Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
lisa feldman barrett
a professor of psychology at
northeastern university
and one of the most brilliant and bold
thinkers and scientists i've ever had
the pleasure of speaking with
she is the author of a book that
revolutionized our understanding of
emotion in the brain
called how emotions are made and she's
coming out
with a new book called seven and a half
lessons about the brain
that you can and should pre-order now
i got a chance to read it already and
it's one of the best
short whirlwind introductions to the
human brain i've ever read
it comes out on november 17th but again
if there's anybody worth supporting it's
lisa so please do pre-order
the book now lisa and i agreed to speak
once again
around the time of the book release
especially because we felt that this
first conversation is good to release
now since we talk about the divisive
time we're living through in the united
states
leading up to the election and she gives
me a whole new way to think about it
from a neuroscience perspective
that is ultimately inspiring of empathy
compassion
and love quick mention of each sponsor
followed by some thoughts related to
this episode
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to support this podcast as a side note
let me say that the bold first
principles way that lisa
approaches her study of the brain is
something that has inspired me ever
since i learned about her work
and in fact i invited her to speak at
the agi
series i organized at mit several years
ago
but as a little twist instead of a
lecture we did a conversation in front
of the class
i think that was one of the early
moments that led me to start this
very podcast it was scary and gratifying
which is exactly what life is all about
and it's kind of funny how
life turns a little moments like these
that at the time don't seem to be
anything out of the ordinary if you
enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube
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friedman and now here's my conversation
with lisa feldman barrett since we'll
talk a lot about the brain today do you
think
let's ask the craziest question do you
think there is other intelligent life
out there in the
universe honestly i've been asking
myself lately if there's intelligent
life on this planet
uh you know i ha i i have to
think probabilities suggest yes and
also secretly i think i just hope that's
true
it would be really um i know scientists
aren't supposed to have hopes and dreams
but
uh i i think it would be really cool and
i also
think it would be really sad if it if it
wasn't the case if we really were alone
that would be
that that would seem
profoundly sad i think so it's exciting
to you not scary
yeah no you know i take a lot of comfort
and curiosity
it's a great it's a great um
resource for dealing with uh stress
so um i'm learning all about mushrooms
and
uh octopuses and you know all kinds of
stuff
um and so for me this counts i think in
the
realm of awe but also i think i'm
somebody who
cultivates awe deliberately on purpose
to feel like a speck
you know i i find it a relief
occasionally it feels small to feel
small
in a profoundly large and interesting
universe
so maybe to dig more technically
on the question of intelligence do you
think it's difficult for intelligent
life to arise like it did on earth
from everything you've written and
studied about the brain
how magical of a thing is it
in terms of the odds it takes to arise
yeah so you know magic is just
don't get me wrong i mean i like i like
a magic shirt as much as the next person
my husband was a magician at one time
but
you know magic is just a bunch of stuff
that we don't really understand how it
works yet so i would say from what i
understand
there are some major steps in the course
of evolution that at the beginning of
life
the step from single cell to
multicellular organisms things like that
which are
really not known i think for me the
question is not so much um
could it you know what's the likelihood
that it would happen again
as much as um
what are the steps and how long would it
take and if it were to happen again on
earth
would would we end up with the same
you know menu of life forms that we
currently have now and i think the
answer is probably no
right there's just so much about
evolution that is stochastic and
driven by chance but the question is
whether that menu would be equally
delicious
meaning like there'd be rich complexity
of the kind of
like would we get dolphins and humans or
whoever else falls in that category of
weirdly intelligent
seemingly intelligent however we define
that
well i think that has to be true if you
just look at the range of creatures
who've gone extinct
i mean but if you look at the range of
creatures that are on the earth now it's
incredible
and you know it's sort of tried to say
that but it actually is really
incredible
um particularly i don't know i mean
animals there are animals that seem
really ordinary
until you watch them closely and then
they become miraculous you know like
certain types of birds
which do very miraculous things uh
um build you know bowers and do dances
and all these really funky things that
are hard to explain uh with a standard
evolutionary story although
you know um people have them birds are
weird they do a lot of for mating
purposes
they they have a concept of beauty
i haven't quite maybe you know much
better but it doesn't seem to fit
evolutionary arguments well it does fit
well it depends right so
i think you're talking about the
evolution of beauty the um
book that was written recently by was it
from
um without his name richard from i think
no i didn't oh it's a great book it's
very controversial though because
he is argues make an argument that
the the question about birds and some
other animals is why would they
engage in such metabolically costly
um displays when it doesn't improve
their fitness at all
and the answer that he gives is the
answer that darwin gave
which is sexual selection um not natural
selection but you know
selection can occur for all kinds of
reasons there could be artificial
selection
which is when we breed animals right
which is actually
how darwin that that observation helped
darwin come to the idea of natural
selection
oh interesting um and then there's
sexual selection
um meaning and the argument that that um
i think his name is from
uh makes is that um that it's the
pleasure the selection pressure is the
pleasure of female birds
which as a woman and um as someone who
studies affect that's a great
answer i actually think there probably
is natural i think there is an aspect of
natural selection to it which he maybe
hasn't considered
but you were saying the reason we
brought up birds is the
the life we got now seems to be quite
yeah so you
peek into the ocean peek into the sky
there are miraculous creatures
look at creatures who've gone extinct
and
you know in science fiction uh stories
you couldn't dream up something as
interesting so my guess is that
you know intelligent life evolves in
in many different ways even on this
planet uh there isn't one form of
intelligence there's not one brain that
gives you intelligence
there are lots of different brain
structures that can give you
intelligence
so my guess is that the
menagerie might not look exactly the way
that it looks now but it would certainly
be
as as interesting but if we look at
the human brain versus the brains or
whatever you call them
the mechanisms of intelligence in our
ancestors even early ancestors
that you write about for example in your
new book
what what's the difference between
the the fanciest brain we got which is
the human brain
and uh the ancestor brains that it came
from
yeah i think it depends on how far back
you want to go
you go all the way back right in your
book
so what's the interesting comparison
would you say well first of all i
wouldn't say that the human brain is the
fanciest brain we've got
i mean an octopus brain is pretty
different and pretty fancy and they can
do some pretty
amazing things that we cannot do you
know we can't grow back limbs we can't
change color and texture we can't
comport ourselves and squeeze ourselves
into a little crevice
i mean these are things that we invent
these are like superhero abilities that
we invent in stories right we can't do
any of those things
and so the human brain is certainly um
we can certainly do some things that
other animals can't do
that seem pretty impressive to us but
but
i would say that there there are a
number of animal brains which
seem pretty impressive to me that can do
interesting things and
really impressive things that we can't
do i mean with your work on how emotions
are made and so on you
you kind of repaint the the view of the
brain
as um as less glamorous
i suppose than you would otherwise
think or like i guess you draw a thread
that connects all brains
uh together in terms of homeostasis and
all that kind of stuff
i yeah i wouldn't say that the that the
human brain is
any less miraculous than anybody else
would say
i just think that there are other brain
structures which are also miraculous
and i also think that there are a number
of things about the human brain which
we share with other other vertebrates
other animals with backbones
but um that are that we share these
miraculous things but we can do
some things in abundance and we can also
do some things
with our brains together working
together that other animals
can't do or at least we haven't
discovered their ability to do it
yeah this social thing how i mean that's
one of the things you write about
uh what's uh how do you make sense
of the fact uh like the book sapiens and
the fact that we're able to kind of
connect like network our brains together
like you write about i'll try i'll try
to stop saying that
uh is that is that like some kind of
feature
that's built into there is that unique
to our human brains like how do you make
sense of that
what i would say is that our ability to
coordinate with each other is not unique
um to humans there are lots of animals
who can do that and we um
but what we do with that coordination
is unique because of some of the
structural features
in our brains and
it's not that other animals don't have
those structural features
it's we have them in abundance so
you know the human brain is not larger
than you would expect it to be for a
primate of our size
if you took a chimpanzee and you
ex grew it to the size of a human
that chimpanzee would have a brain that
was the size of a human brain
so there's nothing special about our
brain in terms of its size
there's nothing special about our brain
in terms of
the um the basic blueprint that
builds our brain from an embryo is the
basic blueprint that builds all
mammalian brains and maybe even all
vertebrate brains
um it's just that because of its size
and particularly because of the size of
the cerebral cortex which is the
um a part um that people mistakenly
attribute to rationality yeah mistakenly
is that
where all the clever stuff happens well
no it really isn't
and i will also say that lots of clever
stuff happens in animals who
don't have a cerebral cortex but right
um but
uh but because of the size of the
cerebral cortex
and because of some of the features that
are enhanced
by that size that gives us the capacity
to
do things like build civilizations um
and coordinate with each other not just
to
manipulate the physical world but to add
to it
in very profound ways like you know
other animals can cooperate with each
other and use tools
um we draw a line in the sand and we
make countries and we even then we
create you know uh we create citizens
and immigrants
but also ideas i mean the countries are
centered around the concept of
like ideas well my well what do you
think a citizen is and
and an immigrant those are ideas those
are ideas
that we um impose on reality and make
them real
and then they have very very serious and
real effects
physical effects on people what do you
think about the idea
that a bunch of people have written
about dawkins with memes
which is like ideas are breeding like
we're just like the canvas for ideas to
breed
in our brains so this kind of network
that you talk about of brains
it's just a little canvas for ideas to
then yeah eat against each other and so
on i
i think it's a rhetorical tool it's cool
to
uh think you know think that way so um i
think it was michael pollan
i don't remember if it was in the botany
of desire but it was in one of his early
books on um on botany
and gardening where he wrote about
um and he wrote about uh you know
plants sort of utilizing humans for
their own
you know evolutionary purposes which is
kind of interesting you can
think about a human gut in a sense as a
propagation device for the seeds of you
know tomatoes and what
what have you so it's kind of cool um so
i think
i think rhetorically it's an interesting
device but you know
ideas are as far as i know
invented by humans propagated by humans
um so you know i i don't think they're
separate from human brains in
in any way although it would it is
interesting to
to think about it that way well of
course the ideas that are using your
brain
to communicate and write excellent books
uh and they basically picked you
uh lisa as an effective communicator
and and thereby are winning so that's an
interesting world view
to think that there's particular aspects
of your brain
that are conducive to certain sets of
ideas
and maybe those ideas will win out yeah
i think the way that i would say it
really though is that
there are many species of animals that
influence each other's nervous systems
that regulate each other's nervous
systems
and they mainly do it by physical means
they do it by
chemicals scent they do it by you know
so
so termites and ants and bees for
example
use chemical scents mammals like
um like rodents use scent and they also
use uh hearing audition and that little
bit of vision
um primates you know non-human primates
add vision
right and
i think everybody uses touch humans as
far as i know are the only species that
use
ideas and words to regulate each other
right
i can text something to someone halfway
around the world
they don't have to hear my voice they
don't have to see my face
and i can have an effect on their
nervous system and
ideas the ideas that we communicate with
words
i mean words are in a sense a way for us
to do mental telepathy with each other
right i mean i'm not the first person to
say that obviously but
how do i control your heart rate how do
i control your breathing how do i
control your actions
with words it's because those words are
communicating ideas
so you also write i think let's go back
to the brain
you write that plato gave us the idea
that the human brain has
three brains in it three forces
which is kind of a compelling notion uh
you disagree
first of all what are the three parts of
the brain
and uh why do you disagree
so plato's description of the psyche
which for the moment we'll just assume
is the same as a mind
there are some scholars who would say
you know a soul a psyche a mind
those aren't actually all the same thing
in ancient greece but we'll just
for now gloss over that so plato's idea
was that
and it was a it was a description of
really about moral behavior and moral
responsibility in humans
so the idea was that you know the human
psyche can be described with an
um a metaphor of
two horses and a charioteer so one horse
for instincts like
feeding and fighting and fleeing and
reproduction i'm trying to control my
salty language
which apparently they print in england
like i actually tossed off of
f s yeah f f okay yeah yeah i was like
you printed that i couldn't believe you
printed that
without like the stars or whatever no no
no there was full print
yeah they also printed the a b word and
it was really
quite yeah anyways we should we should
uh learn something from england
indeed anyways but instincts and then
the other horse
represents emotions and then the cherry
tier represents rationality which
controls
you know the two beasts right and
um fast forward you know
couple of centuries and uh
in the middle of the 20th century there
was a very
popular view of brain evolution which
suggested that you have this uh
reptilian core like a lizard bra an
inner lizard
brain for instincts and then wrapped
around that
evolved on layer on top of that evolved
a limbic system
for uh in mammals so the novelty was in
a mammalian brain
which uh bestowed mammals with uh gave
them emotions the capacitive emotions
and then um on top of that
uh evolved uh a cerebral cortex
um which in
in largely in primates but but very
large
in in humans um and
it's not that i personally disagree
it's that as far back as the 1960s but
really by the 1970s it was shown pretty
clearly
with evidence from molecular genetics so
peering into
cells in the brain to look at the
molecular makeup of genes that the brain
did not evolve that way
and the irony is that
um you know the the idea of the
the three-layered brain with an inner
lizard you know that
hijacks your uh hijacks your behavior
and causes you to do and say things
that uh you would otherwise not or maybe
that you will regret later
that idea um became
very popular was popularized by
uh carl sagan in the dragons of eden
which won a pulitzer prize
in 1977 when it was already known pretty
much
in evolutionary neuroscience that the
whole uh narrative was a myth
so well the narrative is on the the way
it evolved but do you
i mean again it's that problem of it
being a useful
tool of conversation to say like there's
a lizard brain
and there's a like if i get overly
emotional on twitter
that was the lizard brain and so on uh
but do you no i don't think it's useful
i think it's a
i think that is it is is it uh is it
useful is it accurate
i don't think it's accurate and
therefore i don't think it's useful
so i here's what i would say you know i
think that
um the way i think about
philosophy and science
is that they are useful tools for living
and in order to be useful tools for
living
they have to
help you make good decisions
the try and brain as it's called this
this three-layer brain the idea that
your brain is like an already baked cake
in and you know the cortex cerebral
cortex is just layered on top like icing
the idea that idea is the foundation
of the law in
most western countries it's the
foundation of uh
economic theory and it
largely and it's a great narrative it
sort of fits our
intuitions about how we work but it also
um it's in addition to being wrong
it lets people off the hook for uh
for nasty behavior you know um
and it also suggests that emotions can't
be a source of wisdom
which they often are in fact you
you would not want to be around someone
who didn't have emotions that would be
that's a psychopath right i mean that's
not someone you
you know want to want to really uh have
have that person deciding your outcome
so i guess my
and i could sort of go on and on and on
but my point is that
um i don't think
i don't think it's a useful narrative in
the end
what's the more accurate view of the
brain that we should use when we're
thinking about it
i'll answer that in a second but i'll
say that even our notion of what an
instinct is or what a reflex is is not
quite right right so if you look at
evidence
from um ecology for example and you look
at animals in their ecological context
what you can see is that even things
which are
reflexes are very context-sensitive
um the the brains of those animals are
executing
so-called instinctual actions in a very
very context-sensitive way
and so you know even when
a physician you know takes the you know
it's like the idea of your patellar
uh reflex where they hit you know your
patellar tendon on your knee
and you you kick the the force with
which you kick
and so on in is influenced by all kinds
of things it's it's
a reflex isn't like a robotic
uh response and um
so i think a better way is a way that
to think about how brains work is the
way that um
matches our best understanding our best
scientific understanding which i think
is
really cool uh because it's really
counterintuitive so how i came to this
view
and i'm certainly not the only one who
holds this view i was reading
work in on neuroanatomy and the
the view that i'm about to tell you was
sugges strongly suggested by that and
then i was reading work and signal
processing like by engineer electrical
engineering
and similarly it the work suggested
that that the research suggested that
the brain worked this way and
i'll just say that i was reading across
multiple literatures and they were
who don't speak to each other and they
were all pointing in this direction
and so far although some of the details
are still
up for grabs the general gist i think is
i've not come across anything yet which
really violates and i'm looking um
and so the idea is something like this
it's very counterintuitive
um so the way to describe it is to say
that your brain doesn't react to things
in the world
it's not it to us it feels like our eyes
and our um
our windows on the world we see things
we hear things
we we react to them um in psychology we
call this stimulus response
so your face is your voice is a stimulus
to me
i receive input and then i react to it
uh and i might react very automatically
you know system one uh and uh oh
but i also might execute some control
where i
maybe stop myself from saying something
or doing something
and um more in a more reflective way
execute a different action right that's
system two
the way the brain works though is it's
predicting all the time
it's constantly talking to itself
constantly
uh talking to your body uh and it's
constantly
um predicting what's going on in the
body and what's going on
in the world and making predictions and
the information from your body and from
the world really
confirm or correct those predictions so
fundamentally the thing
that the brain does most of the time is
just
predict like talking to yourself and
predicting stuff about the world not
like this dumb thing that just senses in
response senses
yeah so the way the way to think about
it is like this you know your brain is
uh trapped in a dark silent box yeah
that's very
romantic of you um which is your skull
and the only information that it
receives
from your body and from the world right
is through the senses through the sense
organs
your eyes your ears and you have
a sense sensory data that comes from
your body
that you're largely unaware of uh to
your brain which we call interroceptive
as opposed to exteroceptive which is the
world around you
and but your brain is receiving
sense data continuously
which are the effect of some set of
causes
your brain doesn't know the cause of
these
sense data it's only receiving the
effects of those causes which are the
data themselves
and so your brain has to solve what
philosophers call an inverse inference
problem
how do you know when you only receive
the effects of something how do you know
what caused those effects so
when there's a flash of light or a
change in air pressure
or a tug somewhere in your body
how does your brain know what caused
those
events so that it knows what to do next
to keep you alive and well
and the answer is that your brain has
one other source of information
available
to it which is your past experience
it can reconstitute in its wiring
past experiences and it can combine
those past experiences
in novel ways and so
we have lots of names for this in
psychology we call it memory
we call it perceptual inference we call
it simulation
it's also we call it concepts or
conceptual knowledge
we call it prediction basically if we
were to
stop the world right now stop time
your brain is in a state
and it's representing
what it believes is going on in your
body and in the world
and it's predicting what will happen
next
based on past experience right
probabilistically what's most likely to
happen
and it begins to
um prepare
your action and it begins to
prepare your the prepare your experience
based so it's anticipating the sense
data it's going to receive
and then when that those data come in
they
either confirm that prediction and your
action executes
because the plan has already been made
or
um it where there's some uh sense data
that your brain
didn't predict that's unexpected and
your brain takes it in
we say encodes it we have a fancy name
for
that we call it learning your brain
learns
and it updates its storehouse of
knowledge which we call an
internal model and uh that you so that
you can predict better next time
and it turns out that predicting and
correcting predicting and correcting
is a much more metabolically efficient
way to run a system
than constantly reacting all the time
because if you're constantly reacting it
means you have no
you can't anticipate in any way what's
going to happen and so the
the amount of uncertainty that you have
to deal with is
uh overwhelming to a nervous system
metabolically costly i like it
and so what is a reflex a reflex is when
your brain doesn't check against
the sense data that the potential cost
to you is so great maybe because
you know your life is threatened that
your brain
makes the prediction and executes the
action
without checking yeah so but prediction
is still at the core that's a beautiful
vision of the brain i wonder
from almost an ai perspective but just
computationally
is the brain just mostly a prediction
machine then
like is the perception just the
nice little feature added on top like
the
both the the integration of new
perceptual information
i wonder how big of an impressive system
is that relative to just the big
predictor model construction well i
think that we can
we can look to evolution for that for
one answer
which is that when you go back you know
550 million years give or take
we you know the world was populated by
creatures really ruled by creatures
without brains
um and um you know that's a biological
statement
not a political statement really world
war ii
dinosaurs dumb you're talking about like
oh no i'm not talking about dinosaurs
honey i'm talking
way back further back than that um
really these they're these little
little um creatures called uh amphioxus
which is the modern
it's a or a lancet that's the modern
animal
but it's an animal that scientists
believe is very similar
to um our common the common ancestor
that we share
uh with invertebrates um because
uh basically because of the tracing back
the molecular genetics and cells
and that animal had no brain
it had some cells that would later turn
into a brain but in that animal there's
no brain but that animal also had no
head
and it had no eyes and it had no ears
and it had really
really no senses for the most part it
had
very very limited sense of touch it had
an eye spot for um not for seeing but
just for
um in training to circadian rhythm to
light and dark
and it had no hearing it had a
vestibular cell
so that it could keep upright in the
water
at the time approx we're talking
evolutionary scale here so
you know give or take some 100 million
years or something
but at the time you know what are the
vertebrate like when of when a backbone
evolved
and a brain evolved a full brain
that was when a head evolved with sense
with
sense organs and when um that's when
your viscera like internal systems
involved so
the answer i would say is that um that
senses
nurse motor neuroscientists people who
study the control of motor behavior
believe that senses evolved in the
service of motor action
so the idea is that like
what triggered the what triggered what
was what was the big evolutionary change
what was the big
pressure uh that made it useful
to have eyes and ears and a visual
system and an auditory system and a
brain basically and
you know and the answer that um is
you know commonly entertained right now
is that it was predation
that when at some point an
animal evolved that deliberately ate
another animal
and this launched an arms race between
predators and prey
and it became very useful to have senses
right so these these little antioxidants
these little amphioxy
you know don't really have they
they don't have an um they're not aware
of their environment very much
really they um uh
and so being able to
look up ahead and you know
ask yourself you know is that you know
should i eat that or will it eat me
um is is a very useful thing so the idea
um is that sense sense sense data
is not there for consciousness it didn't
evolve for the purposes of consciousness
it didn't evolve for the purposes of
experiencing anything
um it evolved uh in the cert
to be in the service of motor control
however
maybe it's useful um this is why
you know scientists sometimes uh
avoid questions about why things evolved
that this is what
philosophers call this teleology you
might be able to say something about
how things evolve
but not necessarily why we don't really
know the why
that's all speculation but the y is kind
of nice here this
the interesting thing is uh that was the
first
element of social interaction is am i
gonna eat you or are you gonna eat me
and for that
it's useful to be able to see each other
sense each other
that's kind of fascinating that there
was a time when life didn't eat each
other
or they did by accident right so an
amphioxus for example
well um it kind of like gyrates in the
water
and then it plants itself in the sand
like a blade of like a living blade of
grass and then it just
filters uh whatever comes into its mouth
right so it is it is eating but it's not
actively
hunting and when um
the concentration of food decreases
it the amphioxus can sense this
and so it basically wriggles itself
randomly to some other spot which
probabilistically will have more food
than wherever it is
so it's not really you know it's not
guiding its actions
um on the basis of it's not we would say
there's no real intentional action
um in that in that in the traditional
sense speaking of intentional action
and if the brain is put if prediction is
indeed
a core component of the brain let me ask
you a question that scientists also hate
is uh about free will so how does uh
do you think about free will much how
does that fit into this
into your view of the brain why does it
feel like
we make decisions in this world this is
a hard q a
scientists hate this because it's a hard
it's a hard question we don't know
they're taken aside
i think i have free will i think i have
taken aside but it it
i don't put a lot of stock in my own
intuitions or anybody's intuitions about
the cause of things right our ex
one thing we know about the brain for
sure is that the brain creates
experiences for us
my brain creates experiences for me your
brain creates experiences for you
in a way that lures you to believe that
those experiences
actually reveals the way that it works
right but it doesn't
so so you don't trust your own intuition
about
not really not really no i mean no but
but i am
also somewhat persuaded by you know i
think dan dennett wrote at one point
like um uh you know the philosopher dan
dennett wrote at one point that
um it it's i can't say it as eloquently
as him but it
people obviously have free will they are
obviously making choices so
it's you know and so there is this
observation
that we're not robots and we can do some
things like a little more sophisticated
than an amphioxus so
um so here's what i would say i would
say
that your predictions your internal
model
that's running right now right that your
ability to
understand the sounds that i'm making
and attach them to ideas
is based on the fact that you
have years of experience knowing what
these sounds mean in a particular
statistical uh pattern
right i mean that's how you can
understand the words that are coming out
of my
mouth right i think we did this once
before too didn't we when we were
i don't know i would have to access my
memory module i think when i was in your
glen classic yeah i think we did it just
like that actually so bravo
wow yeah i have to go look look back to
the tape
yeah anyways the um the idea though
is that your brain is using past
experience and it can
and it can use past experience in um
so it's remembering but you're not
consciously remembering it's basically
re-implementing prior experiences
as a way of predicting what's going to
happen next and it can do something
called conceptual combination which is
it can take bits and pieces of the past
and combine it in new ways
so you can experience and make sense of
things that you've never encountered
before because you've encountered
something
similar to them
um and so a brain
in a sense is not um
just um doesn't just contain information
it is information gaining meaning it can
create it new information
by this generative process so in a sense
you could say well that maybe that's
that's a source of free will but i think
really where free will comes from or the
kind of free will that i think is worth
having a conversation about is um
involves cultivating experiences for
yourself
that change your internal model
when you were born and you were raised
in a particular
context that your mod your brain wired
itself
to your surroundings to your physical
surroundings and also to your social
surroundings
so you were handed an internal model
basically
um but uh when you grow up
the more control you have over your
where you are and what you do um
you can cultivate new experiences for
yourself and those new experiences
can change your internal model and you
can actually
um practice those experiences in a way
that makes them automatic meaning it
makes it easier for the brain
your brain to make them again and
i think that that is something like
what you would call free will you aren't
responsible
for the model that you were handed that
someone you know your your caregivers
uh cultivated a model in your brain
you're not responsible for that model
but you are responsible for the one you
have now
you can choose you choose what you
expose yourself to
you choose uh how you spend your time
not everybody has choice over everything
right but everybody has a little bit of
choice
um and and so i think
that is uh something that i think is
arguably called free will
yeah there's this like the the ripple
effects of the
billions of decisions you make early on
in life
have are so great
that uh even if it's not
even if it's like all deterministic just
the amount of possibilities that are
created and then the focusing of those
possibilities into a single trajectory
uh that somewhere within that that's
free will even if it's all deterministic
that might as well be
of just the number of choices that are
possible and the fact that you just make
one
trajectory to those set of choices seems
to be like
something like they'll be called free
will but it's still kind of sad to think
like
there doesn't seem to be a place where
there's magic in there
where it is all just a computer well
there's lots of magic
i would say so far because we don't
really understand
uh how all of this is exactly
played out at a
i mean scientists are working hard and
disagree
about some of the details under the hood
of what i
just described but i think there's quite
a bit of magic actually and also there's
there's also um stochastic
firing of neurons don't they
they're not purely digital in the sense
that
there is there's also analog
communication between neurons not just
digital
so it's not just with not just with
firing of axons
and some of that there's there are other
ways to communicate and
also um uh
there's noise in the system and the
noise is there
for a really good reason and that is the
more
variability there is the more
potential there is for your brain to
be able to be information bearing so
um basically you know there are some
animals that
have clusters of cells the only job is
to inject noise
you know into their um neural patterns
so maybe noise is the source of free
will
so you can think about you can think
about stochasticity or noise as
as a source of free will or you can
think of
of um conceptual combination as a source
of free will
you can certainly think about um
cultivating uh
you know you can't reach back into your
past and
change your past you know people try by
psychotherapy and so on but
what you can do is change your present
which becomes your past
right think about that sentence so one
way to think about it is that you're
continuously this is a colleague of mine
a friend of mine said so what you're
saying is that people are continually
cultivating
their past and i was like that's very
poetic
yes you are continually cultivating your
past
as a means of controlling your future
so you think uh yeah i guess the the
construction of the mental model that
you use for prediction
ultimately contains within it your
perception of the past like the way
you interpret the past or even just the
entirety of your narrative about the
past
so you're constantly rewriting the story
of your past
oh boy yeah that's one poetic and also
just awe inspiring
what about the other thing you talk
about
you've mentioned about sensory
perception as a thing that like
is just you have to infer about the
sources
of the thing that you have perceived
through your senses
so uh let me ask the
another ridiculous question is is
anything real at all
like how do we know it's real how do we
make sense
of the fact that just like you said
there's this brain sitting alone in the
darkness trying to perceive the world
how do we know that the world is out
there i
will be perceived yeah so i don't think
that you should be asking questions like
that without passing a joint
right no for sure yeah i actually did
before this so i apologize
okay no well that's okay you apologize
for not sharing that's okay
so i mean here's what i would say what i
would say is that the reason why
we can be pretty sure that there's a
there there is that
the the structure of the information in
the world
what we call statistical regularities in
sights and sounds and so on
and the structure of the information
that comes from your body it's not
random stuff
there's a structure to it there's a
spatial structure and a temporal
structure
and that spatial and temporal structure
wires your brain
so an infant brain is not a miniature
adult brain
it's a brain that is waiting for wiring
instructions from the world
and it must receive those wiring
instructions
to develop in a typical way so for
example
when a newborn is born when a newborn is
born when a when a baby is born um
the baby can't see
very well because the visual system in
that baby's brain
is not complete the
the retina of your eye which actually is
part of your brain
has to be stimulated with photons of
light if it's not
the baby won't develop normally to be
able to see
in in a neurotypical way same thing is
true for hearing
the same thing is true really for all
your senses so the
point is that that
the physical world the sense data from
the physical world
wires your brain so that you have an
internal model
of that world so that your brain can
predict well to keep you alive and well
and allow you to thrive that's
fascinating that the brain is waiting
for a very specific kind of uh set of
instructions from the world like not
not the specific but a very specific
kind of instruction yes
so you scientists call it expectable
input
the brain needs some input in order to
develop normally
and so we're and we are genetically
you know we as i say in the book we we
have the kind of nature that requires
nurture
we we can't develop normally without
sense
input sensory input from the world and
from the body
and what's really interesting about
humans and
some other animals too but really
seriously in humans is the input that we
need
is not just physical it's also social
we in order for an an infant a human
infant to develop normally
that infant needs eye contact touch
it needs certain types of smells it
needs to be
cuddled it needs right so um
without social input
the brain it's that that infant's brain
will not wire
itself in a neurotypical way and again i
would say
there are lots of um
cultural patterns of caring for an
infant it's not like the infant has to
be cared for in one way
um whatever the social environment
is for an infant that it will will be
reflected in that infant's
internal model so we have lots of
different cultures lots of different
ways of rearing children
and that's an advantage for our species
although we don't always experience it
that way
that is an advantage for our species but
if you
if you just you know feed and water a
baby
without all the extra social doodads
what you get is a profoundly impaired
uh human yeah but
nevertheless you're kind of saying that
the physical reality
has uh has a consistent
thing throughout that keeps feeding
these
set of sensory information that our
brains are constructed
for but yeah the cool thing though is
that if you change the consistency
if you change the statistical
regularities so prediction error
your brain can learn it it's expensive
for your brain to learn it and it takes
a while to
for the brain to get really automated
with it but you know you um
had a wonderful conversation with david
eagleman who just published a book
about this yeah and gave lots and lots
of really very very cool examples
some of which i actually discussed in
how emotions were made but not obviously
to the extent that he did
um in his book which it's a fascinating
book and it's
but it it speaks to the point that
your internal model is always under
construction
and therefore you always
can modify your experience i wonder what
the limits are
like uh if we can if we put it on mars
or if we put in virtual reality
or if we sit at home during a pandemic
and we spend most of our day on twitter
and tick tock
like i wonder what where the breaking
point like the limitations of
the brain's capacity to uh
to properly continue wiring itself
well i think what i would say is that
there are different ways to
specify your question right like one way
to specify it would be the way that
david
um phrases it which is
can we can we create a new sense like
can we create a new sensory modality
how hard would that be what are the
limits in doing that
um and um but another way to
say it is what what happens to a brain
when you
remove some of those statistical
regularities right like what happens to
a brain what happens to an adult brain
when you
remove some of the
statistical patterns that were there and
they're not there anymore
you're talking about in the environment
or in the actual like
you remove eyesight for example or did
you well either way
i mean basically one way to limit
the inputs to your brain are to stay
home and
protect yourself another way is to put
someone
in solitary confinement another way
is to stick them uh in a nursing home
another well not all nursing homes but
you know
but there are some right which really
are
some where peop people are somewhat
impoverished in the interactions the end
this
sensory the variety of sensory
stimulation that they get
another way is that you lose a sense
right but the point is i think that you
know
the human brain really
likes variety to to say it in a
you know like a pro you know sort of
cartesian way
you know variety is a good thing
um for a brain and um
uh
there are risks that you take uh
when you restrict uh what you expose
yourself to
yeah you know there's always talk of
diversity
the brain loves it to the fullest
definition and degree of diversity
yeah i mean i would say the only thing
basically human brains thrive
on diversity the only place where we
seem to have
difficulty with diversity is with each
other
right but we who wants to eat the same
food every day
you never would who wants to wear the
same clothes every day i mean
my husband if you ask him to close his
eyes he won't be able to tell you what
he's wearing
he's just right he'll buy seven shirts
of exactly the same style in different
colors
but they are in different colors right
it's not like how would you then
explain my brain which is
terrified of choice and therefore i wore
the same thing every time
well you must be getting your diversity
well first of all you are a fairly sharp
dresser so
there is that but um so you're getting
some reinforcement progressing the way
that you do
but well your brain must get diversity
in in other words
in other places but i think we you know
the the so there the two most expensive
things your brain can do metabolically
speaking
is um is move your body
um and uh learn something new
so novelty that is diversity
right comes at a cost a metabolic cost
but it's a cost it's an investment that
that gives returns and in general
people vary in how much they like
novelty unexpected things
some people really like it some people
really don't like it and there's
everybody in between
but in general we don't eat the same
thing every day
we don't usually do exactly the same
thing
in exactly the same order in exactly the
same place
every day the only place we have
difficulty
uh with diversity in is
in each other and then we we have
considerable problems there
i would say as a species let me ask uh
i don't know if you're familiar with
donald hoffman's work about
this like questions of reality what are
your
thoughts of the possibility that the
very thing we've been talking about
of the brain wiring itself from birth
to a particular set of inputs is just a
little
slice of reality that there is something
much bigger out there that we humans
with our cognition cognitive
capabilities is just not even perceiving
that the thing we're perceiving is just
the crappy
like windows 95 interface onto a much
bigger richer set of
complex physics that we're not even in
touch with
well without getting too metaphysical
about it i think we know for sure it
doesn't have to be the
you know crappy version of anything but
we definitely have a limited
we have we have a set of senses that are
limited in very physical ways
and we're clearly not perceiving
everything there is to perceive
that's clear i mean it's just it's not
that hard we can't
without special why do we invent
scientific tools it's so that we can
overcome our senses and
and experience things that we couldn't
otherwise whether they are
you know different parts of the uh
visual spectrum the light spectrum
or um things that are too
microscopically
small for us to see or too far away for
us to see
so clearly we're only getting a slice
um and that slice
you know the interesting or
potentially sad thing about humans is
that we
whatever we experience we think there's
a natural reason for experiencing it
and we think it's obvious and natural
and it must be this way
and that all the other stuff isn't
important
and that's clearly not true many of the
things that we think of as natural
are anything but we've cr they're
certainly real but we've created them
they certainly have very real impacts
but we've created those impacts
and we also know that there are many
things outside of our awareness that
have
have tremendous influence on what we
experience
and what we do so there's no question
that that's
true i mean just it's it's um
but the extent is how fantastic really
the question is how fantastical is it
yeah like what you know a lot of people
ask me i'm
i'm not allowed to say this i think i'm
allowed to say this uh i've
eaten shrooms a couple times but i
haven't gone the full
i'm talking to a few researchers and
psychedelics it's an interesting
scientifically place like what is the
portal you're entering when you take
psychedelics or another would ask is
like
dreams whatever so let me tell you what
i think which is based on
nothing like this is based on my life
right so i don't
your intuition it's based on my it's
based on my
i'm guessing now um based on what i do
know
i would say but i think that well think
about what happens
so you're running your brain's running
this internal model right and it's all
outside of your awareness really
you see the you feel the products but
you don't you don't sense the
you have no awareness of the mechanics
of it right
it's going on all the time um
and so one thing that's going on all the
time that you're completely unaware of
is that um when your brain your brain is
basically
asking itself figuratively speaking not
literally right like
how is the scent given the last time i
was in this sensory array with this
stuff going on in my body and i
and that this chain of events which just
occurred
what did i do next what did i feel next
what did i see next
it doesn't come up with one answer it
comes up with a distribution of it
possible answers
and then there has to be some selection
process and so you
have a network in your brain a
subnetwork in your brain a population of
neurons
that helps to choose
it's not i'm not talking about a
homunculus in your brain or anything
silly like that um this is not
the soul it's not the center of yourself
or anything like that but there
is um
a a set of neurons that weighs
the probabilities uh um um and and helps
to select
uh or narrow the field okay and that
that network is working all the time
it's actually called the control network
the executive control network or you can
call it a fronto parietal
because the regions of the brain that
make it up or in the frontal lobe and
the parietal lobe
there are also parts that belong to the
subcortical parts of your brain
it doesn't really matter the point is
that that there is this network and it
is working all the time
whether or not you feel in control
whether or not you feel like you're
expending effort doesn't really matter
it's on all the time
except when you sleep when you sleep
it's it's a little bit relaxed
and so think about what's happening when
you sleep when you sleep
the extra the external world recedes the
sense data
from so basically your model becomes
a little bit the tethers from the world
are loosened
and this network which is
involved in you know maybe weeding out
unrealistic things
is a little bit quiet so use
your dreams are really your internal
model that's
unconstrained by the immediate world
except so you can do things that you
can't do in real life
in your dreams right you can fly like i
for example when i fly
on my back in a dream i'm much faster
than when i fly on my front
don't ask me why i don't know when
you're laying and you're back in your
dream no
when i'm in my dream and flying in a
dream
i am much faster flyer in the air very
[Music]
i don't think i've flown for many years
well you must try it
i've i've thought i've uh flown uh i've
fallen
that's scary yeah but you fl you're
talking about like yeah
i fly my dreams and i'm way faster right
and you're better on my back way faster
um
now you can say well you know you never
flew in your life right it's conceptual
combination i mean i've flown in an
airplane and i've seen birds fly and
i've watched movies of people flying and
i know superman probably flies i don't
know if he flies faster on his back but
he's voice he's out of never he's lying
on his front right but
yeah but anyways my point is that you
know all of this stuff
really um all these experiences really
become part of your internal model
the thing is that when you're asleep
your internal model is still being
constrained by your body
your your brain's always attached to
your body it's always
receiving sense data from your body
you're mostly never aware of it
uh unless you run up the stairs uh or or
you know
uh maybe you um are ill in some way
but you're mostly not aware of it which
is a really good thing because if you
were
you know you'd never pay attention to
anything outside your own skin ever
again
like right now you seem like you're
sitting there very calmly but you have a
virtual whole thing drama right it's
like a
like a like an opera going on inside
your body
and so i think that one of the things
that happens
when people take psilocybin or
take uh you know ketamine for example
is that the tethers
completely are completely removed yeah
yeah that's fascinating and then and
that's why it's helpful to have a guide
right because the guide is giving you
sense data
to steer that internal model so that it
doesn't go
completely off the rails yeah i know
there's so again that wiring to
the other brain that's the guide is at
least
a tiny little tether exactly yeah
let's talk about emotion a little bit if
we could
emotion comes up often and i have never
spoken with anybody who um
who has a clarity about emotion from a
biological and
neuroscience perspective that you do
and i'm not sure i fully
know how to as a as a i mentioned this
way too much but as somebody who was
born in the soviet union
and romanticizes basically everything
talks about
love non-stop you know emotion is a
i don't know what to make of it i don't
know
so maybe uh let's just try to talk about
it i mean from a neuroscience
perspective
we talked about a little bit last time
your book covers it how emotions are
made but
what are some misconceptions we writers
of poetry
we romanticizing humans have about
emotion
that we should move away from before to
think about emotion
from both a scientific and an
engineering perspective
yeah so there is a common view of
emotion
in the west the caricature
of that view is that um
you know we have an inner beast right
your limbic system
your your inner lizard um we have an
inner beast
and that comes baked in to the brain at
birth so you've got circuits for anger
atmosphere it's interesting that they
all have english names these circles
but um that that and they're there and
they're triggered by things in the world
and um then they cause you to do and say
and
you know so when your fear circuit is
triggered you widen your eyes
you gasp your
heart rate goes up you prepare to flee
or
to freeze and these are
these are modal responses they're not
the only responses that you give but on
average they're the prototypical
responses
that's the view and um
that's the view of emotion in the law
that's the view
you know that emotions are these
profoundly unhelpful things
that are obligatory kind of like
reflexes
the problem with that view is that it
doesn't comport to the
evidence um and it doesn't really matter
the evidence actually lines up
beautifully with each other it just
doesn't line up with that view and it
doesn't matter whether you're measuring
people's faces
facial movements or you're measuring
their body movements or measuring their
peripheral physiology or you're
measuring their brains
or their voices or whatever pick any any
output that you want to measure and you
know any system you want to measure and
you don't
really find strong evidence for this and
i say this as somebody who
who not only has reviewed really
thousands of
articles and run you know big meta
analyses which are statistical summaries
of
of published papers but also as someone
who
has sent teams of researchers to
small-scale cultures
you know remote cultures which are
very different from urban
large-scale cultures like ours and
one culture that we visited and i say we
euphemistically because
i i myself didn't go because i only had
two research permits
and i gave them to my students because i
felt like it was
better for them to have that experience
and more formative for them to have that
experience
but i was in contact with them every day
by satellite phone
and this was um to visit
the um hadza hunter-gatherers in
tanzania
who are not um an
ancient people they're a modern culture
but they live
in circumstances um hunting and foraging
circumstances that um are very similar
in similar conditions to our ancestors
uh hunting gathering ancestors
when expressions of emotion were
supposed to have evolved
at least by one view of okay so
i you know for many years i was sort of
struggling
with um this set of observations right
which is that i feel emotion
and i see i perceive emotion in other
people
but scientists can't find a single
marker
a single biomarker not a single
individual measure or pattern of
measures
that will can predict how someone what
kind of emotional state they're in
how could that possibly be how how can
you possibly make sense of those two
things
and through a lot of reading and a lot
of
and immersing myself in different
literatures i came to
the hypothesis that the brain
is constructing these instances out of
more basic ingredients
so when i tell you that the brain when i
suggest you that what your brain is
doing
is making a prediction and it's asking
itself figuratively speaking
the last time i was in this situation
and
this you know physical state what did i
do next what did i see next what did i
hear next
it's basically asking what in my past is
similar to the present
things which are similar to one another
are called a category
a group of things which are similar to
one another as a category
and a mental representation of a
category is a concept
so your brain is constructing categories
or concepts on the fly continuously
so you really want to understand what a
brain is doing you don't
using machine learning like
classification models is not going to
help you because the brain doesn't
classify it's doing category
construction
and the categories change or you could
say it's doing concept construction it's
using past experience to
conjure a concept which is a prediction
and if it's using past experiences of
emotion
then it's constructing an emotion
concept
your concept will
be the content of it is
ism changes
depending on the situation that you're
in so for example if your brain
uses past experiences of anger that you
have learned either because somebody
labeled them for you taught them to you
you observed them
in movies and so on in one situation
could be very different from your
concept
of for anger than another situation and
this is how
anger instances of anger are
what we call a population of variable
instances
sometimes when you're angry you scowl
sometimes when you're angry
you might smile sometimes when you're
angry
you might cry sometimes your heart rate
will go up
it will go down it will stay the same it
depends on what action you're about to
take
because the way predict and i should say
the idea that
physiology is yoked to action is a very
old idea
in in uh the study of the peripheral
nervous system that's been known for
really decades and so
if you look at what the brain is doing
if you just look at the anatomy
and you what here's the hypothesis that
you would that you would come up with
and i can go into the details
i've published these details in in
scientific papers and they also appear
somewhat in how emotions are made my
first book they
are not in the you know seven and a half
lessons because
that book is is really not pitched at
that level of
explanation right it's just giving it's
really just a set of
little essays um but the evidence
but what i'm about to say is actually
based on on on scientific evidence
when your brain begins to make
form a prediction the first thing it's
doing
is it's making a prediction of how to
change the internal
systems of your body your heart your
cardiovascular system the control of
your heart control of your lungs
right a flush of of cortisol
which is not a stress hormone it's a
hormone that gets glucose into your
bloodstream
very fast because your brain is
predicting you need to do something
metabolically
expensive and so so either that means
either move
or learn okay and
so your brain is preparing your body the
internal systems of your body
to execute some actions to move in some
way
and the and then it infers
based on those motor predictions and
what we call visceral motor predictions
meaning the
the the changes in the viscera that your
brain is preparing
to um to execute um
your brain makes an inference about
what you will sense based on those motor
movements
so your experience of the world
and your experience of your own body
are a consequence of those predictions
those
concepts when your brain makes a concept
for emotion
it's constructing an instance of that
emotion
and that is how emotions are made and
those concepts
load in the predictions that are made
include
contents inside the body contents
outside the body
i mean it includes other humans so just
this construction of a concept
includes the variables that are much
richer than just
some sort of um simple notion
yeah so our colloquial notion of a
concept where
um you know um
where i say well what's the concept of a
bird and then you list a set of features
off to me
that's that's people's understanding you
know typically of what a concept is but
if you go uh into the literature
in um cognitive science what you'll see
is that the way
that scientists have understood what a
concept is has really changed over the
years so
people used to think about a concept as
um
philosophers and scientists used to
think about a concept as a dictionary
definition for a category
so there's a set of things which are
similar out in the world
and um your concept
for for that category is a dictionary
definition of the features
right the necessary insufficient
features of that of those instances so
for a bird um you know would be
wings feathers right a beak yeah it
flies whatever
okay um that's called the classical
category
and scientists discovered observed that
actually
not all instances of birds have feathers
and not all instances of birds
fly and so the idea was that you don't
have a single
representation of necessary and
sufficient features stored in your brain
somewhere instead what you have
is a prototype a prototype meaning
um you still have a single
representation for the category
one um but the features
are like of the most typical instance of
the category or maybe the most frequent
instance but not all
instances of the category have all the
features right they they have some
graded similarity
to the prototype
and then uh you know
what um
i'm gonna like incredibly simplify now a
lot of work
to say that then a series of experiments
were done
to show that in fact
what your brain seems to be doing is
coming up with a single
exemplar or instance of the category and
reading off
the um features when i ask you for the
concept
so if we were in a pet store
and i asked you what are the features of
a bird tell me the concept of bird
you would be more likely to give me
features of a good
pet and if we were in a restaurant
you would be more likely you know like a
budgie right or
a canary if we were in a restaurant you
would be more likely to give me the
features
of a bird that you would eat like a
chicken and if we were in a park you'd
be more likely
to give me uh in this country
uh you know the features of a sparrow or
a robin
whereas if we were in south america you
would probably give me the features
of a peacock because that's more common
or it's or it is more common there than
here that you would see a peacock in
such circumstances so
the idea was that really what your brain
was doing
was conjuring
a concept on the fly that meets the
function
that the category is being put to
okay yep okay
then people started studying
ad hoc concepts meaning
um concepts that where the instances
don't share
any feat any physical features
but the function of the instances are
the same
so for example think about all the
things that can protect you
from the rain what are all the things
that can protect you from the rain
uh umbrella uh
like this apartment right
um your car not giving a damn
like like a like a mindset yeah
right right so the idea is that the
function
of the instances is the same in a given
situation
even if they look different sound
different smell different
this is called an abstract concept or
a conceptual concept
now the really cool thing about
conceptual
categories or conceptual concept yes
conceptual category a conceptual
as a category of things that are held
together by
a function which is called an abstract
concept or a conceptual category
because the things don't share physical
features they share functional features
there are two really cool things about
this one is
that's what darwin said a species was
so darwin is known
for discovering natural selection
but the other thing he really did which
was
really profound which he's less
celebrated for
is understanding that all biological
categories
have inherent variation
inherent variation darwin
wrote in the origin of species about
before darwin's
book a species was thought to be
a classical category where all the
instances of dogs
were the same had exactly the same
features and any variation from that
perfect platonic
instance was considered to be error and
darwin said
no it's not error it's meaningful
nature selects on the basis of that
variation
the reason why natural selection is
powerful
and can exist is because there is
variation
in a species and
in dogs we talk about that variation in
terms of the
size of the dog and the uh amount of fur
the dog has and the color and the
how long is the tail and how long is
this snout
in humans we talk about that variation
in all kinds of ways right including in
cultural ways
so that's one thing that's really
interesting about conceptual categories
is that darwin is basically saying a
species is a conceptual category
and in fact if you look at modern
debates about
what is a species you can't find anybody
agreeing on what the criteria are
for a species because they don't all
share the same genome
we don't all share we don't there isn't
a single human genome
there's a population of genomes
but they're variable it's not unbounded
variation
but they are variable right and
the other thing that's really cool about
conceptual categories is that um
they are the categories that we use
to make civilization
so think about money for example
what are all the physical things that
make something a currency is there any
physical feature
that all the currencies in all the
worlds that's ever been used by humans
share
well certainly right but uh but what
what is it uh is it definable
you know so it's getting to the point
that you're
because you're making it function it's
the function right function it's that we
trade it for material goods
and that and we have to agree right we
all impose on whatever it is
salt barley little shells big rocks in
the ocean that can't move
bitcoin pieces of plastic mortgages
which are basically a promise of
something in the future nothing more
right
all of these things we impose value on
them
and we all agree that we can exchange
them for material goods
yeah and uh yes that's bril by the way
you're attributing some of that to
darwin
that he thought no i'm no i'm saying
that because it's a brilliant view of
what a species is is the function
yeah what i'm saying is that what darwin
darwin really
talked about variation in um so if you
read for example the biologist ernst
mayer
who was an evolutionary biologist and
then when he retired
became a historian and philosopher of
biology
and his suggestion is
that darwin darwin did talk about
variation
he vanquished what's called essentialism
the idea that there's a single
set of features that define any species
and um out of that grew
um really discussions of
the function you know like some of the
functional features that species have
like they can reproduce
uh off they can have offspring the
individuals of a species can have
offspring
it turns out that's not a perfect uh
you know that's not a perfect uh
criterion to use but it's a functional
criterion right so
what i'm saying is that in cognitive
science people came up with the idea
they discovered the idea of conceptual
categories or
ad hoc concepts these concepts that can
change
based on the function they're serving
right and
um uh that it's there
darwin it's in darwin and it's also in
the philosophy of social reality you can
the way that philosophers talk about
social reality just look around you
i mean we impose we're treating a bunch
of things as similar which are
physically different
and sometimes we take things that are
physically
the same and we treat them as separate
categories
but it feels like the number of
variables involved in that kind of
categorization is nearly infinite
no i don't think so because there is a
physical constraint right like you and i
could agree
that um we can fly in real life
but we can't that's a physical that's a
physical constraint that we can't
break right you and i could agree that
we could walk through the walls
right but we can't we could agree that
we could eat glass but there's a lot of
constraints
but yeah we could agree that the virus
doesn't exist and we don't have to wear
masks right
yeah but you know physical reality still
holds the trump card right
but still there's a lot of card well
pun completely unattended but there you
go that's a predicting brain for you
um uh but but there's a tremendous
amount of leeway
yes yeah that's the point so what i'm
saying is that emotions are like money
basically they're they're like money
they're like countries they're like
um kings and queens and presidents
they're like
everything that we construct that we
impose meaning
on we take these physical signals and we
give them meanings
that um they don't otherwise have by
their physical nature
and because we agree yeah
they have that function but the the
beautiful thing so maybe unlike money
i love this similarity is it it's not
obvious to me that this kind of
emergent agreement should happen with
emotion
because our experiences are so different
for each of us humans
and yet we kind of converge well in a
culture we converge
but not across cultures there are huge
huge differences
there are huge differences in what what
concepts exist
what their um what they look like um
so what i would say is that they feel
like
what what we're doing with our young
children
as we as their brains become wired to
their
physical and their social environment
right is that we are
curating for them we are bootstrapping
into their brains
a set of emotion uh concepts
that's partly what they're learning and
we curate those for infants just the way
we curate for them what is a dog what is
a cat what is a truck
we sometimes explicitly label and we
sometimes
just use mental words when you know your
kid is you know throwing cheerios on the
floor instead of eating them
or your kid is crying when you know she
won't put herself to sleep
or whatever you know we use mental words
and um a word is this
words with for infants words are these
really special things that they
help infants learn abstract categories
there's a huge literature
showing that children can take
things that don't look infants like
infants really young infants
pre-verbal infants can take if you
label if i say to you and you're an
infant
okay so i say lex lexi
this yeah is a bling yeah
and i put it down and the bling makes a
squeaky noise
and then i say unless he's excited by
the way this
is a bling and i put it down and it
makes a squeaky noise
and then i say lexi
this is a bling you
as young as four months old will expect
this to make a noise a speaking noise
and if you don't if it doesn't you'll be
surprised because it violated your
expectation
right i'm building for you an internal
model
of a bling yeah okay infants can do this
really really at a young age and so
there's no reason to believe
that they couldn't learn emotion
categories and concepts in the same way
and in in one and what happens when you
go to a new culture when you go to a new
culture
you have to do what's called emotion
acculturation so my colleague bacia
mosquita in belgium
studies emotion acculturation she
studies how when people move from one
culture to another
how do they learn the emotion concepts
of that culture
how do they learn to make sense of their
own
internal sensations and also the
movements
you know the rays of an eyebrow the tilt
of a head how do they
learn to make sense of cues from other
people
using concepts they don't have but have
to make
on the fly so that's the difference
between cultures
let me uh open another door i'm not sure
i want to open
but difference between men and women
is there um difference between the
emotional lives
of those two categories of biological
systems
so here's what i would say you know we
did a series of studies
um uh in the 1990s where
we asked men and women to tell us about
their emotional lives
and women described themselves as much
more emotional than men
they believed that they were more
emotional than men and men agreed
women are much more emotional than men
okay and then
we gave them little handheld computers
these were little hewlett-packard
computers they fit in the palm of your
hand
a couple of pen they weighed a couple of
pounds so this was like pre-palm pilot
even like this was
you know 1990s and like early
and um we um
asked them we would you know ping them
like 10 times a day and just ask them to
report how they were feeling
which is called experience sampling so
we experience sampled
and and then at the end
and then we looked at their reports and
we found is that men and women basically
didn't differ
and there were some people who were
really
had many more instances of emotion so
they were
you know um they were treading
uh water in a tumultuous sea of emotion
and then there were other people who
were like
floating tranquilly you know in a lake
it was
really not perturbed very often and and
everyone in between
but there were no difference between men
and women
and the really interesting thing is at
the end of the sampling period
we asked people um so
reflect over the past two weeks and tell
it so you know we've been now pinging
people like
again and again and again right so tell
us how emotional do you think you are
no change from the beginning so men
and women believe that they are they
believe that they are
different and when they are looking at
other people
they make different inferences about
emotion
if a man if a man is scowling like if
you and i were together
and some so somebody's watching this
okay
and um yeah hey
when you look at the camera
um if you and i
make exactly the same set of facial
movements
when people look at you both men and
women look at you
they are more likely to think oh he's
reacting to the situation
and when they look at me they'll say oh
she's having an emotion she's
you know yeah and i wrote about this
actually
um uh right before
the 2016 election
you know what maybe i could confess let
me
try to carefully confess but you are
really gonna
yeah that i'm that
when i that there is an element when i
see hillary clinton that there was
something annoying about her to me
and i just that feeling and then i tried
to reduce that to
what what is that because i think the
same attributes that are annoying
about her when i seen other people
wouldn't be annoying so i was trying to
understand
what is it because it it certainly does
feel like that
concept that i've constructed in my mind
well i'll tell you that i think
well let me just say that um that that
what you would predict about for example
the performance of the two of them in
the debates and i wrote an op-ed for the
new york times
actually um before the second debate
and it it played out really pretty much
as i thought that it would on based on
research it's not like i'm like a great
fortune teller or anything it's just i
was just applying the research which was
that when a woman um
a woman's people make internal
attributions it's called
they infer that the facial movements and
body posture and vocalizations of a
woman reflect her inner state
but for men they're more likely to
assume that they reflect his response to
the situation it doesn't say anything
about him it says something about the
situation he's in
that's brilliant now for the thing that
you are
that you were describing about hillary
clinton
um i think a lot of people experienced
but it's also in line with research
which shows
and and particularly research actually
on um
in about teaching evaluations is one
place that you really see it
where the expectation is that a woman
will be nurturant and that a man
there's just no expectation for him to
be nurturing so he's
you know if he is nurturant he gets
points
um if he's not he gets points right
they're just different points right
whereas for a woman
especially a woman who's an authority
figure she's really in a catch-22
right because if she's serious she's a
and if she's empathic uh then she's weak
right that's brilliant i mean one of the
bigger questions to ask
here so that's one example where our con
construction of concepts
gets right but remember you're in
trouble but so
remember i said science is a science and
philosophy
are like tools for living so i learned
recently
that if you ask me what is my intuition
about what regulates my eating
i will say carbohydrates i love
carbohydrates i love
pasta i love bread i love i just love
carbohydrates
but actually research shows and it's
beautiful research
i love this research because it so
violates my own
like deeply deeply held beliefs about
myself
that most animals on this planet who
have been studied and there are many
actually eat to regulate their protein
intake
so you will overeat carbohydrates if you
in order to get enough protein and these
this research has been done with human
very beautiful research
with humans with crickets with like you
know bonobo i mean just like all these
different animals not bonobos but i
think like baboons
um now that i have no intuition about
that
and i even now as i regulate my eating
i don't i still i just have no intuition
it just i can't
i can't feel it what i feel is only
about the carbohydrates
it feels like you're regulating around
carbohydrates not the protein yeah
but in fact actually what i am doing if
i am like most
uh animals on the planet i am regulating
around proteins so
knowing this what do i do i correct my
behavior
to eat to to actually deliberately
try to focus on the protein that
this is the idea behind bias training
right like
if you um
i also
did not experience hillary clinton as
the warmest
candidate however
you can use consistent
science since the consistent scientific
findings to
organize your behavior that doesn't mean
that rationality is
the absence of emotion because sometimes
emotion
or scent anything feelings in general
not the same thing as emotion um that's
another topic
um but you know our our source of
of information and their wisdom and
helpful so i'm not saying that
but what i am saying is that if you have
a deeply held belief and the evidence
shows that you're wrong
then you're wrong it doesn't really
matter how confident you feel
you that confidence could be also
explained by science right so
it would be the same thing as if i
regardless of whether someone is
like charlie baker right regardless of
whether somebody is a republican or a
democrat
if that person has a record that you can
see
is consistent with what you believe then
that is information that you can act on
yeah and and then so try to i mean this
is kind of what empathy is in
open-mindedness is try to um
consider that the set of concepts that
your your brain has constructed
through which you are now perceiving the
world is
not painting the full picture i mean
this is now true for basically ever
it doesn't have to be men and women it
could be basically the prism through
which we pursue actually the
political discourse right absolutely so
so here's what i would say um
the you know there are
people who scientists who will talk to
you about cognitive empathy and
emotional empathy and
i i prefer to think of it
i think the evidence is more consistent
with what i'm about to say which is that
your brain is always making predictions
using your your own past experience and
what you've learned
from you know books and movies and other
people telling you about their
experiences and so on
and if your brain cannot make a concept
to make sense of those anticipate what
those sense data are
and make sense of them you will be
experientially blind
so you know when i'm giving lectures to
people i'll show them like a blobby
black
and white image and they're
experientially blind
to the image they can't see anything in
it and then i
show them a photograph and then i show
them the image again the blobby
image and then they see actually an
object in it but the art but the image
is the same
yeah it's there they're actually adding
their predictions now are adding right
or
anything for example anybody who's
learned a language
uh a second language after their
first language also has this experience
of
um things that initially sound like
sounds that they can't quite make sense
of eventually come
to make they eventually come to make
sense of them and in fact there are
really cool examples
of people who are like born blind
because they have cataracts
or um they have corneal damage so that
no light is reaching
the brain and then they have an
operation
and then light reaches the brain and
they can't see
for days and weeks and sometimes
years they have they are experientially
blind to certain things
so what happens with empathy right is
that your brain
is making a prediction and if it doesn't
if it doesn't have the capacity
to um
make it doesn't if you don't share if
you're not similar
remember you mean you know categories
are
instances which are similar in some way
if you are
not similar enough to that person you
will have a hard time making a
prediction about what they feel
you will be experientially blind to what
they feel
in the united states children
of color are under prescribed medicine
by their physicians this
is been documented
it's not that the physicians
are racist necessarily
but they might be experientially blind
the same thing is true of male
physicians with female patients
i could tell you some hair-raising
stories
really that where people die as a
consequence
of a physician making the wrong
inference the wrong prediction because
of being experientially blind
so we are
you know empathy is not um it's not
magic
it's we make inferences about each other
about what each other's feeling and
thinking
in this culture more than there are some
cultures where
you know people have what's called
opacity of mind where they
will make a prediction about someone
else's actions but they're not inferring
anything about the internal state of
that person
but in our culture we're constantly
making inferences what is this person
thinking what is and we're not doing it
necessarily consciously but it's doing
it really automatically using our
predictions what we know and
if you expose yourself to
information which is very different from
somebody else i mean
really what we have is we have different
cultures in this
in this country right now that are there
are a number of reasons
for this i mean part of it is i don't
know if you saw the social dilemma the
the netflix um uh part about it yeah
it's a great
it's really great um documentary and uh
about what social networks are doing to
our society yeah yeah
but you know nothing no phenomenon has a
a simple single cause there are multiple
small causes which all add up to a
perfect storm that's
that's just you know how most things
work
and so the fact that machine learning
algorithms are serving people
up information on social media that is
consistent with what they've already
viewed
and making you know um
is part of the reason that you have
these silos but it's not the only reason
why you have these silos i think there
are other
there are other things afoot that uh
enhance um people's inability to
even have a decent conversation yeah i
mean okay so
so many things you said are just
brilliant so the experiment
experiential blindness but also from my
perspective
like i i preach and i try to practice
empathy a lot and something about the
way you've explained it
makes me almost see it as a kind of
exercise that we should all do
like to train like to add experiences
to the brain to expand this capacity to
predict more effectively absolutely so
like what
like what i do is kind of like a method
acting thing which is
i imagine what the life of a person is
like
you know just think i mean this is
something you see with black lives
matter
and uh police officers it feels like
they're both
uh not both but i have because martial
arts and so on i have a lot of friends
who are cops
they don't necessarily
have empathy or visualize the experience
of the other
certainly currently unfortunately people
aren't doing that with police officers
they're not imagining they're not
empathizing
or putting themselves in the shoes of a
police officer
to realize how difficult that job is how
dangerous it is how
difficult it is to maintain calm and
under so much uncertainty all this kind
of
thing you know but there's more there's
even that's all that's true but i think
that there's even more
there's even more to be said there i
mean like from a predicting brain
standpoint
there's even more that can be said there
so i don't know if you want to go down
that path or you can
strike on empathy but i will also say
that
one of the things that i was most
gratified by i
still am receiving you know it's been
three
more than three and a half years since
how emotions are made came out and i'm
still receiving
daily emails from people right so that's
gratifying but one of the
most gratifying emails i received was
from police officer
in texas who told me that he thought
that how motions are made
contained information that
would be really helpful to
resolving some of these difficulties
and he hadn't even read my op-ed piece
about when is a gun not a gun and you
know like using
the what we know about the science of
perception from predict from a
prediction
standpoint like the brain is a predictor
to understand
a little differently what might be
happening in these circumstances
so there's there's a real what's hard
about it's hard to talk about because
everyone gets mad at you when you talk
about this like
you know and um there is a way to
understand this which has profound
empathy
for the suffering
of people of color and
that definitely is in line with black
lives matter
at the same time as understanding the
really
difficult situation that police officers
find themselves in
and i'm not talking about this bad apple
or that bad apple i'm not talking about
police officers who are necessarily
shooting people in the back as they run
away
i'm talking about the cases of really
good
well-meaning cops who
have the kind of predicting brain that
everybody else has
they're in a really difficult situation
that i think
both they and the people
who are harmed don't
realize like they just the the way that
these situations are constructed i think
it's just
there's a lot to be said there i guess
is what i wanted is there something we
can try to say
in a sense like what i'm from the
perspective of the predictive brain
which is a
fascinating perspective uh to take on
this
you know the all the protests are going
on
there seems to be a concept of a police
officer being built
no i think that police i think that
concept is there
but it's is gaining strength so it's
being re-um
i mean yeah it is sure it is there but i
think
yeah for sure i think that that's right
i think that there's um
there's a shift in the
stereotype of what i would say is a
stereotype there's a stereotype of
of uh black man in this country that's
always
in movies and television not always but
like largely
um that many people watch
i mean you know you think you're
watching a 10 o'clock drama
and all you're doing is like kicking
back and relaxing but actually
you're having certain predictions
reinforced
and others not and what's happening
what's happening now with police
is the same thing um that there are
certain stereotypes of a police officer
that are being abandoned and other
stereotypes that are being reinforced
by by what you see happening all i'll
say is that
if you remember i mean there's a lot to
say about this really
that you know regardless of whether it
makes people mad or not i mean i just
i the science is what it is um
just remember what i said the brain
is makes predictions about internal
changes in the body first and then motor
it starts to prepare motor action
and then it makes a prediction about
what you will see and hear and feel
based on those actions okay
so it's also the case that
we didn't talk about is that sensory
sampling
like your brain's ability to sample
what's out there
is yoked to your heart rate it's yoke to
your heartbeats
there are certain phases of the
heartbeat where it's easier for you to
see
what's happening in the world than in
others
and so if your heart rate goes through
the roof
you will be less like you will be more
likely to just go with your prediction
and not correct based on what you
what's out there because you're actually
literally not seeing as well
or you will see things that aren't there
basically
is there something that we could say in
by way of advice
for when this episode is released in the
in the chaos of uh emotion sorry i don't
know about a term
that's just flying around on social
media what's um
well i actually think it is it is
emotion in the following sense
you know and it sounds a little bit like
it sounds a little bit like
artificial when i and the way i'm about
to say it but i really think that this
is what's happening
you know one thing we haven't talked
about is
you know brains evolved didn't evolve
for you to see they didn't evolve for
you to hear
they didn't evolve for you to feel they
evolved to control your body that's why
you have a brain
you have a brain so they control your
body and the metaphor
the there's a the scientific term for
predictively controlling your body is
allostasis
your brain is making um is attempting to
it's tempting to anticipate the needs of
your body and meet those needs before
they arise
so that you can act as you need to act
and the metaphor that i use is a body
budget
you know your brain is running a budget
for your body it's not budgeting money
it's budgeting glucose and salt and
water
and instead of having you know one or
two bank accounts it has
gazillions there are all these systems
in your body that have to be kept in
balance
and it's monitoring very closely
it's making predictions about like when
is it good to spend and when is it good
to save and what would be a good
investment and am i going to get a
return on my investment
whenever people talk about reward or
reward prediction error or anything to
do with reward
or punishment they're talking about the
body budget they're talking about your
brain's predictions about whether or not
there will be a deposit
or withdrawal so
when you when your brain is running a
deficit in your body budgets you have
some kind of metabolic imbalance
you experience that as discomfort
you experience that as distress when
your brain
when things are chaotic you can't
predict
what's going to happen next so i have
this
absolutely brilliant scientist working
in my lab
his name is um jordan terrio
and he's published this really terrific
paper on
um a sense of should like why do we have
social rules why do we
you know adhere to social norms
it's because if i make myself
predictable to you
then you are predictable to me and if
you're predictable to me
that's good because that that is less
metabolically expensive for me
novelty or unpredictability at the
extreme
is expensive and if it goes on for long
enough
what happens is first of all you will
feel really jittery and antsy
which we describe as anxiety
it isn't necessarily anxiety it could be
just
something is not predictable and you are
experiencing arousal because
the chemicals that help you learn
increase
your feeling of arousal basically but if
it goes on for long enough
you will become depleted you will start
to feel
really really really distressed so what
we have
is a culture full of people right now
who are their body budgets are just
decimated
yeah and there's a tremendous amount of
uncertainty
when you talk about it as depression
anxiety
it makes you think that it's not about
your metabolism that it's not about your
body budgeting that
it's not about getting enough sleep or
about eating
well or about making sure that you have
social connections
um it's you know it's you think that
it's something separate from that but
depression anxiety are just a way of
being in the world
they're a way of being in the world when
things aren't quite right with your
predictions
that's such a deep way of thinking like
the the brain is
maintaining homeostasis it's actually
allostational
stasis i'm sorry uh and it's it's
constantly making predictions
and metabolically speaking it's very
costly to make novel
like constantly be learning to making
adjustments
and then over time there's you know
there's a
cost to be paid if you're just yeah in
in in a place of chaos where there's
constant need for adjusting and learning
and experience novel things and so part
of the problem here
there are a couple of things like i said
you know it's a perfect storm there
isn't a single cause
right there are multiple cause multiple
things that combine together it's a
complex
it's a complex system multiple things
part of it is that um people are
they're they're metabolically encumbered
and they're distressed and in order to
try to
have empathy for someone who is very
much unlike you
you have to forage for information you
you have to explore
information that is novel to you
and unexpected and that's expensive
and at a time when people feel what do
you do when you
are running a deficit in your bank
account you stop spending
what does it mean for a brain to stop
spending
a brain stops moving very much stops
moving the body
and it stops learning it just goes with
its internal model
brilliantly put yep so
empathy requires to have empathy for
someone who is
unlike you yeah requires
learning and practice you're foraging
for information
i mean it is something i talk about in
my in the book in seven and a half
lessons about the brain i think it's
really important it's hard
but it's hard i think it's you know it
it's hard for people to have
to be curious about views that are
unlike their own
when um when they feel so encumbered
and i'll just tell you i had this
epiphany really
i was listening to robert reich's
the system he was talking about
oligarchy versus democracy
so oligarchy is where very wealthy
people like extremely wealthy people
shift power so that they become even
more wealthy
and even more insulated and from the you
know the
pressures of the common person um it's
actually
the kind of system that
leads to the collapse of civilizations
if you believe jared diamond
just say that but anyways i'm listening
to this and i'm listening to him
describe
in fairly decent detail
how the ceos of these companies
there's been a shift in what it means to
be a ceo and not not being no longer
being a steward of the community
and so on but like in the 1980s it sort
of shifted to this other model of being
like an oligarch
and he's talking about how
you know it used to be the case that um
that ceos
uh made like 20 times
uh what their um their employees made
and now they make about 300 times on
average what their employees made
so where did that money come from it
came from the pockets of the employees
and they don't they don't know about it
right no one knows about it they just
know
they can't feed their children they
can't pay for health care
they can't take care of their family and
they worry about what's going to happen
to their
you know they're living like you know
months a month basically
any one big bill could completely you
know put them out on the street
so there are a huge number of people
living like this so
all they what their experience they
don't know why they're experiencing it
so it's
and then someone comes along and gives
them a narrative yeah
well somebody else butted in line in
front of you
and that's why you're this way
that's why you experience what you're
experiencing just for a minute
i was thinking i had deep
empathy for people who have beliefs
that are really really really
different from mine but
i was trying really hard to see it
through their eyes yeah
and did it cost me something
metabolically i'm sure
yeah i'm sure but you had something in
the gas tank
well i in order to allocate that i mean
that's the question is like where did
you
you what resources did your brain draw
on
in order to actually make that effort
well i'll tell you something
honestly lex i don't have that much in
the gas tank right now
[Laughter]
right so uh i i am surfing
the stress that you know stress is just
what is stress stress is your brain is
preparing for a big metabolic outlay and
it just keeps preparing and preparing
and preparing and preparing
you as a professor you as a human both
right it's a for me this is a moment of
existential
crisis as much as anybody else democracy
all of these things
so in many of my roles
so well i guess what i'm trying to say
is that um
i get up every morning and i exercise i
run
i row i lift weights right you exercise
in the middle of the day
i saw your like yeah you know daily yeah
i hate it actually you love it right you
get it no i hate it i
hate it but i do it religiously
yeah why because it's a really good
investment
it's an expenditure that is a really
good investment
and so
when i was exercising i was listening to
the book and when i realized the
insights that i was sort of like playing
around with
like is this does this make sense does
this make sense i didn't
immediately plunge into it i basically
wrote some stuff down
i set it aside and then i did what i i
prepared myself to make an expenditure i
don't know what you do before
you exercise i always have a protein
shake
always have a protein shake because i
need to fuel up before i make this
really big expenditure
and so i did the same thing
i didn't have a protein drink but i um
but i i did the same thing and
fueling up can mean lots of different
things it can mean talking to a friend
about it it can mean
um you know it can it can mean get
making sure you get a good night's sleep
before you do it it can mean lots of
different things but i
i guess i i think we have to
do these things i uh yeah that
this i'm gonna re-listen to this
conversation several times this is
brilliant uh
but i do i do think about
you know i've encountered so many people
that can't possibly imagine that a good
human being can vote for donald trump
and i've also encountered people
that can't imagine that an intelligent
person can possibly vote
for a democrat and
i i look at both these people many of
whom are friends
and uh let's just say
after this conversation i can see as
they're predicting brains not willing to
invest
the resources to empathize with the
other side and i think
you have to in order to be able to like
to see the obvious common humanity in us
i don't know what the system is that's
creating this division
we can put it like you said it's a
perfect storm it might be the social
media
might i don't know what the hell i think
it's a bunch of things i think it's
just there's an economic system which is
disadvantaging
large numbers of people there's uh
a use of social media like if you you
know if i
had to orchestrate or architect a system
that would screw up a human body budget
it would be the one that we live in
you know we don't sleep enough we eat
pseudo food basically
we are on social media too much which is
full of ambiguity which is really hard
for
a human nervous system right really
really hard like
ambiguity with no context to predict it
i mean it's like
really and then you know there are the
economic concerns that
affect large swaths of people in this
country i mean it's really
you i'm not saying everything is
reducible to
metabolism not everything is reducible
to metabolism but
there if you combine all these things
together
it's helpful to think of it that way
then somehow it's also
uh somehow reduces the entirety of the
human experience the same kind of
obvious logic like we should exercise
every day in the same kind of way
we should uh we should empathize every
day
yeah you know there are these really
wonderful wonderful programs for
um for teens and um sometimes also for
parents of
people who've lost children in in wars
and in conflicts in political conflicts
where they go to a bucolic setting and
they talk to each other about their
experiences
and um miraculous things happen
you know so um
uh you know it's easy to
uh it's easy to sort of
shrug this stuff off as kind of
pollyanna-ish you know like what's this
really gonna do but
um you have to think about
when my daughter went to college i i
gave her advice i said
uh try to
be around people who let you be the kind
of person you want to be
you were back to free will you have a
choice
you have a choice it might seem like a
really hard choice it might seem like a
unimaginably difficult choice do you
have a choice
do you want to be somebody who
is wrapped in in fury and agony
or do you want to be somebody who
extends uh
a little empathy to somebody else and in
the process maybe learn something
curiosity is the thing that it protects
you
curiosity is the thing it's curative
curiosity on social media the thing i
recommend to people
um at least that's the way i've been
approaching social media
i i don't it doesn't seem to be the
common approach but
i basically uh
give love to people who seem to
also give love to others so it's the
same similar concept of
surrounding by yourself by the people
you want to become
and i ignore sometimes block but just
ignore
i don't i don't add aggression to people
who
are just constantly full of aggression
and negativity and toxicity
there's a certain desire when somebody
says something mean
to to um to say something um
to you know say why or try to alleviate
the meanness and so on
but what you're doing essentially is
you're and you're you're now surrounding
yourself by that
group of folks that have that negativity
so even just the conversation
so i you know i i think it's just so
powerful to uh to put yourself amongst
people
who are yeah who whose basic mode of
interaction is kindness
because uh i mean i don't know what it
is but maybe i'm just it's the way i'm
built is
that to me is energizing for the gas
tank of
that that i can pull to for sure when i
start reading
the rise and fall of the third reich and
start thinking about
nazi germany i can empathize with
everybody involved i can start to think
make these difficult uh like thinking
that's required to understand our little
planet earth well there is research to
back up what you said there's research
that's consistent with your intuition
there
you know that there's research that
shows that
being kind to other people doing
something nice for someone else
is like making a deposit to some extent
you know because i think um
[Music]
making a deposit not only in their body
budgets but also in yours
like people feel good when they do good
things for other people
you know we are social animals we
regulate each other's nervous systems
for better and for worse right the best
thing
for a human nervous system is another
human
and the worst thing for a human nervous
system is another human
so you decide do you want to be somebody
who makes people feel
who who who makes people feel better
or do you want to be somebody who causes
people pain
and we are more responsible
for one another than we might like
or then me might want but remember what
we said about social reality
you know social reality so you you
you know there are lots of different
cultural
uh norms about uh you know independence
or
or you know collective you know nature
of people
but the fact is we have socially
dependent nervous systems
we evolved that way as a species and in
this country
we prize individual rights and freedoms
and that is a dilemma that we have to
grapple with and we have to do it in a
way if we're going to be productive
about it we have to do it in a way
that um
requires engaging with each other and
which is what i understand
the you know the founding members of
this country
uh intended beautifully put let me ask a
few
final silly questions so one
we talked a bit about love but let me
it's it's fun to ask somebody
like you who can effectively
from at least neuroscience perspective
disassemble some of these romantic
notions but
what do you make of romantic love why do
human beings
seem to fall in love at least at least a
bunch of
80s hair bands have written about it uh
is that a nice feature to have is that a
bug
what is it well i i'm really happy that
i fell in love i wouldn't want it any
other way
but i would say is that you the person
speaking or the neuroscientist
well i me that's me the person speaking
but uh i would say
as a neuroscientist babies are born
not able to regulate their own body
budgets because their brains aren't
fully wired yet
when you
feed a baby when you cuddle a baby when
you
everything you do with a baby impacts
that baby's body budget
and helps to wire that baby's body
budget
has to wire that baby's brain to manage
eventually her own body budget to some
extent
that's the basis biologically of
attachment
humans evolved as a species
to be socially dependent meaning
you cannot manage your body budget on
your own
without a tax that eventually
you pay many years later in terms of
some metabolic illness right loneliness
when you break up with someone that you
love or you
lose them right it you feel like it's
going to kill you
but it doesn't but loneliness will kill
you
it will kill you approximately you know
what is it seven years earlier i can't
remember exactly the exact number it's
it's actually in the web notes to um
seven and a half lessons
but um social isolation loneliness
will kill you earlier than you would
otherwise die and the reason why
is that you're not you didn't evolve to
manage your nervous system on your own
and when you do
you pay a little tax and that tax
accrues very slightly
over time over a long period of time so
that by the time
you're in you know middle aged or a
little older
you are more likely to die sooner from
some metabolic illness from heart
disease from diabetes from depression
um you're more likely to develop
alzheimer's disease i mean it's
the it you know it takes a long time for
that tax to accrue
um but it does so yes i think it's a
good
thing for people to um to fall in love
but i think the funny view of it is that
uh
it's clear that humans need the social
attachment
to uh what is it manage their nervous
system as
as as you're describing and the reason
you want to stay with somebody for
a long time it's so you don't have is
the novelties very costly for
uh for well now you're mixing now you're
mixing things now you're
you know no you have to decide whether
but what i would say is when you
lose someone you love you um it feels
like you've lost a part of you
and that's because you have you've lost
someone
who was contributing to your body budget
we are the caretakers of one another's
nervous systems
like it or not and
out of that comes very deep feelings of
attachment some of which
are romantic love are you
afraid of uh your own mortality
we two humans sitting here yeah
do you think do you ponder your
immortality i mean you're somebody who
thinks about your brain a lot
it seems one of the more um
terrifying or i don't know i don't know
how to feel about it but it seems to be
one of the most definitive aspects of
life is that it ends it's a complicated
answer but i think the best i can do in
a short
snippet would be to say for a very long
time i did not fear my own mortality
i feared the i feared pain
and suffering so that that's what i
feared
i feared being harmed or dying in a way
that would be painful
um but i didn't fear having my life be
over
now as a mother i
i think i i have fear i fear
dying before my daughter is
um ready to be
without me that's what i fear
it's
that's that's really what i fear and
frankly honestly i fear my husband dying
before me
much more than i fear my own death
there's that
love and social attachment again yeah
because i know i
it's i know it's just gonna i'm gonna
feel like i wish i was dead
yeah a final question about life
uh what do you think is the meaning of
it all
what's the meaning of life
yeah i think that there isn't one
meaning of life there's like many
meanings of life
and you know you use different ones on
different days but for me
depending on the day depending on the
day but for me i would say
um sometimes the meaning of life is to
understand
to make meaning actually the meaning of
life is to make meaning
um sometimes it's that sometimes it's
to um leave the world just slightly a
little bit better
than it like the johnny appleseed view
you know
sometimes um the meaning of life is um
to um you know
like clear the path for my daughter
or for my students you know it's to
you know so sometimes it's that and
sometimes it's just
um you know like you know
your moments where you're
looking at the sky or you're
you know by the ocean or sometimes for
me it's even like
i'll see a you know like a
weed poking out of a crack and a
sidewalk you know
and you just have this overwhelming
sense of the like wonder of
the um of the world like the world is
like just like the physical world is so
wondrous and you you just get very
immersed in the
mome in the moment like the sensation of
the moment
sometimes that's the meaning of life i
don't i don't think there's one meaning
of life
i think it's a population of instances
just like uh
just like any other category i don't
think there's a better way to end it
lisa the first time we spoke is um
i think if not the then one of
i think it's the first conversation i
had that basically launched this pocket
yeah that's actually the first
conversation i've had to launch this
podcast
and now we get to finally do it uh the
right way so it's a huge honor to talk
to you that you spent time with me
uh i can't wait for hopefully the many
more books you'll write
certainly can't wait to uh i already
read this
this book but i can't wait to listen to
it because as you said offline
that you're reading it and i think you
have a great voice you have a great i
don't know
what's a nice way to put it but maybe
npr voice
in the best version of what that is so
thanks again for talking today always my
pleasure thank you so much for
for having me back thank you for
listening to this conversation with lisa
feldman barrett
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lex friedman and now let me leave you
with some words
from lisa feldman barrett it takes more
than one human brain
to create a human mind thank you for
listening
i hope to see you next time
you