the different
muscles that we can move in our body so
some of this was mapped out by a guy
named wilder penfield who was a
neurosurgeon at mcgill and they have
these brain surgeries where you could
have the brain open while the person's
in surgery because there are no pain
receptors in the brain it doesn't hurt
to have it open and to have the
neurosurgeon poke around in there and
partly what they wanted to do is map out
you know where's the where are certain
functions that we want to avoid for
example if we're going to excise a part
of the brain to treat the epilepsy we
want to make sure we don't take out a
speech center so they do this kind of
careful mapping and one of the things he
found is that there was a very orderly
arrangement on the surface of the
cerebral cortex in the post-central
gyres there's this map of the sensory
body so if you stick an electrode in one
place and you put a little current in
there the person will feel tingling in
their finger you move a little bit and
then they feel it in their elbow and
then in their neck and you can map out
the whole human body over the course of
this one gyrus this one lump in the
cerebral cortex and everyone has a
pretty similar map that's the sensory
homunculus on the other side of the
central sulcus is the precentral gyrus
and that has a map that corresponds to
all the different
muscles in the body so if you stimulate
there in one location you can get you
know a finger to twitch or
a toe to twitch depending on where where
it is that you stimulate i did not know
that this map and then you know you
mentioned transcranial magnetic
stimulation this is a stimulation you
can do through the head so tms is a
technology that allows you to create to
induce electrical current in the brain
without having to open up the skull you
just put this coil of wires next to the
head and turn it on and off really
quickly and it creates a little
magnetic field that induces the current
and you can stimulate the motor cortex
so you put it in the right place you can
get someone's finger to twitch
that's crazy and we'll come back to tms
because i find it very i have a question
about whether something i heard about it
is true or not which is very interesting
but going back to the humunculus for a
second so it's got this map the map is
distorted so your hands are gigantic
your lips are gigantic because they're
very sensitive and we get a ton of data
from them
but
they're
one question in all the maps they never
show the genitals as being sort of
outsized but i would say those are
pretty sensitive are they not outsized
are people just doing the drawing to be
sort of politically correct or are they
really
not
they're there they're there and they are
outsized yeah they would have to be
ridiculously large right yeah i mean
i guess that's a personal thing
but they're they kind of hang right over
the um the corner of the top of the
cerebral cortex going into the medial
surface and if i'm not mistaken they're
next to the feet yes they're next to the
feet right that's so weird why uh i
don't know why it's organized in the way
that it is but you know i think this
leads to some of the sort of cross
sensations that we get if something
happens to be next to it on the map you
can get these you know if you touch your
feet you can feel it in your genitals or
something like that because of the
the closeness of the real estate
the interesting part about that and i'm
curious to know if this has anything to
do with it so a the sort of joke fetish
that everybody will bring up is a foot
fetish yeah and as somebody who was once
walking the streets of paris and a guy
came up to my wife and asked if he could
take photos of her shoes wow and but i
wasn't standing next to her at the time
so i come up and this guy's taking
pictures of her feet i'm like honey i
promise you he was not taking photos of
your shoes
but uh she was like what and so in the
in the map if you were to lose your feet
which has happened to some people the
brain is so expecting stimulation from
that area if it doesn't get it then
other areas will begin to bleed into
that region
and since the genitals are right next to
the feet there are people that have had
their feet or foot amputated who
experience orgasm in their phantom foot
wow which is crazy that is very crazy
i'm like this is the brain is so
fascinating yeah those maps are plastic
they can change you know if you losing a
foot is an extreme example but if you
just aren't using or not receiving
sensory input from a location of the
body for a long period of time like if
you just like you know tape two fingers
together so you're not getting any
information from them separately and you
can see the maps start to reorganize
them how fast
uh within days
it's insane i heard somebody
they were hypothesized and they
obviously don't know it hasn't been
studied as far as i know um that part of
the reason that
we may dream with visual hallucinations
is to keep the visual cortex going at
night because it's so quickly like if
you blind your fold yourself
um
for even a short period of time you
begin to notice that whoa i'm really
hearing things that i wasn't hearing
previously and so that very rapidly
those areas of the brain become
allocated to other things yeah i think
this is david eagleman's theory yes
that's absolutely right that's pretty
interesting idea i don't know if the
reorganization he has some evidence that
the reorganization can happen that fast
like you know if you just didn't get
visual input for one night that other
reasons the brain would start to
encroach on the visual cortex and you'd
lose it so the brain has to keep it
stimulated it's really interesting idea
very interesting all right transcranial
magnetic stimulation i heard at one
point that you could take somebody that
can't draw well at all
zap them with tms and their drawing
improves like 400 or whatever instantly
i'm not familiar with a study that shows
that
i will say that you can change people
with tms at least temporarily give me
some examples there are different ways
of using tms depending on the kind of
stimulation that you do you know the
frequency and pattern of of bursts that
you do that you can create long-lasting
changes that either
activate you know increase the activity
of a brain region or inhibit the
activity of a brain region it could be
like a we call virtual lesion that
you're kind of turning off temporarily
one one region of the brain you can see
how that works um i have a colleague the
guy that works with me um his name is uh
leo christophe moore and he did a study
with tms where he was able to show that
stimulating a certain part of the
frontal lobe that he could make people
more generous that would give them some
kind of a game where they you give them
some money and you say you've got ten
dollars and this is a real person who
lives in los angeles you have the
opportunity to give up some of the money
to that person and they were either
wealthy people or poor people and you
could sort of see how the
the amount that people gave there's no
reason to give you know it's all
anonymous nobody's going to know whether
you do it or not people do actually give
money in that circumstance but then if
you zap their frontal lobe you can get
them to give even more wow because there
are these sort of inhibitory inhibitory
control mechanisms that you're is that
damping down so are you turning an area
off or on in this case you're turning an
area off and the area off though is uh
is something that is inhibitory yeah so
you're turning off
you would naturally just without this
inhibitory control you would just be
totally generous and give away
everything you own but you've got some
kind of mindset that's like well i
should keep some for me i mean you know
there's
why does this guy deserve it and like i
could probably put it better used than
he can anyway whatever that process is
that you know um in inhibits the
impulse to just totally give it away
that's so interesting to me that some
things are like a move towards and some
things are move away yeah and that
generosity is turning some turning an
inhibitory impulse off
i would not have guessed that it was
that way i would have guessed that you
were creating generosity a desire for
something well another analogy is we
know i mentioned the mirror neurons
earlier which help us to understand the
correspondences between each other when
i see you do something i map it onto my
own body my own motor cortex understand
by kind of simulating what it is that
you do and the
consequence of that is that it's i'm
able to do what you do it can we can
imitate each other and there is a kind
of um subconscious imitation that
happens
to people when they're near each other
this is like an emotional contagion or
if like you know i start to lean up for
a while like you might start to lean up
and i lean back and that sort of thing
there are some people that have damage
to the prefrontal cortex and have an
uncontrolled imitation of others whoa so
i'll do something and the person will
just automatically imitate me and and
they don't stop it which reveals that
there is this mechanism in the frontal
lobes that kind of damp down our our
impulse to imitate each other and to
just constantly um map
i've never heard that before i knew
about mirror neurons but i didn't
realize that there was a um
damage to an area where you could get
people that would just copy it
automatically yeah the mirror irons are
subject to some higher order control
that is really really interesting
jonas this has been so much fun where
can people learn more about you follow
along uh they can find me on twitter at
jonas underscore kaplan i think
something like that if you google my
name you'll find me i'm out there
amazing dude thank you so much for
coming on the show
guys
this is somebody that really understands
the brain and if there's anything you
really need to understand in order to
get ahead in life i'm telling you it is
the brain but speaking of other things
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legendary take care peace